Internal Monologue

Planet Earth is ruled by a species of chimpanzee in possession of both nuclear weapons and Abrahamic religion. We're doomed.

"Growing up, I was told of several key moments in British history: Trafalgar, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the 1966 World Cup final [vs. Germany]. The tone got extra reverent when it came to 1966." --Andrew Sullivan ( England just lost to Germany 4-1 )

This is a pretty cool but gross video of a giant spider crab crawling out of its shell:

Here's what my old co-workers at Microsoft are up to. Pretty cool. I'm glad Microsoft is doing something with a "wow" factor that really hasn't been available before.

Here's a good idea: save Detroit by letting people immigrate there . Detroit has a big problem: its population is declining. Lots of people in the world have a big problem: they live in areas much worse than Detroit. Solution for both: let those people come to Detroit to start an immigration-based economic revival. This is not within the realm of possibility given our current politics, but "current politics" is hardly something I'm interested in preserving if it gets in the way of a solution to a problem. And there's also the question: What about all those "worse places" where the immigrants come from? When the brightest/most ambitious/most well-connected in those areas leave for Detroit, what happens to those places? Do they suffer? Does net human suffering go up or down when people move to a better situation? Certainly, the people who move are probably better off, but what about those left behind? Do those places benefit from having a presumably mor

This agrees with my personal experience: I haven't had a working "desktop" computer in a long time. My current "desktop" is my old laptop with the broken screen hooked up to an external monitor. I suppose if I really wanted a high-performance machine, I'd get a desktop, but I find I'm more concerned with Internet bandwidth and latency than machine performance these days. Yesterday's overclocked processor is today's fat pipe to the 'Net.

That would be awesome : To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers---coherent light---at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: "no mass, no charge, just energy." Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world. [...] There is no such thing as peak hydrogen. Video here . (I guess on the scale of the whole universe there is such a thing as peak hydrogen, but we'll let subsequent generations worry about that.)