When you want to learn how to wake up Godzilla and Cthulhu at the same time…
I remember my physics prof talking about it around four years ago, insisting it was impossible to utilize under any circumstances. Gotta find him and throw this at his face.
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That is not as big as it might seem.
On announcing the breakthrough Dr Marvin Adams, deputy administrator for defense programs at the US National Nuclear Security Administration, said that the laboratory’s lasers had input 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, which had then produced 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output.
It is not the first fusion experiment where the energy input is smaller than the output. I guess it is just the first time that happened with a reactor where a laser is used.
The real breakthrough in fusion would be if the electrical output of the whole generator surpasses the energy input. This is different than the above, as the fusion energy output is heat and radiation, it has to be converted to usable energy. And the reactor has to run for long enough to give a stable output.
Lasers are awfully inefficient, so to pump 2.05MJ energy into the target with a laser, this one here needs roughly 300MJ electrical energy to operate it. (A detail BBC must have forgotten to mention 
) I guess the overall amount of energy is even a bit higher than that as preparing the plasma and keeping it in an operational state surely requires powerful magnets with expensive cooling.
Maybe not impossible, but scientists keep saying fusion is 50 years away for decades, and that probably is still true. 
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No doubt it would’ve been covered wider if it was an efficient utilization. But a progress, as tiny as it can be, brings vision and makes the final goal less impossible.
He was the second one after Mohsen Shekari. A few dozen more are awaiting.
Iranian drones, tinkered by foreign parts, given to Lord Putin, Savior of the Islamic Revolution.
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NHS Nurses who are members of the RCN, a union in the UK, are striking today. This is the first time in 106 years that their members have voted to take industrial action and attempt collective bargaining with the government. The aim of the strike is to encourage more nurses to stay in the NHS and to pursuade people to join the profession.
We believe this can be achieved by giving nurses a pay rise which reverses the 20% real term pay cut that the profession has suffered since 2010. Our ultimate goal is promoting and ensuring patient safety. Due to the staffing crisis this is a real threat and an ethical dilemma for nurses in England, Scotland and Wales.
Updates are below for those interested.
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… a 20-year-old woman was arrested for supposedly leading protests and later was brought by the police to a hospital in Karaj, shaking violently, head shaven, her rectum hemorrhaging. The woman is now back in prison.
… a 14-year-old girl from a poor neighborhood in Tehran who protested by taking off her head scarf at school.
The girl, Masooumeh, was identified by school cameras and detained; soon afterward, she was taken to the hospital to be treated for severe vaginal tears. The girl died and her mother, after initially saying she wanted to go public, has disappeared.
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It’s rough business for sure. I just learned not long ago that to open for a big big act you actually pay them. I can’t remember who it was but they went on tour with the Killers and they paid the killers $10,000 a show to open for them. So to make it profitable they have to sell enough posters and shirts every night and then chalk some losses up to exposure. I can’t imagine being good at music but if I was there is no way I’d pay someone else to play for them even if it made financial sense.
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The entire economics of the music industry in general a pretty - well lets say fucked.
Not only do bands frequently have to pay to open for bigger bands but they often have to pay for their own promotional tours, music videos, etc that the publisher insists they do in order to keep their contracts. Generally how it works is band gets loans from the publishers, and signs agreements giving them x amount additional royalties etc on top of paying the loan back in exchange for a lower interest rate etc.
So there has been a general culture that there are periods where musicians are just expected to eat up losses and run at a net negative in order to progress up the ladder.
Live shows used to be one of the few events where bands could expect to make money they could keep in their pocket due to merchandise sales, etc - in large part because publishers were not willing to accept the risks of not making a profit if they didn’t sell enough tickets etc. For the band doing the tour, this included the money from bands paying to open them (since again, publisher doesn’t want to get involved).
So smaller bands would pay to open for larger bands, not just because they thought they could sell enough t-shirts etc, but because it was frequently the only way to expose their merchandise to a big enough audience to make it profitable and worth the risk of making the posters and t-shirts in the first place. Those sales were also the best way to grow their audience since now people who went to see the Killers have a t-shirt and a CD from another band.
Since music has moved to streaming, musicians now basically get paid much, much lower rates for their albums and had become more and more dependent on live show income - and there hasn’t been a good substitute created anywhere so that has the knock on effect of the smaller bands no longer have the money to make the merchandise to sell even if they got invited to open.
Which is particularly shit for genres like metal, where playing it in your home is fine - but what fans really want to do is feel the noise and thrash out.
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It mystifies me that anyone takes this doorknob seriously. 
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Argentina picking up the “disorderly conduct” baton. 
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Nigel Farage is in shambles.
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If it makes you feel any better that poll is bogus, he was already setting himself on leaving or he was being forced to step down. This was just like last year when he made that Twitter poll asking if he should dump Tesla stock, he had to do that but Elon can’t handle being forced to do things he doesn’t want to do so he turns to the public to validate his decision like any terminally online reactionary.
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The Jan. 6 Committee has made its criminal referrals of Trump to the Department of Justice. They are:
- Obstruction of Official Proceeding
- Conspiracy to Defraud the United States
- Conspiracy to Make a False Statement
- Assisting or engaging in insurrection against the United States
They are also referring four members of Congress to the ethics committee for failing to cooperate with their investigation. (Unless I missed it, they didn’t name who yet…)
Edit to add that The Guardian is reporting:
The four Republican congressmen who have been referred to the House ethics committee for refusing to comply with the January 6 panel’s subpoenas are Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader and would-be speaker from California; Jim Jordan of Ohio; Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona.
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Genuine question : is the Department of Justice expected to follow on those referrals ? Does anyone knows. I don’t expect it to be an obligation, but it could be one of those in effect/precedent “obligation”.
And if it happens, how it might pan out.
I know just enough about the US system to know the numerous, and essential, missing gaps to me.
Also, “assisting or engaging in insurrection against the United States”. If it’s followed and charged, it would be historical, no ?
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As I understand it, the Justice Department has no obligation to do anything at all with these referrals. Congress has no power to direct DoJ to do anything, so they could theoretically ignore this entirely, if they so choose.
But I would have to imagine that special counsel Jack Smith will take these recommendations seriously–it’s worth noting that several members of the committee are former prosecutors who have experience making these kinds of legal recommendations–and I suspect that the special counsel’s office has already at least considered charges of this kind while conducting their own investigation. Whether or not any of this leads to Trump being formally charged with these or other crimes, only time will tell.
Yes, it would. But, then, we reached historic a long time ago. 
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One of the bits of positive news about this is Jack Smith has a reputation for being willing to prosecute difficult cases against powerful people - he was likely selected as Special Counsel because it would allow the DoJ to say that they are, in fact, doing everything in their power to ensure any wrong doing is punished.
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The House Ways and Means Committee has voted to release six years of Trump’s tax records to the public. It’ll take a few days for the returns themselves to be properly redacted, but the committee reports they are attached to are expected to be released later this evening.
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