Einstein, 1952

Ummmm...yeah. That's called evolution.

I have noticed over the past few years that ants in my area have "learned" to avoid consuming Raid borax laced syrup. I remember early on in my house that ants would feast on the stuff, sucking large drops dry in a matter of minutes. Now, the new ants crawl up to the syrup I have left, seem to probe it, and then run away quickly. Even if I applied the syrup to an established ant pathway, they go around the drops without consuming any of it. I don't know whether they are averse to eating the sugar, or whether they can somehow sense the borax in the syrup. There seems to be some evolution going on here.

Those who would trade their freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security.

Ben Franklin

When I was a teenager, the father of a wealthy school friend won a hovercraft in a card game. It looked quite similar to the one above. It was powered by a Bombardier snow mobile engine and was extremely loud. It would only hover when the fan was running, as the airstream for the hovering air came from a diverted stream of about 1/3rd of the prop wash air. Steering it felt a lot like trying to push one of those Ikea shopping carts that has four pivoting wheels...during a turn, you end up going sideways for a time. Going over water, it felt not unlike being on a loud boat or a seadoo. Going over land, it felt like being on a loud ground vehicle. The cool part came when we could drive it over a mud flat which alternated between sand and water. It really was an unusual sensation. The problem was that it ate fuel like crazy. It was far worse than a regular boat. The other problem was that when it came to a rest, the sand started to grind down the bottom. We did mitigate this by adding some fiberglass enforced wooden rails. Overall, it was great fun as a teenager, but even if I had the money to dump on such a toy, I doubt I would.

I have an hypothesis:

# of libertarian slashdot posters = k / (average software developer salary)

where k is some real number.

This guy built a self-driving car powered by an android phone and a laptop. He did something similar with a raspberry pi in place of the phone. I find this fascinating. In essence, he taught the car to drive by driving it around a black track delineated by white boundaries, with the computer recording a basic video of his driving technique. The neural network was then trained to drive like a human. The neural network ideas were contained in this free Stanford Machine Learning Course by Andrew Ng. It would be unbelievably cool to me if someone could make this technology more accessible to a wider audience.

People said that about the Toyota Prius. And yet, I recently talked to a taxi driver who drove his Prius for 500 000 miles with no problems other than regular maintenance such as brake replacement. The Prius electric motor takes the stress off the gasoline motor during startup, reducing wear. And the battery is aggressively kept at an optimal charge level (60 to 80% I think). BTW, I am also a Prius owner, and I like the car a lot.

Again, the above is a perfect example of bullshit, or if you want a more polite term, "poppycock" or "humbug". Quoting from the above link...

"bullshit" can be sometimes be distinguished from lying...

The parent poster seems to implicitly (and deliberately?) confuse climate and weather. There are numerous quality discussions about chaotic systems, the differences between climate and weather, and how climate is predictable farther into the future than weather. The existence of these arguments, and the poster's seeming ignorance of them seems to indicate to me that the poster simply does not care about the truth, but cares rather only to appear to be truthful to those less well-read in science. As such, he falls nicely under Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshiter given in his 2005 monograph 'On Bullshit':

What about ROUS's?

It is a derogatory term for a despicable practice.

Definiton of bull shit:

Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.

"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions. It may also merely be "filler" or nonsense that, by virtue of its style or wording, gives the impression that it actually means something.

Here is a video of a scientist named Charles Chase who works for Lockheed Martin Skunkworks. The presentation is made at Google's "Solve for X". The video is 14 minutes long so I'll give an executive summary. Chase claims that his team has made a breakthrough in developing a small fusion reactor that will lead to a 100MW reactor the size of a truck trailer and of the complexity of a jet engine. The prototype they have built is a cylinder 1m in diameter by 2m long. In their experiment they put deuterium gas into a magnetically confined space and heat it up with radiofrequency energy. He infers that the confined plasma is reaching the conditions necessary for fusion to occur. The reactor is "high beta", with "beta" referring to the ratio of the magnetic field pressure to the pressure of the plasma pushing out. He says that the magnetic field strength in the reactor increases as you go out from the centre of the plasma, thus creating an extremely effective plasma confinement. He contrasts this with a Tokamak reactor, where the magnetic field is generated by the moving plasma itself, and thus decreases in strength out from the centre of the plasma. He says that this decreasing field strength is the main problem with Tokamak reactors and that it causes the confinement to be unstable. If the confinement becomes unstable, the magnetic field decreases, thus creating a negative feedback loop. This contrasts with his reactor design, that tends to create a far more stable plasma confinement.

I have a background in physics and what this man says in his video makes sense to me. It is of course short on details, but what would you expect for a short presentation. And you wouldn't expect a Skunkworks scientist to publish information in the same way as a university scientist. I have often puzzled in the past as to why we can't use an elegant method of magnetic confinement to achieve the conditions for fusion on a small scale. Tokamak seems an inelegant dead end. I think that if you can adequately confine the plasma, you have solved the energy balance problem that has plagued fusion reactors in the past.

Watch the video and see what you think.

2500 years ago, Aristotle wrote that

I sometimes wonder if many of our current political difficulties are due in part to the fact that our political and academic elites have stopped reading the classics. Those who designed our current political and economic systems were steeped in classical Greek literature (ie. Locke, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Voltaire, Rousseau et al.). The ancient Greeks invented money as a medium of universal exchange, private property, constitutional law and democracy. I wonder how we can preserve these systems if we do not understand where they come from.