Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• From the Words I Didn't Know Until Yesterday Department: Forcemeat is meat ground sufficiently fine to make it cohere with a fat base, and mixed with spices and sometimes other ingredients before incorporating in pates, stuffings, and sausages.
• The Weather Channel is running saturation-level advertising for a "3D chalk" product from Crayola, which

Comments

Fusion

[anonymous]

I'm not a physicist, but I've been following the focus fusion guys for a couple years now. It doesn't look like a scam to me. They're not claiming any new physics, and not trying to raise a huge amount of money. They just have an off-the-wall idea and they're doing an experiment to see if it works, at roughly a thousandth the cost of ITER.

They're not the only ones. Robert Bussard (of ramjet fame) invented the "polywell" approach, which is now continuing (sadly without him) with renewed funding from the Navy. Reports so far are very positive.

Both approaches would work with boron fusion, which is non-radioactive except for minor side reactions. Both would make rockets good enough to start the kind of space age we sci-fi types have always dreamed of.

Another approach is General Fusion's, which is plain old deuterium fusion and probably no good for a rocket...but if they get it working I won't complain too much.

It seems to me that funding a lot of different approaches, especially the cheaper ones, is preferable to just spending tens of billions on ITER and laser ignition.