[waves]

I had this done a couple of weeks ago. Worked great, and now we have much better water flow.

The molers had an absolute torrent of sex jokes on tap, I wonder if it's an occupational hazard for them?

:-) Best of luck.

Let's not forget pocketknives. And sometimes tiny prybars.

My ventures into building energy measurement have taught me that the air temperature and the radiant temperature can be completely different.

They can also be hard to measure separately, so nobody does, and so the forecast just has 'temperature' as though that was a single thing. It really isn't.

Surveys are too mired in a tickbox true/false dichotomy to engage with any of this. Silly them.

And that's what people often do with beliefs about things that make no difference to them. Well, beliefs is too strong a word, but I don't have the right word for it.

The literal scientific truth or falsity of the idea is simply not the point. The (qualified and temporary) belief in it is a game, a plaything of the mind.

My work making massive robot creatures has given me a new appreciation of the space that exists between 'definitely factually true' and 'completely made up and untrue'.

People are very happy to treat an clearly nonalive thing as alive for a while, just because they like the idea.

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I love every bit of this. I should come visit more often, clearly.

Is your concern about showing this piece that it will get you some backlash? Or that it will be undesirably upsetting to religious people?

Totally. Shame he misplaced the problem, though, blaming the AIs instead of the techbros.

Iran has had a go.

Where would you show it if it wasn't blasphemous?

Loyal subjects of King Ludd.

awww

All we have for evidence are the costs we're paying now for decommissioning the reactors we're done with. And they are enormous, much larger than the costs of building the things.

That makes nuclear electricity very expensive, as well as dangerous.

.. leaving us a massive decommissioning challenge, with a massive bill to match. For example:
'Costs are currently around £3 billion annually'
www.gov.uk/government/p...

And that's the sunny-day case, where government goes on paying for it.

Note that the disasters I mentioned were not to do with waste. That is a large and unsolved problem, but the reactors are more active problems when mismanaged.

My expectation is that renewables and batteries will go on improving, and nuclear will quietly go away as a useful source of energy...

You can focus on governments not going bad all you like - I'd absolutely encourage it - but you can't guarantee that they won't, and should plan on that basis.

Renewables don't poison a landscape for generations if they are neglected. Maybe a turbine falls over and kills a sheep.

America is currently showing us a worked example of how quickly that state can regress.

We must not take it as a given.

Billions of people have lived (and live now) happy and productive lives in places where there is not a giant stable responsible and technologically-capable government. The level of stability that (say) Western Europe has enjoyed for the last 50 years is a bit of an anomaly...

The safety cases for nuclear always assume a stable, well-run society in which expensive investments will be made to keep the bad stuff in.

That is not a safe assumption. Look at Chernobyl, Fukushima, all the Soviet RTGs that have gone astray. Look at the American antivaxers in government.

Maybe a megavolcano winter? Lots of dust and clouds everywhere.

I'd love to see what happens when you do, but I think there's a turning point like this every three months now. You can always wait for the next bus.

Could you talk about the kinds of things you do, just not the specifics? I don't think I had any idea that this kind of private science lab even existed before I heard about it from you.

I copperleafed and patinated a tower desktop once, back when they were a thing. Did look great. Can confirm.

I'm sure you can. How much do you care about the spectral response?