Reece Howe

[Pat Condell @patcondell]

As if they haven't suffered enough.

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

@UKLabour 'Stealing your money - and spending it on toast'
Feel free to use that one, lads

[Burnside @BurnsideWasTosh]

@Keir_Starmer Mr Nowak made it clear that his son was not treated with the kindness extended to the murderer. He did not say "whatever you do don't ask questions about 2 tier policing". You are, without doubt, the most shameless person to be PM, and that is saying something.

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@DavidLammy It’s not accurate that only men have a prostate, @DavidLammy. I understand women can grow them too.

[Edward Dutton @jollyheretic]

For a police officer to address a man, let alone Henry Nowak as he lay dying, as 'mate' rather than 'sir' is just the ultimate evidence of contempt for the English public and should, in itself, merit a jail sentence.

[BLAIM GAME @BLAIMGame]

@GBPolitcs The Prime Minister shouldn’t need the Speaker to tell him when he needs to show a minimal level of humanity.

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@Doinkadect Astrophysics 20 years ago used to be a guarantee of a good / great salary straight out of uni, and is one of the hardest degrees going. Commenters talking it down probably failed GCSE maths

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@JakeJK666 @SW_Help You know the monkey grape cucumber experiment? I’m the monkey who got the cucumber

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

.@SW_Help why do I have to pay £30 to travel into London while your lazy Woking staff stand around and do nothing when someone pushes through the barriers? And tell me it’s not worth doing anything about it?

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@UU_Ess_Pee @kuta_isi @SW_Help According to the replies, I gather you have to pay much more than NMW for that person to be willing to contact said police officers 🤷‍♂️

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@jon_warburton @SW_Help OK sure, guy was maybe travelling a short distance, not into a London, one-way, off peak, so what’s the big deal.

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

To clarify, there were 4 staff standing at the gate, so I expected each one to grab and hold a limb until the SAS helicopter turns up. Failing that, maybe reporting it or calling fare enforcement or BTP would have been nice to see

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@kuta_isi @SW_Help What’s the hourly rate you have to pay to get people to do stuff, if minimum wage gets you nothing

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@Rielle212 @SW_Help It is painful. And if they're not going to enforce the rules then they could reduce our fares by removing the cost of ticket inspectors.

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@kuta_isi @SW_Help "minimum wage"

[Reece Howe @reecehowe]

@UU_Ess_Pee @SW_Help Why so defensive about expecting everyone who uses a service to have to pay the same amount?

[Bennie🕊️ @Bennieeexyz]

A couple of years ago I was about to propose to my girlfriend.

Ring in hand. Speech prepared. Everything ready.

My roommate Joseph burst through the door out of nowhere, tripped over absolutely nothing, and fell face first through a glass table.

Me: (ring still in hand)

Me: (staring at Joseph on the floor)

Me: (staring at the shattered table)

Me: (staring at my girlfriend)

Mood: gone.

Joseph got a large piece of glass in his eye. Was walking around with a cotton pad over it for two months. I put the proposal on hold and helped him through the whole thing because that's what you do.

Then one day Joseph was gone.

My girlfriend was also gone.

Together.

Apparently they bonded during his recovery. Eloped without leaving a single note. I tried to find them. Never could.

So if you've ever wondered why I'm not married right now.

It's because if it hadn't been for cotton eye Joe I'd have been married a long time ago.

Where did you come from.

Where did you go.

Where did you come from cotton eye Joe.

[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.

[Real Jose Galvan @Jose_Galvan]

“He’s looking for the ketchup. Tell him it’s there and when he can’t find it, walk over and when you open the fridge the bottle will slide down from the secret compartment”

[Jordanreviewsittt @jordanreviewsit]

He’s going to the post office. Add 10 people in line who have never mailed anything in their entire life