Link Nexus for March #2
more links for March
very nice survey of the supersonic/hypersonic flight landscape. science, history, tech, economics, current startups
Alex Gilbert & colleague on Russia's role in the nuclear fuel supply chain. they see US enrichment capacity development as more important than uranium mining. i would like to see more mining as well, although the politics are tougher. creating a supply chain for the HALEU fuel needed in some new advanced reactors was a problem before Ukraine, so one silver lining of the crisis happening now is that US & friends will build it from the ground up with geopolitics & security front of mind
ditch the renewable fuel standard. yes. there are better ways to achieve energy security & resilience. that said, the most interesting defense of US ethanol policy is that having a huge reservoir of crop production not going towards food counterintuitively creates food security, wrt catastrophic tail risk. the idea is that in a nuclear winter or something, it would be relatively easy to switch from ethanol to food. with no ethanol subsidies propping up this potential capacity, land gets converted to normal food production or other uses. the world market efficiently adjusts, ultimately resulting in a net decline in emergency production buffer. it's a clever argument, though not enough to convince me that the RFS is worth keeping
Eric Berger on NASA's SLS finally, agonizingly, approaching a test launch
impressive video game graphics demo from Unity
people are fighting over solar development near Death Valley National Park. it's annoying how often energy development battles concern land that is not actually formally protected, but rather adjacent to protected land. like, if protecting a patch of land as per your values requires some amount of buffer land to also be protected, you should formally & explicitly set that up. then energy & mining companies won't pursue projects there. but if you have land that is not protected, that everyone says is ok to do stuff on, and companies pursue projects there for years & spend millions of dollars on it & do all the formal paperwork, but then just at the end the nimbys & environmentalists start screaming about how it will ruin the actually-protected land, well... that's just not a good system. i can't really fault people for not paying attention to this stuff until the final stages then things really start happening. and there surely is some selection effect that makes these boundary conflicts more common & high-profile. but probably the govt should try to develop processes that make this a less-consistent source of clusterfuck
tundranaut on energy aesthetics & architecture
good Alan Cole on why building physical infrastructure is so slow & dysfunctional in US, emphasizing environmental regulation & nimby empowerment
new thinkwert choose-your-own-adventure twitter game, set in Rome. what can you say, the man is a true master
a drone carrying a defibrillator helped save the life of someone in Sweden. three-minute response time! really amazing. but also bittersweet that this kind of thing isn't happening first in USA. FAA has really dropped the ball on drone regulation, both by taking too long in creating initial regulations, and by having an ongoing regime that restricts the most exciting applications. i want my taco-copter dammit
relatedly, a good reminder that China's DJI has the power to centrally restrict the operation of small drones by location. article is re: Ukraine. not shocking of course. but as small drones become more common & more important, there probably is a national security rationale for building up friendlier supply chains. i'm still disappointed that Chris Anderson's 3D Robotics plan to build drones in Mexico failed. maybe China's domination of this market was inevitable, idk
Microsoft going to use excess heat from a new data center to run a residential district heating system in Helsinki. seeing this more and more; it just makes sense
an example of non-use rights in Australian fishing, i.e environmentalists paying money to buy fishing rights in order to not use them. this is good free market environmentalism, and a great alternative to heavy-handed govt regulation & endless lawsuits. sadly it's not allowed in many contexts, most prominently in US public land energy leases
astronauts crave spicy food, apparently. microgravity clogs the sinuses & interferes with smell, or something
Future Matters, new longtermism substack
really cool business models are emerging for electric school bus fleets. the company here manages the entire thing including charging costs, & offers a simple subscription price to the school district (lower than diesel). they even make some revenue selling to the grid, which is neat. EVs definitely have some challenges to work out, especially for small cars. but for organizational fleets like schools & delivery, electrification is rapidly becoming a financial & operational no-brainer in most cases. & EV tech & charging infrastructure will continue to improve. you will also see ancillary markets evolve over time, like battery reuse & recycling
there's just an incredible amount of growth & innovation & entrepreneurship here. ppl who rage against the current defects & inferiorities of EVs relative to ICEs or hybrids are just being kinda silly & anti-progress imo. the direction of the future is clear. i can imagine plausible scenarios where EVs don't come to dominate in 50 years, such as a huge breakthrough in synthetic fuels or a collapse in key metals supply or production capacity because of geopolitics. but it all seems unlikely, especially looking at the trajectory in other countries. EVs will continue their forward march & find adequate solutions to most existing & future issues. we will see new battery chemistries, and new mining operations like geothermal brine lithium. and in the longer run we will probably build massively expanded passive wireless charging infrastructure in roads & parking lots. and transportation systems in general will continue to evolve to better incorporate the particular strengths & weaknesses of EVs. autonomous vehicles & eVTOL air transport will arrive, etc. it's bad to be naively optimistic, of course. but focusing solely on the challenges & downsides of EV tech is a choice
books
Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century by Anthony King. the big claim in this book is that armies have significantly declined in size recently, which makes urban combat more common & important. this is an underrated explanation for recent trends, compared to theories that emphasize general demographic urbanization & technological innovation. in the past, you had huge land armies that formed big fronts optimized for firepower concentration & logistics. cities were still important industrial & political objectives, but armies could just totally envelop them & so they weren't really the defining strategic focus of interstate war. & insurgencies that tried to actually control territory within cities just got crushed, & fled to the countryside to hide. with today's much smaller armies, you don't really have clear fronts and so both sides converge on cities, and insurgents can hide in them successfully. modern armies can't really hold big swathes of urban territory, and so urban war becomes a game of hyper-localized fighting & the slow evolution of safe zones protected by concrete walls etc
there is much more in this book, which i really enjoyed. it walks though the history of urban combat (sieges etc) & various tactics & technology dimensions, & gets into contemporary stuff. it is interesting to read now given the war in Ukraine. the book is clearly over-indexed on recent US fighting in Iraq & elsewhere, but it mostly holds up, i think. some of it is quite prescient, e.g: the failure of certain kinds of sexy high-concept rapid-warfare deep-strike approaches, and the importance of civilians & memewar. on the other hand, it says tanks will increasingly become the centrepiece of urban combat, which seems questionable now given Ukraine's apparent success using modern infantry-carried missiles. the author says that military ppl are terrified about the prospect of a true large-scale war within a megacity, which is interesting. although he concludes the book by evaluating possible locations, and says it's pretty unlikely (if you don't count drug war stuff in Latin America)
A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin. i don't really know why i read this. i guess i was curious after having just finished the Tolkien books. (actually i listened to the audiobook here too, which was mediocre compared to Andy Serkis' great LoTR narration). the first season of the GoT tv series is basically a line-for-line adaptation of the book, and my mental image of all the characters is hopelessly defined by the actors. so this basically just felt like re-watching the show. it's fine? idk, the world-building is quite good, better than Tolkien probably. or at least more grounded & less in the style of a myth or bedtime story. i probably won't read the rest of the books, they are very lengthy. although i am somewhat curious to see if the books maintain their quality better than the show did