Jack Aspinall

@ramonagusta abdicating responsibility

"not our war" latest...

@TerribleMaps Thats why theyre so expensive. Lots of steel.

I didn’t realise the UK’s nuclear submarines were this big

@patrick_oshag This is wild. Maybe the human balance of risk-reward is approximately constant. As interventions make startups more likely to succeed, founders simply up the ambition to balance this out.

A crazy image

@ToriPeck stateofbritain.uk/foundations/so… Have added a page on social care, bringing together DfE, Ofsted and local authority spending data. Thanks for flagging this Tori!

Fewer foster carers, dangerously high case loads per social worker, more family and setting breakdowns, entirely broken funding model. Successive govts have launched successive commissions on adult social care but childrens as critical and little focus.

Lots of great stuff on @state_britain but particularly striking visualisation of children’s social care crisis. Avg council now spending double than in 2010 compared to avg 20% rise in looked after children. Increased spending isn’t delivering improved outcomes.

@ToriPeck Important issue, glad you found the data vis helpful. Will add plotting childcare spend and number of kids vs time to the list so you have the graphs to point to.

@PJL_UK Right. In a growing country youd expect a growing steel/capita anyway.

@jackaspi You mention 9 tonnes per capita. The amount of steel in circulation is key to arc furnace being viable. There has to be enough scrap available. We export ours at the moment. Probably more people in the scrap industry than in the steel industry.

Steel is trending. Thermodynamics of steel are worth revisiting. Steel is iron with ~1% of carbon in it. We dig it out the ground as iron oxide (FeO, Fe2O3, Fe3O4). To transform those into Steel you need a reducing agent, something to grab the oxygen off the iron. Carbon is great at this, C + O2 -> CO2. Happens at ambient pressure spontaneously if you heat it up. This makes pig iron (Fe+>3%C). Then can melt it and blow in oxygen to pull off the excess carbon, making Steel. This is hugely carbon intensive, but what are the alternatives? 1 - Hydrogen Hydrogen is often offered as an alternative reducing agent. (2H2 +O2 -> 2H2O). However this isnt strong enough to rip the oxygen off iron oxide unless you have insanely high pressure of H2 and tiny pressure of H2O. Which seems essentially impossible to maintain. Hydrogen also embrittles Steel - which makes it much less useful as a material. It would be great if it worked, it currently doesn't. 2 - Electric arc furnaces EAFs are a key part of the governments strategy. They use electricity to melt steel. Crucially though this is only a recycling and refining method. It doesnt produce new steel from iron ore. 3 - Oxide electrolysis. One exciting, and under-discussed technology is using electrochemistry to do the reduction of iron from molten iron ore. Running at ~1500°C, an electrochemical potential can be applied to opposing electrodes to produce iron metal and oxygen. This is electrochemical reduction, no C is emitted. Companies such as Boston Metals are pursuing this technology and aluminium is already made by an analogous process. There are obviously challenges, corrosion at elevated temperature is very high. But its a potential option. It also relies on electricity being very cheap to be in any way competitive with carbon reduction. -- Steel underpins our modern world, in Britain we have ~9 tonnes of steel per capita. In our bridges, buildings, roads and cars. Its important to have domestic production.

Check out all of this and more at stateofbritain.uk

Our aircraft fleet is increasing again after dipping, with a steady Typhoon fleet and new F35s

The data on defense procurement is striking. - £8 bn spent on 8 ships, 114% over budget and 2 years delayed. - £6.2 bn spent on AJAX tanks, 77% over budget, 9 years late, now paused. - Only 9% of defense procurement tenders logged as 'competitive'.

The main procurement programmes are significantly delayed and over budget.

@ArkaSerezh This is beautiful. Who's next?

Honor Individuals

@DanNeidle Seems more sensible to label the opposite. In the same way we label homemade soups, original oil paintings, handcrafted sculptures.

Can anyone explain how this would work? Where do you draw a line? 100% AI written with no human involved: sure. 100% human written with no AI involved: easy. But plenty is in the middle. Everything I write is proof-read by AI. It's brilliant. Was this post "made using AI"?

@flavioAd The Internet is going to get so pretty

Every time Google AI Studio makes an svg i’m like yeah ok this is insane This was literally one shot

@EdConwaySky We all love the mammoth screen with LOTS of charts

📆 Tomorrow... the primer lots of you have been asking for, looking into one of the hottest topics right now: - How much more oil and gas could we get out of the North Sea? - Could Britain be energy independent again? Mammoth screen with LOTS of charts coming your way at 6am