the front power-seat switch could overheat and ignite the seat
Dolly Parton playing Miss Mona in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas:
You know what burns my ass?
Sure scientists are fallible, but nonetheless it still grinds forwards to the truth about reality. And that is now the anathema to the right where ideology trumps reality. See, for example, the rights general opinion on binary "biological sex" which appears to miss out on all sorts of interesting bits of reality like XY-CAIS, XXXY mosaicism, Swyer syndrome and so many more.
You can kill Lysenko's opponents but you can't make Lysenkoism reality.
I tell you what I think and why I think it. I post on slashdot for fun.
Academics playacting as public intellectuals earn their salaries directly or indirectly from selling themselves as people qualified to tell you how or what to think, and they know it.
See the difference?
Yeah man. Just like back when mike pence rounded up the gays and put them on cattle cars. Dark times.
Citation required for every single thing you said.
No evidence I benefited from past nastiness any more or any less than any person alive today. The direct descendants of slaves are long-dead and the last people to come of age under institutional racial segregation in this country are past retirement.
No evidence the bag of crazy one finds in Robin DeAngelo (read her work, I did, and there's literally elementary school logic mistakes on every page), Ibram Kendi, or their many copycats actually does any good to anyone other than the consultants pocketing fees for their diversity training services.
Also no evidence that saying land acknowledgements ad nauseum, renaming columbus day, or prefacing all your statements with a header packet listing your ancestry and supposed guilt has the power to reach back in time and undo the slave trade or innoculate the natives against smallpox.
I was told to go along with race-baiting, race-essentialist, communist-adjacent propaganda so I voted for the guy who promised to fight it. And he is.
Scientists are fallible humans the way everyone else is. And my personal observation is that academic science is a magnet for several particular human failings.
At its best, the intentionally adversarial nature of the scientific process (in experiment, nature is your adversary; in publication your peers are your adversary) separates the wheat from the chaff.
At its worst (when money and personal reputation and prestige are on the line), it's far easier to go along to get along, get the grant, get the publication, get the recommendation letter. And bad ideas fester.
There are a lot of bad ideas festering in American universities. Not least of which is the idea that having the letters PhD after your name qualifies you to opine on $current_events with unquestioned solomonic wisdom regardless of whether you have any expertise in the subject or whether your next grant is riding on a particular direction of public opinion.
As someone who's been in and around American academia for close to 25 years, I can say with certainty that a large element of American academia absolutely earned its place in the doghouse.
Years and years of quiet ascent to this shit:
https://www.newsweek.com/smith...
will grate on you too. Twenty plus years ago almost every announcement for a grant or fellowship application in my university was followed up with "women and minorities especially encouraged to apply" and not too long ago my wife (both a woman and a "minority!") is required by her employer to put a disclaimer in every presentation she gives to medical students that she did her due diligence to seek out scientific and medical sources written by underrepresented minorities before she may proceed to give the lecture, citing the people who actually did the work in question. Complexion and chromosomes notwithstanding.
Yep, if there's one thing that needs fighting, it's those pesky lower gas prices.
Given I'm spiritually Calvin's dad, I agree.
Thus, autocrats dislike research, which enables that change.
Yes: you can't control research: you can murder Lysenko's opponent but you can't make him right and in a fight between ideology and reality, reality wind eventually. Autocracy is all about control, and research is the anathema to that. It may often tell you thing that are directly contradictory to deeply held beliefs.
I mean just look at how the "biological sex" crowd respond to things like XY-CAIS, XY/XX mosaic chimerism, 46XX DSD, Swyer syndrome, and so on.
And now it's being systematically destroyed by one psychotic senile moron
Afraid to say it's not. Not not being destroyed. Not by one psychopathic senile moron. I mean he is, certainly, but he still has an approval rating of 34%. That's about 70 million complete morons or so. You have about 34%of the population cheering him on.
People who are deeply partisan or utterly in love with a single politician don't understand people who despise a politician specifically because of their actions and policies. It's particularly confusing for them when this is baised towards one party or the other because parties tend to stick to similar sorts of things in the short to medium term.
The blind partisans can't tell the difference between that and being blindly partisan like themselves.
So, they assume that like themselves you don't judge the actual actions of the person.
They do make the news, but often only the regional news. Did you read about the fire in Bermondsey or Avonmouth? Both were on the BBC somewhere.
The UK is never going to deploy vast amounts of solar, we donâ(TM)t have the insolation for it.
Indeed, but even so, we do get enough that relatively expensive rooftop solar is generally worth it.
But we sure as shit have the wind (and tidal) and thereâ(TM)s all the rest to do as well: EAFs, induction cookers, heat pumps, EVs, blah. We need to race or be left in the dust, like Americans with their shitty payments systems with cheques etc (and obviously with fossil fuels too).
Yep, we have a lot of wind, especially now with modern offshore building techniques.
I think with the right investment and incentives, we can also focus on batch industrial processes, things like arc furnaces and electric cement kilns which can be spun up and down fast enough to deal with weather variations where necessary. Sure depreciation is a bit of a pain, but having free energy in order to dump excess capacity is quite compelling.
Multiple reasons.
One is they have a very high power density, both specific and volumetric. You need quite a lot of power to vapourise water and lithium is the winner here. Largely speaking, small, especially disposable vapes appear to be limited by the power density of battery chemistries not the energy density.
Pouch cells are also really good for small batteries because they don't have a prismatic metal shell, and they can easily be made to custom shapes.
It is an incredible waste of resources.
Too much is not enough.
