But that's taking the argument one step too far already. If the question was why the situation at Google is 80-20 one needs only to look at the graduation statistics from US Comp Sci PhD programmes (if Google hasn't changed their hiring practices recently), where the figures are indeed in that range (and that's counting mostly foreign women, without them I seem to remember that the figure would be closer to 90-10).

Now you're already addressing the question of why women have opted out much earlier in the chain, and while that is interesting, it's not really something that Google can fix with their hiring practices, they can only hire from the candidate pool that is there after all. It takes something else. In another part of society (of which admittedly Google is a part, so they can do something, of course).

Now, I know from first hand experience in the academic teaching field how unpopular it is to (as I've had to do) point out that our targets and goals of increasing comp. sci. female undergraduate admissions were completely unrealistic as we would have to attract (in that case) all qualified girls from high school, not a single one would be left for medicin, law, etc. which we know already attracts a majority of the qualified female students. But like the aspie idiot I am I feel it still needs to be pointed out. (And I have tenure, so I'm harder to fire... :-))

Our answers in both acceptance and hiring to the "WHY DON'T YOU X MORE WOMEN" (where X is hire/accept) is and continues to be, "because they aren't there and they don't apply". We can't fix that at the end of the pipeline. (And I've been exposed to that in both industry and academia for more than twenty years, no come to think of it, it's closer to thirty...)

And being in Scandinavia I'm not sure I buy the "there are too many men there" argument. Thirty years ago that was very much true of medicin, veterinary medicine, and law to mention just a few highly sought after careers, difficult to get into and more importantly almost 100% male. And today Swedish universities have been e.g. fined for instituting "affirmative action" programmes for boys so that the veterinary programme (or was it law?) wouldn't be completely female. (But that's against the law, so no boys in that field...)

For example, in 1992 (Sweden), medical doctors 55-62 were 93% male 7% female. In 2010 in the youngest cohort it's the other way around, with 39% men and 69% women. If the "(old) men scare away women" hypothesis would be true, then this change of affairs is a very clear (data) point against. At the very least it didn't work on doctors.

Or lawyers, 57% of all judges in Sweden are women now. 55% of all judges in criminal matters are women, and that's set to change even more, as their dominance in the younger cohorts are ever more marked. If not even the grumpy old judges managed to scare the dainty young women away, well, that's another pretty hard blow against that hypothesis. (That doctors are wishy washy and can't put their collective foot down is after all somewhat believable, but scary and scarred judges, well they were kind of our last hope! :-))

But of course in comp. sci. the figures are pretty much identical to what they were in the eighties. There are a few more now, but we haven't nearly have the sea change that we've had in medicin (both veterinary and human) and law.

That said, the reason that we don't have the necessary skill set readily available today is because NIMBY-ism and regulatory hoops (esp. laws regarding public purchasing - cheapest bidder wins) means that nuclear is a more or less dead industry. When everything you ever build is a once-in-a-lifetime one-off, of course you're not going to reap any benefits from economy of scale, a mature subcontractor market, industry tradition and knowledge etc. etc.

So, the politics mentioned above did manage to kill nuclear, but indirectly, by making it such an uncertain (huge political risk) and unattractive field that the economy to support is isn't there. It's not inherent in the technology itself, we managed to do this (including welding) well enough in the sixties and seventies; as a species we're better at it now...

That's the problem. They're satellite phones, so there's no "easily" in changing the endpoint software. Your solution amounts to "change the cipher to a more secure one". Well, yes, indeed, that's what we need to do.

That you can always run your own crypto on top of the one provided by the carrier is kind of trivially always true, but most often not a realistic option.

That said, smaller installations, like in a house, aren't that efficient, even though they've become much more advanced (with fans, lambda sensors and whatnot) in the last couple of decades.

Instead, what is typically meant is CO2. A wood fired boiler will of course have much lower net CO2 emissions as they don't burn fossil fuel.

When it comes to particulate matter and a few other nasties, smaller wood installations are actually pretty bad. Esp. in our cities.

It's not even a question of that, but of cost. Heating oil in Norway is considerably more expensive than electricity, and having travelled and worked in Norway I can't remember when I saw something other than electricity (radiator or under floor heating), though of course wood (often in the form of pellets) is also popular.

Electricity is dirt cheap in Norway, so people even typically don't have a heat pump (like we do in Sweden), but just heat directly with electricity. As an example, for a 600 sq foot apartment with three outside walls, in the "cold" part of the country (two hours north of Oslo) I paid about $50 USD per month for electricity. That includes heating. In winter. Rent was $750 USD/month, so heating/electricity didn't add much.

In the Nordic countries we haven't installed oil fired boilers since before the energy crisis in the seventies. It's only houses with a very old heating system that burns oil these days. A system that should be well past its replacement days.

So that's why the Norwegians make this rule now. Usage is already virtually nil, so banning them won't have any real effect. Furthermore a typical oil fired boiler can be converted to burn wood pellets for, say $1000 USD or so, so even though a cheap conversion like that has it's disadvantages, it's not exactly a deal breaker if you own a house.

Well, while I agree there are problems with the article, in fairness 1kg of "spent" nuclear fuel won't magically develop wings and spread it self out to make a city the size of New York uninhabitable either. (And spent fuel isn't that dangerous to begin with. )

If you leave it alone, it will pretty much leave you alone as well. And a 1kg cube of spent fuel just sitting there won't be that dangerous. We store them in pools in our plants for the shortest lived, most active daughters to decay before sending them on after all.

That's not to say that just leaving it laying about is a good disposal strategy for spent nuclear fuel, of course. Far from it. And, equally obvious, neither does 300kg of solar panels present nearly as much of a hazard as nuclear fuel when dealing with the aftermath.

Oh, Thomas Midgley was both careless, stupid and did not care. It's not too long a shot to call his work in lead additives to petrol down right evil (check the link).

Now, whether he knew CFCs were bad, is somewhat moot given that it's not difficult to imagine that he would have gone ahead anyway. Like he did with tetra ethyl lead before.

I remember at my first job at an industrial research laboratory with its own small metal working shop (for sample preparation and whatnot). Hence they got all sorts of odd jobs from the rest of the company, such as demo rigs for industry fairs and whatnot.

So I was asking what a guy was doing and he was finishing a small demo rig designed by a bright young recently graduated engineer (like myself) that called for a 17mm thick steel base plate. My colleague pointed out to me that that would cost quite a bit extra, since at those thicknesses the standard sizes from the mill was every other mm of thickness, i.e. 16mm and 18mm respectively. Said he: "Now, ordinarily I would just take an 18mm and grind it down in the surface grinder (machine). That would take about 12-18 hours or so, just about doubling the time allotted. But since this is a rush job, and the thickness isn't structural I'll just call him and ask if he'll be happy with an 18mm base plate..." :-)

Industry of course have many such kindly old men; willing and able to teach the snot nosed engineer about the world, one ("costly") mistake at a time. I was told that at least the lesson tends to stick that way. :-)

Arms and armaments was 11B Swedish, i.e. $1B in 2016.

So its large, but not huge.

And ostensibly we're not selling weapons to people who will actually use them, that wouldn't do... (Don't get me started...) But when it comes to larger systems, i.e. JAS Gripen fighter bombers, they're not really "used" in that respect.

It actually all started with the observation that being neutral during WWII no-one would sell us any arms when push came to shove. So in order to defend ourselves we needed our own arms industry. But in order to make that industry large enough to be viable, we had to also export... And that's where we're stuck to this day.

The problem with that argument is that it applies equally to Helmut the grocer and Helga the farmer's wife.

There were very few cows had.

Now, to what extent Ahmed and Alia are comparable to Helmut and Helga in this particular case, and in this particular time I don't know. I'm just pointing out that for there apparently is clear historical modern precedent.

Nope, "modern" light water reactors currently operating are actually pretty good at load following:

That more or less qualifies as "on a dime" as you don't really need more than that given the (large) size of current reactors (and networks). Demand doesn't change that fast on larger networks as the multitude of individual consumers average out.

And as the report says if you're participating in both primary and secondary frequency control and you're (in France's case) 75% of production, you're as "load following" as can be. What you're talking about are older designs that aren't really in operation today. That we're running nuclear as base load is due to economic considerations and that many (like Sweden) have a mix anyway. In Sweden we have ca 50% hydro, and when you have that on tap, it doesn't make sense to run your nuclear as anything but base load. But it's not because we couldn't.

Ever heard of Beta blockers, or Losec? Just to name a few. Invented and developed by Swedish industry. A country that is very much single payer, with centralised purchasing of all drugs at set prices.

And yet, there's plenty of money to be made...

No, not even remotely true. I'm working much harder and under much higher scrutiny as a publicly funded researcher than I ever did in industry (where I spent ten years of my life).

This is especially true in medicin. Most new drugs are from publicly funded research in the US. While private industry spend a lot of money it's later in the game, commercialising public results.

The public can afford to take cheap (relatively speaking) risks that nothing will result. Corporations won't. They'll play it safe. (Just witness Hollywood...)

No, that's not really true. Nuclear can and is operated in a load following manner in e.g. France and even Germany... You can really ramp up and down on a dime, as it were, i.e. there's no technical reason not to.

The reason it isn't too popular is instead that nuclear is a capital expense heavy operation, with low (relatively speaking) operating costs. So if you've built a nuclear plant you want to run it as close to 24/7 as possible, as anything else would be uneconomical.

And that's the problem with renewals, they're eating nuclear's lunch. That is, they're happy to skim the cream off the top, delivering when they can and selling dearly then, while not being able to deliver when it counts. In doing so having taken a big chunk of the money we need to make nuclear financially viable.

P.S. Smart grids are a canard. In Sweden we use our electricity for industry, and we should use a lot more for transportation. Switching water heaters on and off on a whim doesn't make one iota worth of difference.

as long as they cry 'racism'...how long before our judicial elite give the OK to nonwhites chasing whites down in the streets and lynching us?