Now that I am off on parental leave, it’s time to finally read @wellerstein.bsky.social latest book! My wife had rave reviews of it, so I’m excited to dig in and maybe read out loud to the baby. It’s never too early to teach the complexity of nuclear weapons!
Physics remains challenging for most folks who like to talk about energy sadly.
Yeah and don’t forget the pain in the ass if transporting notes if you have ti say… drive to the other side of the lab.
Holy cow, what a cool place to get a photo taken!
That was the idea with the Shuttle and then things went a bit south.. fingers crossed we can get back to the point where sending artists is the plan again.
I sure feel this and with a job that was supposed to be the kind that was a cheat code into easy living. It’s wild how much rent eats into my cost of living and that is without a ton of student loan debt or any of the other things that folks struggle with.
Yeah…. what a “great” deal maker he is…
Fair. I can’t exactly treat anything from this admin seriously. Still, I would want more from Iran in an ideal world at least.
Is it with them kicking out inspectors though? Maybe a reratification would be in order at least? It seems like they haven’t held to the intent if not the letter of the agreement.
I mean yes, but they also kicked out IAEA inspectors and weren’t exactly playing by the rules before. The American admin is full of liars but I wouldn’t go believing the Iranians here either.
... weapons physicists, engineers, chemists, material scientists, mathematicians, etc for the future. Without the best and brightest - and these students are the best and brightest, I am glad to be able to say - there is no NNSA. Shortsighted and self harming to kill that funding.
As for the stupid: Zeroing out the NNSA Academic Programs funding is impossibly stupid. It's got idiot DOGE staffer all over it. That ~$100M account is probably the most effective money NNSA spends for the arsenal, period. Couch cushion change level of money to ensure a steady supply of...
It's late Friday evening & world events have kept us from doing the obvious #nukesky dissection and cross examination of the DOE+NNSA FY27 budget. There's some good, some bad and some very stupid to work thru.
The #1 weapon related line item people have brought up is pits. Let's start there.
A lot of folks with too much money see “SpaceX” on a resume and just write a check. It’s wild to me for things outside of aerospace, since basically nothing learned there is applicable to something like nuclear power. Maybe QC standards?
But Phil, he worked at SpaceX so that obviously makes him good at all things right? Right!? 🤦
This was also a topic that Lucas made the slides for and I presented on, thanks to passport issues, at the IRG 2023 conference. It’s a ton of fun to work on this sort of “out there” stuff and I hope I can keep finding the time for it.
On top of that, humanity is barely searching for such signals! ET could be trying to hit us up via X-ray comms and we really wouldn’t know. The paper ends with a rough recommendation on what should be built and launched to make sure not to miss the best way to talk between the stars.
We show that with even current X-ray sources, it would be far better to use those for interstellar communication than radio or even optical lasers. You need many, many, many orders of magnitude lower power and smaller focusing elements, which drops the barrier to entry.
A paper I am coauthor on, which is the result of a fun idea from almost 4 years ago by @nuke-luke.bsky.social, just was published! It dives into the idea that current SETI searches are missing the best part of the EM spectrum for messages, x-rays! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
“Increasingly, it (AI) can do the sort of physical real-world experiments that post-docs and junior researchers were responsible for as well.”
A line that could only be said by the utterly deranged who haven’t done a lick of scientific work and has no clue what AI actually is.
Oh how nice….
Anyone who says that at the lab needs a reality check.
I wouldn’t take it as anything. The premise itself makes no sense.
Since it’s in the NYPost and invokes AI+quantum mechanics, I’m going to guess this is as real as unicorns.
The one academic conference I went to in ABQ was very nice and we were near the Sawmill so lots of walkable food options. I am less of a fan of workshops at Sandia, although that is purely a base traffic issue.
Diablo Canyon just got its license extensions from the NRC! Unit 1 is licensed to run until 2044, Unit 2 2045. The plant generated 9% of the state’s total electricity and 17% of its zero-carbon power
www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...
(The catch is that CA law currently allows it to run to 2030)
Our only hope may be that they keep partying too much and too hard! Hang overs save us…
Do you think they are getting tired of popping champagne in Beijing over stupid stuff like this? The constant parties must get old.
This article has a really interesting chart that I have long wondered about. The number of designers at a lab (in this case LLNL) vs the number with actual nuke experience, and this is from 2 decades back! A modern chart of the whole NNSA would be really interesting.
Am I right in remembering that he wasn’t told what the “package” was before the jump as well? Given the era it’s probably obvious but that would have been worse to jump with a big mystery between your legs!