The Earth's upper atmosphere is delicate. It's already being disturbed with rocket fuel residue and particulate space junk. Vacuuming up air and ionizing it risks putting the upper atmosphere even more out of balance.

Could you elaborate on that?

The article mentions "both positive and negative ions are pushed out of the thruster".

Won't the ions eventually recombine?

El Niño events are more than 36% stronger today than they were 40 years ago due to climate change.[1]

[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord. Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660

They had 59 votes from Democrats for the public option, not single payer. Public option is to let people choose either a non-profit government insurance plan or private insurers. They needed 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster. Joe Lieberman (Ind-CT) said he would filibuster the public option but would vote for the ACA without it.

Whoops, good correction, I did misremember public option versus single-payer, and I guess technically Liberman was not a Democrat at that point, but he had been for a while up until shortly before then and still had committee chair positions from the Democrat leadership, so it mostly feels like a distinction without a difference.

I still think this is an important historical detail that seems to go under the radar a lot; if anything, it gives me yet another reason to disdain the filibuster!

Interesting this earthquake struck shortly after a solar eclipse, implying significant spring tide forces were present. The earthquake occurred near dawn, when the sun/moon pair, Indonesia, and the Earth's core formed a right angle to each other, creating tidal tension forces on the crust.

Tidal forces have been linked to the Dec. 26, 2004 Sumatra earthquake. This paper claims there's a significant link between tidal forces and earthquakes in the region (https://doi.org/10.1029/2006GL027074). The authors conclude "The observed relationships suggest that the cyclical crustal flexing, which will be at a maximum at full or new moons, might provide sufficient extra force to a plate-boundary region already on the point of rupture to trigger an earthquake that was ‘waiting to happen’."

California has huge amounts of excess renewable generation nearly every day, especially in spring and fall. Last April the grid operator curtailed 1.47 million MW/hrs of renewables, or about 2 GW per day. That's excess power the grid did not accept due to no demand. (source: https://www.caiso.com/documents/key-statistics-jul-2026.pdf)

In my mind the ideal solution is in addition to daily BESS time-shifting is seasonal time-shifting: long term storage of April excess for use in July.

Is this curtailment due to overproduction, curtailment due to inadequate _grid_ capacity, or some mixture? In Ireland there's now a _lot_ of curtailment, but it's mostly driven by inadequate grid capacity (wind power in particular expanded quicker than the grid could).

I think you had me until you mentioned long term storage. How do you store significant amounts of energy across seasons? I'm just not aware of anything other than pumped hydro power that has anywhere near the cap as capacity to do such a thing.

Green hydrogen. Generate hydrogen from water during excess times and convert back later on.

Is is actively done at scale? I suspect not given the amounts of batteries being installed.

No because there’s lower hanging fruit. We’re still burning dinosaurs on windy days and in summer, seasonal storage is a long way down the list.

AI, when used in an organized and structured way, is excellent for learning a language. For example:

1. Ask AI for the 10 most commonly used verbs in ordinary daily speech in language X.

2. Prompt AI: generate 4 short sentences for each of the 10 verbs at the A1 (beginner) level. Provide the sentences in .csv format compatible with the Anki flash card program.

3. Import .csv into Anki. Study your 40 cards.

As you advance you can do much more like having conversations with AI avatars, transcribing videos, translating text, generating audio clips, and so on.

Dr Taylor Jones, a PhD linguist, goes into greater detail here: https://youtu.be/xQXiSGDXknA?

If you want to skip the clunky csv step, you can utilize https://github.com/jasperket/clanki and push directly from AI to Anki.

You can also use it to write and see the corrected version of your sentences. This got me to practice a lot more.

Many elderly die primarily from sedentary disease, not from aging itself.

Why was the period 1961-2020 chosen? Why omit the years 2021 to 2025? The X user appears to be a climate denier and is cherry-picking data to support their agenda.

In 2020 the average US temperature was 55.7 F. In 2025 it was 57.8 F, an increase of 2.1 F in only five years. The cherry-picking conveniently excludes 2022 when the US set an all-time record of 34 days where the max temp exceeded 100 F.

The chart in the post appears to at least include 2020 through 2024...

Yes, but the bars shown don't match the NOAA data source I found. Also, if the chart goes to 2025 then why was the 1961 to 2020 period chosen for the average? Doesn't make sense.

Too late. My household's desktops and laptop are all on Debian/KDE Plasma linux. Glad I switched, I think Plasma is a better more customizable "windows" than Windows is.

Too late. In my household there are 4 desktops and one laptop. Wiped Windows and installed Debian with KDE Plasma. For our use it's a better "windows" than Windows. Not going back.