> You'd probably be shocked at just how much wilderness is in the UK.
You're right. I was shocked at just how little there is. If one's definition of large is more than a few square km, there's virtually none, for any sensible definition of wilderness, at least south of the Cairngorns.
Very cool and hopefully will help influence policy in the future. (Here’s [not] looking at you, insanely overbright LED shop window ads blasting well into the late night in my city)
This is so cool, but I did not see a key piece of info in the article: does the ongoing operation of this mission fall under NASA's science budget and therefore at risk of cuts and defunding under Trump [1]?
Sure, the launch will go through, but SpaceX doesn't see any recurring revenue from later operations, and I wouldn't put it past the current administration to cut NASA's budget such that continuing operations are affected.
I'm not sure how to make out of comments like this. Is SpaceX actually launching customer payloads under $50m or whatever? Because, unless they are, it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA, which is already like 15t to LEO for $67m at 150 JPY/USD, which leaves F9 reusable barely competitive in price. I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
Superheavy-Starship reusable launches at F9 price would completely destroy everything in space space, but so far the only things it had disrupted are itself and airline services under its flightpath. And even F9 is starting to show increasingly clear signs of repetitive "old space" scrubs as NASA gets more disrupted.
Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
I'm sorry no, you should spend some time actually understanding the industry.
JAXA builds a tiny amount of rockets, almost exclusively for their own use. They have never been a significant player and its very unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Its pure fantasy to suggest otherwise. And even if they could reliably hit these prices at commercial launch scale, Falcon 9 could easily lower their prices if real competitors actually existed.
If H3 was such a dynamic thread as you suggest, why did Amazon not buy 100s of launches from them. They bought launches from every SpaceX competitor, but not Japan.
> I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
China isn't really relevant. Western stuff is just not going to fly from China.
India used to do more commercial stuff, but SpaceX Rideshare is far, far, far more popular.
The reality is, India large rockets, like Japan, is mostly build for their own program, they don't really have that much access capability.
> Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
The $67m figure is the same one I'm finding for Falcon 9 (and it can carry loads 40% heavier). That made me think they were matching each other on price to stay competitive in the market and that seems correct as the internal costs I'm seeing for SpaceX Falcon 9 launches are estimated around $15mil, meaning they have a large margin from which to come down from.
> it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA
SpaceX doesn't stand still. It's weird to think that in several years SpaceX will be in the same place (relying on Falcon 9) yet JAXA, etc will have improved dramatically.
So are they launching F9 at $67m? Or do you merely expect SpaceX to eventually price match? Not that MHI is selling a lot of slots, but still. Quoted payload figures is also within ballparks.
They are actually doing launches as low as $62 million (as of 2024). They also have enormous margin to lower this cost because even the upper-bound estimate by industry analysts on the Falcon 9 launch cost for SpaceX is only $28 million.
Costs are largely meaningless when talking about global situation and other nations and their strategic interests. Europe will move fully to ESA for anything actually important, China and India have their own stuff too.
Private satellites, sure why not if companies are OK with risking of getting their payload removed at last minute because somebody again bruised musk's ego.
Business can't be done in an environment with zero trust, doesn't matter how much better the offer looks on paper. That trust with spacex is gone for good.
Costs are never meaningless when you're talking about technical projects that cost billions of dollars.
> trust with spacex is gone for good.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but they launched 134 rockets with payloads last year and they all made it to their orbits successfully except for one of their own starlink payloads. This is more than 90% of all launches that occurred last year.
Trump created the Space Force so he will presumably want some amount of funding for rockets and what not. If Space Force fails it would make him look bad after all.
Trump is the one who actually decided to go through with the creation of a distinct branch rather than having it as a command. I think it is fair to say he created it.
There are all sorts of politicians and military members who advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing that, then he should get credit for creating it even though it has been a long time coming.
> distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command
It's not 'instead', it's adding a cyber branch to a different org chart. There are two major org charts in the US military:
The services, such as Army, Navy, Space Force, etc., which are generally defined by domain (land, sea, orbit) and whose role is to recruit, organize, train, and equip forces - to prepare them, but not to deploy or command them in operations.
The combatant commands, which are defined by geography - such as Africa Command, Indo-Pacific Command - and sometimes by geography-independent domains, such as as Space Command or Cyber Command. The combatant commands deploy the resources provided by the services in various combinations. Modern conflicts generally require resources from multiple services/domains working jointly.
It makes some sense - you want domain experts to train and equip them for their domain, then you must necessarily deploy them jointly. Who should organize, train, and equip sea-born forces? Probably you want the Navy to do that, not the Army. Who should organize, train, and equip electronic domain forces (I hate the term 'cyber')? Do you want your IT organization organized, trained, and equipped (think of the importance of each step) by the US Marine Corps, or maybe by some actual researchers, engineers, and experienced managers?
Yep, it looks like it will be cut and closed, which is truly unfortunate. It’s disappointing to see that science nor innovation are not a priority for this administration. And this doge cutting of funding or even shutting down important projects will have long-term consequences, impacting research, education, and technological advancements that benefit everyone.
> "We'll soon be releasing real-time and historical forecasts from GenCast, and previous models, which will enable anyone to integrate these weather inputs into their own models and research workflows."
They will give you the weights and code not the forecast - your quote is incomplete.
Its either a temporary gift to the community until its adopted then charge for it OR they know most orgs can integrate that into their products therefore requiring to buy google products IF it works as they say it does.
The key assumption is that T and H may not have the same probability, but each flip isn't correlated with past or future flips. Therefore, TH and HT have the same probability. So you can think of TH as "A" and HT as "B" then you repeatedly flip twice until you get one of those outcomes. So now your coin outputs A and B with equal probability.
I feel like I am missing something so obvious that I feel the need to correct wiki, but that likely means I am fundamentally missing the point.
"The Von Neumann extractor can be shown to produce a uniform output even if the distribution of input bits is not uniform so long as each bit has the same probability of being "one"->[first] and there is no correlation between successive bits.[7]"
As long as the person doesn't favor which of the two bits they chose is "first", then it should appear as random.
But that is self-defeating, as if the person had the capability to unbiased-ly choose between two binaries, they wouldn't need the coin.
But since the only way to determine the variation from expectation is repeatedly increasing sample size, I don't see how doing it twice, and just taking encoding of the bits, then...
Is the magic in the XOR step? To eliminate the most obvious bias (1v5 coin), until all that could had been left was incidental? Then, always taking the first bit, to avoid the prior/a priori requisite of not having a fair coin/choosing between two options?
and it clicked. Rubber duck debugging, chain of thought, etc.
Maybe I don't understand why or what you don't understand but...
Say you have a biased coin. It lands heads 55% of the time (but you don't know that.) Then the probabilities are:
HH = (0.55 * 0.55) = 0.3025
TT = (0.45 * 0.45) = 0.2025
HT = (0.55 * 0.45) = 0.2475
TH = (0.45 * 0.55) = 0.2475
If you disregard the HH and TT results then the equal probabilities of HT and TH result in a perfect binary decider using a biased coin. You assign HT to one result and TH to the other.
Coins and dice and datums (solid objects with detectable outcomes) may, or may not have bias, it depends on how they were made and on manufacturing defects that resulted. But, at a minimum, such bias can oftentimes be side-stepped or bypassed.
Consider this argument from Johnny Von Neuman.
Suppose you have a single biased coin with these outcome probabilities:
A) Heads (1) 60% (Call this probability p.)
B) Tails (0) 40% (The probability of this outcome is q=(1-p), by definition.)
Now let us apply this algorithm to sequential tosses for this coin:
1) Toss the coin twice.
2) If you get heads followed by tails, return 1. (Say this outcome occurs with probability p’.)
3) If you get tails followed by heads, return 0. (The probability of this outcome is q’=(1-p’), by definition.)
4) Otherwise, ignore the outcome and go to step 1.
The bit stream that results is devoid of bias. Here’s why. The probabilities of obtaining (0 and 1) or (1 and 0) after two tosses of the coin are the same, namely p(1-p). On the other hand, if (1 and 1) or (0 and 0) are thrown, those outcomes are ignored and the algorithm loops around with probability 1 – 2p(1-p). So, the probability (p’) of getting a 1 using this algorithm after any sequential two tosses of the coin is p’ = p(1-p) + p’(1-2p(1-p)). The solution of which is p’=1/2, and since q’=(1-p’), then q’=1/2. A fair unbiased toss!
In fact, the example bias numbers given above don’t matter for the argument to hold (note that after solving for p’ it is independent of p). The outcome of the algorithm is a fair toss (in terms of the (0 and 1)-bit stream that results), regardless of the actual bias in the coin for a single toss. All the bias does is have an effect on the efficiency with which the bit stream is created, because each time we toss heads-heads or tails-tails we loop around and those two tosses are thrown away (lost). For an unbiased coin the algorithm is 50% efficient, but now has the guarantee of being unbiased. For a biased coin (or simply unknown bias) the algorithm is less than 50% efficient, but now has the guarantee of being unbiased.
This algorithm is trivial to implement for the Satoshi9000.
But many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are quite minor.
Paul Hawken, for example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
Producing a single electric car releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This is rising, as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. That means that even if operating electric cars reduces emissions overall, it’s not going to reduce them much. One calculation estimates reductions of 6 percent in the United States. That’s not enough to make much of a dent in warming.
> almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants
I love this: it implies we should eliminate refrigerants and we should eliminate food waste...
Like a child wanting two incompatible things.
And I was answering "it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs". Which to me contains the same locura - trying to face reality but failing to.
Plus the other reply which is black and white: "unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests"
And I've just noticed the original comment is flagged... Another form of denying and erasing the reality of others.
That list is only scale (e.g. 40 Gigatons saved by onshore wind or utility solar by 2050) and even on that measure EVs do pretty well at 10 Gigatons.
But they do even better if you consider cost since the TCO of many electric vehicle classes is lower than the alternative, so you save money and carbon.
These tradeoffs are displayed on a marginal abatement cost curve:
> Technologies: Many measures in the power and transportation sectors are cost-effective right now, including several electric vehicle classes, electric efficiency, high-quality solar PV and onshore wind resources, and nuclear relicensing. The use of heat pumps in buildings is also available.
> Emissions: Together, the measures in this range represent more than 1 gigaton of potential annual emission reductions by 2050 or 22% of way toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Frankly, these articles are obviously written from a very left-wing perspective with essentially no relevance on the American political stage.
None of the opinions stated in the protect* article are close to majority.
> > Benson’s argument is that “mining critical metals is a necessity for a greener future.” But I would ask—a necessity for whom? For example, do child slaves laboring in Congolese cobalt mines call this necessary? Cobalt is an essential ingredient in mobile phones and electric vehicle batteries, but those kids aren’t driving Tesla’s and listening to podcasts all day. They need liberation, not consumer toys.
“Liberation” is not the solution to extreme poverty in the Congo/DRC. You either need to convince wealthier societies to do vast wealth transfers or find a way to bootstrap a stronger economy, which very well might involve lithium mining.
The leftism exemplified by this blog post resembles actual leftism. Unfortunately, it only really exists in the confinement zone of social media, and isn't allowed anywhere near the political stage.
What Americans consider "leftist" in their politics is just "socially progressive but center right." Hillary Clinton gets called a Communist, Barack Obama a Marxist. Americans wouldn't know an actual leftist if one threw a Molotov cocktail through their window.
Sure, the people winning elections aren't part of the capital-L Left but that doesn't mean the capital-L Left isn't an important political force even in America.
This is (one of the many) reasons why I care primarily about biodiversity and preventing as many human-caused extinctions as we can. Those are a permanent loss to the beauty and complexity of the universe built up over millions of years, and they are permanent and irreversible.
That was exellently presented. Clear, informative, compelling. I especially appreciated getting to the end without being bombarded with any ads, popups, or begging for email signups. Curious how I could support such media, I found https://pressroom.rferl.org/about-rfe-rl/ which says,
> RFE/RL, Inc. is a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation funded by the U.S. Congress through a grant from the United States Agency for Global Media...
Well, the RFERL was funded through a CIA front organization, it was mostly an anti-communist propaganda operation. It definitely is/was a "state effort". So yes, taxes.
> According to certain European politicians such as Petr Nečas, RFE played a significant role in the collapse of communism and the development of democracy in Eastern Europe.[40][41][42] Unlike government-censored programs, RFE publicized anti-Soviet protests and nationalist movements. Its audience increased substantially following the failed Berlin riots of 1953 and the highly publicized defection of Józef Światło.[43] Arch Puddington argues that its Hungarian service's coverage of Poland's Poznań riots in 1956 served as an inspiration for the Hungarian revolution that year.[44]
> For the first two days following the Chernobyl disaster on April 26, 1986, the official Eastern Bloc media did not report any news about the disaster, nor any full account for another four months. According to the Hoover Institute, the people of the Soviet Union "became frustrated with inconsistent and contradictory reports", and 36% of them turned to Western radio to provide accurate and pertinent information.[58] Listenership at RFE/RL "shot up dramatically" as a "great many hours" of broadcast time were devoted to the dissemination of life-saving news and information following the disaster.[59] Broadcast topics included "precautions for exposure to radioactive fallout" and reporting on the plight of the Estonians who were tasked with providing the clean-up operations in Ukraine.[59]
You're right. I was shocked at just how little there is. If one's definition of large is more than a few square km, there's virtually none, for any sensible definition of wilderness, at least south of the Cairngorns.