Jeeze, and I thought Parisians were snobs. Not everything on streaming is devoid of value. Do you hold yourself to the same impossibly high standard ("Create your own joy and endorphin-goading hi [sic]!")?

For a long while now, I've desperately wished for the mainstream U.S.-based newspapers to start adding dual dimensions, at least in their sci-tech articles. I'm sure the reporters are tired of, say, writing about things that are 0.6 mi or 330 feet, when any scientifically-literate person knows that's actually code for 1 km or 100 m. Or trying to muddy the distinction among the different versions of ton.

Instead, I propose a new editorial standard for them: just put in the dual dimensions. Along the lines of "the asteroid is estimated to be about 330 feet [100 m] across." That will not only make it comprehensible to the rest of the world, but also will demonstrate that the numbers being reported aren't random - they only seem random when converted into nonsensical U.S. units.

Came here to say roughly the same thing. Something along the lines of "the mote that is in thy brother's eye" [ref]. That's a biblical reference that all the God-fearing hypocrites on Capitol Hill ought to recognize.

While that might work for those in mild climates an all electric house is impractical for any region that sees snow on the ground regularly.

I'll see your anecdote with one of my own: I live in the U.S. at about 45degN. I receive about 90" [2.3 m] of snowfall per year (historically, anyway - less and less in recent years, fucking climate change), and wintertime overnight lows average below 20F [-7 C]. My residential heat and domestic hot water are fully electrified - we capped our natural gas supply several years ago. My home has a 200 A service from the grid - an upgrade from when the home was built a century ago, but pretty much what you'd expect in residential new construction. One place installing lots of heat pumps in the U.S. is Maine, which is hardly a tropical paradise. My operating expenses are lower than with natural gas, and subject to less volatility.

There are times when I worry about electrical outages, and I am making plans to mitigate them. But at the same time, when my heat came from gas I was still vulnerable to losing heat during an outage, because the furnace, forced exhaust, circulating pumps, etc., all required electricity to run!

Unlike you, I am not so haughty as to say "this is my experience, therefore it's true for everyone." Still, fully electrified homes are quite practical in lots of geographies.

You've probably never actually cooked in a wok. To make the types of cuisine that are typically cooked in a wok requires temperatures that electric elements (induction or otherwise) just can't reach.

I do, in fact, cook with a wok on occasion. But I don't consider myself an expert, nor do I have one of the countertop units I mentioned.

On the other hand: these guys do fancy themselves experts (for what that's worth on the Internet), and readily demonstrate several styles of wok cooking using these countertop units. Most seem rated to 1500-2000 W output which, since it's induced directly into the wok material, should match the results of a 15,000 BTU/hr gas burner in a typical home. Neither will replicate the results of what you'd find in a Chinese restaurant, but there are more powerful (up to 10 kW!) induction hobs specifically for that purpose, too.

If you cook in a wok you need gas.

Bollocks. You can use a modestly flat-bottomed wok (made of carbon steel) on an induction burner. You can also purchase counter-top induction burners meant to receive spherical-bottomed woks. Five seconds of Google, my friend.

Or are you referring to the jet engine burners you find in a Chinese restaurant? Do you have one of those at home? Got a fryolator, too? Restaurants have all kinds of equipment that home kitchens don't.

Gas stoves/ovens are being banned around the world, to prevent houses catching fire.

That is a worthy, but ultimately small, side benefit. (There's also eliminating the risk of explosions, which seems pretty obvious.)

The real benefits are, as this article points out, not having methane in your indoor air, nor the byproducts of indoor combustion (CO2, NOx, and - especially if the combustion is poor and incomplete - CO and soot). And before the nay-sayers crow "those are all the result of shoddy installation and poor ventilation!" I will pre-but with "So what?" Shoddy installation should be expected in some percentage of any household product - how many homes still have knob-and-tube, or lack outlets that are properly grounded? Better ventilation is a laudable goal - just about every home could use it - but survey existing and new home construction and you'll find all manner of bad practices.

There is a wider benefit of reducing emissions that drive climate change. Not just from the emissions in one person's home, but also reducing/eliminating the emissions from the natural gas distribution to all those individual homes/businesses, and the emissions from mining that gas in the first place.

Finally, there is reduced cost to the end user: an electrified home doesn't need a separate gas hookup and internal gas plumbing, which reduces construction cost; nor does it have a gas meter or gas utility bill. Electricity prices are much less volatile than natural gas'. Many residences can generate their own electricity via solar, which is substantially cheaper than what you'll get from the utility.

Seems like an ideal use case for the hybrid airship designs that came out a few years ago. Like the one that looks like a giant butt.

I don't disagree. I also don't view it as an exclusive either-or situation. An airplane like this can cover distance at speed (2000 km at 700 km/hr) and get you pretty close. The airship can handle the last mile (airstrip to turbine-in-progress) and aid with assembly by hovering.

I'm thinking in transport from seaport to seaport and from there by waterways to the final destination. Or maybe, if we're talking about wind farms to last several decades, building capable railroads (if possible and economically viable) just as we do with ore mining regions.

That may work in some cases, but I don't see that being a viable solution for, say, the middle of the Dakotas. There are navigable rivers, yes, but not something you're going to float a 100-m turbine blade along all the way from, say, New Orleans. The typical Mississippi barge maxes out at ~200 ft (60 m). Rivers have turning radii, too, and locks have maximum lengths.

I don't see how building a railroad is a less-impactful solution than widening a 1-km stretch of access road, which they're going to have to build anyway.

Sea and rail transport still seems the best way to do it.

As the article points out: ground transportation is the limiting factor for larger on-shore turbines. Rules of the road and rail place a practical upper limit of 70 m. So, sure, you could build a 100-m blade - similar to the largest offshore turbines - at a coastal facility, and you could transport it to a large port nearest to your wind farm. But then what? How do you get it the last mile (or last 1000 mi) to your site?

To answer the question "why this design vs. other nuclear rockets?" it comes down to operating temperature. Previous nuclear-thermal rocket designs, like NERVA, were designed with solid nuclear fuel in mind - similar to most nuclear reactors. On the relative scale of rocketry, that's a pretty simple design. ("Simple" != "Easy") However, this means your thrust is a bit limited by the melting point of the nuclear fuel assembly - the hydrogen (or whatever propellant) is being relied upon to keep the nuclear core from (literally) melting down. So: the propellant can only be heated to, say, 2500K before it hits the nozzle.

But if your design assumes that the nuclear fuel is already liquified by its own prodigious heat, then the propellant can be heated much higher. Earlier work by NASA and AIAA talks about getting up to 5500K. But, it seriously complicates the engine design, because now your design needs to handle molten nuclear fuel, usually at high pressure (to ensure it doesn't boil off), and separate it from the propellant (so you don't spew U235 out the back end). So we have this centrifuge design.

It seems to me that some kind of heavy lift helicopter solution might make more sense. My understanding is that a reliable 100m turbine blade can be made weighing about 35 tons. Although the most capable current helicopters can only accommodate an external lift weight of about 20 tons, it seems easier to build a more powerful helicopter than a massive aircraft that can land on a makeshift dirt runway.

An airplane provides two major benefits: range and efficiency. Radia is targeting ~2000-km range at max payload. This permits a factory to turn out giant blades and move them pretty much wherever. Need to refuel? Just land at any airport and gas up. A Skycrane, by contrast, has a maximum range of 370 km with no payload. Need to refuel? First you need to hover and detach your payload, then go over somewhere else to refuel, then re-hitch your payload and continue on. Generally speaking, fixed-wing aircraft a vastly more fuel-efficient at moving things than helicopters, whose main advantage is hovering and not needing a runway.

Despite LIGO being a revolutionary tool for astrophysics - Nobel Prize work, already built and paid for - the Trump Administration is proposing to drastically cut its funding, so that one of the two observatories would have to shut down. [1] [2] [3]

As the NYT succinctly put it in their headline: "Happy Birthday, LIGO. Now Drop Dead."

Eppur si muove!

(to distract us from some totally-fake-hoax-thing..)

Which one?! There are so many awful things that I'm supposed to not be paying attention to, it's hard to remember.

I guess you have no clue what the power requirements for a cell tower are.

Who says it has to be a cell tower? There's plenty that you could do with LoRa. Or you could have a local operative do a slow drive-by and check in over WiFi or Bluetooth.