Lord give me strength.

https://twitter.com/robert_zubrin/status/1860763662568308864

434 pages, almost no content. Who wrote it? How long did it take? It reads like the Codex Seraphinianus.

But first, would you like a NASA STI?

What happens to the future of energy generation in the US with cheap synthetic fuels added to the mix?

First, let's look at energy flows through the US in 2021, measured in Quads, or quadrillion BTUs.

Rejected Energy is a fancy word for "waste heat". Step 1: Do a 1-1 replacement of all industrial coal, petroleum, and natural gas with their synthetic equivalents. Solar to fuel is about 35% efficient, so we're increasing wasted heat, but that heat would otherwise be on undeveloped solar land anyway.

I'm reading this to my kids. Follow along for light hearted technical commentary.

https://twitter.com/TheMarsSociety/status/1761447046085542331

Unsure why people would go to the trouble of building large underground masonry structures when they could skip directly to tensile transparent membranes made of fluorinated reinforced plastics and live on the surface under daylight.

Here's how we fix water scarcity in the US SW forever.

The current Imperial Valley irrigation system has worked well* for more than a century, but it's time to upgrade it.
The addition of a large solar powered desal plant and brine processor will upgrade the region's economic engine from wildly productive agriculture to add wildly productive industry and housing.
Water abundance will also allow the permanent remediation of the Salton Sea, fixing its level and salinity and allowing life to return.
Finally, a detailed block diagram showing material and economic flows.
* Sometimes too well.


Here's the geographic summary.

I'm about half way through this interview. I'm not unfamiliar with Marxist ideas and definitely left of center by US standards but I'm really struggling to believe just how poor Wolff's arguments are. Thread with examples:

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1537834833740812288

Zero recognition of rising productivity increasing wealth. For example, mechanization of labor results in lay offs instead of direct distribution of increased surplus to laborers.

There are two separate threads going on here: cost growth and Mars helicopter. Thread.

https://twitter.com/astrogrant/status/1541487337263071232

1) the chosen MSR architecture is very different from previous Mars landers in that it has a lot of moving parts and almost all of it is being done outside JPL, by collaborators who sometimes lack direct experience.

My wildest idea to address demographic collapse: tax rebates to drastically reduce the marginal cost of the last kid(s). If parents are ambivalent about going from 2 to 3, what does it take to push them over the edge? We can then also accurately price true costs of having kids. Which incidentally are way higher than the usual $5k baby bonus or whatever. Right now this cost, mostly in the form of traditionally unpaid caring labor, is born by a tranche of society least able to pay.

IMO it was a huge policy mistake to allow housing scarcity, rising prices, inflationary pressure due to deflationary asset accumulation, and so on. Noone likes land tax or inheritance tax, but the whole point of tax is to destroy unproductive money and wealth. If you don't destroy stagnant cash, minting gets out of balance and produces a cash glut and inflation. Now we see this everywhere but particularly in Australia, SF, and LA. The problem is now a mechanism for involuntary wealth transfer from the hopeless landless mostly young...

Possibly unpopular opinion: As advances in AI reach human like levels of competence in conversation, chess, art criticism, piloting, etc it's not clear what, if anything definitively separates our form of thinking from other computation. IMO, consciousness is a red herring. Other forms of intelligence do not need consciousness to have agency and execution capacity. Frankly I'm unconvinced that the human experience of consciousness is any more real than the experience of emotion or sensation.

Understandably some Twitter employees seem to be apprehensive about new management, though the SWE job market is hot. In MechE, Elon's companies are highly desirable. I for one thought Elon's SW management days were over, but maybe we will see PayPal Mafia 2.0? I think people even in tech routinely underestimate how badly engineers want to work for Elon. Not all of them, obviously, but more than enough. They all know they will get better pay and easier hours elsewhere, and still that's where they want to go. Why? That's another question

Hubble's field of view is 202 arc seconds, so about 3.2 million observations would be enough to cover the sky. This got me curious, it turns out Hubble has made about 1.4 million observations since it was launched in 1990. Half way there? Not quite... (1/2) Some observations take longer than others, and some parts of the sky are more interesting. So what HAS hubble seen? I did some coding to generate these images of each quadrant of the sky. Can see ecliptic, galactic plane, Magellanic clouds, Andromeda. (2/2)

Each of these planets is currently bombarding us with light that would enable us to know if they were habitable or inhabited. After 500 years of effort our best telescopes are still too puny to see it.

https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1506281280362713099

It is wild that all that data is streaming right by and through us every second of every day and the only reason it's inaccessible is that our telescopes are still ludicrously primitive.

I still think this is true. The hard part is squaring the geopolitical goal of bleeding Russia slowly enough to do the job properly, and the humanitarian goal of ending the war quickly and limiting suffering and death.

https://twitter.com/CJHandmer/status/1501806149628153861

Ukraine leadership is clearly asking for a NFZ to force a decisive end (or decisive escalation) to the war, while eastern European NATO countries are playing a game of "you go first" for any action that crosses some arbitrary threshold that could lead to Russian retaliation.

This weekend I finally got around to a project I'd put off for a year: learning to weld HDPE by attempting to make a small Eastport Pram dinghy, but lighter.

Yes, I know this is impossible.

Step 1: trace the plans with sharpie. Color choice was important. Step 2: cut out with tin snips, a box cutter, or when the kids aren't napping, a skill saw. Most of the red on my hands is ink that rubbed off. The rest is blood.

HDPE is an incredible material. It's even used commonly for kayaks, but they are made by rotomolding.

Resumes are almost perfectly zero signal-to-noise ratio. What information they do contain is almost always redundant and irrelevant to the job in question. Literally the only thing I can tell for sure is whether the candidate's resume was proof read by someone before submission. At @TerraformIndies we're hiring for a range of skills, but obtaining high quality proofreading isn't near the top of the list. Plenty of amazing engineers and technicians I know struggle with writing. This is why our recruiting hook asks for a one pager with evidence of ability.

This is a cool thing about NASA. Even when I worked there, as long as I was clear I was speaking in a personal capacity (NASA has its own PR team) I could blog or podcast anything I liked, except ITAR stuff obviously. If I was a retired astronaut, this would encourage me.

https://twitter.com/KristinFisher/status/1503901953511804936

For @StationCDRKelly and @astro_g_dogg, fairly stringent NASA standards of professionalism meant they were unable to point out that @Rogozin's unquenchably rapaciousness theft of Roscosmos funds brazenly endangered their lives in space, before they retired. Why hold back now?

CCP gambled that their superior NPI control measures could beat evolution. Probably too late to spam the country with mRNA vaccines. Still worth a try, and not like China can't afford to import. But this is one reason why COVID eradication is impossible.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1503223895930937345

IIRC China imported about 100 million doses of Pfizer, I wonder who got them? Once again, for reasons of parochial self interest (at best), Chinese leadership has gambled with the peace and prosperity of the entire world, and if Omicron B2 doesn't get them, the next one will.

It is darkly fascinating to me that Russian leadership ran so enthusiastically into what was an obvious trap. US and the West, largely through economic sanctions and weapons supply, can continue to crush the Russian army at their leisure without even declaring hostilities.

https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1501665689874096129

Imagine getting this owned. Certainly suboptimal for Ukraine to be the tip of the spear, but preferable to the alternative. What did Russian leadership think would happen? Anyone could see constant shipment of anti-tank weapons by C-17 all January and February. Not a secret!

.@elonmusk gave a really good statement at the end of the earnings call yesterday. I think it underscores why @Tesla's vertical integration and single minded focus has put them five years ahead of a now rapidly atrophied competition. Lightly edited transcript below: 0/9 "There are one or perhaps two points that are worth keeping in mind, as our quarterly letter indicates." 1/9