Excess Heat

Marc Andreessen is one of the earliest tech entrepreneurs of the information age, a Democrat and major league venture capitalist.  His many successes give reason to take his thoughts very seriously.  He has been quite skilled at recognizing value in the complex and competitive emerging fields.  Did all that recently change?  Probably not. This recent ZeroHedge article about a Joe Rogan interview of Andreessen is focused on the statements from Andreessen about meetings in Spring of 2024 with Biden officials.  Andreessen is influential for obvious reasons, besides being a fountain of capital to fuel the aspirations of tech innovators.  Influential people are those with whom politicians want to somehow join forces.  In this case, it backfired because of the policy that shocked Andreessen concerning startup businesses, which have been his 'bread and butter'. How does this differ from a merchant being approached by a mob made man who makes him 'an offer ...

I spent most of my FAA career in field installation work.  The last major project I worked was a new Airport Traffic Control Tower at Broomfield, Colorado .  This was to replace an existing ATCT that was poorly positioned and too short to view one of the entire runways.  I had only a portion of the engineering work assigned to me, which was installation of communications and RADAR .  The RADAR work there consisted of a display system that is fed out of Denver International Airport .  The project was a great success for all involved. During the review of the antenna placement on the roof, I was concerned about the possibility of multipath because the air-to-ground communications uses a very old form of modulation, AM , that is particularly susceptible to multipath.  Multipath is a condition where the signal transmitted by an antenna is reflected so that there are multiple transmission paths of differing lengths between the receiver and transmitter.  S...

I am an engineer.  Engines run on heat.  Sources of energy in any form are of basic interest to scientists and engineers.  Cold fusion experiments were supposed to be producing heat in quantities that exceeded what would be caused by the power used to drive them.  This was ridiculed as perpetual motion, but if a reaction of a type that was formerly unknown is occurring, it is not perpetual motion.  It is a discovery. My life during and since high school was in the shadow of the awareness that civilization consumes an extreme and steadily increasing amount of energy and that we live on a finite planet with an expanding population.  If we do not find a different way to power civilization, we may prove Malthus correct and discover a real need to reduce population by a large amount, or drastically decrease energy consumption per capita and that is potentially a very dismal prospect.  Even if we can get all the energy we need to live comfortably, the enviro...

Life is not a popularity contest for Randell Mills.  Yet, he is quite sociable and it seems that everyone who has had the chance to know him thinks highly of him.  He's not normal in the sense of being anywhere near average intelligence and I expect that made social interactions challenging many times.  His very intense desire to understand the world around him was evident at an early age and his high school chemistry teacher considered him to be of genius intellect.  His professor of physical chemistry, which is the subject that bridges the gap between chemistry and quantum mechanics, at Franklin and Marshall college, Dr. John Farrell , was deeply impressed with his student.  In a most extraordinary turn of events, the professor gradually became the student of the former student.  I know of no other example of a student convincing the professor that the understanding of the subject about which the professor is a recognized expert is mostly wrong.  Fer...