If we look past the maximalist approach to squeeze every last kWh/kg, sodium batteries are already there. They're even selling sodium starter batteries, going beyond their use in cars. Better low temp performance, comparable capacity, and having the stellar distinction of not being rolling bombs. Why are we still so focused on the rare earths and patents needed for lithium ion? The logic of "lithium batteries have been in development for a fraction of the time ICE have been, so give it a little more time and they'll be comparable to ICE" should now be applied to sodium ion batteries.

Delta did pay for my group's meals and hotel rooms. That bill was more than the price of our tickets.

I have a rocketmail email address I've been using since before it was acquired by Yahoo and became Yahoo Mail.

EVs pollute the land and water much more than ICE. You can clean tailpipe emissions, but you can clean the EV detritus.

https://www.popsci.com/environ...

Got to admire the entrepreneurial spirit.

I had assumed HarmonyOS was based on Linux, in the sense Android and Tizen are. But looks like they've gone and made their own OS from the ground up. With even a variant analogous to WearOS, and their own programming language too. Bold move...

My copy of Advanced MS-DOS Programming: The Microsoft Guide for Assembly Language and C Programmers (1986; ISBN 0-914845-77-2) is a bit old. It only covers through DOS 3.2. Do you think it'll be adequate fo DOS 4.00?

Do we still need constellations of satellites for networking when we have drones that can take off and land on their own, be serviced, and go back up and stay there for a year?

The title and summary confused me and made me want to read the article, breaking the Slashdot tradition. Is the discovery that black holes are merging generally, per how the summary starts off "now we have evidence that hundreds of thousands of them are merging". Or is it that black hole pairs are merging, and the summary says shortly thereafter "the population of massive black hole pairs that are merging"?

Or is it that the way that the general merging is happening is one pair at a time, such as with Sagittarius and Andromeda, which just happen to the the two that are merging the closest to us, and which will result in a binary system forming? will the binary system then merge with another supermassive black hole? Or does it have to then merge with another binary system? Or is is a one level merge event, and once every supermassive black hole has participated in one merge event, then it's all done?

I got confused enough and got so any terms thrown at me in the summary hinting that something got grossly oversimplified in the title.

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you ...

Purchased in August, 2013, still in use today, although its 2nd-generation i3 is more than a bit long in the tooth. Current desktop is an HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini with a 6th-gen i5 picked up refurbished on Amazon back in August, 2020. I figure it's got at least another year before I get the urge to replace it.

Sorry, but the idiocy you see here is natural

Don't they know the right forum for posting stuff that they want to later blame on AI or bitter chicken?

There are oil & gas fields releasing over 25000 kg of methane all over the world. That's per hour, by the way. Good to see that after all the diversions into subsidies that gives us at best incremental benefit in cutting greenhouse gases, the US is doing something that can have immediate and substantial impact and not just greenie points.

I got an A in organic chemistry. Maybe I should have gone to med school.