https://jmail.world/thread/0f7fac62a94c1d9a989c769d770dbb1a?view=inbox

Smh Tom. You should have known better.

The way that arsonist was able to melt the weird pointy top into something more appealing was really a thing of beauty.

Bouba > Kiki

What happened to 🍇 and 🍍?

I googled it for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome

In 90 percent of these individuals, the syndrome is caused by the Y chromosome’s SRY gene, which triggers male reproductive development, being atypically included in the crossing over of genetic information that takes place between the pseudoautosomal regions of the X and Y chromosomes during meiosis in the father.[2][7] When the X with the SRY gene combines with a normal X from the mother during fertilization, the result is an XX genetic male. Less common are SRY-negative individuals, those who are genetically females, which can be caused by a mutation in an autosomal or X chromosomal gene.[2] The masculinization of XX males is variable.

I’m currently working on a government funded project to develop a robot to locate nuclear contamination in soil (for cleaning up the Hartford and Savannah River sites, where we used to make nuclear weapons). The idea being that we use robots to perform these surveys rather than handheld detectors.

My recommendation though, is focus only on one thing. Having two degrees has not made me particularly marketable, it is certainly unique, but HR doesn’t actually seem to give much of a shit. Instead, it’s much better to focus on one thing, get a Masters or PhD in it (double degrees also suck for this as well, because you don’t have time for research and publishing when you’re graduating with 195 credit hours taken out of 128 required, so even if you have a good GPA it’s hard to get into grad school).

I did a double major in college.

In my computer engineering courses, I learned digital signal processing, and then took a follow-up course on signals and systems because I enjoyed the material and I had an eye on robots, because robots are dope.

Imagine my surprise when I got to 4th year and I suddenly found myself using the exact same math to handle thermal and fission product neutron poisoning feedback in my nuclear reactor physics courses.

I don’t know much about lay person explanations of nuclear engineering that are accurate and accessible. I can perhaps recommend the textbooks I used in my major? Nuclear engineering is a cousin to mechanical engineering, so if you have a background in differential equations then you have all of the tools necessary to start learning the material. The physics of nuclear interactions are mostly abstracted away into tables and data, (such as the Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) which you can browse online here) so you don’t need to learn Nuclear Physics beyond the complete basics.

The introductory course at my old university, which kind of discusses general things rather than specifics, uses “Nuclear Engineering Fundamentals” by Masterson. From here if you’re specifically interested in nuclear reactors, you can study Radiation Physics (Turner’s “Atoms, Radiation, and Radiation Profection”), and then Reactor Physics (Lamarsh’s “Introduction to Nuclear Engineering” and Lewis’s “Fundamental of Nuclear Reactor Physics” and Duderstadt’s “Nuclear Reactor Analysis”). From there, if you have a background in Heat Transfer and Thermodynamics (very important) you can learn how practical (rather than abstract) reactors work using Todreas’s Nuclear Systems I. This covers mostly PWRs and BWRs. Undergrad doesn’t talk much in curriculum about other reactor types (Fluoride, Lead Eutectic, Breeders, etc) that’s mostly Graduate material.

Please note this isn’t a complete major, there’s a lot of material about radiation protection and shielding and health effects and so on.

Hi, I’m a nuclear engineer. I’m not looking to specifically argue against you, or counter your points. Just to provide some information, some of the things you have said I will confirm, some I will not

Not all modern designs have these safety features.

It’s not clear to me which passive safety features, specifically, you’re referring to. Safety is a very serious concern, and there are many different ways to make a safe reactor. If you are specifically referring to powered off passive cooling via carefully designed convection, then there are reactors in development with this particular safety system, but they tend to be SMRs, such as NuScale. However, not all reactor designs need this. For instance, a molten fluoride salt dissolved fuel reactor doesn’t need circulation to prevent damage to the reactor in the event of an unpowered SCRAM, because if the salt gets too hot it will simply melt a plug in the salt that is actively being kept frozen, and allow the salt to drain into a series of tubes which have enough surface area to be passively cooled by the air in the containment building.

However, if by modern reactor you are referring to the current generation (Gen 3/3+) of reactors, they are characterized, in part, by the incorporation of these sorts of passive safety systems. The existence of these systems are one of the things that makes a Gen 3 reactor a Gen 3 reactor. However, because the nuclear industry in the United States essentially stopped in 1996 as the first Gen 3 reactors were coming online, the only Gen 3 or better reactors you will find in the US are the reactors 3 and 4 at Vogtle, Westinghouse AP1000. (The recent plant that came online at Watts Bar in 2016, was originally built in the 70s and just turned on for the first time recently, so it’s Generation 2.)

The US certainly does not currently have a good plan to handle nuclear waste that is currently politically possible to implement. However, there many options, and the problem is not actually urgent. All of the transuranic waste produced by the entire 80 year history of US civilian nuclear power fits safely in dry casks on about 3 football fields. Nuclear power just doesn’t make a lot of waste in an absolute sense because it is so much more energy dense than fossil fuels. This is a problem that we can take our time on to do right. The solution will probably involve some form of reprocessing, which will reduce the amount of waste by over 90%, and reduce the amount of time it takes for the waste to decay to background levels from over 10,000 years to just 300.

That being said, other than the plans to put it in Yucca Mountain, which has been deeply unpopular with Nevadans, there are also studies about freezing and immobilizing it in a salt mine, which is being done by Sandia National Lab, and Savannah River National Lab is investigating encasing waste in glass and other relatively chemically inert substances for disposition. Probably other projects as well, these are just the ones I’ve come across in my this far short career. I’m personally not a super fan of disposing of transuranic waste without reprocessing, due to the 10,000 year thing, but that is the method currently favored by the government due to security concerns regarding the potential of proliferation during reprocessing.

Opinion section:

It is true that there is only so much investment and so much manpower to go around. And perhaps a future in renewables only is possible. But I’m not confident in that at the moment due to the requirements of energy storage, but I will readily admit to not keeping up with this area of study. Perhaps large advances in energy storage are possible, but as far as I am aware the technology isn’t there quite yet, and nuclear is possible with the technology we have now (provided we can muster the political will to get them built, but historically, frankly, that has been difficult).

Overall, I look at this largely the same way I look at solutions to “fixing traffic.” The solution is trains, not a million whiz bang things that try to be new and cool and exciting. Not individualized self driving pods, that can dynamically connect and disconnect. Not a fleet of robo-taxis. Not a hyper loop. Just trains. Trains are the solution and they are unpopular, because they are boring, proven technology, there’s nothing to sell, no value to add, no capitalist is going to want to do this because it’s a big investment and shareholder value blah blah blah. They are an AM* solution not an FM** promise.

We have a functioning solution to energy that is politically difficult in nuclear reactors. And we have a half-solution that is easy to spin up in he private sector, but difficult to get us all of the way to carbon free in renewables. We are still waiting on the other half of the solution, and until then we’re simply stuck on carbon power to meet the difference. At least, that’s how I see it. But I only know what I know.

Thanks for the taking the time to read this.

* Actual Machines

** Fucking Magic

Well, you see, it was only a problem for him when it turned against him. When he actively supported it his entire career it was the obvious and natural order of things

The hottest year on record so far.

Well, to play Devil’s advocate (ironically), I’ve spoken with some conservative Rabbis on this point when I worked in a Kosher kitchen at a Jewish summer camp, and their argument was that God, of course, knows about and intentionally inserted these loopholes into scripture and intended them to be found and used. However, the follow-up question of why bother doing that instead of just not disallowing the behavior in the first place did not yield a satisfactory answer.

Ad block is the number one thing you can do on the Internet to reduce your risk to exploits, phishing, etc. The US government recommends the use of ad block specifically for this reason. Usage of ad block is basic internet security hygiene.

An environmental posadist. Not a stance I’ve normally seen. Imo, if nothing came out of deep water horizon, there’s no oil accident big enough to matter.

Transocean received an early partial insurance settlement for total loss of the Deepwater Horizon of US$401 million about 5 May 2010.[60] Financial analysts noted that the insurance recovery was likely to be more than the value of the rig (although not necessarily its replacement value) and any liabilities – the latter estimated at as much as US$200 million.

Everybody talks about pumpkin spice but nobody talks about pumpkin sugar or pumpkin everything nice.

A problem that only affects newbies huh?

Let’s say that you are writing code intended to be deployed headless in the field, and it should not be allowed to exit in an uncontrolled fashion because there are communications that need to happen with hardware to safely shut them down. You’re making a autonomous robot or something.

Using python for this task isn’t too out of left field, because one of the major languages of ROS is python, and it’s the most common one.

Which of the following python standard library functions can throw, and what do they throw?

bytes, hasattr, len, super, zip

https://theonion.com/bush-our-long-national-nightmare-of-peace-and-prosperi-1819565882/

Published days before W took office.

Most recently, other than Trump, George HW Bush lost the election while incumbent. Prior to that it was Jimmy Carter.

The next most recent person to win the election but lose the popular vote was George W Bush, prior to that is was Harrison back in 1888.

Not quite. Their “malicious” extension only got a few hundred installs. Using the data gathered by that extension and via other means they were able to locate other actually malicious extensions. Those total in the millions of installations.

Through this process, they have found the following:

1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
1,452 running unknown executables.
2,304 that are using another publisher's Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.

For those curious: Gothic 1.

I’ve never heard of it before and it doesn’t look like my type of game. Anyone played it?

What about Elisa? I was under the (potentially mistaken) assumption that Elisa was the successor of Amarok.