I was just reading that the USGS has determined that there are likely large pegmatite deposits in ME/NH that could supply US lithium demands for a long time, but lithium extraction is environmentally destructive, highly polluting, and uses vast amounts of water.
I loosely follow a site that puts up blurbs about interesting developments in all sorts of science and engineering. My impression is that there are multiple technologies under the broad category "direct lithium extraction" that are close to ready and will greatly reduce all of those impacts. A billion dollars in directed development might do the trick fairly quickly. Granted that they won't be as cheap as the dirty methods, but if we're going to have national industrial policy we don't have to always go the cheapest route.
Over the years, I've created an (admittedly biased) model of an "East Coast, mostly BosWash urban corridor" perspective on American history. Brooks fits it pretty well, IMO. So he doesn't think about things like the post-Civil War Plains Indians genocide. Nor the western states mining unions violence. Nor, likely, the post-WWI racial violence peaking in the 1919 Red Summer because mostly it wasn't in the places he thinks of as "historical". Nor the Zoot Suit Riots because they were white-on-brown, not white-on-black.
As for AI and my personal contribution to saving lives, let me know when ChatGPT can donate a pint of low-titer O+ whole blood. Or even the hundredth donor who comes in because "ChatGPT made such a compelling argument that here I am. Bring on the needle!"
I recall a visit to Kaiser back in the 90s sometime when the nurse was asking questions from the computer display and entering answers during the initial screening. She told me Kaiser was using it because the rules-based system was better at putting together a set of symptoms and asking diagnostic questions that would eliminate unusual but serious problems.
Although it felt very weird (Vance being hustled off the stage before Trump, Trump’s apparent lack of concern)...
If you buy into much of the dementia remote diagnosis crowd, which regularly hypothesizes sundowning and a ton of mood-control drugs, this doesn't seem unusual. Vance would react quickly to the Secret Service agents; Trump would have to be cajoled. One of the pictures that has been posted a lot shows Trump and Melania in an early moment when everyone recognized something was wrong. She looks concerned; he is smiling and mellow.
There's lots of ways to look at the Justices. When Gorsuch was nominated during Trump's first term, pretty much everyone acknowledged that he was selected because he strongly opposed the regulatory state and would be a consistent vote to overturn Chevron and support the major questions doctrine. Which he has been. His other quirks -- eg, strong support for Native American tribal authority -- when he sometimes sides with the liberal minority were immaterial.
A majority of SCOTUS decisions are 9-0 or 8-1 every term. That's because a majority of the cases are asking for a narrow ruling on some detail of federal law or court procedures. Big cases are the ones where the plaintiff is asking the Court to make changes: in the balance of power between two branches, in the balance of rights between two groups, in how far (or not) the government can intrude into your private life. The Trump tariff case is a big case, even though most analysts think it will be 8-1 because the Court is going to hold that Congress has not ceded a broad tariff authority to the President, nor that the President has some implicit foreign policy authority to levy tariffs.
Open thread... Filed federal and state income taxes. Made good estimates -- between the two, wound up with a $32 refund. Always have to wait until pretty late to file, because we each get a K-1 form, and hers is always late. Made another admission about my wife's condition. We've used the same online tax service for many years, going back to when she was in charge of things like paying bills and filing taxes. I've been putting it off, but went through all the extra steps this time to make me head of household and her the spouse.
For those reading who are not subject to the wonders of the US federal income tax system, just know that calculating the tax is not the hard part; the hard part is classifying money into all the different kinds of income so you know what rate to apply.
I have seen a few pieces suggesting not to get overly hopeful about the change in Hungary. That the new guy is still center-right, but is willing to make enough pro-democracy changes to get the EU to release some €17-18B in grants they have been holding back. Re Ukraine, pro a large emergency loan, anti fast tracking EU membership.
A while back I signed up to be notified when the county started its process to hire election judges for the primaries. The notice arrived yesterday so I applied. Part of the online process was a voluntary "computer skills" test. One of the first questions was to generate a password that was at least 15 characters and contained at least one each of lower and upper case letters, numbers, and special characters. Several questions later they asked, "What was the password you generated earlier?" Lots of interesting quirks they might be testing for there :^)
On the other hand, the great love of my life (who was German) used to tell me that among many educated Germans it was reckoned that the works of Shakespeare were better in German than in English.
I don't know about if they were translated, but I found that Shakespeare's English was much more accessible after a couple semesters of college German. The whole "after all these subject and object and subordinate in various ways clauses there will eventually be a verb" experience was useful.
And communication is another field of expertise entirely for most disciplines. It’s rare to find someone who is adept at both.
I started out at Bell Labs as a systems engineer, quietly doing optimization problems. After a couple of years management had discovered that I could go talk to the software people, and come back and explain what they were doing and why they were unhappy with systems engineering. Then that I could do the same thing with the hardware people. Even the people over in Research. I didn't get to work on optimization problems very much after that.
One of the strange little memories still stuck in my head is the day I got a phone call from a dept head over in Research asking if he could steal a page from a memo I'd written for systems engineering explaining why a particular research project was important. "You explained it much more clearly than any of my people have managed to."
So far, there seems to be little agreement between the United States, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, and the Arab Gulf states about who is involved in the ceasefire, who is not, and the terms. Israel/US says Lebanon is not included, Israel continues air strikes there. Iran says Lebanon is included, keeps the Strait closed. KSA and UAE disagree on tolls entirely, with KSA having made air strikes in Iran and UAE threatening to freeze/confiscate Iranian assets in their banking system. Kuwait seems to say that damage from Iranian strikes have put them out of the oil and LNG business entirely.
I suppose this could just be a case of experts in a field consciously perverting the meaning of common terms in order to exclude those not participants in the field.
Or just borrowing words where there is some sort of vague relationship between the concepts rather than making up new words. Many years ago, in a Bell Labs cafeteria, I was involved in a discussion about certain sorts of error recoveries in early long-running Unix systems. One of the problems was "orphans", running processes that had no "parent" process. Another was "zombies", non-existent processes that still had an entry in the process table. Much of the talk was about turning orphans into zombies, or vice versa, and how to attach them to a parent so the parent could safely kill them.
When the gray-haired lady at the next table got up to leave, she paused to tell us, "You people are sick."
But since it presupposes Iran agreeing to re-open the Strait of Hormuz, unless the Pakistanis got the Iranians’ agreement to that before making this suggestion...
I'm already depressed today** but I can't imagine Iran agreeing to that unless Pakistan was able to credibly tell them, "Guys, he's really going to drop a nuke outside Isfahan if you don't agree to open the Strait." Absent the leverage closing the Strait gives them, Iran either surrenders or bombs the snot out of the Arab Gulf states' oil/gas terminals and then surrenders. It seems unlikely that if they surrender they can get any meaningful guarantees that Israel/US won't start bombing again in t he future.
** Since it's an open thread, this week I donated my wife's car to charity. She's slowly dying in memory care from early-onset dementia, and there's no need for me to keep a second car licensed and insured. Getting rid of it hurt -- there are a lot of family memories attached. By the time she and I met we were both rather compulsive about keeping paperwork about assets. Today I put 27 years worth of paperwork, starting with the receipt for the initial deposit, into the recycle bin.
I suppose we should be grateful that Kegseth didn’t just force them into retirement.
Probably did in fairly short order. You can only sit at full colonel and get passed over for promotion to flag rank for so many years before retirement is mandatory.
Pardon? A dirty bomb is a bomb loaded with radioactive material, intended to contaminate the area. Uranium enrichment has nothing to do with it.
Exactly. Lots of cobalt-60, strontium-90, and cesium-137. Where are you going to get it? An actual fission bomb will produce it, but you almost certainly want to consider the blast as your primary weapon. Or you can get a bunch of spent reactor fuel. Properly aged: thermally cool enough to work with, still radioactively hot enough to be "dirty".
Re the generals... Promotions to one-star rank and initial postings must be submitted by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Same applies for promotions to more stars. The standard procedure is a board of general officers drafts a list. Said list goes to the secretary of the service branch and the Joint Chiefs, then on to the Secretary of Defense, then to the President, then to the Senate. Precedent is that the Secretary of Defense will either approve or disapprove the entire list rather than striking individual names. We all know that precedent is a weak straw to depend on these days.
Trump, consciously or not, is breaking the US military leadership of any independence.
The USS Tripoli and her 2,500 marines ought to be getting close to the Persian Gulf about now.
As of Monday, Chinese commercial satellite images showed the Tripoli moored at Diego Garcia. Amateur analysts suggest the reason is likely to top off fuel and food supplies before heading towards the Hormuz area.
This month the Bureau of Reclamation issued a new forecast for the water level at the Glen Canyon Dam. Under the "most probable" scenario the level drops below minimum power pool in December. Under the "minimum probable" scenario it reaches that level in August. For the last couple of years, reality has tracked closer to the minimum probable scenario. If the water level is below minimum power pool, the dam can't generate electricity. Glen Canyon isn't an enormous source of power. Its face plate capacity is 1.3 GW, but it's utility factor is only 41%. OTOH, it is a large part of the regional grid's spinning reserve, and provides a lot of frequency control fine tuning.
Granddaughters #2 and #3 slept over Sunday night and we did odd things on Monday.
Tuesday I got a bicycle ride in before it got too hot. It's March and I'm at the north end of the Colorado Front Range urban corridor. Writing that first sentence just seems so wrong. My endurance held up better this time out. It takes me a disturbingly long time to grow replacement red blood cells after a donation these days.
At Polymarket you can buy a $1 payout on a yes answer to the question "Will the US officially declare war on Iran by Dec 31, 2026?" for nine cents. The resolution explanation states that they mean Congress passes a declaration of war. People are apparently ignorant of history: the last time Congress officially declared war was in 1942.
The USS Tripoli and her 2,500 marines ought to be getting close to the Persian Gulf about now.
More than 30 years ago now -- how did I ever get to be this old? -- when I was doing research into real-time multi-party multi-media communication over parts of the internet, I needed a placeholder video that (a) was video rather than a slideshow and (b) a 50 MHz 486 processor could simultaneously encode one stream and decode at least two. Out of that came MikeVision, "the world's ugliest video": 15 fps, 240x176 black and white pixels. Error diffusion dithering to give the illusion of gray shades. A number of world experts told me that it could never work. In fact, once you got used to it, you could pass an enormous amount of information with it.
@hartmut, I took the liberty of editing your comment to provide the blockquote formatting. I'm seing all the tools in the comment box on the site. Is your's still missing? If so, you might try a forced refresh.
My immediate reaction to Trump's "invitation" was... Wait. Did you just invite China to bring their aircraft carrier in, and give them a chance to fly planes around measuring US carriers' premier radar signals, and getting a chance to bounce radar off F-35s? The US very carefully did not deploy F-35s over much of Syria while the Russians were there, because they didn't want the Russians to know what the returns were like.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “It’s funny what gets left out”
I was just reading that the USGS has determined that there are likely large pegmatite deposits in ME/NH that could supply US lithium demands for a long time, but lithium extraction is environmentally destructive, highly polluting, and uses vast amounts of water.
I loosely follow a site that puts up blurbs about interesting developments in all sorts of science and engineering. My impression is that there are multiple technologies under the broad category "direct lithium extraction" that are close to ready and will greatly reduce all of those impacts. A billion dollars in directed development might do the trick fairly quickly. Granted that they won't be as cheap as the dirty methods, but if we're going to have national industrial policy we don't have to always go the cheapest route.
"
Over the years, I've created an (admittedly biased) model of an "East Coast, mostly BosWash urban corridor" perspective on American history. Brooks fits it pretty well, IMO. So he doesn't think about things like the post-Civil War Plains Indians genocide. Nor the western states mining unions violence. Nor, likely, the post-WWI racial violence peaking in the 1919 Red Summer because mostly it wasn't in the places he thinks of as "historical". Nor the Zoot Suit Riots because they were white-on-brown, not white-on-black.
On “It’s a beautiful day to save lives”
As for AI and my personal contribution to saving lives, let me know when ChatGPT can donate a pint of low-titer O+ whole blood. Or even the hundredth donor who comes in because "ChatGPT made such a compelling argument that here I am. Bring on the needle!"
"
I recall a visit to Kaiser back in the 90s sometime when the nurse was asking questions from the computer display and entering answers during the initial screening. She told me Kaiser was using it because the rules-based system was better at putting together a set of symptoms and asking diagnostic questions that would eliminate unusual but serious problems.
On “Clusterfucks r us”
Although it felt very weird (Vance being hustled off the stage before Trump, Trump’s apparent lack of concern)...
If you buy into much of the dementia remote diagnosis crowd, which regularly hypothesizes sundowning and a ton of mood-control drugs, this doesn't seem unusual. Vance would react quickly to the Secret Service agents; Trump would have to be cajoled. One of the pictures that has been posted a lot shows Trump and Melania in an early moment when everyone recognized something was wrong. She looks concerned; he is smiling and mellow.
On “Your choice: an open thread”
Open thread... View from the front porch, 10:00 MDT, April 17. Might do this off and on all day.
On “Imagining a mad king”
There's lots of ways to look at the Justices. When Gorsuch was nominated during Trump's first term, pretty much everyone acknowledged that he was selected because he strongly opposed the regulatory state and would be a consistent vote to overturn Chevron and support the major questions doctrine. Which he has been. His other quirks -- eg, strong support for Native American tribal authority -- when he sometimes sides with the liberal minority were immaterial.
"
A majority of SCOTUS decisions are 9-0 or 8-1 every term. That's because a majority of the cases are asking for a narrow ruling on some detail of federal law or court procedures. Big cases are the ones where the plaintiff is asking the Court to make changes: in the balance of power between two branches, in the balance of rights between two groups, in how far (or not) the government can intrude into your private life. The Trump tariff case is a big case, even though most analysts think it will be 8-1 because the Court is going to hold that Congress has not ceded a broad tariff authority to the President, nor that the President has some implicit foreign policy authority to levy tariffs.
On “Your choice: an open thread”
Open thread... Filed federal and state income taxes. Made good estimates -- between the two, wound up with a $32 refund. Always have to wait until pretty late to file, because we each get a K-1 form, and hers is always late. Made another admission about my wife's condition. We've used the same online tax service for many years, going back to when she was in charge of things like paying bills and filing taxes. I've been putting it off, but went through all the extra steps this time to make me head of household and her the spouse.
For those reading who are not subject to the wonders of the US federal income tax system, just know that calculating the tax is not the hard part; the hard part is classifying money into all the different kinds of income so you know what rate to apply.
"
I have seen a few pieces suggesting not to get overly hopeful about the change in Hungary. That the new guy is still center-right, but is willing to make enough pro-democracy changes to get the EU to release some €17-18B in grants they have been holding back. Re Ukraine, pro a large emergency loan, anti fast tracking EU membership.
On “Maybe time for an Open Thread”
A while back I signed up to be notified when the county started its process to hire election judges for the primaries. The notice arrived yesterday so I applied. Part of the online process was a voluntary "computer skills" test. One of the first questions was to generate a password that was at least 15 characters and contained at least one each of lower and upper case letters, numbers, and special characters. Several questions later they asked, "What was the password you generated earlier?" Lots of interesting quirks they might be testing for there :^)
"
On the other hand, the great love of my life (who was German) used to tell me that among many educated Germans it was reckoned that the works of Shakespeare were better in German than in English.
I don't know about if they were translated, but I found that Shakespeare's English was much more accessible after a couple semesters of college German. The whole "after all these subject and object and subordinate in various ways clauses there will eventually be a verb" experience was useful.
"
And communication is another field of expertise entirely for most disciplines. It’s rare to find someone who is adept at both.
I started out at Bell Labs as a systems engineer, quietly doing optimization problems. After a couple of years management had discovered that I could go talk to the software people, and come back and explain what they were doing and why they were unhappy with systems engineering. Then that I could do the same thing with the hardware people. Even the people over in Research. I didn't get to work on optimization problems very much after that.
One of the strange little memories still stuck in my head is the day I got a phone call from a dept head over in Research asking if he could steal a page from a memo I'd written for systems engineering explaining why a particular research project was important. "You explained it much more clearly than any of my people have managed to."
On “That beacon of peace, China, errr, I mean Pakistan…”
So far, there seems to be little agreement between the United States, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, and the Arab Gulf states about who is involved in the ceasefire, who is not, and the terms. Israel/US says Lebanon is not included, Israel continues air strikes there. Iran says Lebanon is included, keeps the Strait closed. KSA and UAE disagree on tolls entirely, with KSA having made air strikes in Iran and UAE threatening to freeze/confiscate Iranian assets in their banking system. Kuwait seems to say that damage from Iranian strikes have put them out of the oil and LNG business entirely.
On “Maybe time for an Open Thread”
I suppose this could just be a case of experts in a field consciously perverting the meaning of common terms in order to exclude those not participants in the field.
Or just borrowing words where there is some sort of vague relationship between the concepts rather than making up new words. Many years ago, in a Bell Labs cafeteria, I was involved in a discussion about certain sorts of error recoveries in early long-running Unix systems. One of the problems was "orphans", running processes that had no "parent" process. Another was "zombies", non-existent processes that still had an entry in the process table. Much of the talk was about turning orphans into zombies, or vice versa, and how to attach them to a parent so the parent could safely kill them.
When the gray-haired lady at the next table got up to leave, she paused to tell us, "You people are sick."
"
But since it presupposes Iran agreeing to re-open the Strait of Hormuz, unless the Pakistanis got the Iranians’ agreement to that before making this suggestion...
I'm already depressed today** but I can't imagine Iran agreeing to that unless Pakistan was able to credibly tell them, "Guys, he's really going to drop a nuke outside Isfahan if you don't agree to open the Strait." Absent the leverage closing the Strait gives them, Iran either surrenders or bombs the snot out of the Arab Gulf states' oil/gas terminals and then surrenders. It seems unlikely that if they surrender they can get any meaningful guarantees that Israel/US won't start bombing again in t he future.
** Since it's an open thread, this week I donated my wife's car to charity. She's slowly dying in memory care from early-onset dementia, and there's no need for me to keep a second car licensed and insured. Getting rid of it hurt -- there are a lot of family memories attached. By the time she and I met we were both rather compulsive about keeping paperwork about assets. Today I put 27 years worth of paperwork, starting with the receipt for the initial deposit, into the recycle bin.
"
I suppose we should be grateful that Kegseth didn’t just force them into retirement.
Probably did in fairly short order. You can only sit at full colonel and get passed over for promotion to flag rank for so many years before retirement is mandatory.
"
Pardon? A dirty bomb is a bomb loaded with radioactive material, intended to contaminate the area. Uranium enrichment has nothing to do with it.
Exactly. Lots of cobalt-60, strontium-90, and cesium-137. Where are you going to get it? An actual fission bomb will produce it, but you almost certainly want to consider the blast as your primary weapon. Or you can get a bunch of spent reactor fuel. Properly aged: thermally cool enough to work with, still radioactively hot enough to be "dirty".
"
Re the generals... Promotions to one-star rank and initial postings must be submitted by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Same applies for promotions to more stars. The standard procedure is a board of general officers drafts a list. Said list goes to the secretary of the service branch and the Joint Chiefs, then on to the Secretary of Defense, then to the President, then to the Senate. Precedent is that the Secretary of Defense will either approve or disapprove the entire list rather than striking individual names. We all know that precedent is a weak straw to depend on these days.
Trump, consciously or not, is breaking the US military leadership of any independence.
"
The USS Tripoli and her 2,500 marines ought to be getting close to the Persian Gulf about now.
As of Monday, Chinese commercial satellite images showed the Tripoli moored at Diego Garcia. Amateur analysts suggest the reason is likely to top off fuel and food supplies before heading towards the Hormuz area.
"
nous -- The Colorado River is in serious danger.
This month the Bureau of Reclamation issued a new forecast for the water level at the Glen Canyon Dam. Under the "most probable" scenario the level drops below minimum power pool in December. Under the "minimum probable" scenario it reaches that level in August. For the last couple of years, reality has tracked closer to the minimum probable scenario. If the water level is below minimum power pool, the dam can't generate electricity. Glen Canyon isn't an enormous source of power. Its face plate capacity is 1.3 GW, but it's utility factor is only 41%. OTOH, it is a large part of the regional grid's spinning reserve, and provides a lot of frequency control fine tuning.
"
Granddaughters #2 and #3 slept over Sunday night and we did odd things on Monday.
Tuesday I got a bicycle ride in before it got too hot. It's March and I'm at the north end of the Colorado Front Range urban corridor. Writing that first sentence just seems so wrong. My endurance held up better this time out. It takes me a disturbingly long time to grow replacement red blood cells after a donation these days.
At Polymarket you can buy a $1 payout on a yes answer to the question "Will the US officially declare war on Iran by Dec 31, 2026?" for nine cents. The resolution explanation states that they mean Congress passes a declaration of war. People are apparently ignorant of history: the last time Congress officially declared war was in 1942.
The USS Tripoli and her 2,500 marines ought to be getting close to the Persian Gulf about now.
On “Iran and the US”
Even classic movies include shades of grey.
More than 30 years ago now -- how did I ever get to be this old? -- when I was doing research into real-time multi-party multi-media communication over parts of the internet, I needed a placeholder video that (a) was video rather than a slideshow and (b) a 50 MHz 486 processor could simultaneously encode one stream and decode at least two. Out of that came MikeVision, "the world's ugliest video": 15 fps, 240x176 black and white pixels. Error diffusion dithering to give the illusion of gray shades. A number of world experts told me that it could never work. In fact, once you got used to it, you could pass an enormous amount of information with it.
On “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
@hartmut, I took the liberty of editing your comment to provide the blockquote formatting. I'm seing all the tools in the comment box on the site. Is your's still missing? If so, you might try a forced refresh.
"
My immediate reaction to Trump's "invitation" was... Wait. Did you just invite China to bring their aircraft carrier in, and give them a chance to fly planes around measuring US carriers' premier radar signals, and getting a chance to bounce radar off F-35s? The US very carefully did not deploy F-35s over much of Syria while the Russians were there, because they didn't want the Russians to know what the returns were like.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.