Michael Spencer MLA msadesign
1.1K posts

Michael Spencer MLA msadesign
@msadesign
Writer, columnist, blogger, gardener, site planner, Landscape Architect and plant geek.



Of all the anti vaccine scaremongering tactics the idea of VAIDS is the most ridiculous Vaccine induced AIDS People find AIDS scary So let's pretend vaccines cause it It's pathetic






This has been updated to include a fascinating part of Lane Kiffin's deal: LSU agreed to pay his postseason bonuses even though he won't coach Ole Miss in the CFP, so he could still make up to $1 million if the Rebels win a national title without him. #tncms-source=featured-top" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/sp…










@JoyceCarolOates Don't these stories undermine entirely the value we place on a college degree?




This is the company that will build the world's first commercial scale fusion power plant, and it'll be done in three years. Listen to this interview with the CEO to learn more about it (skip past the first part of you already know about fission and fusion energy), but here's my synopsis of how this works and why it's unique. First, realize that most power plants, coal, oil, natural gas, and yes, even current nuclear power plants, are thermal plants. They create heat, which boils water, generates steam which runs a steam turbine to generate electricity. It's literally 100 year old technology with some efficiency updates, but the best they can do is convert 35% of the fuel energy into electricity, the rest is waste heat. The rest of the world's fusion power plant prototypes will use this same steam generator system and throw away 65% of generated energy. Helion instead uses direct energy to electricity conversion, no heat cycle engine, and can be 85% energy efficient. As an overview, it uses a giant capacitor bank to electromagnetically accelerate a fusion fuel plasma (deuterium and He-3) while also electromagnetically compressing it to a target. It does this from two different directions, colliding each beam. This magnetically compressed, fast moving and high heat plasma will fuse in milliseconds and produce new charged particles (protons) which will then push against the magnetic field. The system then bleeds the resultant energy in this much more energetic magnetic field (due to the fusion) back into its capacitor bank. This is a pulsed fusion system that runs at 100 Hz in tests (100 pulses per second), and each pulse produces more electricity than was put in. This is the only fusion technology that makes any sense to me. All the others have tons of unsolved problems. In the video below, learn about fusion energy at a more detailed level, how David runs his company (very similar to Elon), how their system can be tightly coupled with AI data centers without even needing to produce AC electricity and much more.








This paper - which is really technical but is in my view exhilarating to at least read through (if not fully understand to say the least!) if you have an interest in quantum gravity / black holes / holography etc etc, contains what is surely one of the great footnotes. ‘We leave the theological implications of this statement as an exercise for the reader’. arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02359





