Long ago when I took a graduate class in topology, the prof said early on that once you had the right picture in your head, the proof would follow easily. There was an implication, at least, that if you couldn't visualize that way you were going to have a miserable time with topology.

This. I went from the Labs to Bellcore to one of the regionals. One of my hats at the last was technology forecasting. I was one of the few people who were saying, "People, Ethernet and IP have won, the others just don't know they're dead yet." I was putting together working demonstrations of every kind of multi-party multi-media real-time communications that I could manage. I was not popular, because even that sort of prototype stuff made the company's products based on CCITT/ITU standards look bad.

Including the world's ugliest 15-fps grayscale video. But it was all software (except the frame grab), could run on 50MHz 486s, and conveyed all the facial expression and body language information you could want.

Years and years ago, when I was working at Bell Labs (Holmdel, not Murray Hill) I visited the Smithsonian. One of the temporary exhibits they had was about communication over fiber optics and all of the work done at the Labs on the piece-parts. One part of it was Alexander Graham Bell's lab notebook opened to his experiments with transmitting voice by modulating a sunbeam. I started laughing and almost couldn't stop when I noticed that Bell's notebook was exactly the same type -- sewn binding, numbered pages, leather corners on the cover -- the Labs' stockroom still handed out to researchers and engineers.

One of the things that can drive people to the self-checkout lines is getting rid of film plastic bags and charging for paper. People don't switch because of the convenience or inconvenience, they switch because most groceries do a miserable job of bagging. Suddenly people want their reusable or paper bags filled and are not willing to accept the quality of work of the typical teenager doing the bagging. We went through that locally a couple of years ago. The Kroger-owned local chain added six self-check stations at all their stores here just before the bag change law went into effect. I was chatting with one of the local store managers who explained the construction for me.

Gates and Buffett are already putting money into a molten-salt reactor design. Proposed site is in Wyoming on land previously used for a coal-burning power plant (indirectly owned by Buffett). I actually give them a better chance of getting something up and running than the NuScale-based project in Idaho. The NuScale project is likely to run into serious financial problems before much longer. The Gates/Buffett project is, at least, backed by people who can pick up the phone and call people who might be willing to drop a billion dollars into the pot.

My local power authority, which gets just under half of its annual delivered power from hydro, wind, and solar, currently models home/office solar as demand reduction, same as it does with efficiency improvements.

... [Starship] had a absolute defective launch pad...

And SLS has a billion dollar mobile launch system -- tower and crawler -- that will be used three times and then (presumably) dismantled. It's not big enough to handle the Block 1B version. The 1B-capable launch system will be another billion dollars. (A recent independent review team thought $1.5 billion and delivery in December 2027 was more accurate.)

The most impressive person in the space industry today is Gwynne Shotwell, who runs the Falcon program for SpaceX.

The actual goal is not the kind of toy examples we see, like "Write a BASIC program to implement bubble sort." The actual goal is to turn human languages into some sort of declarative programming. Eg, "Write a program that makes my phone a single remote control for my TV and multiple streaming services." I'll be excited when the AI can do that, and then accept additional constraints/goals when the first result is not what the user had in mind. Heck, I'll be excited when the AI can actually start asking the necessary follow-on questions.

For any sort of US-centric analysis, I tend to ignore it if they don't start by reminding their readers that the US has three grids with minimal power transfers between them. Renewable-only solutions for the Western Interconnect are straightforward, if not simple. Lots of marginal land with rich renewable resources within reasonable distance of the handful of major demand centers and only a couple of realistic layouts for the necessary bulk transmission network. The Eastern and Texas Interconnects are a different story.

I kept a virtual machine around and reasonably current because from time to time I had to deal with other people's Excel spreadsheets that used less common things like Solver, so needed to be bug-for-bug compatible with the Windows version of Office.

But I'm an oldster, and cut some of my computing teeth on early UNIX at Bell Labs. I've had a Linux box of some sort around since the early MCC interim release days. I gave up on Macs after 15 years because writing hobby code in my language(s) of choice no longer felt like "it's UNIX underneath." At least not without the pain of upgrading Homebrew and MacPorts every time MacOS got upgraded. To be honest, replacing the last Mac with a little Mint box felt like coming home after being gone for a very long time.

Mint installation on a small Minisforum box (small enough to mount on the back of a monitor using the holes for a mounting bracket) was a piece of cake. Beats the hell out of my first Linux install, using the MCC Interim release on a 386SX.

I got the Minisforum as a replacement for my old Mac Mini. It was at a point in time where it was clear new OS releases for my old hardware were going to eventually stop, and I was uncertain about going ARM. It's been nice and solid -- small, fan almost never runs. Not a high-performance box, but I'm not a gamer and don't do much heavy number crunching any more. My VirtualBox Windows 10 VM runs fine on it, but tells me that the hardware is insufficient for Windows 11.

My wife and I now live in a small city well-known for the reliability of its electricity supply. We moved in two years and four months ago. In that time, the power has not dipped enough to cause the appliances to reset. Not once. For what it's worth, a municipal utility does distribution, a non-profit power authority generates the power. The municipal utility started burying aerial wires -- power, telephone, and cable when it arrived -- in 1948. Something like 99% of the plant is buried now, and there's still a million-dollar line in the annual budget to continue the work.

...all screamed "Toaster!" at me. I could set one in the kitchen and see if the granddaughters tried to find slots.

In reality, customers are slower at ordering from a kiosk than verbally giving an order to a human employee.

Of course the kiosk is slower. You can tell the counter clerk, "Quarter pounder meal, medium, Diet Coke." They have one screen and can touch three buttons in sequence to enter that order. At the kiosk, at least locally, the same order requires going through multiple screens, with transition time between each of them. So long as the kiosk lacks some sort of quick-entry option, it's going to be slower for many people.

I often wonder what will happen to all of the colonization plans if it turns out that carrying a fetus to term requires the woman to stay in >0.75G gravity for the whole nine months.