Without a purity test how can I tell which members of the tribe are loyal and which might betray me?

The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor’s yards. I’m the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.

A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.

I realized part way through the title works on a few levels. It was refreshing to realize this wasn’t remotely following the 3-act narrative structure and I had no idea what was happening next.

Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.

I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.

The largest stellerator currently operating in the US is. HSX at UW-Madison. The copper magnet coils had to be explosively formed. The coils were delivered one at a time. At one point one was stolen off the loading dock. This caused a lot of panic, as the budget was spent. There was no way to replace the stolen coil.

Something like a day later the sheriff called the university asking the if they were missing a hunk of copper. The thieves took the coil to a scrap yard for scrap value. The yard figured there was no way this bonkers shaped thing wasn’t made to a particular purpose so they played along long enough to call the cops to find the rightful owner.

It’s worth recognizing stellerators since HSX have all been periodic, that is every coil isn’t unique. The designs used to be even more insane.

In my experience the community will usually distinguished between “scientific Q” and “wall plug Q” when discussing fusion power gain. Scientific is simply the ratio of power in vs power out, whereas wall plug includes all the power required to support scientific Q. Obviously the difference isn’t always clearly delineated or reported when talking to journalists…

OK, so we should be clear there are broadly two approaches to fusion: magnetic confinement and inertial drive.

In magnetic confinement a plasma is confined such that it can be driven to sufficient density, temperature and particle confinement time that the thermal collisions allow the fuel to fuse. This is what the OP article is talking about. This Tokamak is demonstrating technologies that if applied to a larger the experiment could probably reach a positive energy output magnetically confined plasma.

The article you referenced discusses inertial drive experiments, where a driver is directly pushing the fuel together, like gravity in the sun, a fission bomb shockwave in a hydrogen bomb, or converging laser beams in Livermore’s case.

Livermore’s result is exciting, but has no bearing on the various magnetic confinement approaches to fusion energy.

I’ve been using Here we go for years. I think it started as a Nokia project, that spun off to it’s own thing. I started using to conserve data. You download the map of your region when you have Wi-Fi, and it’s pretty low data load from there, directions and traffic updates mostly. I’ve been happy with it for a long time. I haven’t opened g-maps in ages. I know there are other options out there, open source and what not, but I never felt the need to try anything else out.

Something like this wiki page? There are some good charts showing trends at this site. That site also gives more context if you’re interested in digging.

On Feb. 15, 2003, millions of people marched in over 600 cities against the plans of U.S. President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.

First time?

In the 80’s and 90’s there was strong undercurrent that activism couldn’t actually change anything. It was the end of history, all outcomes are and always were inevitable, voting with dollars was the only vote that really matters. Hippy punching was in it’s full flower. Environmentalism was seen as self indulgent and meaningless. “Save the whales,” was spit out as a sort of, ‘go waste someone else’s time,’ dismissal.

The 4th Dilbert collection from 94’ was Shave the Whales, which already struck me as a passe gesture at hippy punching at the time, though I couldn’t tell if Scott Adams was engaging in hippy punching or mocking the hippy punchers.

This is a good video on the subject

That is not an uncommon guess, but the argument against it is that these took some sophistication to make. This isn’t some disposable gewgaw. These were made with relatively tight tolerances and exhibited the best metalworking fabrication of the age. One theory I’ve seen seriously floated was that they were made as a demonstration of metal working competency, the equivalent of a benchy in 3D printing.