None of that means that asking Congress to reauthorize federal spending bills every few years isn’t a great idea. Why would stalwarts of “democracy” oppose revisiting spending decisions made by legislators nearly 90 years ago? No living person has ever voted on them. And though “liberals” are generally more protective of Social Security than the Bill of Rights, entitlement programs aren’t foundational governing ideas, they do not protect our natural rights, nor are they at the heart of the American project. Government dependency is, in fact, at odds with all of it.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of private-sector establishments go out of business, and yet not a single federal government program ever does. While nearly every facet of society embraces cost-saving efficiencies, the federal government perpetually grows. It is madness. Simply as a function of good governance, it would be reasonable for Congress to review the efficacy and cost of existing federal programs, and then make suggestions for reforms or elimination or — yikes — privatization. Forget entitlements. Is there any reason we shouldn’t revisit the billions spent on the obsolete Natural Resource Conservation Service (created in 1935 to help farmers deal with soil corrosion) or the Rural Electrification Administration (created in the same year, when large swaths of rural Americans did not have electricity) or the counterproductive Small Business Administration or the subsidy sucking Amtrak corporation? //

In the 1970s, Biden supported re-upping federal spending authorization every four years and requiring Congress to “make a detailed study of the program before renewing it.” Obviously, Biden hasn’t stuck to a single principled position in his entire career. But it is worth noting there was plenty of bipartisan support for sunsetting bills from 1970 through the 2000s — including from Ed Muskie, Jesse Helms, liberal “lion” Ted Kennedy, and George W. Bush.

The Prime Meridian is the universally decided zero longitude, an imaginary north/south line which bisects the world into two and begins the universal day. The line starts at the north pole, passes across the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, and ends at the south pole. Its existence is purely abstract, but it is a globally-unifying line that makes the measurement of time (clocks) and space (maps) consistent across our planet.

The Greenwich line was established in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington DC. That conference's main resolutions were: there was to be a single meridian; it was to cross at Greenwich; there was to be a universal day, and that day would start at mean midnight at the initial meridian. From that moment, the space and time on our globe have been universally coordinated.

Figure 1. This animation of a simple 3-phase power system shows the basic principle of a balanced load. Note how the particles' of current entering and leaving the star node sum to zero. Source: BillC at Wikimedia.

It should be clear that we could connect the star point of the generator to the star point of the load with a neutral conductor but that no current would flow in it as the three phases are perfectly balanced.

Figure 2. Taking the OP's diagram to represent the currents in the balanced load we can see that at examples (1), (2) and (3) that they sum to zero. (I didn't cheat by stretching and of the arrows in each set.)

If we unbalance the load things change somewhat. Without a neutral the star points will shift to adjust the phase-star voltage to maintain the current balance.
If we add the neutral then we can force the star points to remain at the same potential and maintain the same voltage on each load phase despite the different currents in each. The difference between the phase currents must be carried by the neutral.

Why not three lines all in the same phase?

1. Because then there is no return path.
2. Because single phase has no "rotation". Three phase makes it very simple to make a rotating motor with phase sequence determining the direction of rotation. Swap two phases and the direction is reversed.

Is there less loss when the phases of the three lines are all different?

1. Three phase power distribution requires less copper or aluminium for transferring the same amount of power as compared to single phase power.
2. The size of a three phase motor is smaller than that of a single phase motor of the same rating.
3. Three phase motors are self starting as they can produce a rotating magnetic field. The single phase motor requires a special starting winding as it produces only a pulsating magnetic field.
4. In single phase motors, the power transferred in motors is a function of the instantaneous power which is constantly varying. In three-phase the instantaneous power is constant.
5. Single phase motors are more prone to vibrations. In three phase motors, however, the power transferred is uniform through out the cycle and hence vibrations are greatly reduced.
6. Three phase motors have better power factor regulation.
7. Three phase enables efficient DC rectification with low ripple.
8. Generators also benefit by presenting a constant mechanical load through the full revolution, thus maximising power and also minimising vibration.

I'll focus my answer on transmission alone, without explaining why 3 phase is useful in general because other answers did that.

Transmission of power is a compromise. A compromise between transmission efficiency and ease of conversion. The most efficient way of transmitting electric power is DC. This is why most superlong lines are HVDC (high voltage direct current). However, DC is the worst for converting it to HV when you want to send it from power station, and back to LV when you want to feed it to consumers.

AC on the other hand is very convenient to convert - just put a transformer. However the transmission sucks. Eg. AC radiates some of the energy away, but that's not the main concern. If you look at sinusoidal graph, you'll realize that AC wire doesn't actually work 100% of the time. While DC cable carries useful current all the time (one can think of DC as 100% duty cycle PWM), AC cable carries current only part of the time. This means that for the same peak voltage (which dictates cost of insulating the line) and for the same peak current (which dictates size and cost of conductors), AC can transmit only part of the power.

Here comes the idea of multi-phase. Of course multi-phase alone doesn't mean a thing, you can have 3 phases on 6 conductors (3 pairs completely independent of each other). The key here is sharing of the wires between phases. It's like a hot bunk on a warship - 2 seamen share 1 bunk, when one guy awakes and starts his shift, the other ends his shift and goes to sleep. The point is to not have an empty bunk just wasting space, and 3-phase AC works on the same concept: in the time when one phase "rests", another phase is re-using one of it's wires to transmit own current. It's not clear at first sight because it's very fluid, one falling towards 0 while the others rise, and there never is a time when one phase as a wire all to itself. But the point is to re-use the idle time of the wires.

Why 3? Because 2 is too small, you can't have 2 phases on 2 wires. 3 is the minimum number of phases that can share all the wires. Why offset? Because one phase on X conductors is same thing as 1 conductor X times thicker.

When you compare the 3 phase system to a 1 phase system, you can clearly see that with adding just 50% more wires you get 3 times more current.

3-phase transmission uses the wires TWICE as effectively as 1-phase. So you can use half as much copper when building the line.

The tax code isn’t software. It doesn’t run on a computer. But it’s still code. It’s a series of algorithms that takes an input—financial information for the year—and produces an output: the amount of tax owed. It’s incredibly complex code; there are a bazillion details and exceptions and special cases. It consists of government laws, rulings from the tax authorities, judicial decisions, and legal opinions.

Like computer code, the tax code has bugs. They might be mistakes in how the tax laws were written. They might be mistakes in how the tax code is interpreted, oversights in how parts of the law were conceived, or unintended omissions of some sort or another. They might arise from the exponentially huge number of ways different parts of the tax code interact. //

Here’s my question: what happens when artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) gets hold of this problem? We already have ML systems that find software vulnerabilities. What happens when you feed a ML system the entire U.S. tax code and tell it to figure out all of the ways to minimize the amount of tax owed? Or, in the case of a multinational corporation, to feed it the entire planet’s tax codes? What sort of vulnerabilities would it find? And how many? Dozens or millions?

In 2015, Volkswagen was caught cheating on emissions control tests. It didn’t forge test results; it got the cars’ computers to cheat for them. Engineers programmed the software in the car’s onboard computer to detect when the car was undergoing an emissions test. The computer then activated the car’s emissions-curbing systems, but only for the duration of the test. The result was that the cars had much better performance on the road at the cost of producing more pollution.

ML will result in lots of hacks like this. They’ll be more subtle. They’ll be even harder to discover. It’s because of the way ML systems optimize themselves, and because their specific optimizations can be impossible for us humans to understand. Their human programmers won’t even know what’s going on.

Any good ML system will naturally find and exploit hacks. This is because their only constraints are the rules of the system. If there are problems, inconsistencies, or loopholes in the rules, and if those properties lead to a “better” solution as defined by the program, then those systems will find them. The challenge is that you have to define the system’s goals completely and precisely, and that that’s impossible.

The tax code can be hacked. Financial markets regulations can be hacked. The market economy, democracy itself, and our cognitive systems can all be hacked. Tasking a ML system to find new hacks against any of these is still science fiction, but it’s not stupid science fiction. And ML will drastically change how we need to think about policy, law, and government. Now’s the time to figure out how.

The NTSB and FAA are investigating a close call between a FedEx 767 and Southwest Airlines 737 in Austin. The NTSB issued a statement saying it is “investigating a surface event at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport Saturday, a possible runway incursion and overflight involving airplanes from Southwest Airlines and FedEx.”

Landing and departing Runway 18L

At the time of the incident FedEx 1432 arriving from Memphis was cleared to land on Austin’s Runway 18L and the controller then cleared Southwest 708 to depart when the FedEx 767 was approximately 3 miles from the runway. The Southwest 737 was still on the runway at 12:40 UTC (6:40 am local time) as the FedEx flight reached the runway, so the FedEx pilots initiated a go-around. The Southwest flight continued its departure and arrived safely in Cancun 1 hour 54 minutes later. The FedEx flight circled the airfield and landed safely 12 minutes after the incident.

On the 50th Anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, green groups throw their once-sacred "precautionary principle" to the wind. //

Since the passage of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have fought for strict protections for endangered species. They have demanded that the government apply what is known as the “precautionary principle,” which states that if there is any risk that a human activity will make a species extinct, it should be illegal.

And yet here we are, on the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, watching the whole of the environmental movement — from the Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation to scientific groups like the Woods Hole Institute, New England Aquarium, and Mystic Aquarium — betray the precautionary principle by risking the extinction of the North Atlantic right whale.

The cause of this environmental betrayal is massive industrial wind energy projects off the East Coast of the U.S. The wind turbine blades are the length of a football field. Sitting atop giant poles they will reach three times higher than the Statue of Liberty. The towers will be directly inside critical ocean habitat for the North Atlantic right whale.

There are only 340 of the whales left, down from 348 just one year earlier. So many North Atlantic right whales are killed by man-made factors that there have been no documented cases of any of them dying of natural causes in decades. Their average life expectancy has declined from a century to 45 years. A single additional unnatural and unnecessary death could risk the loss of the entire species. //

North Atlantic right whale population declined from 480 to 340 whales between 2010 and 2022

Jonathan Turley
·
Feb 8 @JonathanTurley
·
Roth says that it would not surprise him if "visibility filters" were placed on the accounts of elected officials without their knowledge.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Since he placed many of them there himself, he would indeed not be “surprised” lmao
11:59 PM · Feb 8, 2023

Some of my publications that are most currently useful are accessible below. Items 1-6 and 9 are in PDF format that can be read with Adobe Acrobat. Items 7,8, and 10-16 are text only. .

• Items 1,2,7,8,14 and 16 deal with our test of the linear-no threshold theory of radiation induced cancer, based on lung cancer rates vs radon exposures in U.S. counties. #7 is the best
  place to start in reading about that study; it reviews and justifies the procedures, with special emphasis on treatment of confounding factors. #1 is the basic paper published in 1995. #2 is an extension involving substantial additional data. #8 is a less technical fairly recent review of that project, but parts of it are superseded by #7. Several other papers on that study are included in my list of publications in the CV. Item #14 is a response to a criticism of that work published in a British journal. Item #15 is a response to a very interesting observation by Puskin relevant to that work. Item #16 is my response to a letter by Mossman published in the July 2003 edition of
  Health Physics News.
• Item 12 is my book The Nuclear Energy Option published by Plenum Press in 1990.
  Figures are missing (few are important for understanding the text) and the editing is deficient, but otherwise, the material is there.

rsync is fast and easy:

 rsync -av --progress sourcefolder /destinationfolder --exclude thefoldertoexclude

You can use --exclude multiples times.

Note that the dir thefoldertoexclude after --exclude option is relative to the sourcefolder, i.e., sourcefolder/thefoldertoexclude.

Also you can add -n for dry run to see what will be copied before performing real operation, and if everything is ok, remove -n from command line.

The Manoeuvering Room on board HMS SCEPTRE seen as she lays alongside at Devonport dockyard just prior to decommissioning and disposal. Part of the Marine Engineering Department, the Manoeuvring Room houses the equipment which controls and monitors the submarine's nuclear reactor. It is also from where the boat's power and speed is controlled using the throttle, seen centre right.

Is the net output of CO₂ from Nuclear Energy lower than the net output of other energy sources?

A:

• Low range estimate: 1.4 g CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hr
• Mean estimate: 66 g CO2 equivalent per kWh
• High range estimate: 288 g CO2 equivalent per kWh

This is from a metastudy of 103 studies

You can access the full text from this page on the Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Here is a link to the PDF: Sovacool, B. K. 2008. Valuing the greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power: A critical survey. Energy Policy v. 36 (8): 2950-2963.

For comparison, a natural gas-fired power plant might emit 515.29 g CO2 per kWh (per wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#Carbon_dioxide; (conversion to metric mine & therefore mistakes are as well.) Coal and Oil-fired plants will emit more CO2 than a natural gas plant.

ETA: After more thorough checking, confirmed the neighborhood for CO2 equivalents emitted throughout the life cycle for natural gas and coal plants from Jarmillo et al. "Comparative Life-Cycle Air Emissions of Coal, Domestic Natural Gas, LNG, and SNG for Electricity Generation" in Environmental Science and Technology from 2007, link: http://www.ce.cmu.edu/~gdrg/readings/2007/09/13/Jaramillo_ComparativeLCACoalNG.pdf Natural Gas midpoint: 499 g CO2 equivalent per kWh Coal midpoint: 953 g CO2 equivalent per kWh These are close enough to the wikipedia figures (although not exactly the same) that it appears wiki is also using the lifecycle emissions. Again, the conversion to metric is mine & etc.

A lot of science and policy work treats nuclear power as having 0 CO2 emissions, but that's not quite true, and especially is less true if the higher emissions numbers are more correct. //

• I'm not sure "maximum" and "high estimate" are meant to refer to the same concept. Anyway, please take notice that nowadays gaseous diffusion is not used anymore. Lowering worst estimates by around 60-70 g/CO2 – mirh Apr 28, 2017 at 12:41
• The study cited above is Benjamin Sovacool's now (in)famous meta study. Sovacool is an ardent opponent to nuclear power and this study has been severely criticized. First: it does not include 103 studies, because the majority of those were discarded. The actual number is about 20. Second... of these 20, van Leeuwen & Smith's wildly inaccurate study is included 3 times directly and 1 time indirectly. van Leeuwen & Smith have been even more criticized for missing the goal wildly, peer review finding them to be off the mark up to 8000%. – MichaelK Oct 27, 2017 at 11:09 //

Answer: Yes, lower than combustion based sources like coal, oil, and gas. Not lower than renewable sources like solar and hydro.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory performed a similar study to that posted by @FlyingSquidwithGoggles. This might be a less biased source (NIRS page header says "Nuclear Power: No Solution to Climate Change" and contains much anti-nuke literature).

After screening articles by their criteria, they ended up with ~300 article inputs to the data, and ~1000 data points total.

Here are some of the figures listed by source: (Min, Median, Max)(in g CO2/kWh).

• Hydro: 0, 4, 43
• Solar: 5-7, 22-46, 89-217
• Nuclear: 1, 16, 220
• Nat Gas: 290, 469, 930
• Coal: 675, 1001, 1689

Source: "Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"

Using film from U.S. spy balloons to take pictures of the Moon

"THERE WILL BE LAUGHTER IF THIS PIECE WORKS ...".

Article from the newspaper "St. Petersburg Vedomosti" of April 10, 1993. by Igor Borisovich Lisochkin.

Russian text reference provided by Alexander Dzhuly. Subsection headers inserted by Sven Grahn //

And the fact that we "photographed" the opposite side of the Moon with an American film that was sent to our country with purely spying goals, I told my closest associates only many years later, long after the untimely death of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. In fifteen years. The abbreviation “AB”, I think, is not necessary to decipher. Of course, this is the "American Balloons". Odessites never lose their sense of humor. Starting with "Vostok" I acted as the chief designer of space television systems. Of course, I perfectly remember the immortal flight of Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, and everything that followed. But this is another story and completely different adventures.”

Labor Secretary Walsh is the ‘designated survivor’ at the State of the Union address
By Maegan Vazquez and Matt Stiles, CNN
Updated 9:06 PM EST, Tue February 7, 2023

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Avlon: These are the key things Biden needs to address in State of the Union
02:25 - Source: CNN
CNN
—
Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is the “designated survivor” during President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

The selection comes the same day CNN reported that Walsh is expected to depart the Biden administration soon – marking the first Cabinet secretary departure of Biden’s presidency.

Biden’s address is taking place in the House chamber, where he’s speaking in front of nearly every influential federal official in Washington – including members of Congress, top military brass, US Supreme Court justices and senior officials within his administration.

Walsh, a key member of Biden’s economic team, becomes the first Labor secretary in American history publicly known to have participated in the obscure ritual in order to maintain the line of presidential succession in the rare case that disaster strikes.

Last year, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was the designated survivor for Biden’s first State of the Union address, staying away from the Capitol in an undisclosed and secure location during the president’s prime time remarks.

According to the National Constitution Center, the tradition of a designated survivor during the State of the Union speech began in the 1950s as a result of fears of a nuclear attack during the Cold War. But the federal government did not publicly name the designated survivor until 1981, when President Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary Terrel Bell assumed the designation for an address to a joint session of Congress.

The presidential line of succession is outlined in the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, which was updated during the Truman administration in the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. The updated line of succession was spurred by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945, which led to Harry Truman’s assumption to the highest office.

After the vice president, the speaker of the House, the Senate president pro tempore, and the secretaries of State, Treasury and Defense are next in the line of succession. Data analyzed by CNN shows that the attorney general, seventh in the line of succession, has been the highest-ranking Cabinet member known to have been appointed to be designated survivor. A Justice Department head has been selected for the role three times. //

Who has been the ‘designated survivor’?
One member of the president's Cabinet is chosen to remain absent from the State of the Union address to ensure continuity of government in the case of a mass-casualty event. The vice president and both houses of Congress are typically in attendance, so the designee is chosen from further down the presidential line of succession. Since the 1980s, the selection has been made public.

Note: There was no designated survivor in 2021. Attendance was limited due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sawhorse
3 months ago
Sorry, but the Civil War DID NOT START OVER SLAVERY. Lincoln used Gettysburg to appeal to the abolitionists to motivate the North. This is a fact. States rights was the issue as the North and West cut the South out of the Transcontinental Railroad and it got worse from there.

Blue State Deplorable Sawhorse
3 months ago
You beat me to the punch. In point of fact, states’ rights was the root cause. Slavery was a tangential if irreconcilable issue that fueled it - each new slave-holding state meant a new state without slavery was needed to offset it - but more fundamentally it was about opposing views of how the states would be governed. The Southern states had voluntarily entered the union, and felt they also had a right to secede. They opposed a strong federal government and contended that rights not explicitly granted to the federal government belonged to the individual states.

I see this notion that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves all the time, but that’s simply not so. It’s revisionism. Lincoln personally despised slavery, but was more than willing to retain it to preserve the union. When the states began to secede, they forced his hand leading to the Civil War.

Pepsi_Freak Blue State Deplorable
3 months ago
" Lincoln personally despised slavery, but was more than willing to retain it to preserve the union."

Correct. In fact, he so stated in public. He felt preservation of the Union was more imperative than abolishing slavery (i.e., abolition could wait, restoring the Union couldn't). //

AFVet262
3 months ago
Sounds like DeSantis used a very balanced approach in teaching. When I was working on my masters in military history, I had a professor who used a very similar approach, and who also made the statement that the Civil War was not about slavery.

And the fact is, to many of the players at the time, it wasn't. Of the 11 states that eventually seceded, only 5 explicitly mentioned slavery in their declarations. The majority focused on the concept of states' rights - which included import and export controls, foreign policy, and several other components.

Lincoln stated that his sole goal was to preserve the Union - and if he could do that by freeing all the slaves, he would; if he could do it without freeing any slaves, he'd do that.

The causes of the Civil War were much more complicated than the issue of slavery. It was clearly a part of it, but not the sole reason. DeSantis, by taking the "devil's advocate" approach, opened his students' eyes to the wider historical picture. Good on him. //

CarolineL
3 months ago
To distill the many, many reasons for the Civil War down to “just slavery” is ridiculous.

It’s like saying WWI happened just because Arch Duke Ferdinand was shot. Yes, it was a flash point but it’s laughable to discount the decades of built up of hostility, previous European history, the treaties among allies and countless other integral people, facts and events. //

davenj1
3 months ago

1. Sharyl Attkisson is a hero among investigative reporters in my book. She's been vilified for her story on Queen Hillary and Bosnia, Fast and Furious, and the TSA. She was targeted by the Obama DOJ. She stood strong!
2. There is some strong evidence that the Civil War was fought because of competing economic systems- the industrial North versus the agrarian South. There is nothing for DeSantis to apologize here. I was taught the War of 1812 was not about the impressment of US naval sailors, but because the US had it eyes on Canada, or that it was about products protectionism and tariffs. It's what a real teacher does. Kudos to DeSantis for being that type of teacher. He gets my vote.

medieval davenj1
3 months ago
Item 2 is quite correct -- the Civil War was about re-uniting the US which was split over economic issues. Slavery was a side-issue which was brought forward for purely military reasons. The actual causes of the Civil War are quite complex and covered extensively (and quite read-ably) in first volume of Bruce Catton's "Centennial History of the Civil War."

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