bugbomb

@bob_smith @Ayylmao63963350 There's probably a couple old engines entombed in concrete somewhere in NM. Or we could resurrect ORNL's aircraft reactor division.

@Ayylmao63963350 @bug_bomber well, if it's just vaporware, it's worked on my less-informed brain and I demand an American variant, right now!

Very cool stuff -- there's been talk about this project since the late 2010s & I discussed it with a few mutuals before -- but I want to pick other more knowledgeable folks' brains on just how groundbreaking it is vs. whether it's just an impressive feat that is really just over-engineered theater: 1. it can fly virtually indefinitely, and thus can change it's flight path a lot in approaching a target -- I assume this means tracking, anticipation, planning, and swatting it down from a distance are all more difficult (constant recalculation needed), but when it comes to its terminal phase, it's rapid flight changes that matters, right? Does it have such capacities? It's subsonic, so it might be more vulnerable in endgame, right? 2. Its capacity for low-altitude flight make it harder to detect and to potentially bypass early warning systems. Also, I read that it can "hug terrain" to further reduce visibility and conventional defense systems. How much of a game changer is this?

@Ayylmao63963350 @bob_smith Yeah. And I can only imagine how much of an expensive pain in the ass it would be to test and maintain an exotic, small batch propulsion system that supposedly underwrites your security. It's a shame. Nuclear turbojets ought to be ripping around Jupiter's upper atmosphere.

@bob_smith @bug_bomber In this day and age the main advantages of subsonic cruise missiles are the ability to saturate air defenses, and I suppose to delay detection a bit. Building an extremely expensive one seems to defeat the purpose from my perspective

@bob_smith @Ayylmao63963350 It's likely going to be a high-low mix. Delta-V is still pricey compared to quadcopter spam if you want to move things vast distances in reasonable amounts of time. The revolutions in processing power and sensing/mapping are also lowering the barrier to entry for swank.

@Ayylmao63963350 @bug_bomber The cheap > swanky thesis holds strong

@bob_smith @Ayylmao63963350 This and their nuclear-powered torpedo seem like their primary value would be in threatening enemy fleets. But again, they have many existing conventionally-powered nuclear weapons that can already service those targets. Feels more like posturing than real doctrinal shift.

@bob_smith @Ayylmao63963350 It sounds similar to Project Pluto. As a strategic weapon, it doesn't really give any capabilities that aren't already covered by ballistic missiles. As a tactical weapon, it's basically a standoff range nuclear cruise missile with an eye watering price tag.

@bob_smith Max Cooper - Emergence youtu.be/_7wKjTf_RlI?si…

@bug_bomber What’s this guy?

What albums do you slap on when you gotta grind on bullshit? Some of my go-to's:

@CJHandmer @grok "If the ocean were made of sodium, some damn fool of an engineer would propose a water-cooled reactor." Rickover's life mission was nuclear marine propulsion. Weinberg led ORNL's design of Nautilus' reactor. He certainly had different ideas what terrestrial reactors should be.

Seriously, ask Why Would Rickover Hate Your Reactor? @grok why would Rickover hate reactors that use helium, lithium, sodium, salt, or some other non water coolant?

If you're even thinking about working in the nuclear industry and haven't read this book...

@ww_dasilva @bob_smith You didn't miss out on much. They were an acceptably irreverent form of critique for people who were superficially into politics. They were obsoleted after the left won the culture war and Millennials made the mistake of turning politics into a common hobby.

@bob_smith i could only say googoo gaga when they were around so i don't have an opinion really

any time i catch my parents putting fox news on a tv i like to tell them "you're better than this"

@bob_smith S-tier cabbie compliment.

Uber driver said I’d fit right in in Sierra Leone

When a crystal is placed near a magnet, its electrons can only have certain amounts of energy. When this phenomenon is graphed, fractal patterns called Cantor sets emerge. quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-pr…

Already lots of qrts about how the ancients had spreadsheets too but it really needs to be emphasized that their sheets look *exactly* like ours

@bob_smith I'm not even going to bother translating this. I only know one Indic word and I know this is it.

You think Vance has ever dropped a “बहनचोद” when he’s gotten real frustrated???

@ww_dasilva The same can be said of the French.

illinois does a lot of things wrong, but one thing they absolutely got right was being the most nuclear-powered state

@bob_smith Help! I'm adrift alone in PCoA space!

Thinking about race-mixing? Sound like fun to you? Well, have you considered your child will be placed farther away from you than other white people on a graph with unlabeled axes?? Not so fun now, is it?

🚨🚨New paper out!!! Come for the first large-scale analysis of plasmid copy number across species, stay for one of the most intriguing results of my lab: universal scaling laws in plasmid biology! 📈🧬 👉nature.com/articles/s4146…

Synthetic ecosystems that autonomously and continuously evolve in silico 👾 An Alifer dream we pursue with Flow-Lenia ! If you are interested in complex systems with (1) emergent creatures and (2) intrinsic evolutionary dynamics, go check our new paper ! A 🧵

Unassuming p. chem and mat sci labs at Nowhere State University are hard-carrying the US's technology strategy.

We have two identical groups of 8 gauges with anomalous gauge at position (3,1). The degree of anomaly is identical in both groups ~ 8 deg. Humans have extreme hyperacuity with respect to detecting angular orientation of line segments—needle gauge is so much faster to read. The arc gauges all look the same even though the amount of deviation is the same, about 8 degrees. Even if you concentrate, it's hard to tell which one is off.

@layer07_yuxi @bob_smith New breakthroughs in Heideggerian technological analysis are being made.

Through teosinte-eating, Dasein retrieves its ownmost possibility of authentic Being-toward-nourishment. Corn, disclosed within the totalizing Gestell of agricultural technicity, withdraws into mere presence-at-hand. The teosinte-eater dwells poetically, letting beings be in their essential coming-to-presence within the temporal ekstases of nutritional care-structure.

type of guy who eats teosinte because corn is prematurely optimized and has alienated Man and tamed Nature