According to IAEA calculations, it is necessary to double the number of nuclear reactors in the world - currently at about 400 units - to achieve the objectives of the Paris climate agreement, Grossi said at the World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris. //

"We already have 10 countries which have entered the decision phase (to build nuclear power plants) and 17 others which are in the evaluation process," he said.

"There will be a dozen or 13 (new) nuclear countries within a few years," he added.

Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Namibia, the Philippines, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were cited by Grossi as potential new nuclear countries.

In the future, when I think about the textbook definition of America’s failed pseudo-elite, I’ll think of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

In a Nov. 8 speech to Western state governors in Wyoming that was unearthed Monday, Cardona delivered this line about delivering technical assistance to states.

“As, I think it was President Reagan, said—‘We’re from the government, we’re here to help,’” he said. //

That’s certainly not what Ronald Reagan said.

The original, famous line comes from a 1986 press conference about agricultural policies in which Reagan said: “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Of course, Reagan was channeling the strong belief of many Americans at the time that the federal government had become too big and too intrusive, and was mostly incompetent at delivering solutions to the problems of American society. //

T. Becket Adams @BecketAdams
·
The "education secretary" misstating a well-known quote regarding bureaucratic incompetence is too on-the-nose even for absurdist fiction. Any good editor would send it back and say, "Too much."
Townhall.com @townhallcom
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona:

"I think it was President Reagan who said, 'We're from the government. We're here to help!'"

Here's the actual quote:

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
Embedded video
4:18 PM · Nov 27, 2023 //

Has American education really improved since the department was created in 1980? What does it say that the man who now leads it seems to be lacking in a basic understanding of history?

Whatever Cardona’s reason for botching the Reagan quote, it is an excellent illustration of the shallowness of our nation’s overcredentialed ruling class. Lacking both wisdom and a real education, they instead thrive on bland ideological conformity that stifles independent thought and elevates mediocrities.

America has had plenty of corrupt, incompetent, sinister, and downright crazy politicians and government officials in the past. But never before in our history have we had such uniform incompetence and ignorance embedded in positions of power. //

Let’s say you buy into the progressive-era ethos of replacing constitutionally limited government with an empowered, educated elite. How can one look at our current system and conclude that trading in America’s long tradition of self-government ushered in the rule of wise philosopher- bureaucrats? //

This problem isn’t just about Cardona or the Biden administration. It’s about the current failures of Western civilization and the United States.

When we think of the large and long-term failures of our government, when we think of the frayed and failing domestic institutions that have lost the trust of the American people, we should consider that our problem is not a few clowns in high places. The problem is an entire elite ecosystem that rewards the wrong values, that fails to develop the thinkers and leaders capable of leading a great society.

Our leaders know little about where we came from and less about where we are going.

Maybe one of the many reasons the leaders of our elite institutions stood by and watched, or outright cheered, when the mob came for the statues of our great men is that toppling monuments relieved them of embarrassing comparisons.

Since World War II, most American Jews have believed that the more secular American society is, the more secure their status.

This has been, as I have argued all of my life, a colossal error. Indeed, it may turn out to be a fatal error.

With the outburst of unprecedented levels of antisemitism, American Jews are living the famous warning: “Beware what you wish for; you just may get it.”

The primary reason American Jews have lived in the most Jew-friendly, even Jew-honoring, country in history is that most Americans have been Christian. But we must make a key distinction here. American Christians have been not just Christian, as Europe was, but Judeo-Christian. //

In a famous study published in the American Political Science Review, Donald Lutz, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, surveyed the political literature of the American founding. He found that the Bible was cited more frequently than any other work or any other author. The Bible accounted for approximately one-third of the Founders’ citations. The single most frequently cited work was Deuteronomy, the fifth of the five books of the Torah.

The late great Catholic theologian Michael Novak wrote that the roots of the doctrine that “all men are created equal lie in Judaism, carried around the world by Christians.”

As American society and Americans individually become less religious, i.e., less Christian, the Jews become less significant.

Yet, many, perhaps most, American Jews, have bought—and promulgated—the idea that Jewish security in America lies in secularizing, i.e., de-Christianizing, America. //

Look around, my fellow Jews. Are you happy with the results of the secularization of America? Do you feel more secure? Or less?

I ask you: Is it not obvious that when more Americans attended church every Sunday, America’s Jews were far more secure?

There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance... //

PaulBart • November 27, 2023 7:14 AM

Yawn. Wikileaks Assange still in jail. Snowden still fugitive in Russia. Hillary and the “missing” emails still not “found”.

Lets have state-sponsored health care. Nothing says government boot tastes delicious like having your medical records and health issues handled by the state. Mmm-mmm good. //

Aaron • November 27, 2023 10:19 AM

A government should know next to nothing about its people.
A people should know almost everything about their government.

The world is upside-down

For those who jumped all over @PaulBlart, you’re missing his point.
People who exposed illegal government actions are still prosecuted as criminals.
Government individuals who perform illegal actions are still in government.

The world is upside-down

The 4th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits programs like this.
Yet it persists and gains funding

The world is upside-down. //

JonKnowsNothing • November 27, 2023 11:50 AM

@Aaron

re: You missed the memo – along with millions of others

The 4th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits programs like this
No, No, No it doesn’t – anymore.

A good number of years back, before the NSA lost control of the narrative, they used to claim they did everything according to the “commonly understood meaning” of the 4th amendment: Get a Warrant.

Once they began to lose control, they were confronted by their real usage of this amendment. There are videos of the debate with Gen Michael Hayden on this topic along with a laugh track at what he said. He said it plain and clear.

Gen Hayden is one smart guy and you never want to enter a debate with him.

• The 4th states that “unreasonable” searches require a warrant

• It does not say ALL searches require a warrant, only “unreasonable” ones
  So, it was quite simple logic shift

• All searches are now “reasonable” and not “unreasonable”

• All searches include “everything” the new definition of “relevant”
  So the NSA, CIA, All USA Leas do not need a warrant unless they want to.

If they want to arrest someone and charge them with some crime, they will get a warrant via parallel construction for the courts. //

Aaron • November 27, 2023 6:29 PM

@JonKnowsNothing

I didn’t miss the memo

I served under Gen. “Porky the Pig” Hayden

The memo is an illegitimate power grab from a long line of 3 letter agencies that no longer serve the purpose in which they were commissioned for.

Easy-to-exploit flaw can give hackers passwords and cryptographic keys to vulnerable servers.

Elon Musk Meets With Benjamin Netanyahu In Israel: “It is one thing to kill civilians accidentally, it is another to revel in the killing of civilians. It’s just evil.”

Netanyahu and Musk “agreed on the clear lesson — there is no chance for peace or security as long as Hamas exists.”

John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre
·
Charlie Munger’s formula for success is simple and perfect:

• Spend less than you earn
• Invest prudently
• Avoid toxic people and toxic activities
• Defer gratification
• Never stop learning

4:12 PM · Nov 28, 2023 //

Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital
·
Some of the best of Charlie Munger:

“Every time you hear EBITDA, just substitute it with bullshit earnings”. Absolute legend. 🐐
5:00 / 5:00
4:15 PM · Nov 28, 2023 //

My favorite from that clip? "Warren, if people weren't often so wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." //

In a 2019 interview with CNBC, Munger taught us how to lead a happy life:

You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.

And staying cheerful ... because it’s a wise thing to do. Is that so hard? And can you be cheerful when you’re absolutely mired in deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why would you take it on?

How to join your linux server to the NTP pool project
This tutorial explains how to configure a NTP (Network Time Protocol) server (using ntpd) and join it to the continuously more demanded NTP pool project. ///

5 servers is preferable (article says 3)

Bally Sports Florida: Panthers
@BallyPanthers
·
Follow
"Every player on the ice has a 10-minute misconduct, among other penalties."

😂😂😂😂

9:45 PM · Nov 27, 2023

At the conclusion of the melee, 16 penalties were called on 13 players, and the teams combined to see a full dozen promptly kicked out for the balance of the game. Panthers head coach Paul Maurice was not at all displeased, with the way his team stood up nor with the result.

“It got a little snarly. That was fun. It was good. Sometimes hockey can get like that, it is what makes the game so darned great. It is graceful, beautiful, physical and angry all at the same time. It was good. Probably good for both teams.”

Writing is great fun. I have been doing so rather diligently since 1990. More recently, I've published 20 books in just the past decade. My portfolio spans four technical works, eleven novels, and five anthologies, including a short story, The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, which was nominated for the 2014 Sidewise Awards for Alternate History!

Air Traffic Plans and Publications

The purpose of the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity is to chronicle the scientific and commercial history of radioactivity and radiation. It has been deemed the official repository for historical radiological instruments by the Health Physics Society, and the Society has been generous in its financial support for the purchase of items.

The collection is the property of the not-for-profit ORAU Foundation, and it is located at the Professional Training Programs (PTP) training facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Unless noted otherwise, this website only features items actually in the collection.

For well over a hundred years the world has failed to take proper notice of the word "Table" clearly contained in the name of the famous Periodic Table of the Elements.
One evening while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, I became momentarily confused. He begins a chapter with a description of a periodic table display he loved to visit in the Kensington Science Museum, and in mis-reading the paragraph, I thought it was a table, not the wall display it actually is. While my confusion only lasted a few seconds, when I found out there wasn't a Periodic Table in the British Museum, it left a hole I felt I had to fill.

Actually I would never had had this confusion, or built the table, if I hadn't been thinking for the previous month about the need for a new conference table in my group's common office area. I had already built the Triangle Table to be our coffee table, but we needed a conference table too, and I certainly wasn't going to buy one of those expensive ugly ones from the office supply catalogs.

And I would never have built the table if I didn't happen to have a nice pantograph engraving machine with a complete set of fonts from the closing out auction of a local hospital (new $1700, mine for $50 with fonts).

So really the table is a result of three unlikely and totally unrelated factors coming together at the same time, which probably explains why, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has ever built one like it.

Having decided to make a table, the details fell quickly into place. One thing was immediately obvious: Each element group (e.g. alkali metals, noble gases, etc) would be represented by a different type of wood, with suitably clever analogies made between wood grain and chemical properties. Equally obvious was that the basic matrix of the table would be made of two-inch-thick Walnut boards, because I have two-inch-thick Walnut boards up the wazu on account of a fortuitous auction purchase some years ago. //

Then of course there's the whole question of collecting elements! I won't even begin to get into that, other than to give you one example, the isolation of zinc from roof flashing. It's done by melting.

You start with a bucket of junk from the local scrap metal dealer:

Melt it down in something that gets hot (for zinc a good stove will do, but this dandy is handy for many of the others):

Pour it into something that won't melt, crack, or explode (plaster is nice), and you'll get some metal samples:

and some more of that entropy:

This technique works well for the isolation of copper and aluminum from electrical wire, tin from fishing weights, lead from plumbing lead, etc. You'd be surprised how many elements are available at Walmart, and the isolation is far easier than from the ores.

While many element collectors (is there a society I should know about?) seem to concentrate on authentic mineral samples, I've decided to go with a theme of manufactured objects that use pure elements for their intrinsic properties. I think it's absolutely amazing how many of the elements actually are used straight up in by and large pure form, in common objects you'd find around the house, farm, shop, or battleship. (By the way, if you have any depleted Uranium from Afghanistan, I could use it.)

A great time was had by all, and the speeches were all really quite interesting.

I learned from the doctor at HMO-NO that throwing sodium into the Charles River really is an MIT tradition, as I speculated it must be during my talk. This only serves to reinforce my point that while many have thrown sodium, few have documented or video taped it, and fewer still have been willing to submit their work to the judgement of the public in the form of a web publication with video and an admission of guilt. I seem to be the first, in fact. Odd really.

Perhaps my example will prompt someone to video tape the Harvard tradition next time. (Should such a person wish to have the video posted, with attribution or anonymously, I would be quite happy to provide the service.)

I'd read about, and heard stories about, throwing sodium into water. It's a classic thing chemistry students do in college, and based on the reports I have been able to find on the internet, they are often drunk at the time.

While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why.

I decided I should produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions. To do this, I held a Sodium Party. People brought chips and soda and we had a cookout.

The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.

Next I constructed a patented Sodium Release-o-tron:

What is this thing anyway?
This website documents, in great depth, a large collection of chemical elements and examples of their applications, common and uncommon. Click any element tile above and you will find probably more than you ever wanted to know about that element. All these samples (well, at least the ones that fit) are stored in a wooden periodic table, by which I mean a physical table you can actually sit at, in my office at Wolfram Research.

I decided to build this table by accident in early 2002, as a result of a misunderstanding while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks. I won't bore you with the details here (see the Complete Pictorial History of the Wooden Periodic Table Table), but once it was finished I felt obligated to start finding elements to go in it (because under the name of each element in my table there is a sample area).

Then I started building a website to document all my samples, and that's when things really got out of hand. A few months later my little table won the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, clearly the highest honor for which it is eligible.

Sensing an audience, I began to take the website more seriously, which led to my being asked to write a monthly column for Popular Science magazine, which I've now been doing continuously since the July 2003 issue.

Later I formed a most satisfying partnership with Max Whitby building high-end museum displays, selling element samples and sets, and filming video demonstrations of the chemical properties of the elements.

This website now contains the largest, most complete library of stock photographs of the elements and their applications available anywhere, as well as a large and growing collection of 3D images documenting hundreds of samples rotated through 360 degrees. Try clicking on some elements in the table above: I think you'll be surprised what's lurking behind those little tiles.

Argon is the most common and cheapest of the noble gases. It can be extracted from air by cooling the air down to the point where it liquefies, then doing a fractional distillation of the resulting liquid to isolate the argon fraction. I've seen machines that do this for sale on eBay for a few thousand dollars: Buy you own private argon factory!

This is a short story by Theodore Gray about the installation of the Periodic Table Display at DePauw University.

Max Whitby and I recently built a periodic table display for the fancy new Julian Science and Mathematics Center at DePauw University in Indiana. //

The display is 10 feet wide and 7 feet tall and boy is it beautiful. //

Each element has its own six inch cube, and one of the most remarkable things about the display is the lighting: Five super-bright LEDs per cube, mounted on circuit boards designed by Max and individually aimed to highlight the particular samples.

As we had hoped, up close this gives very much the impression of a hundred separate displays, rather than one display with a hundred parts.

Three things make these displays more than just a collection of elements. First, we have gone to some lengths to include, along with the samples themselves, interesting examples of each element's application in the world. If you click on any of the element cubes in the large photo-mosiac below, you can explore the range of exhibits we have included.

Secondly, we have designed the installation to be interactive with built-in touch sensors. Selecting any of the element symbols calls up detailed text and photographic information about the selected substance on a computer (an Apple iMac) built into the cabinet. In many cases this information includes video footage showing spectacular experiments and industrial uses of the element in question. We plan to make these video available here on this website in due course.

The third significant feature of these large displays is quite simply that they are beautiful objects in their own right. It has been a delight at DePauw to see how people are drawn in to the tableaux of the cubes, where the story of each element unfolds. The cabinet is crafted in beautiful cherry hardwood (other finishes are available) and the glowing noble gas symbols are a beacon that attract people from a distance.

A noble gas, argon is inert and colorless until an electric current excites it to a rich sky-blue glow. As one of the least expensive noble gases, dense argon is often used as a shield gas to protect against oxidation.

Scroll down to see examples of Argon.