Viewing profile — andygates

I'm really not sure you can amortize deaths like that to individuals. Folks are dead or they're not.

Deep geological time isn't very relevant to human civilisations. The Fall Of Civilisations podcast has great long deep dives into what does threaten them, and the score is about 50…

"siri, what is a proxy war?"

Nothing runs at 99.99; 85% is a realistic nuclear reactor uptime. And remember to have multiple gensets so you can take them offline for maintenance.

Variability is smoothed with diverse overbuild and robust inteconnects (sorry, Texas). Batteries are needed for peaker plants, like gas is used now. But they don't need to be every…

Nuclear power stations have very slow demand response. That used to be done by gas peakers and hydro; in a decarbonised world that changes to battery peakers and hydro.

Interesting word choice "consumable" versus "parts require maintenance". One suggests a lie, the other is just SOP in any plant with moving parts. Are you sure you're an engineer?

The carbon industry wants delay on decarbonisation. New nuclear projects are poster children for delay, because the industry has been mostly incompetent at shipping and lacks urgen…

"Serious designs" are nice but no pathfinder demo plants yet. And all that stretches the timescales.

It's a technology demonstrator, and one of the technologies it is demonstrating is "survive the night". Does the heating, panel and charge management all work as expected? Repeat! …

This looks like a job for demilitarised Jaegers.

That's the most obvious part of the grounding, but the ship is properly wedged at both ends. It's not the whole problem.

That’s just a bit of wraparound suction flame, no big deal.

The landing propellant comes from very small header tanks (to reduce slosh), and those tank sizes constrain how long they can run a landing burn. Future iterations may end up with …

The other key take-home is that nobody got a serious case so that's 100% effective at preventing the collapse of the healthcare systems of the world. It's really good news all roun…

Yes. The wacky back-seat epidemiology is new with the many vaccine candidates. Most people won't get an actual choice, they'll be offered what their healthcare provider offers and …

Kudos and good feelings, and probably operating costs going forward. Palantir's shady reputation could benefit from some good feelings.

Bzzt! It pegs critical care facilities if not contained and then a lot of people die.

The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that…

A year after the Curiosity rover, they were out of stock and being resold at a handy markup on ebay. Hopefully the 2020 rover will get a model too so I can get it in time. I'd advi…

The antidote to despair is action.

Mandate taxis to be zero emission. Which is coming for some big urbs.

The Galileo Gambit in the wild! Stop with the bad-faith distractions.

That's not relative, that's local and non-linear. Do pay attention.

And it was only not the hottest because of a neutral ENSO. ENSO (the El Nino - La Nina cycle) puts a wobble on the trend. A strong El Nino year will bust the current 2016 record. T…