That is a great quote. It is somewhat hard to apply here because preventing robo-callers from wasting my time and inflicting their schemes on unwary people is an important role of government. But I have to commend the quote on a day when NPR was running a story about an effort to discredit (cancel) James Webb and make a controversy about the naming of the new space telescope. It seems we are caught between two sets of crazy people...some who think they must impose their progressive morality on everyone (CS Lewis called this chronological snobbery) and some who think their capitalist schemes should be allowed to create chaos if it benefits them (ignoring the obvious fact that law exists to restrain people from harming many for their private advantage.)

Do you mean borked as in "obstructed by systematically defaming or vilifying"? Or is this use of borked slang for "broken"?

The "always innovate even when you don't understand what you are changing" meme is a major pathology of the new generation, and it does ensure job security for those who take the time to figure out how the infrastucture they use is built.

Nice rhetoric. Industry definitely needs bulk trunk level capacity. I thought the "either-or" was about either (1) local and regional renewables where the good options for large renewable penetration of the electric grid have a lot of standby fossil fuel capacity and/or personal/regional storage or (2) building extremely long distance transmission systems so that Arizona solar farms and off Atlantic coast wind farms can both contribute wherever in the country power is needed. What residential users will do for their 43% is quite different in these two scenarios and homeowners and public policy are making bets currently about how the system will evolve. Seems like there is some substance in the debate at least.

Yes, both need to happen. But "both" is an even more complex system than either alone, and there are key questions about which gets built out faster that will have major impacts on the system we end up with in 50 years. For example, people who invest a lot in home storage do not want to also pay for transmission lines and grid based storage and so it is hard to nudge the market toward solutions that get a fair system with "both" built.

One major piece that is not yet in place for your "local" "self-reliant" option is cost effective residential inverter/storage/home power management systems that can function both in grid-tied mode and in off-grid mode. Right now you have to go with either a Tesla powerwall approach which is great but quite expensive or with something like an SMA Sunny Boy which provides extremely limited and unreliable power in off-grid mode. Seems to me the best long term solution has the option for home owners to generate their own rooftop solar electricity and have a degree of personal battery storage of their choosing connected to a grid with some local generation and local storage as well as long distance transmission lines to distant wind and solar generation as well as storage. But the complexity of this system is much much greater than even the current power distribution system which itself is said to be the most complex system humans have engineered. It will take (1) strong leadership with (2) collaboration between industry and government and with (3) support from most of the citizenship to make it happen. Right we seem to be fluctuating between zero and 1.5 of these three in place, making it hard to move forward.

That is a cool result, they they can use topography, landmarks, and water supply to find ancient migration routes. But the summary emphasizes pretty much only that it took an impressively large amount of computational time. We want to know (1) what parts of the problem they are simulating in their model and (2) why it is computationally difficult. The answers seem to be: (1) They are taking topography and finding routes that minimize elevation change while also constraining routes to go near water sources and weighting toward routes that have visible landmarks. (2) Optimizing routes on a complex 2D surface is really hard since the brute force "try all routes" has too many routes to try. Please reply with better answers.

You should never underestimate how much computational time can be wasted by an inefficient or buggy algorithm simulating a physically irrelevant model. Celebrating large computations rather than accurate ones pushes people toward bad behavior.

This was the expected outcome of this idea. The original claim was extremely unlikely to be true since it violated some our foundational understanding of how light and matter interact. See earlier /. discussions for details. But it is good to check carefully and verify how and if our current understanding applies in a new case that shows something odd.

There is a lesson here that many would benefit from. People really want there to be breakdowns in existing physics theories that will make amazing new things possible. Given the accuracy of known physics at human length, time, and energy scales, it is fairly unlikely that large breakdowns will be found. Not impossible. Just expect that there will be a very large number of claims of new physics at macroscopic scales that turn out to be wrong before we actually find a breakdown that is useful technologically.

The main post has much of the story right, but by presenting it as an energy efficiency benefit, they are almost guaranteed to send the popular discussion down the standard confused path. Ultimately, humanity isn't trying to conserve energy. We are trying to maintain a healthy planet while having power available for transportation and many other things. Electrification with renewables is the way to do this. But that isn't because it is thermodynamically more efficient. The "saving energy" arguments take you into arguing about the thermodynamic efficiency of the sun in turning nuclear energy into electricity through solar or wind systems. The sun is also a "thermal energy system" in the language of the main post.

The main point here is right. Electric vehicles are substantially more efficient than gasoline vehicles to operate. For example, the cost per mile for electricity is 1/3 to 3/4 the cost per mile for gasoline (depending on prices of electricity and gasoline.). As electrification proceeds and batteries become larger and less expensive to manufacture we will see substantial benefits from electrification. But it isn't really fair to imagine that you can compare the efficiency of an electric motor (which is often above 90%) with the efficiency of a gasoline motor (which is closer to 30%). Thermodynamics teaches us that when you convert heat energy to mechanical energy you lose most of the energy because you are trying to turn a system at high entropy into a system at low entropy and the second law says you have to conserve or increase entropy. As a result you have to dump a lot of energy at high entropy as waste heat. For an electric system, that waste heat is dumped at the power plant. For a gasoline system, it is dumped in the exhaust. Full cycle efficiency for burning fuel at a power plant and transferring it as electricity to vehicles vs burning the same fuel in the vehicle engine is roughly similar (although there are a lot of interesting variables to think about). Ultimately, it is the availability of renewable electricity that doesn't require burning fuel on earth that is a central feature of the benefits of electrification of our transportation infrastructure.

It would be nice if the SJW crowd would talk about ways to improve social mobility that enhanced societal competitiveness instead of crazy ideas about eliminating homework, standardized testing, and grading because they measure both talent and privilege.

Every teacher for a century has known that some kids get help with their homework. It is usually a harm to the kids that get a lot of help since struggling and learning while doing homework is so essential. But now the radical anti-meritocracy crowd is taking aim at homework as another place where kids get messages about whether they have learned the material or not. Yes, that is what homework does. And that is what standardized tests do. And it is hard to tell the difference between performance that is made possible by good nutrition, a safe home environment, and good tutoring from parents and tutors and performance that is made possible by intellectual talent without so much support. So we should stop emphasizing homework! ??? One would just laugh if these people were not quite so serious about tearing down the meritocratic educational structures that allow a society to compete on a global stage.

This is the key point. When you talk about valuations, you are implicitly including buyers willing to pay. But they used the price of refined metal at a convenient port on earth rather than the price buyers are willing to pay for unrefined minerals on an asteroid. The value of minerals on an asteroid is zero because their value on earth is less than the cost of transporting the materials back to earth. Until there are space manufacturing facilities that need these materials, their value will remain zero.

Many don't realize how deeply the anti-meritocratic movement has penetrated the top universities. They are trying to reconcile their social justice ideas about equality for all with the reality that the rewards go to the winners, and the faculty and students at elite universities have won a competition and are richly rewarded for it. At Harvard it seems like only foolish provocative talk. The faculty at Harvard won't actually take apart the system that they rose to the top of. It is quite a bit like post-modernism: top academics pontificating about the irrationality of scholarship. The academics didn't actually stop using evidence and reason. But a few decades later, a populist is in the white house who has abandoned evidence and reason. That is the threat of anti-meritocracy. Thirty years from now we might be hearing anti-meritocracy from someone who has the power to affect our economic, engineering, and military future. Then we are in serious trouble.

The purveyors of doubt in the last half century have had many different motivations from tobacco companies to post-modern academics to climate change skeptics. But the pro-science voices opposing them often miss an important point: On the really big questions, we don't know the answers and those who claim to know are bluffing. We don't know how a mind works or whether modern industrial society is sustainable or how to achieve mental health. We don't even know how to compute the viscosity of water from first principles of quantum theory. We have a hard future ahead communicating the subtle point that the scientific synthesis is a rock solid certainty and its many skeptics are purveyors of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), but many of the questions people really want answered about how to achieve mental health and how to help their children live healthy lives and how humans can best manage our political differences in an age of environmental stress, we don't have clear answers.

Interesting. But "wrong" may not be the word you want to start with? The conversation was pretty simple, about standard signal diodes I thought. The insight that a special kind of diode can indeed store information seems to add to the discussion rather than invalidating some parts of it.