angiosperm

The word "confabulate" is underused in AI image generation circles.

Disused churches are the best real estate value. But inspect the roof carefully!

TIL there is a Linkedin app.

For me the question is why anyone would even consider installing it.

The other is easy: It's Microsoft,

Hint: A Google data center does not generate power.

A little more starkly, each dollar diverted from solar and wind to nukes and fossil fuels brings climate catastrophe nearer.

This seems to be p-11B fusion via electrically accelerating protons to collide with slow boron nuclei, producing three ballistic helium, or alpha particles, and gamma radiation. Under normal thermal conditions this would need to be many orders of magnitude hotter than e.g. D-D fusion attempted in earthbound projects. Guessing two alphas come out neutral and the third positive, with kinetic energy that can be extracted magnetically. If the boron were ionized, more of the alpha particles would be, too. It is not clear how they get thrust from it. Much of the gamma radiation can be converted directly to electrical energy to power the system.

They say the fusion boosts the thrust by 50% over a simple proton beam.

Nuclear is effectively irrelevant to the future of power production, as it cannot compete on cost, and falls further behind with each passing year.

Use of fossil fuels will fall off naturally as the cost of renewables continues on down the learning curve, radically undercutting them. Without the enormous subsidies fossil fuels still enjoy, they would have been undercut years ago.

"Windmills" and electric cars do not, in fact, rely heavily on rare earth materials. Enormously more are used, e.g., in quadcopters. Even in places where powerful rare-earth permanent magnets are now important, they will soon be largely displaced by nitrogen-iron magnets, which are both radically cheaper and more powerful.

Google data centers are not examples of a "green energy transition".

Neanderthals got to Mediterranean islands using what had to have been boats 200,000 years ago. Of course we know nothing about the boats. It must have been terrifying to be first. One thing we have learned about island populations is that a small population loses cultural knowledge over time. It is reported Tasmanians had lost the secret to making fire by the time Europeans got there, something I find hard to believe.

Anyway boats were re-invented many times in pre-history.

The Peace War is closer to home than Fire. Read both.

Let us not neglect The Peace War and Across Realtime. The former introduced memorable tragic figures, besides its singular vision.

It has, anyway, already had a profound effect on the IT job market.

There is an implicit expectation that numerous tropical solar farms will produce anhydrous ammonia for export, both as fuel for shipping and to back up intermittent temperate sources, and for traditional uses in industry and agriculture.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem for the ammonia economy.

Exactly as I said. Russia's system's extent is broader because Russia itself is broader.

The Russian empire's is larger by extent.

Extraordinary claims require legitimate evidence. "Extraordinary" cannot describe evidence; all evidence is ordinary. What happened here is that the evidence was so bad as to be incapable of supporting any claim.

It is humiliating because he violated all principles of legitimate science. He was not just wrong, his claims were not even possibly scientifically right, or meaningful.

What is humiliating is to be seen failing to learn from elementary criticisms by longtime professionals.

In this, Loeb is different from promoters of the end-Pleistocene comet strike in North America, where all the criticisms were obviously specious and tendentious. In that case it was the critics who were humiliated. E.g., Boslough insisted, both circularly and speciously, that the historical rarity of comet strikes proves that no such recent strike could have occurred.

Loeb is different from promoters of the 130,000 year old mastodon butchery site in San Diego, where all the criticisms published after were already fully refuted in the original paper.

That Loeb failed to collect material outside the area he designated, as controls, demonstrates he was not even attempting actual science.

Female argonauts have the shell their whole life long, and do not only construct it when they have eggs to put in it. We may reasonably assume that it has survival value even when there are no eggs. We know, for example, that they carry bubbles in it to tune their buoyancy.

Paleontology used to be a subspecialty of geology, for a long time after they proved fossils had once been animals. Which the geologists had to do.

Do not neglect the Paper Nautilus, a kind of Mediterranean octopus.

https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-seamstress-and-th...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/26/jeanne-villepreux-...

Jeanne Villepreux-Power invented marine biology, single-handed in the early 19th century.

She observed them repairing a hole in their shell by gluing on a found patch.

The one-liner to solve that SB is

  grep -v '[^victmze]' /usr/share/dict/words |
    grep .... | grep e

A very short program to generate all possible puzzles given a word list is at https://github.com/ncm/nytm-spelling-bee .

I have a short program to solve letterboxed. I can't measure how fast it is.

  #include <array>
  #include <algorithm>
  #include <bitset>
  #include <iostream>
  #include <string_view>
  #include <vector>
  #include <unistd.h>
  #include <sys/mman.h>
  #include <sys/types.h>
  #include <sys/stat.h>
  #include <fcntl.h>
  
  struct Word {
    using Bits = std::bitset<32>; // A bit for each a..z, plus an "error" bit at index 26.
    using Rules = std::array<Bits, 27>; // Map from letter indices to forbidden letters (plus a spare).
  
    std::string_view str;
    Bits bits;
  
    static unsigned ix(char c) { return c - 'a'; };  // 'a'..'z' -> 0..25; others -> >25
    bool ok() const { return !bits.test(26) && str.size() > 1; }
    explicit Word(std::string_view s, Bits accept = {0x3ffffff}, Rules const& rules = {}) : str(s) {
      for (unsigned i = 0, prev_ix = 26, bit_ix = 0; i != str.size(); prev_ix = bit_ix, ++i) {
        bit_ix = std::min(ix(str[i]), 26u);
        if (accept.test(bit_ix) && !rules.at(prev_ix).test(bit_ix)) { bits.set(bit_ix); }
        else { bits.set(26); return; }}}
  };
  
  int main(int ac, char** av) {
    auto usage = [av](){ std::cerr << "usage: " << av[0] << " abcdefghijkl [<wordlist>]\n"; };
    if (ac != 2 && ac != 3) { return usage(), 1; }
    char const* const  name = (ac == 3) ? av[2] : "/usr/share/dict/american-english-large";
    const int fd = ::open(name , O_RDONLY);
    if (fd < 0) { return std::cerr << av[0] << ": failed to open " << name  << '\n', 3; }
    const std::size_t file_size = ::lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_END);
    void const* const addr = ::mmap(nullptr, file_size, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);
    if (addr == MAP_FAILED) { return std::cerr << av[0] << ": failed to open " << name  << '\n', 3; }
  
    const auto  target = Word{av[1]};
    if (target.bits.test(26) || target.str.size() != 12 || target.bits.count() != 12)
      { return usage(), 3; }
  
    const auto rules = [w=target.str, ix=Word::ix](Word::Rules rules = {}) {
      for (int i = 0; i < 12; i += 3)
        rules.at(ix(w[i])) = rules.at(ix(w[i+1])) = rules.at(ix(w[i+2])) = Word(w.substr(i, 3)).bits;
      return rules;
    }();
  
    const auto  candidates = [&](std::array<std::vector<Word>, 26> candidates = {}) {
      for (std::string_view  in = {static_cast<char const*>(addr), file_size}; !in.empty();) {
        const Word word{in.substr(0, in.find('\n')), target.bits, rules};
        if (word.ok()) { candidates.at(Word::ix(word.str.front())).push_back(word); }
        in = in.substr(word.str.size() + 1);  // Skip past '\n' if present (might not be, at EOF).
      }
      return candidates;
    }();
  
    for (auto const& firsts : candidates) {
      for (const auto first : firsts) {
        for (const auto second : candidates.at(Word::ix(first.str.back()))) {
          if ((first.bits | second.bits) == target.bits) {
            std::cout << first.str << ' ' << second.str << '\n'; }}}}
  }

naphtha and caracal.

the "ed" and "ing" puzzles are just annoying.

To share remotely, one player gets halfway to genius, pangram forbidden, and the second player gets over the line. After that you use SB Buddy (no peeking at hints) to get to Queeen Bee.

The most annoying missing wordlist words are naphtha and caracal. An objective measure of word-use frequency should determine the words included. Probably super-obscure articles of clerical costume should not be.

The one-liner to solve that SB is

  grep -v '[^victmze]' /usr/share/dict/words |
    grep .... | grep e

A program to generate all possible NYTM SB puzzles is at https://github.com/ncm/nytm-spelling-bee . The alterations to match the online version are trivial. It runs in well under 100 ms on a modern CPU.

There are bigger dictionaries packaged, e.g. wamerican-huge.

Didn't.