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California is by far the richest and most powerful polity led by Progressive ideals, and it has taken a beating of late. In this post, I discuss a practical roadmap by which California must reclaim its mantle as the shining city on the hill, an embodiment of the positive attributes of Progressive ideals and material optimism, and once again become a target of aspirational upward mobility. This will not be an easy road. Decades of complacency have squandered enviable resources and potential. But I believe a strength of America is syncretism, with the marketplace of ideas providing robust competition for …
As of today, it is 601 days until October 17, 2026, when the mass-optimal launch window to Mars opens next. While I don’t have any privileged information, it’s fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars. (Spoiler alert: Rods from the gods…) Over the next 600 days, SpaceX has a number of key technologies to demonstrate; orbit, reuse, refill, and chill. It’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. I’m optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully fueled Starships ready to go in October next year, to be followed by …
This post is a follow on from Powering the Mars Base. It’s an extended riff on the following thought experiment: What is the most electrical power you could extract from an integrated Starship-delivered nuclear reactor on Mars? The usual caveats apply. I have taught nuclear physics but I am not a reactor designer – which will shortly become obvious to those of you who Know. No liability is accepted for attempts to install open Brayton cycle nuclear turbines in Starships, with or without SpaceX permission. At the outset, let’s rehearse the underlying assumptions. A Starship has a 9 m diameter, …
As part of my job running Terraform Industries, I get to build an amazing team of super smart people, and that involves interviewing hundreds of people. Over time certain patterns have become obvious, but I remember when they weren’t obvious to me on the other side of the table! It has become clear to me that there are some subjects that should be covered as part of any professional degree and are not only not taught and not discussed, but most otherwise highly qualified graduates are completely unaware of their existence. I have previously written about improving resumes, becoming a …
[One from the archives, a previously unpublished short story I wrote c. 2017 on the theme of BASE jumping.] Why anyone thought a prison on the Moon was a good idea was beyond me. Remote, dangerous, inhospitable, to be sure. But certainly not impossible to escape from, as I was about to show. I had been ‘quartered’ in Block D, formerly optical scientist research and habitation module. Half buried in lunar dirt, the squints had wanted light, so Block D had some narrow slit-like windows near the ceiling, unlike the other blocks. From this window I could watch the Earth …
More in science
In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle. The post ‘Next-Level’ Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability first appeared on Quanta Magazine
The Magic Development of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China, and What That Tells Us about US Tariffs, China’s Future, EU Protectionism, Japan’s Zombie Debt, Argentina’s Arrested Development, and more
Non-blog life has been very busy, and events have been changing rapidly, but I thought it would be a good idea to give a brief bulleted list of updates regarding the NSF and associated issues: A court decision regarding who has the authority to fire probationary federal workers has led to the NSF hiring back 84 of the employees that it had previously dismissed, at least for now. The Office of Personnel Management is still altering their wording on this. There is likely some kind of continuing resolution in the offing in Congress, as the current funding stopgap expires on March 14. If a CR passes that extends to the rest of the fiscal year (Sept 30), that would stave off any big cuts until next FY's budget. At the same time, a number of NSF-funded research experience for undergraduate programs are being cancelled for this year. This is very unfortunate, as REU programs are many undergrads' first exposure to real research, while also being a critical mechanism for students at non-research-heavy institutions to get research experience. The concerns about next year's funding are real. As I've written before, cuts and programmatic changes have been proposed by past presidents (including this one in his first term), but historically Congressional appropriators have tended not to follow those. It seems very likely that the White House's budget proposal will be very bleak for science. The big question is the degree to which Congress will ignore that. In addition to the budget, agencies (including NSF) have been ordered to prepare plans for reductions in force - staffing cuts - with deadlines to prepare those plans by 13 March and another set of plans by 14 April. Because of all this, a number of universities are cutting back on doctoral program admissions (either in specific departments or more broadly). My sense is that universities with very large components of NIH funding thanks to medical schools are being particularly cautious. Schools are being careful because many places guarantee some amount of support for at least several years, and it's difficult for them to be full-speed-ahead given uncertainties in federal sponsor budgets, possible endowment taxes, possible revisions to indirect cost policies, etc. Enormous uncertainty remains in the wake of all of this activity, and this period of comparative quiet before the staffing plans and CR are due is an eerie calm. (Reminds me of the line from here, about how it can be unsettling when a day goes by and you don't hear anything about the horse loose in the hospital.) In other news, there is a national Stand Up for Science set of rallies tomorrow. Hopefully the net impact of this will be positive. The public and our legislators need to understand that support for basic science is not a partisan issue and has been the underpinning of enormous economic and technological progress.
In 2006 (yes, it was that long ago – yikes) the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially adopted the definition of dwarf planet – they are large enough for their gravity to pull themselves into a sphere, they orbit the sun and not another larger body, but they don’t gravitationally dominate their orbit. That last criterion […] The post Where Are All the Dwarf Planets? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
And all the different ways you can “train” a model
