“Mr Edwards left the BBC in April.”

No experience myself, but one of the fitness YouTubers I like posted this recently: https://youtu.be/_ro-YvnLF-4

The real question is why did they install a system based on 5.25" floppy disks in 1998 in the first place!?

The 5.25" floppy was surpassed by the 3.5" floppy by 1988 - ten years prior to this systems installation - and by 1998 most new software was being distributed on CD-ROM. So by my reckoning, in 1998 they installed a ‘new’ system based on hardware that was 1.5 generations out-of-date and haven’t updated it in the 26 years since.

At Kuala Lumpa International Airport half the signs were like this near our gate a couple weeks ago…

Yep, especially surface mount lithium batteries - they’re very sensitive to the solder reflow profile being juuuust right

I’ve found all of the tabs on Google have a tendency to go AWOL these days - like the other day I was searching for camera lenses and Google took away the ‘Products’ (formerly kmown as ‘Shopping’) tab, even though what I was searching for couldn’t have been more obviously a product. Instead, all I could get were super low quality copy-paste blogs vaguely related to the product.

Fun fact: While metric predates our full understanding of electricity, our understanding of electricity played a key role in the definition of the SI units.

As I understand it, the reason the SI unit for mass is kg not g - making it an outlier to my mind - is so that electical engineers could keep volts and amperes as convenient numbers.

Long read: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.07306

I agree it’s good that the article is not hyping up the idea that the world will now definitely be saved by fusion and so we can all therefore go on consuming all the energy we want.

There are still some sloppy things about the article that disappoint me though…

1. They seem to be implying that 500 TW is obviously much larger than 2.1 MJ… but without knowing how long the 500 TW is required for, this comparison is meaningless.

2. They imply that using more power than available from the grid is infeasible, but it evidently isn’t as they’ve done it multiple times - presumably by charging up local energy storage and releasing it quickly. Scaling this up is obviously a challenge though.

3. The weird mix of metric prefixes (mega) and standard numbers (trillions) in a single sentence is a bit triggering - that might just be me though.