Musk is trying to check all the boxes:

• Iteration X: Tesla, Solar City, Boring Co.
• New World Order: xAI, OpenAI, Zip2
• Progenitors: Neuralink
• Syndicate: PayPal, X (Twitter)
• Void Engineers: Space X

It’s like a Syndicate stooge staged a hostile take of the other conventions of the Technocratic Union, and it’s going about as well as expected. Cybernetics is a bit of a cheat as it’s in the overlap between Progenitors and Iteration X. If anything he’s trying to sideline Progenitors out as he boosts anti-vax statements.

I’ve been working my way through NADDPOD, and there was a great session where

It was such a great session. It really emblemizes how I try to approach being a GM. Have a prepared roadmap, but have space around the road for the characters to take a roadrally off-road.

Have you seen Dmge ? It’s web based, but it has fog of war and a few other nice tricks, if you’ve got the maps.

A lot of the usual suspects, but when my group of grognards plays we reach back a bit. Tomorrow we’re playing Traveler. Last few times we played it was Champions.

I’d like to run an OpenD6 game of I can pull a group together. The last few times I ran it was D6 Star Wars, but I like the system for other genres as well.

Let’s not forget the endless conversations about which park is Werewolf territory and which is Gangrel Vampire territory. Then the slow realization that you don’t live in a place cool enough to attract any supernatural presence.

The scientific method is more about falsification than problem solving.

“If you ever succeed, devise and implement a test to see if it was a fluke.”

I too grew up in an era of action movies, where the good guy decisively self-defenses the bad guy to death, saves the world, goes home and has marital relations with the prom queen. It’s a powerful story, but ultimately it’s just a story.

Peaceful resistance does work, but there isn’t a single event that achieves change. It has to be an accumulation.

Rosa Park’s arrest didn’t achieve anything “in terms of change”.

Ghandi’s protest fasts didn’t achieve anything “in terms of change”.

When the Baltics had their singing revolutions, there wasn’t a single performance that achieved anything “in terms of change”.

All these were parts of larger efforts of peaceful resistance that culminated in change.

What did Cory Booker’s speech achieve? It’s too early to say. It’s possible it will be part of an accumulation that culminates in measurable results. On the other hand, it’s possible cynicism will poison the resistance and it will achieve nothing. We’ll only know once the history is written.

Without a purity test how can I tell which members of the tribe are loyal and which might betray me?

I’m reminded of the story of Garg and Moonslicer, and I wish more publishers would lean in to this approach to good and evil. A purely lore approach would be enough to frame the conflict around, some races are naturally social creatures, and some races are naturally antisocial. Both have hierarches, but not all races have the same natural concepts of fairness and justice. Any individual can embrace either world view or a mix, but one comes more naturally to each race. Even if humanity is naturally a good race (debatable, but whatever), members can obviously deviate significantly.

Ultimately it doesn’t mater what race the slavers are, I’m not going to worry about the ethics of self-defensing a party of slavers to death as PC or GM.

The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor’s yards. I’m the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.

A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.

I realized part way through the title works on a few levels. It was refreshing to realize this wasn’t remotely following the 3-act narrative structure and I had no idea what was happening next.

Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.

I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.

The largest stellerator currently operating in the US is. HSX at UW-Madison. The copper magnet coils had to be explosively formed. The coils were delivered one at a time. At one point one was stolen off the loading dock. This caused a lot of panic, as the budget was spent. There was no way to replace the stolen coil.

Something like a day later the sheriff called the university asking the if they were missing a hunk of copper. The thieves took the coil to a scrap yard for scrap value. The yard figured there was no way this bonkers shaped thing wasn’t made to a particular purpose so they played along long enough to call the cops to find the rightful owner.

It’s worth recognizing stellerators since HSX have all been periodic, that is every coil isn’t unique. The designs used to be even more insane.

Elon: Roll the dice to see if I’m getting drunk!

In my experience the community will usually distinguished between “scientific Q” and “wall plug Q” when discussing fusion power gain. Scientific is simply the ratio of power in vs power out, whereas wall plug includes all the power required to support scientific Q. Obviously the difference isn’t always clearly delineated or reported when talking to journalists…

OK, so we should be clear there are broadly two approaches to fusion: magnetic confinement and inertial drive.

In magnetic confinement a plasma is confined such that it can be driven to sufficient density, temperature and particle confinement time that the thermal collisions allow the fuel to fuse. This is what the OP article is talking about. This Tokamak is demonstrating technologies that if applied to a larger the experiment could probably reach a positive energy output magnetically confined plasma.

The article you referenced discusses inertial drive experiments, where a driver is directly pushing the fuel together, like gravity in the sun, a fission bomb shockwave in a hydrogen bomb, or converging laser beams in Livermore’s case.

Livermore’s result is exciting, but has no bearing on the various magnetic confinement approaches to fusion energy.

On Feb. 15, 2003, millions of people marched in over 600 cities against the plans of U.S. President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.

First time?