_n_b_

I like it!

I wish you could click on individual patents to see the full text of them, even if that was hosted elsewhere…

"Meanwhile, the ADS-B mandate in Canada has been under an indefinite suspension since November 2019. It was originally slated to begin in February 2021 but was placed on hold in response to stakeholder feedback."

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/20...

> Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...).

I have my own biases, but I am fairly confident that people of the future will come to a much different conclusion.

Every form of power generation has byproducts and waste. Many of these (even for renewables) are nasty, toxic substances. Nuclear seems to have one of the best ratios of waste to electric production of any form of power generation, including very low lifetime CO2 generation. I would hope the future people of earth are far more aghast that people kept doing things like burning coal (and then dumping the fly ash in places that contaminate groundwater) instead of building alternate sources of baseload generation.

We’ve known what to do with nuclear waste for a very long time. In the US at least, its more a question of politics and funding.

Basically, we can:

* Bury all of it (deep geological repository, bore holes)

* Reprocess fuel, take out the remaining U and/or built-up Pu, and then dispose of the small amount of fission products remaining

* Keep storing it in casks at plant sites or regionally consolidated ISFSIs (like [1])

All options are feasible; the first seems to be cheaper. Nobody seems to want a geological repository for nuclear waste in their backyard, even if it’s quite safe.

[1] https://holtecinternational.com/products-and-services/hi-sto...

I commented more below, but you’re exactly right. This is an export product.

France’s oldest operating reactors are in the 900 MWe range, so more like 3. Their newer fleet is 1300 and 1450 (now 1500) MWe, plus the 1600 MWe EPR under construction at Flamanville.

The 300 MWe NuWard really only makes sense as an export product, even if they build a couple in France. Framatome and EDF are working on an EPR-2 that is meant to be more efficient and inexpensive to build, and I hope that means it will be a bit scaled down from the EPR, which is frankly too large for many electric grids, and takes far too long to construct.

This source[1] puts bitcoin-related electricity consumption at around 165 TWh/year, which is larger than the annual consumption of all but the 23 largest countries[2].

Much of that electricity is not going to be from renewables, hydro, or nuclear, so generating CO2 and other GHG.

However, I suspect what makes it be perceived as particularly environmentally unfriendly is that there is no inherent societal value in the effort.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Nuclear industry here.

In the fanciest systems, checklists live in a computerized procedure system tied into the plant process computer, so the plant state and procedures can be kept in sync and mistakes can be avoided when the software can see if you didn’t actually do the step you were supposed to.

A more conventional approach is a document management system and controlled binders in the control room with the latest procedures, often laminated so they can be marked up and wiped off.

When working procedures on paper, we always use a circle-slash system for place-keeping: circle the step number when starting it, and slash through the circle when completed.

Finally, key procedures should have a separate document documenting the bases of the procedure—-why key values were chosen or what other documents they were taken from or depend on. That document becomes the key in change management—-if a dependency changes, or you want to change the procedure, you can use the bases document to ensure side-effects are considered.

Finally, procedures still have programmed regular reviews.

I am an avid gardner. I have a house full of plants, plus a front and back garden, plus a patch of veg. I enjoy gardening immensely. Although I do like getting plants as gifts, I very much still like enjoy cut flowers, and you know why?

> Flowers don’t take any effort on your part to be enjoyed. [...] Flowers come without any obligations.

Just like the article says.

> Can apple appeal in this case to a higher court not in Texas? (As I understand, a lot parent cases are brought to one small district in Texas)

Yes, appeals in patent cases go to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and then to the Supreme Court. Both are based in Washington, DC.

> And secondly can apple stop doing business in east Texas all together so that Rodney gilstrap no longer has jurisdiction?

Venue can be complicated. See recent SCOTUS ruling here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/16-341_8n59.pdf

Honestly, you could just Google it… it’s not exactly a secret where the nukes and their various major subcomponents components live. Pantex, Y-12, LANL, etc.

> stupid teams chat doesn't even have a 'reply with quote'

Don’t worry guys, it’s on the roadmap for this month! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featur...

Next maybe we can fix issue where if you have the iOS app, you randomly appear available for hours?

I have some very recent, very specific domain knowledge in this area; there is more low-burnup ex-research reactor material, off-spec material, etc. out there looking for a good home than you might imagine—-especially at micro-reactor quantities.

Interesting data point. At my (non-software-focused) engineering firms, all product managers are capital-M managers and most come with signifiant hands-on experience within the business—-they often significantly influence very large product strategy decisions than can have 15+ year impacts—-so are expected to be leaders on both the technical and business aspects.

The setup is clearly a lot easier to swing in a bigcorp with relatively low turnover and relatively high-value products, rather than a smaller company without a deep talent pool and sufficient span of control for a manager-level product manager... but I think it’s a better model all the same.

*PdM, incidentally, to differentiate them from project managers who are the PMs

I'm a nuclear engineer and also unlicensed and also know very few who are, but...

> for me to call my self a "Professional Engineer", I have to pass a test almost wholly focused on Civil Engineering

isn't true. The FE exam has a number of discipline options, including Electrical and Computer[0] and the PE exam is then done be discipline.

[0] https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/FE-Electrical-and-Compu...

In the UK, FTTC (FTTN) with VDSL is very common, but speeds are much higher—-I get 60+ Mbps solidly. Luckier people have G.fast and FTTP, but 60 Mbps is still pretty good.

Here they’ve split the ILEC-equivalent (BT) from the company that is responsible for providing wholesale access to BT and the CLECs and that company owns the physical plant and infrastructure, including last mile (Openreach). BT owns Openreach but it is semi-independent and seems to be heavily regulator-driven to provide as much access to as many people as possible.

Compared to other places I’ve lived, this model seems to be working better than most.

> Bad people often don’t have bad careers, and there is no justice

I always like to think that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Not all of them, but many of the bad folks you work with eventually flame out or stall.

The rest seem to become CEOs.

> criminal sabotage under US law

It is pretty comfortably not sabotage under 18 USC 105, which requires proving intent to harm the national defense of the United States. Absent finding an email from one of the researchers saying "this use-after-free is gonna fuck up the tankz," intent would otherwise be nearly impossible to prove.

> how you protect the signing certificates

You get an HSM like this: https://www.veritech.net/product-detail/keyper-hsm/ that stays air-gapped.

Then you build procedures around it, like https://www.iana.org/dnssec

Not cheap or easy.

Air purifiers with HEPA filters can effectively trap the virus in the filter [1]. Air purifiers with HEPA filters aren't terribly expensive and DIY options are possible (e.g., [2]) although I have also read that this setup is not as efficient at filtering as a purpose-built air filter [3] but also probably much better than nothing.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/can-hepa-air-purifie... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch/kH5APw_SLUU [3] https://www.wired.com/story/could-a-janky-jury-rigged-air-pu...

> This guy is now marked for life [...] based on the subjective option of a judge

That is not quite what this is. He hasn’t been convicted of anything; the judge is determining the conditions on which he can be released before the trial happens and making that determination requires the judge to weigh the available evidence and apply a legal standard—albeit one where ‘danger’ doesn’t align with its everyday definition-to determine if some level of monetary bail is required.

I do agree that he may well be marked for life and in the sense that Google will remember this event forever, even if he is acquitted at trial.

It seems like this was a bail hearing, where “danger to the community” is a condition—-and not a particularly rigorous one—-required to set bail[0].

Since his bail was set at $1000 according to the article, it seems like the judge also didn’t believe this guy was really all that dangerous either.

It’s important not to confuse this finding purely for bail purposes from a preliminary exam with any actual finding of guilt or innocence.

[0] https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs4.asp?ActID=1966&C...

I don’t disagree with you generally.

Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of the manufacturing base still exists. Big US nuclear players have had a base load of domestic upgrades and international new plant jobs that have kept these capabilities alive.

But for construction, we really are awfully thin on specialized trades. Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.

I’ve been involved with large scale nuclear construction projects of different designs in multiple different countries and different regulatory schemes. I have a hard time squaring what I’ve seen on the ground with the summary of this study.

To respond to your exact point, big parts of the nuclear-qualified workforce in most places really do move from large job to large job (assuming relatively static demand), so you do get that transfer of knowledge on sequential jobs.

Also, don’t forget the design and manufacturing that happens off-site, which can be significant and often is a huge driver of risk and cost. (10 MW vertical motors! Big safety-related pumps! Mega-sized forged components! Specialized custom fabrications!) The back office engineers and subcontractors and factory floor people who make them remain pretty static as long as there is work to be done. By the Nth unit, there is know-how and known problems are worked out; some of this is translatable into drawing updates and schedule resequencing but really a lot of it is expertise that stays in peoples’ heads. Once everybody is demobed and scatters, that is all lost.

Natural uranium is 0.7% U-235, and enrichments of 80%+ are needed for U-based weapons (like Little Boy). The enrichment process used during the Manhattan project (electromagnetic and then gaseous) not perfectly efficient, and there are losses during conversion, but assuming 100% efficiency that means just Little Boy required 8 tons of raw U.

If you add up all the work going on, all the experiments, all the piles (reactors) off consuming uranium, this figure doesn’t seem too surprising to me.

Sure, agreed, but PC seems to be about twice as common: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=FR&q=ordinateur...

As a native anglophone working in France, I appreciate the general lack of chit-chatty openings to emails (even if the trend may be negative, as you say) as I generally prefer to get to the point.

But I have noticed, since the start of COVID, the meaningless "j'espère que tu vas bien" ("I hope you are well") at the top of many emails, which feels like exactly the thing you are talking about--a lifting and translation of a meaningless English phase that feels appropriate but adds nothing of substance.

But then, half of the time the English words end up being used anyway, despite what the Académie Française might think.

Outside of government forms, you basically never see 'courriel,' and you hear 'PC' way more than 'ordinateur'

I do love the word 'internaut' though.

I used to essentially be a professional Fortran programmer. It's been 7-8 years since I've done that, so this was a nice trip down memory lane. Anyway.

> Python3 (numpy 1.18.4) 1.3s FORTRAN (gfortran 9.3.0) 6.0s Rust (1.43.1, debug) >60s Rust (1.43.1, release) 4.0s

I suspect that you could get the Fortran and numpy results to converge by turning on the compiler option to use the local BLAS library for MATMUL, which will normally use an OpenMP-threaded solution.

Upfront note: these days "Fortran" is preferred to "FORTRAN."

> Fortran could do with proper namespaces, and properly dropping some of its older conventions, though. Reading it feels like archaeology.

The newer Fortran standards support pretty decent namespaces (USE module x, ONLY : y_ and a limited OO with classes and class methods. The problem, at least when I was doing Fortran work everyday, was that the compilers did not fully support the newer Fortran standards. We found the Intel compiler to be the best of the bunch, but we also found a non-trivial number of compiler bugs and standard options that weren't supported. The Intel Math Kernel Library offers pretty good linear algebra performance, too.

Re: older conventions, we had a lot of modern Fortran code that was easy to read and avoided all of the old Fortran 77 nonsense that really confusing to read if you weren't from that era (e.g., the infamous arithmetic GOTO).

However, it was nice being able to still incorporate "just works" code from the 80s that did complicated calculational things that nobody really wanted to touch too much. You know, the kind of subroutine that starts with the comment, "This code _seems to_ ..." I suspect we're not the only organization that wanted to keep that code around but be able to add modern Fortran around and on top of it.

Have you thought about adding some kind of room-temperature spectroscopy along with your Geiger counter? Might be interesting to correlate with spikes in the count rate.