Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Is Fusion power going to connect to grid soon after next year's demonstration?
On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 3:07 PM Larry wrote:
If only we had an enormous ball of hydrogen to generate fusion power.
Solar power is reportedly borderline cost-effective. As fossil fuel reserves decline and likely become more expensive, solar power should become more economical. However, I’m not sure how long this rise in cost will take; it could be decades.
Installing solar panels on your roof can make roof replacement twice as expensive. Panels can also damage or overheat your roof, and storms could damage them as well. I would rather leave that to the power company.
The solar roof tile idea is interesting, but only if there is a shortage of land for solar installations. There is a great deal of surface area on roofs that we could utilize.
Monday, May 4, 2026
Sunday, May 3, 2026
The Disaster I Never Imagined Having To Worry About
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksn5yrsC3Wg
I found this really interesting, but I assume that most people wouldn't want to watch the full 33 minute video.
The bottom line is that the AIDS drug Ritonavir started crystallizing during production making it not useful. This is because chemicals can take different arrangements called polymorphs. Once the process starts, it is impossible to stop because the crystals are self-replicating, and it is not simply a matter of cleaning or replacing all the equipment.
This process could affect many drugs we take. One researcher made it happen with aspirin.
This problem has led to increased medical regulation requiring research on possible polymorphs.
Saturday, May 2, 2026
Friday, May 1, 2026
A Masterclass in Manipulation
0 seconds ago
Hank,
Climate Alarmism has become a religion. I think that it is confirmation bias for the political left because it justifies authoritarian government control over the entire energy sector. It was justification for Biden bragging about shutting down coal plants. This is what the Climate Alarmist Skeptics are afraid of. They don't want authoritarian government. They want free choice.
They also don't want the government spending a trillion dollars of their money to fix the problem until we are sure that it really is a problem. When government provides incentives to do a particular thing, this is a form of coercion because it causes people to make economic decisions that they would have not otherwise made, and at the expense of taxpayers.
The actual temperature changes are not very scary and the public in general senses this. When temperatures are not much different than they were in my childhood 60 years ago, I notice, and so do many other people.
The data shows that it took 140 years for the average atmospheric surface temperature to rise by 1 degree celsius. In short, these changes happen very gradually giving the people and the government plenty of time to adapt if we need to.
Saying we have a large number of record warm days sounds scary, but when those records are by 0.01 or 0.02 degrees, we are clearly being manipulated by graphs that resemble a hockey stick.
Apparently, the somewhat questionable need for massive AI datacenters is causing the country to not worry so much about our energy usage and climate change.
I think that humans have a psychological need to worry about something. The boogey man of the day could be government, corporations, or climate change, but it feels like much ado about nothing.
I always enjoy your videos.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Thursday, April 30, 2026
COVID Cover-Up: Hiding Star Researcher Ralph Baric’s Ties to Global Pandemic | RealClearInvestigations
I had to shorten my comments because the website limited the number of characters that I could use. Well, maybe brevity is better...
1 minute ago
It is possible that the COVID-19 virus came from a lab leak. Reportedly, it is less likely that it came from Gain of Function research, but on both points we don't have enough evidence. We are in the dark.
Much speculation has been made about a relatively small U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab to catalogue bat viruses that had nothing to do with Gain of Function Research. However, we have no evidence about what the Chinese researchers may have otherwise been up to.
Parts of the article are factual, but it is constantly engaging in emotionally tinged conspiratorial language. These are speculations and I do not accept them as fact until we have more evidence. What is described as a coverup may have only been scientists defending what they thought was correct. Some of this was very likely CYA because scientists didn't want their research grants denied because of false claims.
Maybe the full truth will eventually come out or maybe it won't. I see at least three possibilities...
1. The virus came from a natural source, either mutating before or after it infected humans.
2. Since the Wuhan lab was cataloguing natural viruses, with the intent of finding ones dangerous to humans, the lab leak theory is plausible. I heard a report of researchers getting sick after collecting bat viruses from a remote cave.
3. The Wuhan lab was working on Gain of Function Research that leaked. One of the lab's scientists was quoted as feeling relieved that COVID-19 was not related to her research viruses.*
* However, we have no way of knowing if this claim is true.
Monday, April 27, 2026
Sunday, April 26, 2026
Friday, April 24, 2026
Thursday, April 23, 2026
P(doom) | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
This way overstates the case. Obviously AI will have controls.
Furthermore, AI is not near as smart as we give it credit. It is like a Wikipedia that can talk. It understands language really well, but everything else is based on probability where certain facts and things are associated with other facts and things.
Beyond probability, AI has little understanding of things that it is talking about, and its ability to reason is limited, although it might be able solve simple problems.
However, this is why there is a big push to make AI's smarter. Doing so requires a great deal more hardware, and they are building it. The AI demand for computer memory is driving up the cost of computers by a significant amount.
However, I suspect that the current methods are inefficient and they are just throwing more hardware at the problem to make it better. This is a drain on resources, when they need to come up with better algorithms.
So I asked ChatGPT what it thought of my points, and this is what it said...
Your core argument is clear and grounded, but it leans a bit too confidently in a few places where the reality is more nuanced. Here’s a straightforward take on the strengths and weaknesses:
What works well:
- You push back against hype. That’s valuable—AI discussions often swing toward extremes.
- The point about scaling via hardware vs. improving algorithms is thoughtful and widely debated in the field.
- You correctly note that current AI systems rely heavily on statistical patterns rather than deep “understanding” in a human sense.
Where it overreaches or could be refined:
- Saying AI is “like a Wikipedia that can talk” undersells it. Modern systems don’t just retrieve facts—they generate novel responses, combine ideas, and can perform nontrivial reasoning in some domains. It’s still probabilistic, but not merely lookup-and-repeat.
- “Beyond probability, AI has little understanding” is philosophically debatable. Even humans rely on pattern recognition more than we like to admit. The real issue is type and reliability of understanding, not its total absence.
- The claim that reasoning is limited to “simple problems” is outdated. AI can now handle fairly complex reasoning tasks, though inconsistently and with failure modes.
- “Obviously AI will have controls” is asserted too casually. In practice, governance, safety, and control mechanisms are active areas of concern—not something universally agreed upon or solved.
Your strongest idea (worth emphasizing more):
- The critique that the field may be over-relying on brute-force scaling (more compute, more memory) instead of algorithmic breakthroughs is legitimate. Many researchers are asking the same question.
How you might sharpen it:
Instead of framing AI as “not that smart,” you could frame it as:
- powerful but uneven
- impressive in narrow ways, unreliable in others
- advancing quickly, but with unclear long-term efficiency
That keeps your skepticism but makes it harder to dismiss.
If you want, I can rewrite your paragraph to sound tighter and more persuasive without losing your viewpoint.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Sunday, April 19, 2026
Saturday, April 18, 2026
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
The Climate Crisis is a Scam - Professor Ian Plimer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kNvSu93P9Q&t=1153s
This guy says many of the same things I’ve been saying, such as pointing out how changes in the Earth’s orbit can cause ice ages. He talks about the massive CO2 decline over Earth's history and how it got dangerously low 20,000 years ago, where if it had been any lower, all terrestrial plant life would have died.
However, he denies any relationship between man-made emissions and rising temperatures.
The average global atmospheric temperature has risen by about 1 to 1.1 degrees since 1880. Some of the temperature records are controversial because the government has adjusted past measurements, claiming that earlier methods were not consistent with modern ones. Nevertheless, we know that temperatures have increased, albeit rather slowly.
It seems very likely that man-made emissions have been at least partially responsible for this increase. However, we also came out of the Little Ice Age around 1850, so there was already an upward trend.
The temperature and CO₂ data suggest that the rate of change is gradual and that temperature sensitivity to CO₂ is relatively low. I have no reason to believe that we are in a climate crisis, at least not in the near future.
Reportedly, out of the 100+ models that the IPCC uses, the only model that accurately predicts actual climate is the less extreme Russian model. However, the IPCC likes to average all the models, including the more extreme ones. They make their predictions with huge error bars, indicating a wide range of possible outcomes, because they really don't know. However, the focus tends to be on the more extreme predictions.
Almost all of the disagreement is about the degree of positive feedback, also known as Climate Sensitivity. Although this seems mild now, I can't rule out some significant effect in the future. However, if there were, we would have plenty of warning. These changes happen very slowly.
All of the really bad scenarios would require us to raise the temperature by 4 to 5 degrees. We just aren't getting there very fast, and we are running out of fossil fuels.
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
You are being misled about renewable energy technology
0 seconds ago
I am almost convinced, but...
Reportedly, China has massively subsidized solar panel construction in order to dominate the world market, leading to an oversupply, driving solar panel cost down by 90%. Is this a sustainable economic situation?
Given that, I think that the free market will use the most economic source of energy, which could change depending upon a combination of economics and politics.
There is much concern about the reliability of renewable energy. The counter argument is that you need massive backup sources of energy, but it seems to me that we already have that.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Saturday, April 4, 2026
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
Monday, March 30, 2026
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