There are lots of generators/motors at conventional hydro power plants and pumped hydro storage systems that predate rare earth magnets. Weight is not an issue for them, so cheaper magnets are fine.
Interestingly, wind turbine companies are rapidly shifting away from rare earth magnets to electromagnets. Those are even lighter (and cheaper!) for a given field strength. Non-permanent magnets are a problem if you have to do a grid-wide black start -- see, eg, Spain/Portugal recently. I suspect that a battery installation big enough to jump start enough turbines to bring an entire farm back online has gotten quite cheap.
In 2024, an additional 38 GWh of grid-scale battery storage was deployed in the US. Almost all of that was lithium-ion. The biggest battery manufacturers look ready to start switching to sodium-ion for grid applications: it's safer, cheaper, uses less scarce materials, operates well over a wider temperature range, and the modest weight penalty doesn't matter.
My second session was at the beginning of the Great Recession and a billion dollars of state revenue evaporated. Programs had to be cut. I was glad I wasn't the staffer who said, "The governor's budget office calculation is wrong. Staff recommends ten days of furlough for all non-essential personnel, not the requested three." We took to letting all our calls go to voice messaging; having the people affected by the cuts we recommended scream at us in real time got old in a hurry.
The last part of my interview for a job with the Colorado legislature's joint budget committee was to take a bunch of information and with a 45-minute time limit, write a recommendation on what the committee should do. One of the JBC rules was that staff presentations always end with a "Staff recommends..." statement. The most common reason new analysts left at the end of the first session -- or sometimes mid-first session -- was that they had to choose. Not lay out six options and stop. Lay them out and say, "Staff recommends option three because..."
As I recall, it was less that no one was putting the information together than that the organizations were inadequately staffed. Immigration didn't have the resources to run down and deport everyone who overstayed their student visa. The FBI lacked the resources to check out every report of student pilots who were skipping the landing classes. It's not clear that slapping them all together under a DHS tag means those things are being done.
The fundamental problem, though, is that everyone's mindset towards hijackers hadn't changed for decades. 9/11 wouldn't have happened on Israeli planes because cockpit doors were reinforced and the protocol was that if a terrorist on the intercom said, "Open the cockpit door or I'll kill this flight attendant," the answer was "No, the door stays shut." Then land the plane at the nearest field that can take it and then hit the big red button that disables the engines.
DHS, of course, chose instead to greatly inconvenience millions of flyers every day in hopes of keeping anyone from sneaking a box cutter onto jets. I always recall a bit from The Loo Sanction many years ago:
Jonathan recalled an incident in Yokohama in which his assailant had ended with a Ticonderoga #3 driven in four inches between his ribs.
The world is full of weapons that don't look like weapons.
In epee sport fencing, the pressure test for the spring in the tip is 750 grams (26.4 ounces, a bit under two pounds). At least in the folklore, that's the pressure required to reach a vital organ with a well-sharpened object. A sharpened pencil isn't an ideal shape for it, but wouldn't take a whole lot more pressure.
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would -- and this sounds odd, but I'm looking for votes -- eliminate TSA and we'd go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.
Based on my time as part of the state legislative staff here, the state and local regulatory minefields are the bigger problem. At least for construction. Public K-12 schools across the country all look like big masonry blocks with, under all that concrete and brick, lots of steel. That's the only reasonable way to meet the state/local codes for structural integrity, fire resistance, etc for schools.
Eg, here all of the interior hallways are required to qualify as tornado shelters. When I was a kid, the standard was to be a bomb shelter in case of a nuclear attack.
This has been the subject of considerable debate here. Charter schools* don't have to meet the same construction code that the regular public schools do.
* Here, charter schools are part of the public school system, under the local school districts, but with some of the construction and personnel rules relaxed. The construction rules have to be relaxed; charter schools have to operate somewhere and nothing else is built to the K-12 standards.
The "We hate algebra 2, pre-calc, and most especially calculus" folks aren't ever going to stop coming. Nor are they going to allow substituting discrete math and algorithms, which might make sense. No, they're going to teach them enough probability and statistics to make them seriously dangerous.
Cite? The Ballers play in an MLB partner league, which is not officially any part of the MLB system. (We have a local team in the same league, the Ballers visit regularly.) As I understand it, players in the partner leagues aren't generally good enough to make any of the four single-A, advanced-A, double-A or triple-A official minor league levels.
Long ago in graduate school my housemate's and my emergency food, for when the money ran out a couple days before the end-of-the-month and our next paychecks, was a bag of onions, a big block of rat cheese in the bottom of the fridge, a couple of cans of really cheap local brand enchilada sauce, and the little old Mexican lady at one of the busy street corners making ten-for-a-quarter fresh corn tortillas. Austin Texas, 1977. Cheese and onion enchiladas get a little tired when it's the third day in a row.
He was the housemate who taught me to heat flour tortillas barehanded on a gas stove burner. We went on vacation for three weeks after our second year, doing day trips out from his Mom's house in San Jose. She caught me one night when I was hungry flipping tortillas barehanded on the gas stove. "You have," she said, "Entirely the wrong color skin to be doing that so well."
Yes, if you don't eat the free food at a faculty event, they take away your graduate student card. Even worse if you don't drink the free alcohol :^)
There's a chunk of the west where historically Bernie's done well in the primaries (see here, for example). He and AOC are drawing enthusiastic crowds in those same areas. Myself, I tend to think it's because they check the right boxes on gender, minority, and the environment.
Back in the mid-1990s, when it was still up in the air about which video compression technology would win, Microsoft bought up a bunch of little companies with interesting technologies. None of it went into MS's own algorithms, which remained painfully mediocre. They were just removing potential competitors from the playing field.
I've spent time during the last few months going back and cleaning up previous projects before starting a major new one. The last one on the list was reworking the audio/video chat toy I previously built for the granddaughters [1]. (The only person they can call is me.) The new version is physically smaller and simpler and the software has been cleaned up considerably.
http://mcain6925.com/ordinary/grandpavision.jpg
The new major project is being the family archivist, digitizing and organizing the huge piles of paper that have accumulated [2]. I haven't seen any document digitizing system that is both inexpensive and meets my list of desired features. So I'll be playing around with cheap hardware, chaining together some open-source software, and coding up some algorithm experiments of my own. Plus starting on the actual work, of course.
[1] 30+ years ago now I was doing research on multi-party multi-media communication over internet protocols. During COVID the granddaughters' school held Grandparents Day using Zoom. It was horrible! I dug out my old software and got it running on a Raspberry Pi. Back in the day it was all a '486 desktop PC could do to run this; the Pi just loafs along :^)
[2] For example, my uncle spent part-time during 20 years of retirement collecting stuff about that branch of the family and the tiny Iowa town where he and his siblings were born. When he died my aunt shipped all of his source material to my sister. One day my sister showed up with eight big plastic tubs containing all that stuff. Those are sitting in my basement now, without any sort of organization.
http://mcain6925.com/ordinary/boxes.small.jpg
Domestic cats kill on the order of a billion songbirds per year, just in the US. It's easy to tell you've moved into a neighborhood with a thriving feral cat colony because there are no squirrels or other small rodents, and no songbirds.
Are there any sports that aren't like this? When you're starting out and are terrible, you take great joy in the good things that happen. As you become accomplished, what you remember afterwards are the bad things.
ThTh1: No one seems to make a fuss about the women that SpaceX carries to orbit, on both government missions to the ISS and privately-funded flights. Also regarding Bezos and space flight, the space writers at Ars Technica have been pursuing reports and rumors, and believe the second certification flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn heavy-lift rocket will be delayed until at least October. A successful second flight is necessary for Bezos to qualify for the high-value payloads for NASA and national security.
When my children were small they would ask if it was the last snow of the season. I always told them no, because that way I was only wrong once. They eventually figured out that I was always going to say no, and quit asking.
As for AGI, what does the software do when no one is bothering it with questions or tasks? Does it consider the things it might spend cycles on, and choose from among them? As it does things, does it consider what it might add to, or subtract from, the set of things it might spend cycles on? Does the set include not answering the questions or assigned tasks? If not, it may be a clever tool, but it's not AGI.
It's not an either-or situation. Well, I guess it is if you start from the position, "I want REEs mined and refined in the US to be as cheap as what China produces." It doesn't have to be an either-or situation. We can produce REEs in much cleaner fashion if we want to pay somewhat more.
Living downstream from mines that are still leaching toxic stuff into the surface water more than a century after they were abandoned, I'd be happier to see rapid commercialization of some of the new extraction technologies. Eg, the U of West Virginia has developed a method for extracting from the toxic runoff out of abandoned coal mines a couple of tons of rare earth elements per mine per year. A couple of public research universities, working with the DOE's national labs, have methods for extracting REEs from coal ash ponds.
[sarcasm] But tending an extraction facility that uses somewhat sophisticated chemistry isn't a manly job, like driving big earth movers to shovel whole mountain sides into giant ore crushers, and using a few million gallons per year of concentrated hydrochloric acid that no one knows how to dispose of nicely. [/sarcasm]
While Trump buddies up with Elon Musk, it's been Gwynne Shotwell that has built SpaceX into the powerhouse it is. She was employee #7, hired by Musk to find a COO. The story goes that whenever she suggested someone, Musk said, "They're not as good as you are, why don't you just take the job?" Eventually she did. According to folklore, she's one of the very few people on Earth that if she says, "Elon, shut up and listen for a minute," he shuts up and listens.
China has suspended exports of rare earths and rare-earth magnets. Not just to the US, to the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/business/china-rare-earths-exports.html
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/12/2025”
There are lots of generators/motors at conventional hydro power plants and pumped hydro storage systems that predate rare earth magnets. Weight is not an issue for them, so cheaper magnets are fine.
Interestingly, wind turbine companies are rapidly shifting away from rare earth magnets to electromagnets. Those are even lighter (and cheaper!) for a given field strength. Non-permanent magnets are a problem if you have to do a grid-wide black start -- see, eg, Spain/Portugal recently. I suspect that a battery installation big enough to jump start enough turbines to bring an entire farm back online has gotten quite cheap.
"
In 2024, an additional 38 GWh of grid-scale battery storage was deployed in the US. Almost all of that was lithium-ion. The biggest battery manufacturers look ready to start switching to sodium-ion for grid applications: it's safer, cheaper, uses less scarce materials, operates well over a wider temperature range, and the modest weight penalty doesn't matter.
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
My second session was at the beginning of the Great Recession and a billion dollars of state revenue evaporated. Programs had to be cut. I was glad I wasn't the staffer who said, "The governor's budget office calculation is wrong. Staff recommends ten days of furlough for all non-essential personnel, not the requested three." We took to letting all our calls go to voice messaging; having the people affected by the cuts we recommended scream at us in real time got old in a hurry.
"
The last part of my interview for a job with the Colorado legislature's joint budget committee was to take a bunch of information and with a 45-minute time limit, write a recommendation on what the committee should do. One of the JBC rules was that staff presentations always end with a "Staff recommends..." statement. The most common reason new analysts left at the end of the first session -- or sometimes mid-first session -- was that they had to choose. Not lay out six options and stop. Lay them out and say, "Staff recommends option three because..."
On “The Department of Good Things”
As I recall, it was less that no one was putting the information together than that the organizations were inadequately staffed. Immigration didn't have the resources to run down and deport everyone who overstayed their student visa. The FBI lacked the resources to check out every report of student pilots who were skipping the landing classes. It's not clear that slapping them all together under a DHS tag means those things are being done.
The fundamental problem, though, is that everyone's mindset towards hijackers hadn't changed for decades. 9/11 wouldn't have happened on Israeli planes because cockpit doors were reinforced and the protocol was that if a terrorist on the intercom said, "Open the cockpit door or I'll kill this flight attendant," the answer was "No, the door stays shut." Then land the plane at the nearest field that can take it and then hit the big red button that disables the engines.
DHS, of course, chose instead to greatly inconvenience millions of flyers every day in hopes of keeping anyone from sneaking a box cutter onto jets. I always recall a bit from The Loo Sanction many years ago:
The world is full of weapons that don't look like weapons.
In epee sport fencing, the pressure test for the spring in the tip is 750 grams (26.4 ounces, a bit under two pounds). At least in the folklore, that's the pressure required to reach a vital organ with a well-sharpened object. A sharpened pencil isn't an ideal shape for it, but wouldn't take a whole lot more pressure.
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would -- and this sounds odd, but I'm looking for votes -- eliminate TSA and we'd go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.
"
Based on my time as part of the state legislative staff here, the state and local regulatory minefields are the bigger problem. At least for construction. Public K-12 schools across the country all look like big masonry blocks with, under all that concrete and brick, lots of steel. That's the only reasonable way to meet the state/local codes for structural integrity, fire resistance, etc for schools.
Eg, here all of the interior hallways are required to qualify as tornado shelters. When I was a kid, the standard was to be a bomb shelter in case of a nuclear attack.
This has been the subject of considerable debate here. Charter schools* don't have to meet the same construction code that the regular public schools do.
* Here, charter schools are part of the public school system, under the local school districts, but with some of the construction and personnel rules relaxed. The construction rules have to be relaxed; charter schools have to operate somewhere and nothing else is built to the K-12 standards.
"
The "We hate algebra 2, pre-calc, and most especially calculus" folks aren't ever going to stop coming. Nor are they going to allow substituting discrete math and algorithms, which might make sense. No, they're going to teach them enough probability and statistics to make them seriously dangerous.
On “Gender Critical: Legally Defining Sex”
Cite? The Ballers play in an MLB partner league, which is not officially any part of the MLB system. (We have a local team in the same league, the Ballers visit regularly.) As I understand it, players in the partner leagues aren't generally good enough to make any of the four single-A, advanced-A, double-A or triple-A official minor league levels.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Found a New Dinner to Add to the Rotation”
Long ago in graduate school my housemate's and my emergency food, for when the money ran out a couple days before the end-of-the-month and our next paychecks, was a bag of onions, a big block of rat cheese in the bottom of the fridge, a couple of cans of really cheap local brand enchilada sauce, and the little old Mexican lady at one of the busy street corners making ten-for-a-quarter fresh corn tortillas. Austin Texas, 1977. Cheese and onion enchiladas get a little tired when it's the third day in a row.
He was the housemate who taught me to heat flour tortillas barehanded on a gas stove burner. We went on vacation for three weeks after our second year, doing day trips out from his Mom's house in San Jose. She caught me one night when I was hungry flipping tortillas barehanded on the gas stove. "You have," she said, "Entirely the wrong color skin to be doing that so well."
Yes, if you don't eat the free food at a faculty event, they take away your graduate student card. Even worse if you don't drink the free alcohol :^)
On “A Backlash Is Coming”
There's a chunk of the west where historically Bernie's done well in the primaries (see here, for example). He and AOC are drawing enthusiastic crowds in those same areas. Myself, I tend to think it's because they check the right boxes on gender, minority, and the environment.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/28/2025”
Back in the mid-1990s, when it was still up in the air about which video compression technology would win, Microsoft bought up a bunch of little companies with interesting technologies. None of it went into MS's own algorithms, which remained painfully mediocre. They were just removing potential competitors from the playing field.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Found a New Dinner to Add to the Rotation”
I've spent time during the last few months going back and cleaning up previous projects before starting a major new one. The last one on the list was reworking the audio/video chat toy I previously built for the granddaughters [1]. (The only person they can call is me.) The new version is physically smaller and simpler and the software has been cleaned up considerably.
http://mcain6925.com/ordinary/grandpavision.jpg
The new major project is being the family archivist, digitizing and organizing the huge piles of paper that have accumulated [2]. I haven't seen any document digitizing system that is both inexpensive and meets my list of desired features. So I'll be playing around with cheap hardware, chaining together some open-source software, and coding up some algorithm experiments of my own. Plus starting on the actual work, of course.
[1] 30+ years ago now I was doing research on multi-party multi-media communication over internet protocols. During COVID the granddaughters' school held Grandparents Day using Zoom. It was horrible! I dug out my old software and got it running on a Raspberry Pi. Back in the day it was all a '486 desktop PC could do to run this; the Pi just loafs along :^)
[2] For example, my uncle spent part-time during 20 years of retirement collecting stuff about that branch of the family and the tiny Iowa town where he and his siblings were born. When he died my aunt shipped all of his source material to my sister. One day my sister showed up with eight big plastic tubs containing all that stuff. Those are sitting in my basement now, without any sort of organization.
http://mcain6925.com/ordinary/boxes.small.jpg
On “Cats Are The Best: An Annotated List”
Domestic cats kill on the order of a billion songbirds per year, just in the US. It's easy to tell you've moved into a neighborhood with a thriving feral cat colony because there are no squirrels or other small rodents, and no songbirds.
On “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”
Are there any sports that aren't like this? When you're starting out and are terrible, you take great joy in the good things that happen. As you become accomplished, what you remember afterwards are the bad things.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Caffeine Rituals”
I'm at that in-between point. My children are past the marrying stage, and my granddaughters haven't got there yet.
On “Somebody is Always Taking the Joy out of Life”
Stereoscope. The joy in life clearly extends to illusions of depth in still images, as well as in movies.
On “Throughput: Telling Women They’re Womening Wrong, But In Space”
ThTh1: No one seems to make a fuss about the women that SpaceX carries to orbit, on both government missions to the ISS and privately-funded flights. Also regarding Bezos and space flight, the space writers at Ars Technica have been pursuing reports and rumors, and believe the second certification flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn heavy-lift rocket will be delayed until at least October. A successful second flight is necessary for Bezos to qualify for the high-value payloads for NASA and national security.
On “From Marginal Revolution: o3 and AGI, is April 16th AGI day?”
Anyone who can't pass that test shouldn't be let out without a keeper.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Fell For It Again”
When my children were small they would ask if it was the last snow of the season. I always told them no, because that way I was only wrong once. They eventually figured out that I was always going to say no, and quit asking.
On “From Marginal Revolution: o3 and AGI, is April 16th AGI day?”
As for AGI, what does the software do when no one is bothering it with questions or tasks? Does it consider the things it might spend cycles on, and choose from among them? As it does things, does it consider what it might add to, or subtract from, the set of things it might spend cycles on? Does the set include not answering the questions or assigned tasks? If not, it may be a clever tool, but it's not AGI.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
It's not an either-or situation. Well, I guess it is if you start from the position, "I want REEs mined and refined in the US to be as cheap as what China produces." It doesn't have to be an either-or situation. We can produce REEs in much cleaner fashion if we want to pay somewhat more.
"
HCl or other solvents are routine in the case of REEs in "normal" ores. In coal ash, they can take a different approach.
"
Living downstream from mines that are still leaching toxic stuff into the surface water more than a century after they were abandoned, I'd be happier to see rapid commercialization of some of the new extraction technologies. Eg, the U of West Virginia has developed a method for extracting from the toxic runoff out of abandoned coal mines a couple of tons of rare earth elements per mine per year. A couple of public research universities, working with the DOE's national labs, have methods for extracting REEs from coal ash ponds.
[sarcasm] But tending an extraction facility that uses somewhat sophisticated chemistry isn't a manly job, like driving big earth movers to shovel whole mountain sides into giant ore crushers, and using a few million gallons per year of concentrated hydrochloric acid that no one knows how to dispose of nicely. [/sarcasm]
"
While Trump buddies up with Elon Musk, it's been Gwynne Shotwell that has built SpaceX into the powerhouse it is. She was employee #7, hired by Musk to find a COO. The story goes that whenever she suggested someone, Musk said, "They're not as good as you are, why don't you just take the job?" Eventually she did. According to folklore, she's one of the very few people on Earth that if she says, "Elon, shut up and listen for a minute," he shuts up and listens.
"
China has suspended exports of rare earths and rare-earth magnets. Not just to the US, to the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/business/china-rare-earths-exports.html
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.