Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
At around 1h42m @Leo posits that “now we’d put a solar panel on the thing”… but of course, no we don’t if it’s headed further away from the Sun than say the asteroid belt. The sun just doesn’t provide enough power to the further reaches of the solar system, and certainly would be completely useless once the device gets past Pluto, let alone leaving the solar system completely.
I just wanted to point out that the “golem” associated with the 23AndMe hack would be the clay figure from Jewish lore (Golem - Wikipedia), not “Gollum” from J. R. R. Tolkien lore.
If you’re curious how I know this, it’s not because I’m well verse in Jewish or Tolkien literature. It’s because I’ve watched too many reruns of the Simpsons (Golem of Prague | Simpsons Wiki | Fandom). However, I do have enough knowledge of either of the former to know they are not spelt the same, and even if a person is only familiar withe the written lore, I do not think anyone would pronounce the names the same way.
It sounds like Leo was thinking about the Roman Empire again halfway through the show.
D’oh. Of course, Golem not Golllum. But then, Golem don’t have a distinctive voice I can imitate.
The classic Golem story is Isaac Basevis Singer’s The Golem but I also like Terry Pratchett’s take on Golem’s in the Discworld Series (a must read if you haven’t) and in particular Feets of Clay in which the hero is a Golem!
Regarding the comments on nuclear power. We absolutely would have been better off with from a climate and health standpoint with nuclear power instead of coal or gas. Estimates vary but somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people a year in the U.S. die prematurely from air pollution from coal plants. So far as I can tell, no one in the U.S. who was not a worker in the plant has ever died from an accident at a nuclear power reactor.
Regarding fusion reactors, I am a strong believer in their potential and they do not produce high level waste but they produce a lot of low level radioactive waste (which is the vast majority of the waste from fission reactors as well).