Viewing profile — technicalbard

I used elm before pine, on a terminal hooked to a Bull-Honeywell machine running Multics...

Except it won't work. The intermittency problem of renewables doesn't make them cheaper - there is no low-cost solution to that. The intermittency makes energy more expensive. Furt…

The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2. The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulato…

Wrong. Storage has opex, because it has energy losses. Not all the energy that goes in can come out. 2nd Law and all that. On top of that, there will be maintenance and operating s…

Wind would need to guarantee dispatchability on demand to fix a price. Offering low prices when it can is not the same as reliable on-demand sources.

Nor does it talk about what the COST would be.

In a country with 3.3 TIMES as many people as 1918-19. So the death rate is still about 1/3 that of the Spanish Flu (to date).

This is true of all knowledge-work. Traditional engineering is fraught with the same problem - you don't know EXACTLY how you will solve the challenges, so how can one accurately e…

But you can't get one. You can't get ANY truck from Ford right now. They have blanket changed the delivery of ALL truck orders to 31 October this year due to parts shortages.

So they are building LISP inside Excel.... It is now a corollary of Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming...

If the Vikings had brought the beads to Greenland or Labrador and trader with the Inuit, the Inuit could have traded those beads across the arctic of Canada in a couple of hundred …

Umm. Totally misses that the LISP family of languages predates both C and ML and introduced many of the features he cares about...

I'm an amateur developer and I write checking code in functions all the time because you can't be certain of the source of the data!!!

That it can do units too makes this a possible replacement for MathCAD!

I know companies that live in legal fear of discovery and destroy lots of things that have potential data-mining value. Imagine a firm that deletes all email more than 365 days old…

Awesome. I loved FORTRAN when I was at University

This is curious given there are well documented findings that which school you attended doesn't correlate to actual success. This is true in Engineering and Law. The problem, parti…

It is still debatable whether carbon emissions are falling. Most of the country hasn't got enough data under a carbon tax, and oil and gas pricing has swung more significantly over…

The problem of a planned economy is the economic calculation problem and lack of a mechanism for decision making (i.e. prices). Mises and Hayek laid this out VERY clearly, as early…

Ah, something Common Lisp has had for over 30 years.

Generating power from very small temperature differences (2-3 degrees) with require gigantic surface areas to move energy. 25 mW/m2 is a TINY flux rate, and they are talking about …

The thermodynamics of this are a disaster, which will drive their cost of capture higher than this range. Capturing CO2 from coal fired power plants costs about $100/tonne and is e…