tiffanyg

This is the kind of arrogant ~rationalizing / 'reasoning' that is my daily tell-tale as the ship approaches the leeward shore.

Not unreasonable, but I would point out two options (not the only):

1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive

2) Methods for using 'renewables' to produce &/ support production of chemical fuels - with the added draw / potential goal of 'closing' the 'carbon cycle'

As to #2, one of the ideals that has been kicked around for decades is to do something like: use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into something like butanol, for example.

Now, last I was up-to-date on any of this sort of work (~10+ years ago), the economics were not favorable. Certain types of commodity chemical production with 'biological basis' (another type of renewable, typically) had much more favorable properties economically. And, indeed, you do see, for example, (thermo)plastic products made from chemicals like "PLA" increasingly. But, the "biofuels" concept is / was much more challenging, especially as "fracking" technology made great leaps etc.

Nuclear has its pros and cons - blanket disavowal is fatuous. Nevertheless, there are substantially more options, systems, technologies, etc. in development and production than are often discussed in too many of the pro-nuke(s) / no nuke(s) 'sniping' chains that have been prevalent in society & on the internet since I was a wee tyke myself.

Would have been better if they hadn't bungled their mixed metonymy...

It's a stitch in the bird is worth a pound of eggs off a duck's back, as everyone knows...*

* Courtesy of the excellent "Field Guide of Egregious Mixed Metonomies", soon to be published by Penguin Random House Simon Schuster Merriam Webster Britannica, I'm told

Now that is the kind of "modern problems require modern solutions" thinking I like to see!

Kudos - excellent examination of implications / change of perspective / viewing from another angle.

The kind of thinking that, more seriously, really can be essential in developing insight(s) etc. ... and, finding (proofs by) contradiction(s) etc.

I believe the solution was given by the great philosopher Pratchett*:

"Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it."

- Terry Pratchett

(from Thief of Time - a remarkable book, IMO)

* / Wen the eternally surprised

I'd be more impressed if it were that case that 0% of the WORDS remain.

Nevertheless, the consonance of this 'weaker result' is still satisfying.

Bravo!

Haha - I love this! Excellent, witty, accurate. Kudos.

Sorry for low content response, but, too good a joke to simply upvote, IMO

Hey now, how can you guarantee p(Picasso) or p(Hendrix) is 0 for all readers of your comment?*

In any case, I think your response and multiple similar responses make the essential point(s). One of the useful 'results' from decades of R&D at trying to build machines (&/ "software" - may be considered another type of machine) has been 'seeing' the difficulty in practice at achieving capabilities we (and many other animals ... even, say, nematodes**) absolutely take for granted.

One of the old jokes I always associate with Groucho Marx is something like:

"Can you play the piano?" ... "I don't know, I've never tried"

It reminds me of how people often say "foreign languages are difficult" ... As though any "native language" is somehow different / easy / easier ... Entirely neglecting the tens of thousands of hours of experience and practice most people have with some "native language" by the time they're a mere 10 years old. AND, we all continue to "practice" whatever language we speak and think (to some degree) in every hour of every day.

It's all in what you put your time into, as you get at, as well. And, one particularly crucial aspect is what you believe about how skill "arises" which you reference as well. One of the greatest disservices to (young, especially) people is inculcating them with the idea of "talent." While most people are not likely capable of becoming, say, the top tennis player (male / female) in the world - there are all sorts of variables - too often people are artificially limited by nonsense that passes as "common wisdom" and permeates "culture" (ideas that just propagate from some people to others - here, especially, parents to children).

It's interesting, to me, that while my mom, for example, was an incredible "believer" in education, and had defied her own parents and exceeded the role(s) they envisioned for her by many orders of magnitude, she also would often reference "talent" in various contexts when I was growing up.

We are riddled with nonsense - in our heads. I know for sure that I'll always be full of internal inconsistencies and false beliefs and the like. But, it is very helpful to escape as many of them as possible. Particularly those that artificially constrain us - a species limited enough as-is.***

* Where symbols "Picasso" & "Hendrix" are understood / defined 'in the usual / obvious way' - in terms of equivalence in impact / fame / etc.

** See recent articles on mapping of "neural network" / nervous system structure of C. elegans, for example

*** I write this not to disparage our species but simply to highlight the fact that we are constrained just like all other species by our form(s) and what is optimized by the process of natural selection and such ...

Excellent point - you are 100% correct, parent comment etc. were specifically about water-moderated types.

I was too grabbed by some of the later description and just connected it somewhat haphazardly to not very organized or accurate info rattling around in my head from years ago.

Thanks for pointing that out!

It used to happen much more in the past. Many decades ago, AFAIK, at least in the journals / fields / areas I'm familiar with.

I'm not sure where that might happen or be tolerated, today. If you go back and look at research into antibiotics, DNA, etc. back in the 1940s and 1950s ... and even research in the 1960s and 1970s, decades later, there ended up being serious questions around ethics, authorship, etc. for some really seminal papers, for example.

Thank you so much for sharing that! Beautiful / elegant and simple!

It's been decades since I looked at any of the details involved in any of the various types of reactors that have been designed. When I did, in the past, I hadn't even encountered concepts like "control theory" or spent any time with the subject matter of "systems engineering" or even "chemical engineering". I.e., areas where you start thinking about how to combine all of the different simple "laws"* and properties and such of energy and matter to create "robust" (ideally) or even just practical "systems".

Although I had read about the Chernobyl disaster, and "run-away" that occurred - the massive volumes of water being pumped in, partly as a result of such levels, at near boiling ... the steam voids, etc. I'm not entirely sure whether I really encountered the point about temperature and density, but, certainly, it didn't 'click' quite the way it did now when I read your description.

I love this kind of stuff - the "how it all fits together" from what can otherwise be these seemingly dry / 'dead' "laws" and such that can seem too simple / narrow / etc. to do much of use with - even if your teachers spend as much time as possible giving you homework questions etc. that certainly seem practice-oriented - but who gives a rat's-keister about whether comparing the weight of a duck to a putative witch might establish flammability and hence witchcraft when they're 15, right? ;)

* Simplified models describing various types of matter and physical processes - models that are valid (for some definition of ... as the mathematicians &/ Humpty-Dumpty [Alice in Wonderland / Lewis Carroll] might say) given certain assumptions / pre-conditions (on scale, frame of reference, etc.)

You'd undoubtedly have to design, at least at some point, for such a system to be explicitly attacked. I'm not assuming you haven't considered that, just pointing out that this might factor into how one might approach building something from the start.

I'd suggest it will depend on goals / scale - if not many are using, probably would be ignored even if bad actors were aware of it. If it started to have real effects, there'd undoubtedly be very intentional efforts to attack it. Beyond just the sporadic script kiddiez / for the lulz set ...

Edit: sorry, "app" - to potentially use the app in some malicious way ... Not sure my comment is so useful, but, I'll leave it since it's unfortunately all too easy to end up with unintended consequences. Though, I favor fighting this garbage wholesale and support any efforts to interfere with the deluge of BS / noise with modern communications tech.