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The Really Dangerous Tech is Really Old
Here’s an odd thing – the technology that is really dangerous today all comes from the 1950s and earlier. The big inventions of the last 60 years are nowhere near as deadly as the ones from earlier, especially those from … Continue reading
Good News on Backstopping Renewables (3) – Eavor Advanced Geothermal
The last posts were about batteries and pumped-hydro storage, which will be used to handle excess energy from variable renewables. But what happens when there’s no sun or wind for weeks on end? There still needs to be something to … Continue reading
Good News on Backstopping Renewables (2) – Closed-Loop Pumped Hydro
The Ambri batteries mentioned in the last post are fine for storing some energy for a couple of days, but suppose you need a lot of storage for a week or more. That’ll be necessary when all the fossil fuel … Continue reading
Good News on Backstopping Renewables (1) – Ambri
Wind and solar at this point are cheaper than any other form of electricity, and are getting steadily cheaper still. Coal plants are getting shut down because it’s just not worth it to run them, and even natural gas is … Continue reading
We’ve Got to Get To America 4.0
Every 80 years or so this country has been rebooted. Long-felt tensions exploded, and the country took a new direction. We’re at that point now. There is an outright criminal in the White House, there’s been a massive death toll … Continue reading
H P Lovecraft Had At Least One Black Fan
A while ago I came across an amazing piece of fan fiction – Ex Libris Miskatonici by Joan C Stanley: It’s a pitch-perfect listing of the sinister and bizarre works that have been collected over the centuries by the great … Continue reading
2020 Is Already the 2nd Worst Year in US History
One concrete way to describe how awful something is is by how many people are killed by it. It’s a measure that all can agree on, and is relatively well quantified. There are many other ways in which things can … Continue reading
“The New Alchemy Institute” – a Tech Road Not Taken
Back in the 1970s a lot of people, including me, were worried about Big Tech. It was polluting, it was dangerous, and it operated on inhuman scales. Big Tech was vast refineries, coal power plants, open-pit mines, and steel mills. … Continue reading
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Moore’s Law In Spaaaace: Data Rates from Mars
The visionary scientist Freeman Dyson died early this year at age 96, but he gave a terrific talk in 2011 on four revolutions he had seen: space, computing, nuclear power, and genomics: You may know him from the Orion project, … Continue reading
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Nature Advances Fast When Humans Retreat
The last two months of quarantine have been beautiful here in the Boston area: This is the Boston skyline from Robbins Farm Park in my town of Arlington. I have never seen it be this clear; there’s usually a white … Continue reading
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A Niche in the Library of Babel 