90 karma · joined January 21, 2016
I have played around a little bit with fixing some rigging problems and was impressed, but Opus even warned me it was bad at animations cause it can only really grab screenshots to process static content.
I know that Google search has gotten so bad in the last couple years that I normally have to add "reddit" to the search terms to get a good result.
Basically, at Oak Ridge they produced radioactive isotopes with the appropriate number of neutrons and protons to match the theoretical ratio of the atom. Then, those isotopes needed to be shipped to Russia so they could be smashed together in a particle accelerator to briefly create the atom which we know existed from its specific decay and gamma ray emission.
But there was a lot of political hurdles in the way of shipping the isotopes to Russia in the first place, and it almost didn't happen because the isotopes were decaying while paperwork was floundering between state departments.
In my opinion Fortran is easier and safer to use for scientists with little background in coding because it was built to do math/simulations really well AND it's readable almost like psuedocode (compared with C or C++). Also, modern Fortran is object-oriented which makes building reusable tools and large packages pretty easy.
Having said all of this I think a lot of the physics/nuclear/aerospace/finance community is probably transitioning into more modern languages and starting to employ people with actual CS backgrounds to build with more updated coding practices.
(edit: Having said that, our healthcare costs are out of control and it's not directly because of the R&D. It has more to do with wild overhead in insurance and HMOs where only a small fraction of what consumers pay goes to healthcare.)
I'm not sure subsidizing our current tech in the US will make a difference, but the amount of money in public and private sectors right now for advanced designs needs to be more collectively focused towards building demostration reactors such as the fast neutron reactor being proposed.
It is also difficult for American companies (despite having designed and built a majority of factors globally) to currently compete against state actors like China or the Russian government. That is another critical reason we should be developing leading technology because we don't necessarily have good reason to trust other countries to design and build these safely globally which could lead to more nuclear disasters. The best example is Chernobyl which was a wildly dangerous avoidable accident that should have never happened.