Interesting Links for 27-04-2016

[andrewducker]

What if you could always have the _best_ advice? (tags: philosophy short_story thefuture Technology advice viaJack ) Portishead Recorded a Cover of Abba's "SOS": Listen to it. Although possibly not on the bus, as it just made me cry on the way to the doctor's.
(tags: music sad ) What scientists learned when they bribed babies with crackers (tags

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

We might be approaching cost effective extraction of uranium from seawater but unfortunately we're not approaching cost effective nuclear reactors.

On a levelised cost basis fuel makes up about 5% of the cost of electricity from a nuclear power plant. You could half the cost of fuel and your nuclear energy would still cost 97.5%. Capital and financing costs make up about 85% of the levelised cost. Much of those costs are driven by the health, safety and environmental regulation of nuclear energy - which may, or may not, be too strict or too lax depending on your view.

It's nice to know we can get at the stuff but I suspect the uranium is likely to stay in the sea for the next hundred years or so whilst we burn the last of our natural gas reserves and stick up windfarms and solar panels. Only when we discover that we're short of energy then or if the manufacturers of nuclear reactors can get themselves both cheap and safe does it make sense to start extracting lots of uranium from sea water - or anywhere else.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - nuclear power still seems to be having problems being both safe and cheap. Maybe some day...

[nojay]

Nuclear power IS safe compared to hydrocarbon-fuelled power generation. it's scary though, unlike our old familiar friends like coal, gas and oil that brought us Aberfan, Brent Alpha, Deepwater Horizon...

Extraction of uranium from seawater still has some way to go to beat conventional extraction costs -- minehead yellowcake (U3O8) is currently priced at $27.60 a pound (the market is US based, don't blame me for the weird mass units). There's an oversupply of the world market for fresh uranium feedstock for enrichment while Russia and China are pressing ahead with developing their spent fuel reprocessing capabilities which would undercut the mining industry even more.

[andrewducker]

Nobody said it wasn't safe - just that it's having problems being both safe and cheap. Hopefully some day it will manage both.

[danieldwilliam]

Is Maisie Williams considered a good actress by people who watch Game of Thrones?

[andrewducker]

I'd say she was good in it. Different to her role in Doctor Who too.

Why?

[danieldwilliam]

People seemed very excited about her being in Doctor Who. I was unimpressed but prepared to put that down to the script and my general disgruntlement with the Moffat - a Mofftaint.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. Dr Who is much more panto. She does does serious well.

Would you like to borrow my Box Set of Season one of Game Of Thrones?

[steer]

I'm not sure how this is better than any other method of tracking money.

If you leave the "bitcoin" part out blockchain is actually a pretty good protocol -- it generates a verifiable distributed ledger between mutually untrusting entities and establishes consensus when contradictory entries are published. It's really so much more than bitcoin (which is really simply a distributed ledger for tracking who "owns" the answer to the results of certain proof-of-work computations). Take out the proof-of-work part and replace that with any other data you want to store and you have a really interesting system in its own right.

Discussion of bitcoin often focuses on the mining but it's actually the ledger which is the cool part. I was part of a consortium seeking funding for blockchain research recently (I'm not a domain expert on it) don't know yet if we'll get the money but it's definitely something I'm looking forward to working on if we do.

[cartesiandaemon]

Oh! That's a really interesting point.

[channelpenguin]

with software dev - my 2ps worth. Web stuff is fiddlier. Security stuff has always been complex. There's been ever greater requirement for both - hence I'd guess that couöd be 2 good reasons for an increasing bug rate (if there is one).

[skington]

Personally, I think it's just the OP. I haven't seen anything like this amount of fail in my everyday interactions with computers.

[skington]

The audio for the Portishead track has been pulled. If you didn't get to listen to it, imagine the ABBA song but without the melody or chords.

[snarlish]

It was used to good effect in the film. All in all a good soundtrack.

I'd pretty much say 'imagine Portishead covering an ABBA song' would work better.

[skington]

I listened to it once last night before the audio was pulled, and it's quite possible that if I listened to it a few more times I'd like it more.

I agree that it sounded like Portishead, and it made the lyrics sound good. I just object to it throwing all of the rest of the song away.