In media, though, all those deaths will be ret-conned as due to the Martian colonialism, NEO asteroid supremacy, or whichever other colonial eeevil will be in vogue in 2035...
Splendid! The authors of that forum must have loathed to use a computer for their writing and hybrid lecturing - a product of rigorous research, likely somewhere in the West…
Time to recolonize academia. It is crazy that such clowns whose modus operandi is to switch off their minds and emit streams of impressionistic babble get the same pay and prestige as real thinkers!
The amount of hubris on all sides of this issue is staggering. As a minor example, what are the odds of a fusion reactor becoming usefully operational by 2035? Especially in a 'decolonized' technology community?
The essay didn't suggest that a fusion reactor would become usefully operational, but rather that fusion research continued.
I was struck instead by the lack of common sense or general engineering training in the remarkable plan to, "make it as close to the allowed threshold as we can" or the mismanagement that LLNL actually followed that absurd advice. I also felt a disconnect between the beauty of the Gibbs phenomenon and how its overshoot would cause the pressure excess as compared to unwittingly adding 9% (or 18%) additional margin compared to the ideal square wave.
It was fun to read in the Wikipedia article linked within that in the early 1900s none other than Michelson failed to understand the Gibbs phenomenon.
Thanks for clarifying my wrong assumption. It does read as research experiment within the article's thought experiment. I do stand by my hubris comment. Just gave a bad example. As for Michelson, he was probably prone to a bit of confirmation bias ;-)
I confirm that "as close as possible" was (and has been, for the last 30 years or so) a reasonable thing to do: it would have helped to fight plasma instabilities. But "_possible_" is the key word here: its meaning depends on speaker's grasp of functional analysis or just analysis.
hi Paul, I'm no fusion expert. What's the scenario you were imagining in the essay? That is, what's the cell that breaks under pressure? Does it relate to the link to LLNl's inertial confinement method?
I wonder if this essay might work better with a equity trading algorithm initiating a crash that drives a world-wide depression and associated wars.
Thanks Paul. That article about Arthur Ashkin was fun to read. I remember as a student in the 1980s reading about the optical tweezers and thinking how wonderful that concept was. It came around the same time (for me) as the scanning tunneling microscope, so lots of exciting stuff. It continues these days too!
I had never heard the term Ashkin pressure. I have never heard of radiation-driven implosion for nuclear weapons being related to it, but now I can see it might. And it must be complicated! Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ashkin has this:
Ashkin ... obtained his BS degree in physics at Columbia University in 1947. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied nuclear physics. This was during the era of the Manhattan Project, and Ashkin's brother, Julius Ashkin, was successfully part of it. This led to Arthur Ashkin's introduction to Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and others who were at Cornell at the time.[1][19] He received his PhD degree at Cornell University in 1952,[20] and then went to work for Bell Labs...
So does "Ashkin" pressure, as you used it, refer to Julius or Arthur?
The Schott glass article reminded me of a quip a manager at LLNL said to me in the 1990s (?), "This project has sucked up all the XYZ glass available worldwide for the next N years." I don't remember the values of XYZ or N.
As a non-mathematician and amateur (in the true sense of the word) of the epistemic (not necessarily the technological can of worms) fruits of the scientific method, my fundamental grasp at this level of all this is admittedly tenuous. But my perspective also allows (compels?) me to view in particular the mathematics (perhaps as a 'cope' ;-) as a near religion, revealed partly by the decades-long failure of such as string 'theory' for certain mathematicians to achieve much other than job security and generally inscrutable ecstasies of 'beautiful' math. And there is also Godel shouting into the void that consistency and completeness are mutually exclusive properties of any axiomatic system with sufficient expressive power. But math does work beautifully at most human scales, just not so precisely predictive at the smallest ones, which our evolutionary infatuation with symmetry compels us to wish for. I fear that AGI may become the Deity in this religion with a priesthood of techies. But I digress...
In media, though, all those deaths will be ret-conned as due to the Martian colonialism, NEO asteroid supremacy, or whichever other colonial eeevil will be in vogue in 2035...
We ain't going to Mars.
An entirely believable work of (future) fiction, as with so many of these things involving this 'deCOLONisation' bull-SHIT!
Splendid! The authors of that forum must have loathed to use a computer for their writing and hybrid lecturing - a product of rigorous research, likely somewhere in the West…
They tried, but competence, just like rigor, has been decolonized.
I wish I were joking.
https://theflickeringbeacon.substack.com/p/decolonizing-competence-part-i
Remember, the middle word in decolonization is COLON.
Rather, Colón. Think I'm joking?
https://theflickeringbeacon.substack.com/p/decolonizing-coloniality
Time to recolonize academia. It is crazy that such clowns whose modus operandi is to switch off their minds and emit streams of impressionistic babble get the same pay and prestige as real thinkers!
Academia needs to be recolonized...as do large swathes of the Third World.
The amount of hubris on all sides of this issue is staggering. As a minor example, what are the odds of a fusion reactor becoming usefully operational by 2035? Especially in a 'decolonized' technology community?
dejudge,
"[W]hat are the odds of a fusion reactor becoming usefully operational by 2035 ...in a 'decolonized' technology community?"
Yeah, I had this doubt as well, but I suppressed it :-) .
Paul D. from The Flickering Beacon
<https://theflickeringbeacon.substack.com/>
Good cope. We are all learning to whistle louder past that graveyard.
The essay didn't suggest that a fusion reactor would become usefully operational, but rather that fusion research continued.
I was struck instead by the lack of common sense or general engineering training in the remarkable plan to, "make it as close to the allowed threshold as we can" or the mismanagement that LLNL actually followed that absurd advice. I also felt a disconnect between the beauty of the Gibbs phenomenon and how its overshoot would cause the pressure excess as compared to unwittingly adding 9% (or 18%) additional margin compared to the ideal square wave.
It was fun to read in the Wikipedia article linked within that in the early 1900s none other than Michelson failed to understand the Gibbs phenomenon.
Thanks for clarifying my wrong assumption. It does read as research experiment within the article's thought experiment. I do stand by my hubris comment. Just gave a bad example. As for Michelson, he was probably prone to a bit of confirmation bias ;-)
I confirm that "as close as possible" was (and has been, for the last 30 years or so) a reasonable thing to do: it would have helped to fight plasma instabilities. But "_possible_" is the key word here: its meaning depends on speaker's grasp of functional analysis or just analysis.
hi Paul, I'm no fusion expert. What's the scenario you were imagining in the essay? That is, what's the cell that breaks under pressure? Does it relate to the link to LLNl's inertial confinement method?
I wonder if this essay might work better with a equity trading algorithm initiating a crash that drives a world-wide depression and associated wars.
My text is a fictional "fusion" (in a literary sense now :-)) of several elements, each of which, taken separately, was real. One of them was the actual glass cell used by LLNL <https://www.schott.com/en-us/news-and-media/media-releases/2022/fusion-energy-breakthrough-enabled-by-laser-glass-and-optical-glass-from-schott>, in December 2022; another was an idea---that was in the air 35 years ago---to use a large number of laser beams to apply Ashkin's pressure (<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-021-00768-0>) on the plasma, with a feedback loop that would keep the plasma ball nearly spherical. The very same pressure could, in principle, provide an ignition mechanism.
Thanks Paul. That article about Arthur Ashkin was fun to read. I remember as a student in the 1980s reading about the optical tweezers and thinking how wonderful that concept was. It came around the same time (for me) as the scanning tunneling microscope, so lots of exciting stuff. It continues these days too!
I had never heard the term Ashkin pressure. I have never heard of radiation-driven implosion for nuclear weapons being related to it, but now I can see it might. And it must be complicated! Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ashkin has this:
Ashkin ... obtained his BS degree in physics at Columbia University in 1947. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied nuclear physics. This was during the era of the Manhattan Project, and Ashkin's brother, Julius Ashkin, was successfully part of it. This led to Arthur Ashkin's introduction to Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and others who were at Cornell at the time.[1][19] He received his PhD degree at Cornell University in 1952,[20] and then went to work for Bell Labs...
So does "Ashkin" pressure, as you used it, refer to Julius or Arthur?
The Schott glass article reminded me of a quip a manager at LLNL said to me in the 1990s (?), "This project has sucked up all the XYZ glass available worldwide for the next N years." I don't remember the values of XYZ or N.
As a non-mathematician and amateur (in the true sense of the word) of the epistemic (not necessarily the technological can of worms) fruits of the scientific method, my fundamental grasp at this level of all this is admittedly tenuous. But my perspective also allows (compels?) me to view in particular the mathematics (perhaps as a 'cope' ;-) as a near religion, revealed partly by the decades-long failure of such as string 'theory' for certain mathematicians to achieve much other than job security and generally inscrutable ecstasies of 'beautiful' math. And there is also Godel shouting into the void that consistency and completeness are mutually exclusive properties of any axiomatic system with sufficient expressive power. But math does work beautifully at most human scales, just not so precisely predictive at the smallest ones, which our evolutionary infatuation with symmetry compels us to wish for. I fear that AGI may become the Deity in this religion with a priesthood of techies. But I digress...
For this and other crazy stories from our wacky wokery and beyond, follow our free substack at:
https://theflickeringbeacon.substack.com/