gordonmcdowell

Asked @ElizabethMay if she would be impeding GPC member's vote on nuclear power policy proposals as interim leader. We already did terribly in 2025-04 election thanks to reliance on Green parachute candidates who couldn't get 100 sigs, keeping May off debate stage.

Released JOUSTINE, a Joust game for Apple devices including Apple TV. Up to 12 people can play at once. Anything fancier than a toaster can be a client device. Siri Remote, iPhones, iPads, controllers... any web browsers. Guests need NOT install the app to participate.

CCTE × @CNL_LNC – ANEEL moves into reactor testing! We’ve signed an agreement to fabricate full-scale thorium–HALEU fuel bundles at Chalk River. This is where #ANEEL moves beyond modelling and starts generating reactor data — the step that unlocks licensing and deployment. Same PHWR geometry. No reactor changes. Tested under real conditions. Read full story: cnl.ca/ccte-cnl-initi…

For comparison below is Ezekiel 25:17, the Pulp Fiction version and the Hegseth verse. The real verse, Ezekiel 25:17 “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” The Pulp Fiction Verse 16:30 "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon you." The Pete Hegseth Verse “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of camaraderie and duty shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.”

@Andercot @KowalczykRich Really thought this was a great extended joke. Real is even better.

@KowalczykRich yes

Sneak preview of beamline tycoon My secret plan to trick people into learning particle beamline engineering principles.

@StephenABoydPh1 (Rich person problem, not a Gord problem.)

@gordonmcdowell What is/was “Mac Pro”?

Whaaaaaat???!!!! 300x of Cu metal??? A freakin’ nitride??!!! Wowwwwww - 🥰

@StephenABoydPh1 Used to make more sense when MacOS supported GPU cards. Since that is gone only point of large Mac Pro is powering internal storage and more heat dissipation. However now no form factor to support any Apple Silicon that would throttle in smaller enclosures.

@aakashgupta I thought the moon was covered in 5m of dust. Wouldn’t that absorb vibration like water does?

Genuinely a better question than most people realize. Apollo 11 left a 2-foot wide panel of mirrors on the lunar surface in 1969. No power source, no wiring, no maintenance. Scientists have been shooting lasers at it from New Mexico ever since. The beam travels 239,000 miles, bounces off the mirrors, and returns in 2.5 seconds. That round trip is how we know the moon is drifting away from Earth at 3.8 centimeters per year. So yes, in a literal sense, they were checking if it would still be there. The seismometers are the part that gets wild. Apollo 12 deliberately crashed its lunar module into the surface at 6,048 km/h. Scientists expected a brief shudder. The moon vibrated for over 55 minutes. On Earth, seismic waves from an equivalent impact die in seconds. Nobody had predicted this. So NASA did it again. Apollo 13 dropped its S-IVB rocket stage from orbit. Hit with the force of 11.5 tons of TNT. The vibrations lasted nearly three and a half hours. The reason is water, or the lack of it. Earth's interior is damp. Moisture in rock acts like a sponge, absorbing seismic energy. The moon is bone dry, cool, and rigid. Shockwaves have nothing to absorb them. They just bounce back and forth through solid stone until the rock itself stops vibrating. Scientists described it as the moon ringing like a bell. The seismometers ran for almost 8 years and detected over 13,000 seismic events. Turns out the moon has four types of quakes: deep ones caused by Earth's gravitational pull, shallow ones from the crust shrinking as the interior cools, thermal ones when sunrise thaws the frozen surface, and impacts from meteorites. In 2023, Caltech reanalyzed old Apollo 17 data and found a fifth type: the lunar lander itself creaking and popping every morning as the sun heated it. Every five to six minutes, for five to seven hours straight. They went up to prove the moon was once part of Earth, measure how fast it's leaving, and figure out what's happening inside a world with no atmosphere, no water, and no tectonic plates. "Checking if it was still there" is honestly closer to the truth than most people's actual answer.

@RapidResponse47 Actually, yes. My post was and remains entirely factual

@KairosPower Has a fuel pebble ever rolled under heavy furniture, just out of reach?

What’s the ONE thing you want to know about Kairos Power?

Sex is good but have you tried saving California’s only nuclear plant and sticking it to the boomer anti-nuclear environmentalists?

@whatisnuclear Create underground caverns on the moon?

I'm working to get access to a film about the peaceful uses of nuclear explosions. I asked my wife: Me: "[Wife], what do you think would be the best peaceful uses of nuclear explosions?" Wife: "Celebrations?" 🤣

@dunearrival I should have caught that.

@JWhitebread1 I agree on all points. Sort of wish they hadn’t mentioned ship was almost ready to go at end though. Didn’t need that lessening the sacrifice to maintain an equally upbeat ending. Would have just given people one more thing to think about after leaving the theatre.

Project Hail Mary is an exceptional film. Great adaptation of the novel. Go see it. Anything I could criticize about it would be nitpicking. ... BUT HEY! THAT'S WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR! SO LET'S DO THIS! NITPICKS AWAY! If you loved the parts of the novel of where Grace "sciences" his way out of problems, a hallmark of Weir's writing, you aren't going to get much of that out of this film. They chose instead to focus on the relationship between Rocky and Grace, which was the right call. It's mostly a story about a man finding his courage through an unlikely friendship. Still, there are hints to those problem-solving scenes in the movie. One of my favorites is near the end of the novel where Grace uses the spin-drives on the Hail Mary as an improvised IR LiDAR to find Rocky's disabled ship. If you look at the displays, you can tell that's what he's doing, but they never explain it, it's more of an Easter Egg to fans of the book to let us know, hey, we love that part of the book too. Still, the movie has a LOT of musical montages, and long cinematic scenes where nothing much happens other than gorgeous visuals. They are beautiful, but, they could have cut a few minutes of those and put a LITTLE more of the science into the movie, I think. Overall, very great film though, great performances, great sets and visuals and really heart-warming.

@chrizmillr @jbillinson @philiplord “It’s called suspension of disbelief!”

@jbillinson @philiplord We used a cone with a solid tip! For real!

There’s a scene in PROJECT HAIL MARY where Ryan Gosling’s character pukes in an upside down traffic cone, but they chicken out of playing that bit to it’s logical conclusion (out the other end of the cone). Release the puke cut, @philiplord.

@BaseballAslan @IMAO_ Drugs.

@IMAO_ I was surprised that it’s PG-13, considering that there is no language or really anything objectionable

Here’s how good Project Hail Mary was: I saw it with my wife Friday, and now she wants to see it again and take all the kids. It really is a great family movie even though it’s not aimed at kids.

@atrembath Silent bets taken on Alex==Rocky vs Alex=Grace.

I read PROJECT HAIL MARY before I was a dad, so when I saw the movie last night I was unprepared for the ways in which Grace’s relationship with Rocky would remind me of my relationship with my toddler. 🥹

Only thing we remember about Henry Ford is the assembly line? Only thing we remember about Steve Jobs is iPhone? Flaws are remembered too. Ford was anti-Semite and Jobs an occasional asshole. 100 years from today that will remain essential to understanding them.

"Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." - Mickey Bergman 2001 "Everybody needs Strait of Hormuz. That's why they call it Strait of Hormuz." - Everybody 2026

That famous match cut in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) almost wasn’t the moment we know. David Lean originally planned a slow dissolve. Editor Anne V. Coates suggested a hard cut instead, inspired by the French New Wave.