Very interesting and I would also love to export my own data! Care to share/elaborate a little further how you went into doing this, especially with platforms that do not offer the option to export your own data.
“Nuclear fusion is 30 years away; and always will be." I wonder how this phrase manages to hold after 50 years since its inception.
We could compare it to the state of general AI, but at least in the machine learning field, progress is being made without knowing the feasibility or path to reaching general in AI. In fusion it appears that the theory has already been set and maintaining the chain reaction going for long enough is the limitation (progress being made here), would it be the same case that the final steps are still missing without a clear path, or would the current progress be enough to eventually reach it?
AI research has made slow scientific progress but great engineering progress. Fusion has made great scientific progress but still has a lot of engineering left to do.
Engineering work halted 30+ years ago. There has been no recent work on structural materials that could withstand the neutron bombardment, and no work on extracting bred tritium at parts per billion concentration from thousands of tons of "blanket" material needed for the next day's operation.
There is no possibility of any present scheme operating at even 10x the cost of fission. Fission is not today competitive, and falls further behind each day.
> Engineering work halted 30+ years ago. There has been no recent work on structural materials that could withstand the neutron bombardment
We've made massive strides compacting designs, thereby transforming their unit-economic envelope, using low-temperature superconducting magnets. Those magnets continue to improve, driving potential gains in designs faster than experiments can be funded and built. Optimizing for structural materials, or even blanket versus replaceable structure, seems premature when we don't know the parameters or even type of bombardment we'd be working with.
You can get around the tritium problem with boron-proton fusion. Also gets around the inefficiency of converting to heat / turbines. Obviously not any closer to production (and probably further) than tritium fusion, though. https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/
It's been done by firing lasers at a HB pellet, so I assume you mean not possible to be done commercially? And why would you have to reflect gamma rays?
Obviously you can fuse about anything by accelerating nuclei at each other fast enough. If it takes more energy to do it than you can get back, it is of purely academic interest. Firing lasers comes up many orders of magnitude short.
Another alternative is magnetic confinement, but radiative loss goes up with the 4th power of temperature, so would be 10000 times as much as for a D-T plasma, IIUC.
This chart rests upon faulty assumptions about the efficacy of tokamaks, but it does demonstrate how little interest the U.S. federal government has had towards research of fusion.
From what I've seen living a privileged community in a not so privileged country, its that culture tends to impact in a much higher degree than money or privilege. Yes, money can buy you the privilege of skipping those awkward interactions that make us human, but it is up to the person to actually want to use money with that purpose.
I know very wealthy people that keep very closed ties to their families and friends. It's true that finding real friends gets harder, but the isolation tends to be caused by a deeper cultural norm.
E.g. in Latin America the family is given a much higher importance than in the States or Europe. It is not rare to see young adults living with their parents even if they can easily afford a place of their own. Even those that live on their own tend to meet their families in a regular basis.
In the end it's all about prioritizing what is important in your life and in every society there seems to be a common list shared by it's inhabitants, if you end up in a place that values more independence than relations, maybe its time to start swimming against the current in that regard.
Well, that's true, but my argument is that cultural norms spring from necessity. In places where a lot of people must live adjacent, that kind of living becomes the cultural norm and even if you're in a position to do your own thing, you are still influenced by it.
That is, cultural norms affect people, but basic necessity also affect cultural norms. Just like your values inform what you do, but what you do also changes your values.
You're right in that we must make greater efforts to swim against the current, but so many of us must in adulthood develop tools to foster community and connection. That's hard to do, especially when you're vulnerable, there's trial-and-error involved and you don't really have a good model for what you "should" be doing.
I have a hunch than in a couple decades this issue will be amplified. The biggest problem we are seeing from the disposal of more social interactions arises from not giving it its true importance.
It may be as you say that in the past interactions were fostered mainly as a side product of the necessity to cooperate and interact with others. However as we develop and become for independent thanks to prosperity and technology we must not get rid of interaction for they are an end in itself.
The issue or even taboo is the lack of importance that is given to the interactions with others just for its own sake. Maybe we will move on from this need and become more self reliant, however in the short term it seems that we are having a hard time adapting, especially with the increase of suicides and drug use in younger generations.
-> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650584
>in Latin America the family is given a much higher importance than in the States or Europe
I'm brazilian. I have a sister who is married to an american, and they live in the U.S. He always jokes how my sister talks to our mother in Brazil 10x more than he talks to his, yet his mother lives 15 minutes away.
>Next, participants received our standard instructions to
entertain themselves with their thoughts (in this
case for 15 min). If they wanted, they learned,
they could receive an electric shock again during
the thinking period by pressing a button. We
went to some length to explain that the primary goal was to entertain themselves with
their thoughts and that the decision to receive
a shock was entirely up to them.
Many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation—especially
men: 67% of men (12 of 18) gave themselves
at least one shock during the thinking period
[range = 0 to 4 shocks, mean (M) = 1.47, SD =
1.46, not including one outlier who administered 190 shocks to himself], compared to 25%
of women (6 of 24; range = 0 to 9 shocks, M =
1.00, SD = 2.32).
I´m quite intrigued about the outlier who managed to shock himself every 4.7 seconds for 15 minutes straight. Was he trying to go for a record or just plain masochism...
Thanks for finding this, was it linked in the article and I just missed it?
Either way, I was wondering if people shocked themselves out of curiosity, but the part after what you quoted says "Note that these results only include participants who had reported that they would pay to avoid being shocked again... But what is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid." They all already knew what it would feel like and they did it anyway.
No, it was not properly referenced in the article. I had previously seen the study.
From the supplementary material:
> All participants delivered the shock to themselves in this first part of the study. Thus, in
Part 2 of the study, when people had the opportunity to shock themselves again, everyone knew
what the shock entailed and how painful it was.
They also asked the participants to rate the experience from the sock in a 1-10 scale (negative to positive) and removed all participants who didn't find the shock as a negative experience.
The grade the remaining participants gave to the shock experience was in the lowest part of the scale, which makes it even more insane:
It's too bad studies like this have errors (obvious only in retrospect). I learned as a kid to entertain myself with thoughts and can do so easily for a long time.
But I will shock myself at least once just to see how bad the shock is... not because I would be bored.
(unless they took this into account and let everyone shock themselves before starting the experiment? That would be smart of them... didn't have time to read the study)
I am you and you are me! I have to reign in the day dreaming or I can sit on a bench happy in my mind for hours. I too would have to shock myself at least once to assuage my curiosity.
The innovators dilemma talks about a similar situation with storage. Every x years a new, smaller format would arrive and everybody would brush it aside until after some time the benefits would be noticeable and everybody would scramble to jump into the new format.
This process would go on to repeat itself, not always the innovators of introducing a new format would be able to replicate this shift, mainly because they would be victims of their own success and had to keep up with expected revenue and margins.
Capitalism has its perks, great advancements have been made in technology, quality of life and the development of cities that would otherwise have never existed.
The real issue lies when you look at the system in a more holistic, long term view, lets say another 200 years. In that time-frame the self propelling cycle of capital will make the accumulation of all wealth lie in a very small group.
In itself it is not a bad thing as long as advancements are still being made and the average quality of life is improved, however it leaves the system with a very centralized point of control.
This point of control could quickly deviate the system for purposes not entirely in the best interest of the species, put it as "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It may be a possibility but not the great peril. The real issue lies in the central group having accumulated all resources, and then not being able to maintain said resources and leaving the whole system open to a single point of failure by a revolt of some sorts. (starting from scratch can take more energy that the energy required to topple the system, and sometimes there may not enough energy to build over...)
Do we really want to have a society were the integrity of it depends on a single point? Maybe we do, but it just might not end up being the most resilient system.
I recently came up with an article that promoted an "innovative" park, buzzwords aside, it seems like a great project that is ongoing in Istambul, Turkey.
