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Comment Re: I do not like Zuck any more than the rest of y (Score 1) 74

Sorry but he doesn't deserve a break here. CEOs justify their excessive pay packages by claiming great powers of vision and foresight. When I'm doing any demo's I will always do a quick trial run on the infra I plan to use. He clearly didn't. What does that say. Great powers of overconfidence?

Comment Re: Going for gold (Score 3, Interesting) 255

Ah, but they will install detectors in the fridge ; vibration sensors to tell when you're actually in the kitchen, and light sensors behind the screen. If there's no light detected when you're in the kitchen, it will be flagged as illegal mod to Company equipment and the fridge will warm up slightly so your food spoils a little bit quicker. You only get a proper cold fridge if you can see the ads.

Comment Re: huh? (Score 1) 8

Yeah, my thoughts initially, but photons do interact with strong magnetic fields. Normally the fields in photonic crystals are too small to have any effect, but they're using sophisticated control of the semiconductor lattice to introduce strain which results in a pseudomagnetic field strong enough to have effects. It's pretty amazing stuff. They built two devices; an s shaped waveguide and a beam splitter to demonstrate real world capabilities. Wonder how easy it'll be to transfer precision lab engineering to commercial scale though.

Comment Re: I don't understand how this isn't obvious (Score 1) 40

With the windows shut then. :-)

It's not strictly true that you'd only see light from behind you after you'd passed the horizon. You could see radiation from sources close in front of you that were also falling into the well. The radiation from these could reach you but of course would never make it out.

Comment That's a hell of a lot of energy. (Score 5, Interesting) 40

An astounding fact to note about these black hole mergers is the astonishing amount of radiation given out as gravitational waves. For the merger that's been analysed here the mass loss during the event was 2.3 solar masses. That's all radiated out as gravitational waves in a few hundred milliseconds. To put that into context in 230 ms the merger radiates 68 times the total energy output of our sun over it's expected lifetime (just short of 10 billion years).

Comment Re: I don't understand how this isn't obvious (Score 2) 40

To be a bit more precise it's not the radius of the black hole, it's the Schwarzschild radius, more commonly known as the event horizon, beyond which nothing can escape. For a big black hole you could quite happily go past this without even realising it, so it's not the radius of a physical sphere in the sense you'd talk about the radius of a ball or a planet.

Comment Damned if you do, damned if you don't. (Score 1) 49

Those scientists in favour of geo-engineering climate change solutions seem to be broadly taking the view that, since we are incapable of actually reducing our CO2 emissions, we ought to at least consider any other options to mitigate the problem, and fund some serious research into "sticking plasters". The recent article (available to download from Frontiers in Science) points out that all of the proposals up to now are pretty much infeasible at the scale required, and would likely cause more harm than good, both environmentally, and politically.

Essentially if we want to fix this it needs to be addressed at source, in other words our CO2 emissions, which sadly isn't likely to happen any time soon. It's all too easy for the bulk of folks just to ignore, deny or be apathetic to the problem.

Comment Chilling glimpse of the future (Score 1) 128

It's clearly not gonna happen yet for the despots, but it demonstrates that power obsessed sociopaths would just love eternal life.

There's a revolution currently underway in understanding and control of biological engineering, so inevitably some of those with sufficient resources are going to fund longevity research. I'd be surprised if at some point immortality isn't cracked via genetic re-engineering. What then? One can imagine some very dystopian scenarios for the future. I'm glad I'll be dust by then.

Comment Re: How to make me care about climate action: (Score 1) 138

Grow up. No one ever suggests we go back to living in caves. It's possible to have a very nice life, in a very nice house, without pissing in your own water tank. Go read about Easter Island if you care to see where the world is headed unless we stop consuming so much crap.

Comment Re: Author confuses straight line for circle (Score 1) 99

Couldn't agree more. In general reducing our massive overconsumption of stuff we don't really need, in tandem with producing stuff that's not designed for single use or obsolescence, would make a huge difference in energy use.

I was using circular purely in the sense economists use it, in other words rather loosely. I guess fundamentally no process is circular (arrow of entropy and all that).

Comment Re: How to make me care about climate action: (Score 1) 138

That's right. This is fine. Drink your coffee in the knowledge that it's some future pleb that burns. Unfortunately the problem is the current lifestyle of the average first worlder (Canada, USA, Russia and Australia being the frontrunners) which contributes far, far more than the wanton excess of a small number of rich morons.

Comment Author confuses straight line for circle (Score 1) 99

It's great news the plastic waste problem. We might actually have a viable form of recycling here, instead of the current smoke screen. However circular economy it ain't. We'll just have a new node on this particular oil processing pipeline: crude > PVC > petrol > CO2. Aluminium processing is circular, oil isn't, so no help for our climate problem; yes orange man, there is one.

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