You swing around a couple of low hills, and all of the sudden you’re looking at Kansas. I mean, probably not, unless the flat-earth people are right (they’re not) but the view is epic – downtown to your right, Boulder and the Flatirons behind your left shoulder. Geologic dramatacism making space. Bad shit too, the sins of man – Rocky Mountain Flats, a pretty sketchy pile of nuclear poison, the bastard step child of the yet-to-be-unplugged military-industrial-complex sitting right there under three big ass wind turbines, so everything is ok, cause it’s Green now. The brown cloud of Denver sitting below you so, it’s kind of ok cause you’re not breathing it in theory? Also how is smog still a thing?

The trail tops out (again – its small, 90 feet of vertical from where you top out on the mesa, don’t be impressed), and there’s two crows – just playing in the sky with half the state as their backdrop (again no, cause flat earth is not a fucking thing). There was reasonable breeze coming up the mesa from the east and these dudes were loving it. Launching into sharp, frankly stupid (they didn’t ask me) dives into the head winds blowing up the headwall. I sat there for a good fifteen minutes just watching them dive and soar, at times making -– what bird noises? – maybe just joyful sounds as they played on thermals I’m not blessed with an understanding of. Diving off the mesa with a foot or less of clearance over the rim and then shooting up into the rarified Colorado air. Just joyful play. I guess they don’t understand the guy on the bike either, but at least we’re both enjoying the day.

For my Grandmother’s 90th birthday bash – being that she is was a medieval history major at Rice –  she wanted to see ancient ruins. With her initial suggestion of Syria probably out, we made do with Athens and Florence in (and I say this without hyperbole or excess) what was really a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Pictures

To me, this is just the latest troubling facet of a city – which i still love dearly – but has clearly grown too damn fast and is a victim of reading its own press-releases. Lets take a brief tour of where we stand:

• Affordable housing is a damned myth in this city, with voters nixing bond issues to support it and neighborhood associations engaging in trench warfare on increased density in the form of ‘granny flats’ – allowing single family homes to add small rentals or garage apartments on their properties.
• We prioritize heath-care for musicians over heath care for children and the families in poverty. I appreciate the benefits of a music scene in this city, but this is just stupid and morally wrong.
• Transportation has reached a mind-bogglingly inane level of incompetence – toll lanes on Mopac, but very little actual extra road, Toll projects that make no sense, a metro-rail alignment that – holy shit where do you even start with that? We’re going to build a $600M train to take everyone from Highland Mall to East Riverside, instead of the Guad–Lamar alignment that most people asked for?
• We’re going to run out of water.
• Looking at Transportation on a regional level should have started years ago – that anyone can look at I-35 and say, ‘hrm yeah, that seems like an ok situation,” is border-line insane. Regional rail is starting to come into the conversation, but honestly its five-years late.
• Seriously, we are going to run out of water – why is no one else worried about this?
• Back to the earlier point – Austin may actually be the most racially divided city in the state. Nobody likes to talk about it, and more importantly little is being done about it (see above).

Perhaps geographic city council districts (10-1) will be the start of fixing some of this, but as someone whose been here for 12 years of boom-town, it’s hard to see a place i love turned into another characterless urban jungle. Time will tell i guess if we can address our real problems and turn this into the real city it has the potential to be, or if we just continue to focus on keeping it weird for the sake of the tourists.

If a 22-year-old Muslim man stabbed his roommates to death in their sleep, embarked on a killing spree, and claimed in written and video manifestos that he acted to teach hated women a lesson, there’s little doubt that many would label him a terrorist. That label was scarcely appended to the Santa Barbara killer after his murders.

And if a Muslim couple stormed into a fast-food restaurant armed with a duffel bag full of military gear, shouted, “This is the beginning of the revolution!” and pinned a flag associated with their political movement to the dead bodies of the police officers they executed at point-blank range—then killed another innocent person and carried out a suicide pact rather than being taken alive—there is no doubt that many media outlets would refer to the premeditated attack as an act of terrorism. With a few exceptions, that’s not how this week’s news from Las Vegas played out.

More…

…studies released this week are announcing a bleak future for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — and an accompanying sea-level rise across the globe. Both groups of researchers conclude that global warming is accelerating the disintegration of large parts of the ice sheets, and that the melting that is already under way is likely unstoppable. This, the researchers say, will eventually cause global sea levels to rise by at least 10 feet.

The first study, published today in Science by researchers at the University of Washington, used computer modeling and topography maps to conclude that the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier, an extremely large glacier flowing into Pine Island Bay, is already underway. This process, the researchers say, could be completed within the next few centuries and would cause the ocean to rise by nearly 2 feet. Furthermore, because that glacier is currently acting as a barrier for the rest of the ice sheet, its collapse could ultimately trigger a 10-13 foot rise in global sea levels.

So this is what Galveston Bay would look like. Bleak.

The caution seems especially important in a culture that increasingly celebrates startups, threatening to confuse their mythmaking with reality. Agassi made great Kool-Aid and then drank it all himself.

“Everything we needed to go right went wrong,” says one former employee. “Every cost on our spreadsheet wound up being double, every time factor took twice as long.” There was profligacy, marketing problems, hiring problems, problems with every conceivable part of the business. There was questionable oversight by the company’s board of directors. There was bad luck. And there was hubris. “There was nothing normal about Better Place,” says Pross. “It was spectacular. Shai always said, ‘If we go down, we’ll make a lot of noise.'”

Agassi’s startup lived fast and died young, and left almost nothing behind beyond the car that Pross and I are sitting in. Better Place sold fewer than 1,500 vehicles. Its swap stations, located next to gas stations and near highway on-ramps, closed last year. Their once-gleaming white walls, inspired by Apple’s design, are increasingly caked in dirt.

Better Place is a tragicomic case study of the limits of innovation, the difficulties of getting consumers to embrace new technology, and the perils of believing your own bullshit. What follows is the story of how that happened: a step-by-step guide to the most spectacularly failed technology startup of the 21st century.

An excellent writeup of venture capital plus ego equalling vaporware. 

The most critical part of the reaction, and one that had been a real concern for Hurricane’s team, is the shape of the fuel capsule. The capsule is made from a polymer and is about 2mm in diameter (about the size of a pinhead). On the inside it is coated with deuterium and tritium—isotopes of hydrogen—that are frozen to be in a solid state.

This capsule is placed inside a gold cylinder, where the 192 lasers are fired, hitting the capsule and causing a fusion reaction. The lasers hit the gold container, which emit X-rays, which heat the pellet and make it implode instantly, causing a fusion reaction. According to Debbie Callahan, a co-author of the study: “When the lasers are fired, the capsule is compressed 35 times. That is like compressing a basketball to the size of a pea.”

The compression produces immense pressure and temperature, leading to a fusion reaction. Problems with the process were overcome last September, when, for the first time, Hurricane was able to produce more energy output from a fusion reaction than the fuel put into it. Since then he has been able to repeat the experiment.

The article also explains the differences between inertial confinement fusion (ICF or lots of big damn lasers) and magnetic confinement fusion (MCF or lots of big damn magnets). With the amount of criticism heaped on Livermore Labs over it’s apparent failure to produce results, it’s good to see them get one for the win column.