jadero

What is this stop business? I have it on good authority that it's turtles all the way down.

This is what word problems are.

Things may have changed since my graduation in 1974, but my experience was that word problems were contrived scenarios with little or no relevance to my life. I was pretty good at math and had very good reading comprehension, so I never actually struggled with any of it.

But not once was I ever asked to calculate the storage requirements for a collection of toys, where on the teeter-totter to sit to balance it, how long a ladder needed to be to safely used to get on top of a given roof, or safe maximum driving speed given standard reaction times under various conditions of low visibility.

Instead, it was all stuff that sounded like a surrealist riddle. (If a chicken-and-a-half can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long will it take for a frog with a wooden leg to kick through a pickle?)

And besides being pretty good at it, I actually enjoyed math once other interests and working with my dad in the shop showed me just how useful it can be.

Just leave it as water, then drop small pellets of lithium in as necessary. Sodium works, too, and is more abundant/available than lithium, but maybe tougher to control safely. (The rest of that group is just too reactive, unless you can find a way to use the exothermic reaction for something other than an uncontrolled fire or even explosion.)

Mostly kidding, but only because I can't imagine smarter people than I haven't ruled it out for very good reasons. And while I'm on the topic, running a condenser on the exhaust will capture the water vapour, which is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.

Hmmm. I've seen a few references to Toyota supposedly having a prototype system for generating hydrogen from water on board cars. I've dismissed that as just the latest water powered flavour of the month. You don't suppose...

(looks around)

I thought we did.

That's not what I got from the article. They seemed to be talking specifically about chemicals have absorbed from what they've been in contact with.

One thing that was not addressed in the article is morality. Among the other things I learned during 50 years in the workforce is that sleep is treated as a moral issue.

Choosing to "stay up late" or choosing to "sleep in" are decadent, unless it's a result of late socializing. Choosing to go to bed when tired instead of staying up socializing is antisocial and even an insult to others. Choosing a sleep schedule that is natural and healthy is selfish when it conflicts with the imposed schedule. Not going on-call, taking shift work, or working extended shifts demonstrate the moral failing of a bad work ethic. Students suffering because their circadian rhythms don't match the imposed schedule are lazy or don't care or are unintelligent.

We're not going to fix anything until we treat sleep and sleep schedules as biological imperatives instead of moral decisions.

Yes, but it's important to remember that a much (most?) of that work was performed by those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of the church, or by clergy who had plenty of free time beyond their duties and no separate need to earn income for housing and food. In fact, one reason to enter the clergy was to gain access to the resources to pursue other activities.

The self-proclaimed experts really muddy the waters. As do those seen to be experts by virtue of their charm, charisma, fame, or actual expertise in bullshitting. Another issue is those who claim to be or are judged to be experts in one field by virtue of their legitimate expertise in another.

I think there are actual experts as long as we're willing to define the term in a way that doesn't confer wisdom or in relation to what remains unknowable. For me, a true expert is someone who knows more about something than the vast majority of people, is continually striving towards expertise and mastery, and can explain things to those with little or no expertise.

Also, I think expertise is a range, not an absolute. It's completely reasonable to accept the expertise of your local accountant without also thinking that they could be the CFO of a Fortune 500 company.

For myself, I try to embrace the unknowns as new adventures or ignore them as irrelevant to the task at hand. I don't know why there are so many joinery techniques in woodworking or how to choose the most appropriate for a particular situation, but I'm having fun learning. At the same time, joinery is irrelevant to many of my projects, where doing everything by eye with scraps on hand using nails and screws gets the job done quickly and effectively.

I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.

What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn't mean that it's not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can't identify a return ahead of time doesn't mean there won't be one.

Also, I don't know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don't know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don't know that the LHC was the only way to get them.

Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won't know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.

Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I'm good with whatever. If we're actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don't think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.

The problem as I see it is that "but what good is it" is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any advance that didn't at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.

"What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?"

"Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?"

"That's nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?"

"C'mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!"

At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don't cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.

Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that's little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.

Just be aware that enshittification is under way in this space, too.

I've switched back to using the library's own portal, even when it means forgoing digital media.