Wyoming's Public Service Commission has approved some interesting tariffs for large data center service. The data centers are required to make their backup generation facilities dispatchable under control of the utility most of the time. During periods of high demand, if the backup generators are the cheapest source of additional power, the utility gets to make the decision about running those generators.

The same arrangement probably can't be used in places where an ISO operates the grid through a pure market system.

Hey, what's that watermelon doing there?

... this has lead to a search for a new type of Dark Matter particles, axions, which arise in theories that explain why there is no CP violation in strong interactions.

Does this imply that theorizing and philosophizing, by producing more axions, may in fact hasten the end of the universe??

The end is nigh! Oh dear, now it is nigher! And nigher yet again! AAAAAAAGH!

You know when you are a 100X'er because at that level you just feel the vibes.

So, what is this, just sitting around on a sybian all day?

Actually, that sounds about on-point for some of this AI blather...

Given the goals of Project 2025 and the expressed intent of effectively gutting any service provided by the federal government to the population at large, this scrapping of FCC policy goals meant to aid the public by constraining corporations from offering the bare minimum of service for the maximum of money, without regard for any other goals whatsoever, falls firmly into the "No shit, Sherlock" category of disappointing but unsurprising news.

Most of the biggest battery companies also sell utility scale installations. Tesla has said in public filings recently that they are selling MegaPacks faster than they can build them. My small local power authority -- peak summer demand around 750 MW -- has ordered a 400 MWh battery system. The batteries are being built by a Korean company that is already constructing a big US factory. The power authority would probably accept some delivery delay if they didn't have to pay the tariffs.

Really not sure where your anger is coming from? You're the one who claimed that the Spanish came over "in sailing ships the size of small Inca cities", I'm just pointing out the historical inaccuracy of this. Machu Picchu was just an estate, as you note not even able to feed itself except as part of the overall Incan economy, and that estate was already larger than the crew sizes of the larger Spanish vessels.

Not sure what your point is about carracks? Those were the predecessors to and usually smaller still than galleons -- the Santa Maria was classed as a carrack, and that had a crew complement of only 40. The largest carrack built as of 1502 was the Portuguese Frol de la Mar with a complement of 500, but it looks like most carracks were substantially smaller. Bearing in mind the context we were talking about of when European diseases were brought over, that historical timing makes galleons irrelevant anyway, since they don't really become a thing until the late 1500s. I used that ship size as a quick-and-easy estimator, as I had tried to make clear in the wording of my earlier post.

About settlement size, "city" in general parlance, even in modern contexts, refers to the larger size of community. If you intended something smaller, even smaller than the 40-person crew of the carrack Santa Maria, then yes, you should have used a different word. I would never consider a community of a few tens of people to be a "city", more of a "hamlet"; a few hundreds on up I might consider a "village", a "town" would be up to a few thousands, whereas "city" even in antiquity calls to mind populations of several thousands. The ancient city of Uruk, for instance, regarded by some as the first known real city, had a population of some 40K.

About “As for "you're not sure you can agree"? Are you serious?” — that's an example of being politely indirect.

Spanish galleons were bigger than the earlier conquistador exploratory ships. Apparently they had crews of up to around 400 people on a single ship. Let's use that higher number, for sake of argument. That's close enough to the entire size of Cortés's expedition force when he set out to conquer the Aztecs, about 500 men, albeit spread across 11 ships.

The Incan outpost of Machu Picchu was only ever a small settlement, in its early days basically a royal estate. Even then the town had about 750 people, larger than the crew of a galleon. The proper city of Chan Chan in the neighboring Chimor empire had a population estimated at some 40-60K, yet again a wee bit more than could fit on a galleon. The Chimor empire was conquered by the Incas around 1470. By comparison, the population of London in 1377 was estimated at some 40K, growing to an estimated 50K by 1500.

Just in terms of the numbers of people, your math ain't mathing.

If we pay attention to recent developments in lidar and surveys of now-overgrown areas in Amazonia, archaeologists are finding more and more long-forgotten settlements, showing that what we now think of as remote and largely unpopulated jungle regions were actually home to extensive human settlements in the past.

I'm not sure I can agree with cusco's claim of Incan advancement, but their death-toll estimate might not be far off. It is increasingly clear from mounting archaeological evidence that the advent of European diseases in the Americas caused a rapid and enormous depopulation.

I've kept a copy of vile on every Windows box I've been forced to use. Any installation hassle was worth the effort to keep my fingers from having to learn a new editor.

Any details you could post for those interested in reading more? Case name, date, which district, etc.?

As dense as this stuff is made out as, I wonder how workable it would be?

Would a contractor be able to just drive a nail into it, using a regular hammer and a normal swing? Or would the nail simply refuse to go in, and you're wasting time, energy, and possibly getting injured, just trying to figure out how to fasten the damn stuff?

Likewise for screws: will this need special drivers? Or special drill bits? Etc., etc.

Interesting, thank you for the reply, this prompted me to look deeper into things. It looks like Japanese law regarding educational positions has changed some since I last had much exposure to the educational system over there, with a bit of a revamp in 2007. Upon further inspection, I think you're right that the jun kyouju position might be equivalent to a tenured position in the west, although "tenure" works differently in Japan, and might better be expressed as simply an open-ended contract. That said, from reading around just now, it also looks like only Japanese nationals are eligible for this form of tenure, with foreign nationals offered explicitly temporary contracts.

Even assuming that Lockley has (the rough equivalent of) tenure, that would be for his position as a professor of English. This qualification as an English professor seems orthogonal to any judgment on his publications about history.

Thomas Lockley is a jun kyouju or associate professor (not tenured), and he uses history content as the medium through which to teach English. He is not trained as an historian, but rather as a language teacher. Here is one of his earlier papers from 2011 about "self-access learning", more focused on pedagogy. Here is his listing in the Foreign Language - English faculty at Nihon University (in Japanese), explicitly noting his associate professor status and showing that he teaches several English classes, something about "fundamentals of self-creation" (?), and some kind of seminar.

Here is his own description of his English course offerings for 2024, from page 11 of this PDF course listing archived from the Nihon University site:

Welcome to Nihon University College of Law. Congratulations on your entry. My classes are content-based English classes with a focus on the international history and culture of Japan, containing themes and stories of people from history to help you improve your English and learn content at the same time. I also hold a zeminar class in the final two undergraduate years. I hope you will have a stimulating and informative four years in our College.

Professor Mihoko Oka, whose bio page you linked to, also states that Lockley's work is not academic. From a post of hers on X (in romanization, since Slashcode is still incompetent shit when it comes to Unicode support):

Watashi wa Rokkurii-san no chosaku wa, Nihongo mo Eigo mo "rekishi yomimono" de ari, gakujutsu kenkyuu de aru to wa kangaete orimasen.

My own quick-and-dirty translation:

For my part, Lockley's works in both Japanese and English are "history light reading", and I do not consider them to be academic research.

Considering also that his English-language writings and Japanese-language writings about Yasuke make different statements, I would not personally go so far as to call him a fraud, but I think it is reasonable to not take him as an expert on history, and to approach his works on history with a modicum of caution.

You seem to have greatly mistaken the point of the post you replied to.

That is entirely possible! :D

My points were reacting more to your statements that Yasuke was a samurai because he was kashin, who fought, was granted a stipend, and was allowed to wear two swords. Half of this is not backed up historically (kashin; two swords), and the other half isn't germain to samurai-ness (fighting, at least at Honnou-ji; stipend).

Cheers!

The word fuchi is translatable as "stipend", but historically this was basically just the payroll of a household — even servants were paid fuchi at that time. This word alone is insufficient evidence for Yasuke being anything but an employee.

Prof. Hirayama's post on X takes some liberties with terminology. Per point 1, see above. Per point 2, primary sources state that Yasuke was given a shitaku or "private residence", not the yashiki or "house with land; a manor, a landed estate", the word that Prof. Hirayama uses. A shitaku could well have been a matter of Nobunaga giving Yasuke exclusive use of an empty gardener's hut, quite a different thing than an estate with land. Per point 3, primary sources state that Yasuke was given a sayamaki or literally "scabbard-winding", which tells us only that he was given some kind of bladed weapon with this kind of scabbard. That might well have been a short-sword with no hilt-guard, as described here at Kotobank (in Japanese). Despite Prof. Hirayama's mention of nitou-zashi ("having two swords in one's sash"), we also have no indication in the original documents of how many blades he was given.

Granted, Prof. Hiroyama's points 1 through 3 might have played out the way he suggests, in which case Yasuke could circumstantially be said to have something equivalent to "samurai" status, despite never explicitly being described as such. But then again, points 1 through 3 might have played out instead along more meager lines, in which case the circumstantial evidence would point towards Yasuke not having the equivalent to "samurai" status.

The problem is that we just don't have enough information in the original documents from that time to be able to say much at all definitively about Yasuke's status and role. While we can't say that he certainly wasn't a samurai, we also can't say that he certainly was.