Philip Ryan

Full time ASIC engineer. Occasional pilot. Constant reader. Slowly being dragged into energy wonkism.

[Philip Ryan @RealPhilipRyan]

@SouthernVoice2 Willy?

[Philip Ryan @RealPhilipRyan]

@JohnDPMorgan We seemed to have landed. Who amongst us has not set “flaps full, pitch final” on final?

[Philip Ryan @RealPhilipRyan]

Bugger. Missed approach / go around into Brisbane. Apparently the flaps didn’t deploy completely. Now circling above the clouds.

[Philip Ryan @RealPhilipRyan]

@firstfusilier It doesn’t they much better! Enjoy.

[Nuclear for Australia @nuclearforaus]

They can't do it at home, so Aussies are building nuclear abroad.

Bobby Gallagher is the CEO of Deployable Energy whose reactor recently achieved criticality.

By 2030, they aim to deliver reactors within six months for ~15 cents/kWh.

⚛️ Take Action:
https://t.co/BxaxEvhEMt

[Daniel @ListenToLewko]

An Australian engineer built a micro nuclear reactor that can be mass-produced in months, fits on the back of a ute, with a 5 year refuel cycle - as simple as a swap-and-go gas bottle to replace. The fastest and lowest cost reactor build in American history. Trump called Australian Bobby Gallagher "one of the greatest in the world".

This is banned in Australia.

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

This is a very useful corrective to the conventional wisdom:

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.

- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.

- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.

- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.

- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.

Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.

New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. https://t.co/TsGJdcwG76

[Kelvin MacKenzie @kelvmackenzie]

Good piece by Times columnist Matthew Syed ( dad was a Muslim) demanding the end to an apartheid as bad as South Africa which exists in front of our very eyes - how women are treated by Islam.
He cites the face coverings, the suffering under the dominance of husbands encouraged by religious leaders, the cousin marriages, describing them as the prime mechanism knitting these insular communities together, and the Sharia courts ( almost all populated by men) which women go to for religious divorce while husbands can cancel marriages unilaterally.
There will be worse examples but I like this point he makes about the difficulty of ending an apartheid which he equates to South Africa;
“ It will be opposed by the Islamic patriarchs who control the bloc votes.
“ it will be opposed by their representatives in Parliament, the Gaza MPs and Labour members with large Muslim communities.
“ It will also be opposed by the ultra progressives in our institutions who called apartheid evil when perpetrated by whites but a “ cultural practice” when perpetrated by browns.”
So agree

[ib @Indian_Bronson]

My hottest take is that even now, if Australia went full bore on nuclear power, data centers, industrialization, militarization, dense urbanism, natalism, migration enforcement/restriction, etc. all as variations on the theme of “get rich & strong” it would come to surpass the US

[🖖🏾yestiseye @yestiseye]

"Australia has abundant coal, gas, wind and solar and around a third of the world’s uranium. To deliberately rule most of that out and attempt to run AI as a three-legged race is not a plan for victory. It is unilateral disarmament. In that race, we lose."
https://t.co/wu4FXReqQ9

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

A rare personal note. My dear friend Ivo (the dad) has a rare genetic liver disease (PSC) and has, after concerted persuasion from those of us who love him dearly, finally consented to a public appeal for a living donor.

Liver donation is quite miraculous in that one can give half and both halves grow back.

Fwiw, none of the AI models yet understand how to cure PSC, though I would bet that the next generation of humans will be more lucky.

I've never asked for RTs etc before but I think it would help in this case!

Link below.

[Nuclear for Australia @nuclearforaus]

🚨 Labor insiders have admitted that its inevitable Australia's nuclear power ban will be lifted.

The pressure is finally starting to work.

⚛️ Take Action & Learn More
https://t.co/BxaxEvhEMt

[Charles Haig @charles_haig01]

The most reasonable, insightful and thoughtful piece I’ve read about the Swans 5 https://t.co/lZ3dN9Vl7j

[Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki @MatthewWielicki]

1970. Yungay, Peru.

An earthquake triggered a colossal rock-and-ice avalanche from Nevado Huascarán. 50–100 million m³ of material raced ~14.5 km down the mountain and buried Yungay. More than 18,000 people were killed.

Atmospheric CO₂: ~326 ppm.

If a catastrophe like this happened today, climate attribution would immediately dominate the headlines. But catastrophic glacier, rock and debris flows have been occurring in high mountains for centuries... and the geological record at Huascarán shows repeated prehistoric events.

Put the emphasis where it can actually save lives: monitor unstable slopes and glaciers, map hazard zones, build warning systems, improve evacuation plans and make mountain communities more resilient.

We cannot prevent earthquakes or eliminate every mountain hazard by changing atmospheric CO₂. We can get much better at keeping people out of their path.

[Jaimee Michell @JaimeeUSA]

What a genocide looks like in population data — and what it doesn’t.

[Q-CTRL @qctrlHQ]

We have achieved the world’s first #maritime field demonstration of #GPS-free quantum gravimetric navigation!

Ironstone Opal maintained 1 NM positioning accuracy over the mission duration and surpassed navigation-grade GNSS backups by more than 10 times.

https://t.co/DNxKmx39zx

[Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki @MatthewWielicki]

I’ve spent many weeks doing fieldwork in Tibet, sitting above these enormous, deeply incised Himalayan river systems and seeing firsthand just how geologically active this landscape is.

So spare me the climate-change grift every time a natural disaster strikes.

Catastrophic glacial outburst floods are not new. The 1981 Zhangzangbo GLOF released ~20 million m³ of water and debris into Nepal, with estimated peak discharge approaching 16,000 m³/s. The Himalayas experienced enormous GLOFs long before today's atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.

If it happened naturally in the past, we should expect it to happen naturally again in the future—regardless of atmospheric CO₂.

Turning a horrific loss of life into an immediate climate-change narrative without demonstrating that CO₂ caused this particular event isn't attribution. It's opportunism.

And the people exploiting tragedy to do it are grifters.

[A.R.M @13arm13arm]

6 min and 42 sec of what "dodgy" FSD V12 can do in a market where it was never released.
It's important to keep in mind this is an almost nine year old car running a “magic box” that tricks it into activating the Full Self-Driving software (v12.6.4) - a version that has only ever been released to left hand drive markets. Compared to a HW4 car, this Model X has lower resolution external and no cabin cameras.
People paid $10–11k for "FSD Capability" more than seven years ago and still have nothing official to show for it. Instead, they’re left hunting down potentially dangerous unofficial mods just to get their FSD “fix” to try and justify them not wasting their money on what is essentially vapourware.
Stop mucking us around @TeslaAUNZ and be honest to your long suffering customers, tell us exactly what is happening with FSD for all HW3 cars

[Luke @luke_leisher_]

What did you people think Kardashev 2 meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?