>He was in the right place at the right time, with the right dream.

A statistically unlikely number of times.

Going to Mars personally is no longer in his future for national security reasons.

Only a fool would want to.

It's weird to see a global espionage saga and say, "well that's dumb. I am not a wizard with nation state resources, but I could so that on a casual weekend." Their security sucks so much that my grandson could probably accidentally do that while settling up a game server.

It's not every day you see somebody use the courts to pound a blunt screwdriver into their own nuts. I hope the lawyers are OK.

These social media sites are all lost money. They come and go.

Best wishes for all involved. We expect to follow it closely.

I was reading this and thought, "well, yeah. It's not like cracks in the mounting pylon is going to cause the engine to catch fire." So I looked around and apparently the engine fell off and caught fire. So, that's looking more like a "died of" situation.

Died of vs died with being reference to a COVID era conspiracy theory that death counts during the global pandemic were inflated for nefarious purposes, which is stupid beyond expression in multiple dimensions.

How we use them isn't.

Humans are all different. For some the levels of distinction and discrimination achievable with mathematical operations performed on four bit floats is sufficient. For others less than 16 bits will not do.

Not really in the popular science. Over the years there have been some doozies in the public square. Hawking surveys a few in his works. His final paper featured a smooth exit from cosmic inflation resulting in heat death in a long tail.

One problem with Big Crunch/string of pearls theories is that gravity propagates at the speed of light. As any fool kno, our light cone is on a massive diet as mass exits relevance by being on the far side of so much expanding space that it can never come back or influence us - the event horizon. As the rate of crunch exceeds the speed of light we remain islanded from the rest of that irrelevant greater Universe as you would still have to exceed light speed to get from there to here. There's still a spot between where the taffy breaks. Another is that since the visible universe is obviously a tiny, perhaps an infinitesimal, portion of the whole of what is/was, naturally we recently were in a condition where if there was enough mass and density to cause a crunch, why didn't it do so when our visible universe was (pick an order of magnitude) more dense? Also, crunch theory involves time travel which is heresy all by itself. Violation of causality is not a state of grace.

Economy being what it is, I'll tail this with my contribution. I did previously speculate about aging of stellar formation media playing hob with the distance ladder. This is I think the second major paper on the matter. It's good to see the notion pencil whipped. Observation is coming fast and furious and the astronomers say "we took the picture. It is what it is. Explaining it is your job." With such a rising bounty of observed fact theories will come and go like salesmen at a Las Vegas convention so it's best not to marry one.

They're going to launch it in tranches by popularity. Probably by genre and artist too. Unless you have bizarre eclectic tastes they will likely have all the music you might want and all the adjacent stuff, in a reasonable package.

Cutting out 99.9% leaves the most popular 210,000 songs in about 300GB. Metadata is the big prize I think. It's not like you can't just open Spotify and hear what you want.

More about the analysis of the metadata in https://annas-archive.org/blog... /Heavy chart analysis, and they talk about how the bulk has less than 1,000 listens total.

SpaceX can probably accelerate their flight schedule to accommodate Russian crew needs. There's the question of if Russia is able/willing to pay nearly $100m per seat. Their flights on Crew Dragon are currently paid through NASA in a seat exchange program where they provide flights from this site on Soyuz for US astronauts. They don't actually pony up the cash.

This launch site is also essential to attitude control of ISS. To refuel the ISS stabilizer thrusters and hold it steady while the gyroscopes are relieved periodically requires Progress modules launched from there. There isn't currently a backup plan for those services.

Are you sure about that? I heard MBS through a Canadian wealth management firm.

Hanford announced last week that their spent fuel vitrification plant is officially in operation, converting nuclear waste into glass ingots that can be safely stored for millenia. If they keep going for about a century they might be able to vitrify the spent fuel we already have. But we still have no place to store the ingots.

All these small modular reactors have the same deficits. They require high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) produced only in Russia. They're a proliferation risk. They require a substantial footprint with passive and active defenses, 24/7 armed security, security clearances for all the highly paid professionals involved. They're slow to approve, finance, build. They're more costly even than classic nuclear reactors to build and operate, and those are the slowest building and most costly form of energy which means high energy costs when (if) they are finally built. Traditional nuclear reactor projects have a 95% failure rate from proposal to generation so 19 times of 20 they never deliver a single watt hour. Those times the money is just spent and lost. The one time in 20 that the generation comes online to produce the world's most costly power doesn't even include those costs.

At Hanford cold war nuclear waste continues to seep gradually toward the mighty Columbia river. Inch by inch.

Somewhere in America just now a homeowner just plugged his DIY solar panels into the inverter and battery he bought on Amazon for the first time. It will give power 24/7 for 30 years at no additional cost. It was quick and cheap. He didn't even need permission. It won't kill his family, nor yours, nor mine. There is no chance that his solar panels will result in radioactive salmon or other seafood.

The knowledge is free.

The skilled professionals to persuade the pupil whose civil rights include refusing to learn to absorb it are not.

You can lock a kid in a library but you can't make her think. When ignorance is virtue we have lost.