You Will Anyway: While we're consumed with Trump and fighting over wearing masks...

Monday, December 7, 2020

While we're consumed with Trump and fighting over wearing masks...

As we're busy taking America back to the 50s, China is forging the future.

China has switched on its record-setting “artificial sun” tokamak [Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak - EAST], state media reported today. This begins a timeline China hopes will be similar to the one planned by the global International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project.

[...]

In 2018, EAST made news when the tokamak reached 180 million degrees. In 2019, EAST pushed the boat out further and announced plans to double that temperature in 2020—reaching the tokamak's prime operating temperature of 360 million degrees.

[...]

Like many of the world’s tokamak experiments, EAST has reached fusion before. As a refresher, inside the donut-shaped (or, sometimes, more spherical) containment of a tokamak, sun-hot plasma swirls in a circle that’s held in place by supercooled electromagnets.

This magnetic field is the only thing floating between 360-million-degree plasma and a bunch of human-made materials that obviously can’t sustain that temperature. The plasma results from smashing different nuclei together, fusing them rather than splitting them.

[...]

This means the outside chambers of these tokamak reactors are usually cryogenically cooled masterpieces in their own right, able to withstand conditions that would buckle almost anything else in the world. And even with the best minds in the world working on this idea for decades, scientists still haven’t made productive plasma.

EAST reached plasma for 10 seconds in 2018, which is a major milestone. But it’s just the very, very beginning . . . of the beginning.

[...]

ITER and EAST work closely together, and China is part of the groundbreaking ITER collaboration in addition to its own fusion projects.

Popular Mechanics

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.