Thomas Womack

@wasatch_wind @spacekoala I can’t help thinking that people susceptible to that were already taken out by anime girls …

@spacekoala I'm really afraid that some people are going to watch this stuff and it'll become their thing, that they will literally have impossible standards for women.

AI is perpetuating harmful beauty standards for women 😡 Guys, almost all women cannot phase into higher dimensions👈👈👈

@60sJapanfan I mean, we always have - we accept EU licenses, and we let people drive for a year on other foreign licenses because any much shorter period would screw over tourists renting cars.

@GrandpaRoy2 The wheel revolves - I remember reading novels about the Yom Kippur war in 1973 describing the desert littered with the wires from wire-guided anti-tank guided missiles

Fantastic news that Madyar has embraced fiber optic FPVs. Other Ukrainian drone units will follow now. I'm all aflutter! 1/

@Robotbeat @rjohnhacker You certainly wouldn’t use synthetic methane for DR steel production, since step one is ‘convert methane to CO and H2’ - methane is not itself a reducing agent!

@rjohnhacker I can see synthetic methane as still being used because it’s easier to transport and store. But yeah, exactly right.

A lot of the constraints to building an actual civilization on Mars are the same as reindustrializing the United States. How do you make steel cheaply? A LOT of steel, which keeping labor hours per unit of steel low?

@simoncwrightson @jessralston2 @Telegraph You don’t need to do that, a higher-temperature air-to-water heat pump works fine with unaltered radiators in our Victorian house.

Without the physical cost of changing the fabric of a property to accept large heat store radiators, underfloor heating, HVAC ducting and piping. A typical three bedroomed family home owner can expect to spend not less than £20,000 on the building works, never mind the redecoration.

1) Quite a misleading @Telegraph piece here: the 'average' heat pump cost is not £12,800 as cited in the article A £7,500 Govt grant goes to every homeowner who installs a heat pump, meaning the 'average' cost is closer to £5,000.

@jessralston2 @Telegraph It goes quite slowly to the homeowner - there are many people whose cash flow has a bit of trouble with £7500 out in 2021 and £400 a quarter in for the next twenty quarters.

@BenRamanauskas There is very little concern about people showing off their vroom vroom with Granny or their baby in the car; add blanket permission for relatives.

This is a stupid idea and just another policy which will unfairly punish young people. What if the young person has children of their own or needs to take an elderly relative somewhere? Would be better to ensure that people are severely punished for traffic offences.

@MiamiCapitalist @spacekoala Not really - you can grow some kinds of fancy veg, but the cost advantage for getting your light from the sun rather than from LEDs is so enormous that indoor farming of staple crops is absurd.

@spacekoala Up side? Market forces would have encouraged indoor/vertical farming by now.

See, this entirely misses the point about farming: You subsidize it to artificially keep food prices as low as possible while food production remains sufficient to prevent global famines. The value of arable land near cities is so high and the profits of farming so low if you removed the subsidies market forces would mean good prices would be much higher.

@maxwell_marlow @DavidDavisMP Or one fool driving badly at seventy by himself rather than at a hundred to show off to the girl in the passenger seat, and three kids being driven around by slightly grumpy parents or missing the party.

@DavidDavisMP Dreadful idea - instead of four passengers in one car, four more cars on the road and four times more the risk.

This is a good idea and the government should implement it. It will save lives and cost next to nothing. thetimes.com/article/0bb24d…

@perrymetzger There are a lot of lifeless rocks here which we want to protect - start with Uluru and Half Dome. It might well be worth coming in with a presumption of protecting Lunar and Martian vistas.

No, we do not need to protect lifeless rocks from human beings mining them. (It's remarkable how many people have completely broken values.)

@thomasforth It looks as if China has a reasonably strong fabless / foundry division, Wingtech appears to be the biggest company that does both and is much smaller than Samsung. SMIC is the deliberately-TSMC-like state foundry champion.

But I wonder if there's a Chinese integrated designer and manufacturer that I don't know about. I have no good guess at all about what China do about compute now.

If Intel goes bust and/or splits up who becomes the world's biggest integrated (design and manufacture) CPU company?

@unfilteredGray @TerribleMaps French Guyana is part of France, meaning France’s longest land border is with Brazil.

@TerribleMaps Brazil in France?

A flag map of Europe where each flag is determined by the country with which it shares the longest border

@spacekoala Yes, but the ‘practical’ starting materials are an incredibly rare isotope of mercury or the third most common isotope of platinun

"Alchemy doesn't exist. You can't turn other elements into gold." Nuclear physicists:

@JackKuhr @NZ2257 @PettitFrontier I nearly bought the set of 2024 Christmas socks showing Shuttle stack, Shuttle on orbit, NASA worm, NASA meatball and a fighter plane in red white and blue as a sign of how wrong current perceptions of space are …

@NZ2257 @PettitFrontier had a great post about this. Most folks don’t know the shuttle is retired

Probably nothing

@theobertram ‘Disposable’ is surely more than just ‘after tax’ - I think of it as also after housing costs, food and utilities.

- Targeting Real Disposable Household Income (the money in your pay packet after tax) is a better indicator of the cost of living than just aiming for GDP growth. So, this is a smart post-Biden political adjustment.

On the specific targets: - Bobbies on the beat helps tackle street crime but feels quite 2000s because it won't address pandemic of online fraud

@iainoverton @haynesdeborah @RUSI_org Yes, our army would not last long in a land war of attrition; but we are an island nation with a navy, an air force, Storm Shadow and in ultimum Trident.

@haynesdeborah @RUSI_org 1. What is his definition of an amputation? British mil included finger amputation in their data on Iraq/Afghan amputations. 2. 2 1/2 times as many US civilians have amputations every year than soldiers in British army. 3. Did he mention the UK has nuclear weapons in his speech?

Shocking statistic by General Sir Jim Hockenhull - a top British commander: There are more Ukrainian amputees as a result of Russia’s war “than there are service personnel in the British Army”. The general is giving a speech at @RUSI_org

@newsstudy2_ssc @esa @isro @ESA_Tech @redwire @ESA_BE Yes, there are three operational pads at Satish Dhawan

@esa @isro @ESA_Tech @redwire @ESA_BE There is another launch pad Behind this launch pad ? Can anyone confirm please

🌞 Our eclipse-making Proba-3 mission is set for launch! 🚀 Liftoff is scheduled for TODAY at 10:34 GMT/11:34 CET. 📺 Join us live from 10:00 GMT/11:00 CET ➡️ esawebtv.esa.int Learn more about the mission ➡️ youtube.com/watch?v=qfbYdD…

@MarcusCVance Agreed. Food insecurity is almost always imposed - competent governments can feed people that they want to be fed. Massive emigration was undeniably the reaction to the imposed food insecurity.

In short and to quote Sinnead O'Connor again "All the other food, meat, fish, and vegetables, were shipped out the country under armed guard to England while the Irish starved" They were a colony.

The Irish potato famine wasn't "ope, potatoes are bad, lets go somewhere else" In fact, it's yet another example against colonialism.

@spacekoala This is nonsense: you can’t make the numbers work exporting platinum from near Earth asteroids, let alone food from Mars! Food growing on Mars will be only for Martians!

Historically, food insecurity was a major driver of colonization and human migration, so if people figure out how to grow crops on Mars, why wouldn't you want to colonize it? Do you just hate expanding the food supply?

@MarcusCVance @spacekoala It’s always a major driver of *migration* - Irish to Chicago in the 1840s a really clear example. There are places that were colonised for agriculture - Brazilian savannah, the Great Plains - but generally by well-fed farmers aiming to farm at scale for a city population.

@spacekoala When was food insecurity a major driver of colonization?