Another surprising fact about fusion in the Sun is that the fusion power generated is about 1.5 watts per ton of core. Even in conditions in the core of the sun, fusion is hard, and the particular reaction process just confirmed was at the end of a long chain of reasoning explaining what we do see. So I think this actually give evidence that a bunch of stuff in Wikipedia about processes in the Sun is also true. (If a different fusion process was found, then we'd likely be wrong about how much power is generated, and thus about the rate and manner that that power eventually makes it to the surface and gets radiated).

Airbags, when first mandated by government ahead of when manufacturers were prepared for roll-out, were in fact quite dangerous. Does your car have an airbag off switch for the front passenger seat, so a child can sit there? It took a while for people to catch on and socially impose a "no kids in the front seat" rule, after many unfortunate incidents involving children. It was an total fuck-up, a perfect example of government do-gooding directly injuring people - children and the elderly in this case. And it was years before the problem was properly addressed with weight-sensors in the seats.

There's a strong market for safety features in cars today. You really don't need ham-handed government applying force for adoption.

Self-discipline is, in fact, useful in life. I'm glad you learned to multiply in your head one way or another. I never thought of it as "memorizing a table", as that only took a day or two, I thought of it as a lot of boring drill repeating something I knew already. But, of course, I got faster the more I did it. The journey from "conscious competence" to "unconscious competence" is an important one.

I also spent a few idle hours once to memorize the simplest of logarithm tables - 10^0.1 to 10^0.9, two a couple significant digits, which has proven useful over the years in quick mental estimation of all sorts of financial calculations.

The more tools on has in one's mental toolbag, the better.

I think throughout most of the south, the cities are very different places - was that your experience?

Can you really not tell the product of two single-digit numbers at a glance? I'm sorry for your innumeracy. It's really not hard to fix - like learning to read as an adult, it only takes a few weeks of evening study.

Giordano Bruno? He was politically active, and wrote on many topics, including personal attacks on other thinkers of the day. While only his scientific writings were of lasting interest, it was likely his other writings that got him in trouble. He didn't have a firm political backer, instead wandering from one place to another without gaining a patron. In that time, political writings or public personal attacks were often treated as a challenge between patrons - to do so with no patron yourself was a poor life strategy.

Name one scientist who lost his head for blasphemy?

The key during the time of the inquisition was to stay away from politics. Anything one wrote with consequences or religious overtones was sharply examined for orthodoxy, because of major ongoing conflicts over political power, disguised as arguments over theology.

Most scientific writing at the time had what can be seen as a "boilerplate legal disclaimer" up front, which in the context of the day simply said "any resemblance to a religious or political argument is unintentional". You said explicitly that your weren't taking sides in the politics of the day, and you got on with the content.

ID is not a falsifiable hypothesis. It could be proven true - the aliens who seeded Earth with genetically modified precursors could land in space ships and present us with solid evidence - but it can't be proven false.

I agree it could be a great discussion topic, but likely it won't be. A friend of mine from Georgia (the US state) described his high school biology lecture on evolution as "OK, today I'm legally required to tech evolution. We all believe in Jesus, right? OK, next topic."

I got my first programming job, after a couple of years of struggling to find one, in part because I remembered how to do long division (and some other pencil and paper math). No joke, it was my big break.

But it's been shown that memorizing multiplication tables (and using them in drill until you reach effortless competence with multiplication) directly improves your ability to learn more abstract math and related reasoning.

"There's zero chance it can fail," said the young engineer.

Right, so it's just a matter of building a river, a dam, and a hydro plant next to my solar plant in the desert. That'll work. Some ideas have been tried like pumping water uphill, or molten salt for thermal storage, but are overly lossy. I'm a big fan of the idea of hydrogen-based energy storage (storing hydrogen as a palladium hydride is quite dense and safe), and that can work at small scale so individual home systems can use it, but again that's not yet practical, just another "looks great on paper" idea.

An abrupt 40% increase in power cost (totally do-able with solar thermal) would destroy the economy. It's a non-starter. Over 20 years, though, maybe. Of course, that's plenty of time for better solar panels to happen (today the good ones simply can't be made in the needed quantity, but technology marches on).

I don't share your religious beliefs, and object to your suggestion that they be imposed by force. Maybe you can persuade one of the governments that will actually matter though - China and India. China might be an easy sell there since imposing crazy economic ideas by force is the norm. Pushing down coal use in the US, though, that seems to have some popular support. Natural gas is so cheap, and vastly better in terms of genuine pollution.

Maybe it's you? I'm 45 and recruiters bother me more than ever. I keep my tech skills current, and carefully manage my career so as not to get stuck looking like an expert only on old things. Senior engineers are golden right now - I find it a great place to be. If what I do could be done by a kid anywhere, well, I'd be a terrible engineer after 20+ years.

True enough, but it doesn't matter. Other than during the dot-bust, it's never taken me long to get a series of interviews whenever I wanted/needed a new job. This is not a career where staying for a long time at any company is usually rewarded, this is a job where technical success stories on your resume from many years of companies are rewarded.

Any job that sounds fun like that will be exploitive and pay less. There's likely no worse corner of this industry than the large game companies. Find something to work on that puts your friends to sleep when you describe it, but people in the industry know is important.

Even in the west, the grid is woefully behind (Texas is doing the best, but it's not great). Our 3 big power grids have been running on capacity that was originally intended as redundant for years now, and we've about exhausted that. It's a real and serious problem that no one is fixing. With most state governments going broke, it's not going to catch the interest of voters as a priority until the worst happens. And since that level of infrastructure buildout takes 20 years, it will be bad for some time once it goes bad.

Large scale blackouts due to cascading failures that take hours or days to recover from is the next step. "Off the grid" won't be optional, unless we change our ways and build infrastructure, or people can generate their own, thus taking load off the grid. "Off the grid" solutions are already somewhat popular in places where electrical power is unreliable - which increasingly will be "most places".

I hope we never have to "political will" to impose some guy's idea of what's best on everyone else. It's too expensive and awkward to store power today. There's not really a good, cost-effective solution for using solar as base load generation. The panels that are cost-effective are too tied to rare materials to be more than a nice product. We could make solar thermal work if we had to, at industrial scale, but since we don't have to, we won't. However, with better energy storage and panel technology, it all becomes practical.

Solar power will happen on its own when it's cheap and practical, no dictatorial imposition required. And it seems like that's getting close, just a couple of breakthroughs away. But not today.

Peak energy usage in the home is highest when people are in the home. That's not contentious, right?

So rooftop solar panels on people's own roofs aren't going to generate power where and when it's needed. People buy them, however, because the directly see the savings as money in their pocket. Rooftop solar is growing in popularity. Building public infrastructure is falling in popularity, and as local governments go broke (especially in Cali) it just won't happen, except where cities see the same immediate money-in-pocket rewards. We're going to have an infrastructure crunch regardless of power generation method. And obviously, a pure solar generation strategy can't work today.

All of that gets vastly better with safe dense power storage. With that, home solar doesn't mean dumping power into the grid a 2, then pulling it back at 8- and people will buy it. With that, industrial solar power generation can become base load.

It that a more clear statement? Power storage (together with solar panels that are easier to make) will let mankind move to solar to meet our power needs for quite some time to come, perhaps long enough for fusion power to finally become real. But those are significant technical obstacles.