The great paradox, or great tradeoff: electrons are easy to move; molecules are easy to store.

For fixed installations, the former wins. For mobile installations, the latter does.

Shoehorning one into the other's domain might work sometimes, like dragging a cord behind a plugin lawnmower, and other times it makes about as much sense as hammering in a screw or screwing in a nail, like when trying to talk about battery electric commercial aviation with a straight face.

The MBTA here in Boston recently got rid of their electric trolleybus fleet, took down the overhead wires that ran that fleet for close to a century, and is waiting on some backordered battery electric busses to replace what had already been an all-electric system. The were running diesel busses while waiting.

That was very much on the hammering a screw side of the ledger.

Cars...aren't *as* far...but they're not what you'd do if you weren't already a zealot.

I have cars with very basic controls, but even then, one of them has a screen (and a number of basic controls for AC anyway).. I know foe sure that a phone in my hand with the map on it or with a YouTube channel (I listen, I watch the road) is much easier from point of view of reaction speed than the car's touchscreen. A phone I can glance at for a fraction of a second and control it from memory mostly, the car's screen is so much slower, it requires much longer time to deal with its interface Using a touchscreen in a car is more dangerous than a phone, for sure.

Anyone who's ever operated a motor vehicle could have, did, and has been saying this for the past decade-plus since these things have proliferated.

One could indirectly blame the Obama-era NHTSA for pushing a backup camera requirement that put a giant screen in every car's dashboard, giving the software weenies an excuse to try to turn everything into an iphone copycat. But I prefer to blame the idiots who could have said "no buttons no dice" but didn't. Whether out of cowardice, laziness, or incompetence I don't know and don't care. But every since car is a billion-dollar project for the carmaker and someone there is the one responsible for it. Project Engineer, Lead Designer, whatever his job title was...he's the dipshit who needs to go into the stockade.

I guess Russia is technically in Europe...

But no, you didn't miss anything. Post-war Europe collectively decided to spend their money on the welfare state rather than military development.

Every space program alive today traces its heritage to military programs to provide robust communications, surveillance, and weapons delivery through space. The scientific and commercial stuff came after, and in the US at least became somewhat self-sustaining as an industry.

Europe elected to miss out on the seed capital back in the 50s and 60s because icky militarism and here they are today.

I'm a research engineer in the nominal prime of my career with all kinds of impressive-looking letters after my name. I, too, am a firm believer in systematic, hard-nosed, and uncompromising interrogation of Nature.

I mention this because I would prefer not to be misconstrued as yet another loudmouth in the peanut gallery when I say that the scientific enterprise, both the public-facing and the inward-facing parts, are a badly broken remnant of a once-great human endeavor. And political extremists of both colors (one in capital-S science and one outside it) bear a large portion of the responsibility. But since we all know which stripe of extremist actually influences the direction of science, I assign it a larger fraction of the blame than I do to the inhabitants of the peanut gallery.

Started reading a copy of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World that my uncle gave me a while back.

First chapter calls out thalidomide as a nucleation site for public mistrust of the scientific enterprise (book was written in 1995 back when memories of it were fresher).

Sagan distinctly falls onto the "science cheerleader" camp in today's culture wars, but it's telling that even the patron saint of capital-S Skepticism opens his final book with an exhortation to humility among scientists and presumably also the science cheerleaders.

That lack of humility has been, and very much still is, a nucleation site for skepticism of science and the scientific enterprise. Perhaps one could argue (as the smug intellectual class of today often does) that the skeptics don't need any excuses so it's not worth walking on tiptoes to avoid giving them ammunition.

But that argument is born of hubris, insularity, and a misreading of the human condition. Science that is conspicuously scrupulous about things like refraining from making wild claims about things like ScienceJesus healing the sick and regrowing limbs with a touch and technobable is going to maintain and retain more trust than a scientific enterprise that walks, acts, and quacks like just another priesthood.

;;

By analogy, I'm closer than ever to being a billionaire astronaut olympic sprinter.

AI ethics

Vibes and snake oil

Hmmmm

No. You couldn't and he didn't.

What went down was:

A few days after the crash, he pointed out that you could hear the RAT just before the crash blossoms.

Let's take the other counterfactual by consulting present reality. Let's say Mosadegh got into power and cozied up to the Soviets in the 50s. Okay cool. What would it have looked like if Iran were aligned against the West and with the Russians? Well...that's the facts on the ground now and it doesn't seem to be working out for them given that their leadership is being bombed out of existence and the Russians can't do anything for them.

Well if the beatings don't do the job...

y'all get together in a big room at the same time.

Why here's an inviting one in pristine condition...

His slogan should be "Everyone's listening!", because it's going to be FBI, CIA, IRS, DHS, DOT, FHA but also the ruzzians and Chinese and Hegseth's wife.