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18 Sep, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I like roving as much as the next guy, but isn't Mars a little roved out by now? Let's rove it up a notch and go check out the places in the Solar System most likely to have life.
A human being wearing a pair of plastic wings can fly on Titan. The fact that Mars remains the idée fixe of our aging plutocrats speaks not to their vision, but to the paucity of their imagination.
There's already a bunch of places we know might sustain life, and on top of that are whatever undiscovered unknown unknowns we have yet to find. All we know about Neptune and Uranus is what we learned from sending a single digital camera built in 1977. Put rockets on an iPhone!
This profound incuriosity about our surroundings is what drives me nuts about our timid space program. The same people who dream of autonomous vehicles on earth insist on doing 1960's nostalgia tours in space. What is even the point of having a Solar System?

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Pinboard Profile picture
19 Sep
I think making Facebook the villain, while always fun, takes us past the foundational problem here. Why people are so ready to be radicalized, including into some nonsensical directions like flat earthism, is a bigger question than can fit into a scheme of heroes and villains.
Part of the answer lies in a radical distrust of existing institutions, which if not born in 2008 certainly crystallized then. Another part of the answer has to do with how social media gives every subculture global reach. Another is in the architecture of persuasion and virality
Most of these are questions of human nature—we are a social species whose biology and culture is set up for life in small and gossipy local groups. Taking the "local" and "small" out of that equation has been a great social experiment enabled by the internet. It's not going well
Read 14 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
19 Sep
For years now, nuclear fusion has been 50 years away from being a viable power source. But recent fundamental advances in engineering reactors mean that we are now only 30 years away. Some of the younger people reading this tweet may even live to see the number brought down to 20
Every day the sun mocks us with rays of free, almost limitless power derived from a process that our best minds can't copy down here on earth despite having oceans full of fuel. Having to capture that power with solar panels is almost a slap in the face.
My favorite solar factoid is that the Sun's core, where nuclear fusion takes place, has the same power density as reptile metabolism. Just a big ball of gator meat up there in the sky, mocking our inability to fuse atoms, giving us freckles.
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
19 Sep
59% of electric power in America comes from coal and natural gas, and there are years-long waiting lists for components like large transformers. This couldn't even be done in three years if there was political unanimity and a Great Leap Forward style crash program around it.
I get that it's just senile dementia, but that's also a problem!
What's important is that Biden's goal of achieving a carbon-free power grid by 2025 not interfere with Mark Zuckerberg's important work eradicating all disease in his children's lifetime
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
17 Sep
None of these commanders were "on the ground", the decision to kill a bunch of Afghan kids was made by people looking at drone footage on video screens. The main threat to US forces doing the targeting was lower back pain and eye strain.
Commanders like to talk about the "fog of war" as if that excuses indiscriminate killing without consequences. But part of that concept is that you yourself are under threat and have to make immediate decisions with inadequate information, not sitting in an air-conditioned office
Biden's maudlin and performative sense of empathy seems to end at the US border.
Read 12 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
17 Sep
The Wall Street Journal's "Facebook Files" has been widely lauded. But every article in the series also contains Facebook tracking scripts, and this clear conflict of interest (along with the WSJ's financial relationship with Facebook) is never mentioned. wsj.com/articles/the-f…
This is not unique to the WSJ, but part of a dismaying industry standard in journalism. For example, the New York Times ran a flagship series on privacy, complete with earnest editorial calling for regulation, that was stuffed with ad trackers.
The New York Times went so far as to run an op-ed from the CEO of Google without disclosing either the site's close financial relationship with Google or its role in enabling internet-wide surveillance by the tech giant.
Read 11 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
16 Sep
Montana is a rugged and barely governed mountainous wasteland full of bearded fundamentalist gun nuts. I don't think the culture shock will be too severe, unless you settle people in Missoula.
What are the Afghans going to do to ruin Montana values, grill a lot of meat and enjoy the mountain scenery? In my eyes the biggest cultural difference will be neighbors who aren't polite or friendly, and getting used to a meth-based rather than opium-based economy.
My preferred solution for refugee resettlement is to build high-density housing next to anyone who puts out these lawn signs.
Read 4 tweets

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