Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.

PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not

Lithium battery fires are in the news because they are new. There are many more gasoline fires every day.

Pistons? We don't need no stinking pistons! Next thing, they'll be adding a bridle and a bit!

Indeed, people should take in the full context here, not just platitudes. They should look at how China has interacted with Europe and the US in the context of world wars, trade wars, cultural exchange and economic interdependence. ...then they should call Xi on his tantrums and fragility. He chooses to be this way.

Consider that it is evangelism. Saying "We did this, we're a big investment bank" implies "It's OK, and you should do it too". I've heard people refer to arguing a vendor to lower a price as "jew them down". Enough with that.

We will know if GM built a bettter car battery in 8 years or so. I am sort of dubious, because it's more like your cell phone battery than a lithium car battery. It uses cobalt. GM brags that their EV battery uses less cobalt "than other EV batteries", but Tesla uses none. We know that Tesla batteries last. It will take a while to know that about GM batteries.

Musk is great. He took a lot of things that everyone knew about and nobody would dare to do, and made them work from a business perspective. We need lots more people like that.

Interesting reference:

Blast wind: At the explosion site, a vacuum is created by the rapid outward movement of the blast. This vacuum will almost immediately refill itself with the surrounding atmosphere. This creates a very strong pull on any nearby person or structural surface after the initial push effect of the blast has been delivered. As this void is refilled, it creates a high-intensity wind that causes fragmented objects, glass and debris to be drawn back in toward the source of the explosion.

Here. I found several on the web with a single search.

The problem is getting people to build it exactly as the computer models it :-)

I would think that welds are quite chaotic in nature. The heat changes the crystal structure of the steel, the welds are not uniform, etc.

Steel is really complicated stuff. It's a matrix of iron alloy and hard nonmetallic crystals like carbides. The iron alloy can have five different crystal structures, and can transition between them through heating - which welding does. There is also thermal stress from welding, which you can relax by annealing, but annealing the entire vehicle is not practical.

The cryogenic nitrogen used in the test is very cold, as you can see by the frost on the vehicle. Atmospheric pressure is only 14 pounds, so if you pressurize to 14 pounds greater than you intend in space, you get equivalent stress on the vehicle. The final test is to actually send it to space.

Cryogenic nitrogen. The force of it rushing out creates a vacuum.

The explosion is seen to start in the side of the vehicle. The lower arrow is where it starts.

A blowout on the remains may correspond to this.

I only searched the web for 10 seconds and came up with this.

Obviously, we need storage for conventional power uses. But desalination that runs on sporadic power? That would be fine.

Let's not kid ourselves that fossil fuel exploration and production doesn't also have tremendous tax credits and subsidies, and that nuclear did not also have this when the plants were being constructed. If you want to take away one, you have to take away the other too. I'm also not at all clear that California municipalities are forced to contract with a specific indeprndent solar provider like Alta power.

And backups are not an issue for desalinization. You only need to desalinate when there is power

We can't really pretend that nuclear plants for economically effective any longer. Pretty much all of the oil-fired plants constructed in the 1950s and 60s in California, and about half of the natural-gas-fired ones are no longer economically feasible for operation, and despite the fact that nuclear plants theoretically should be cheaper to operate than the fossil-fuel ones, they haven't been. Cross your fingers and hope for effective fusion, but we're not seeing that so far either.

So it happens that solar and wind crossed the line of being less expensive to sell to California municipalities than fossil-fuel-based power over the past several years. And the perovskite-based cells are looking very promising, and approaching 30% efficiency for tandem perovskite and silicon cells.

Of course desalinization does not have the storage problem that home power does. If you've got more solar power in the daytime, only desalinate in the daytime. And we have lots of desert in which to make that power.

So yes, there is desalinization in the future. I think the real problem, though, is that California has both more people, and more acres farmed, than it can support.

I always found it odd that Trump, and I guess rightists or republicans or sonething, found it offensive that rivers run to the sea.