Brandon Currie

Senior Consultant and Web Practice Lead, @Perry_Group. Helping municipalities and public sector orgs improve their websites so users can get stuff done.

[Josh Hart @joshhart]

Argentina = Knicks

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

In a workshop on the outskirts of Bletchley (it had to be there, didn't it), on the 26th of March this year, a small British company called Pulsar Fusion did something that has not been done by any other company or government on Earth.

It ignited a controlled plasma inside the test chamber of a working nuclear fusion rocket engine.

The plasma held, along with the chamber. The fusion reaction was the kind of reaction that, contained inside a sufficiently engineered magnetic bottle, will one day take a crewed British vehicle to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months, and that will, within the working lifetime of the engineers presently building it, make the outer planets of the solar system accessible to anyone with a British passport.

The geography of the achievement deserves a longer moment of pause. Bletchley, in 1942, was where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma cipher and almost certainly shortened the war in Europe by two years. Pulsar Fusion's headquarters sits roughly 600 yards from the Hut where they did it.

The country that did the maths inside that hut has just, less than a mile down the road, ignited the plasma that could power the next century of human space travel. There is a continuity of British scientific lineage here that is, on the face of it, almost embarrassingly providential, and it is almost completely unreported in the British press.

It's not quite Kitty-Hawk-to-the-moon in 61 years, but it's close.

Like so many great companies of profound importance, Pulsar Fusion is pretty small. It was founded in 2013, and employs around 50 staff. Its chief executive, Richard Dinan, is a working British physicist who has spent the last decade quietly assembling the team and the capital to do what the world's national space agencies have been promising for 60 years and consistently failing to deliver.

The competing American programmes, principally at NASA's Glenn Research Center and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, are years behind on the propulsion side. The competing Chinese programmes are obscure but, on what is known publicly, also behind. The European Space Agency is, as ever, organising a workshop. Pulsar fired its plasma in March and has been preparing the next-stage tests in the months since.
What this kind of capability means, when commercialised, is genuinely vast.

The economic argument for getting a payload to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months is not principally about the human passengers, though there is one. It is about cargo. Given a 30-day transit, Mars becomes a logistically tractable destination for the kind of infrastructure-build that turns it from a flag-planting science mission into a working industrial site.

The argument for the outer planets is even larger. The asteroid belt alone, on conservative mineralogical estimates, contains more economically viable platinum-group metals than the entire crust of the Earth has been mined for in industrial history. The first country with reliable fusion propulsion is the first country with reliable access to that supply. The country that holds that capacity, fifty years from now, will be holding the most consequential industrial advantage of the 21st century, and there is no obvious second prize.

The standard British response to this kind of thing is to either ignore it entirely, sell the company to an American buyer at series B (the DeepMind path) for fire-sale prices, or fund it at the level of a Whitehall departmental tea and coffee budget (the Skycutter and Orbex paths).

The standard British response will not be sufficient. Pulsar Fusion needs the kind of patient capital that turns a working demonstration into an operational engine, and that, in turn, into a manufacturing capability. The British state, on present form, is structurally incapable of providing it, British pension funds are structurally incapable of investing in it, and the British political class will, on present form, only notice if it somehow manages to swing a leadership election.

I wantt= Pulsar Fusion treated as a national-strategic asset, and beyond that as a potential subject of national destiny.

The Sovereign AI Fund that backed Ineffable Intelligence has a clear template. The Prosperity Zone programme we designed at Progress that anchors heavy industry at SaxaVord and Teesside has the geographic flexibility to include a fusion-propulsion cluster in Buckinghamshire, six miles from the most evocative site in modern British scientific history.

The procurement architecture of every major British defence and space agency should, from this autumn, be writing offtake contracts contingent on Pulsar's milestones. There's nothing extreme about these ideas. We could have been doing it decades ago.

I always conceived of Britain as being as much among the stars as it is on Earth. To buy into the idea of Britain as a culture and polity is necessarily to buy into the concept of the human being as an illimitable force. Our history is littered with happy instances of people of great fortitude hitting upon obstacles and, with a cry of "This will not stop us", clearing the way for our brothers and sisters to follow through.

A small British company in Bletchley has, while nobody was looking, extended that arm of our tradition, by accomplishing one of the most important pieces of scientific engineering of the decade.

The country that produced them is, in a measurable sense, the same country that produced the Bombe, the Colossus, the jet engine, the structure of DNA, and the World Wide Web. The capacity is intact. The political class capable of recognising it must catch up, and will.

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

We've built a model of our ideal municipal website.

How does yours compare?

To find out, we turned our model into a short self-assessment. Answer 14 questions questions and you'll get an instant diagnosis of your site's health:

https://t.co/eRVtGXFK9K

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

@Steve_Lafleur @EvanRCameron Yep, Smile Tiger when you get off the train. Arabella Park for drinks/eats in the evening.

[Alistair Croll @acroll]

@digitaldaph @vasta @honeygolightly @Code4Luke @firebethfox @sboots @jessunscripted @fwd50conf @xiaopu @ebonysager @annawong10 @leejosh98 @jillc01 Quick reminder to folks on this thread that while @fwd50conf tickets go on sale shortly, if you work for a regional government (state, city, province, etc.) you can claim a pair of virtual tickets for that region for free as part of our Regional Access Pass program. ;)

[Skaidra Puodžiūnas @SkaidraP]

My team at the @ONdigital Service needs your help!

Recently start a business in Ontario? We would like your input on resources the government can provide to help you get started.

Participants who qualify and attend a session will get a $30 gift card:
https://t.co/UvhWUmPQbw

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

Same here in Waterloo at a regional clinic. You just nod along to acknowledge the shorter interval.

No big rigamarole around the risks, benefits, etc. You don't need to prepare a defence!

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

@jm_mcgrath Same here in Waterloo. Basically just had to nod along to acknowledge I was consenting to jabbing earlier than the 8 weeks.

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

@ConstantContact Your list review phone call process is sending me down a black hole every time. I say my info and it transfers me to *nobody*

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

@mikeboos No issues getting my 6 year old a second jab at 4 weeks at the Region’s boardwalk clinic. Would assume the same applies at any of their sites.

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

@ROWPublicHealth Does this mean I need to do anything other than answer some extra questions in the screening process?

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

@ROWPublicHealth Hi there - will you give a 5-11 second dose at less than the 8 week interval with informed consent?

[Waterloo Vaccine Tracker @watvaxtracker]

Many booster appointments added to Cambridge Pinebush (Moderna for 30+ and Pfizer-BioNTech for 5 to 29) between Dec. 29th & Jan. 9th.
Remember to refresh the Region of Waterloo booking site periodically as appointments may open up when people cancel. Link to site in bio.

[Waterloo Vaccine Tracker @watvaxtracker]

Hello Waterloo Region! 👋
We are back to help you with finding your third dose appointment. Stay tuned for updates!

[Spencer Daniels @spncrd]

Do you own or operate a new business? We need your support to improve services for new business owners on https://t.co/zTuD0eJtrJ!
60 minute session and a $60 gift card for attending. If you’re interested, please complete our 5 minute questionnaire:https://t.co/6FXBRLtDXC

[Kimiko Shibata 🦋 @ESL_fairy]

If your child brought a box of rapid tests home from school today, here is a slide deck with a clear how-to video and clear instructions in English and a few other languages to show you how and when to use the tests: https://t.co/769nePSzem #wrdsbMLL #OntEd

[Erin Anderson @erinbailey_a]

JUST IN: @ROWPublicHealth confirms local residents 18+ can use the regional system to book a booster shot appointment, as long as it’s scheduled for Jan. 4 and beyond — and the date is at least 168 days since your second dose. @CityNewsKIT

[Amy Hupe @Amy_Hupe]

There's a pervasive fear amongst some designers and devs of long pages of content.

They're often less of a problem for users than we imagine they will be - but we resort to tabs, accordions or details before we try out the simpler thing of The Big Long Page.

Why is that?

[Brandon Currie @brandoncurrie]

Great behind the scenes look at government content design by @Bridget_Antwi at #FWD50.

Got right into the weeds of how to redesign a service page based on user needs.

Loved the practicality and directness of this approach.