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The Super-Kamiokande is a gigantic tank full of ultra-pure water, lined with hundreds of glass bulbs with ultra-sensitive detectors. It, like the Canadian SNO+ detector, was buried over a mile under tons of rock to shield it from cosmic rays. The goal of these gigantic underground tanks? To detect neutrinos.

Neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are some of the most abundant particles in the universe, but can fly through miles of rock without interacting with a single atom. The Super-Kamiokande was operating to do the same, and help detect supernova that explode massive amounts of the particles. The SNO+ detector was the first to detect an antineutrino in 2018 – from a nuclear reactor operating over 150 miles away.

Despite planning, the Super-Kamiokande experience a catastrophic failure on November 12, 2001. One of the photomultiplier tubes imploded. Despite having thought of this issue,  in a chain reaction, as the shock wave from the concussion of each imploding tube cracked its neighbors. Around 6,600 tubes were destroyed in just moments. The detector was partially restored by redistributing the photomultiplier tubes which did not implode, and by adding protective acrylic shells that are hoped will prevent another chain reaction from recurring

A great dive into the crazy physics that go into chip making.

Nightdive Studios is on a mission to bring back lost and forgotten games. They have released some very true to the original updates of games like Quake, System Shock, Turok, and Dark Forces.

They also act as kind of preservationists. They contact the original studios to archive and include a lot of extras with the games. Quake 2 includes behind-the-scenes making of the game with concept art, discarded enemies, videos, etc. The PC source code for the original System Shock was found in a subfolder on a Mac. The most recently did this with a re-release of one of my favorites: System Shock 2.

I hope they keep digging up these old classics and making them available for generations to come.

Small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) are generally defined as nuclear plants that top out at about 300 megawatts. That’s enough to run about 30,000 US homes. Advocates have been excited and spreading lots of hype. They claim the new designs are safer, cheaper, and faster to build. There are nearly 80 SMR projects currently in various stages of development around the world. SMR advocates have said these new designs are the answer to our future power needs.

The most recent IEEFA report looked at all these projects brought those aspirations back to a crashing reality. In fact, these SMR efforts have been shockingly similar to large, classical big nuclear projects. Many have massive 200-700% cost overruns and experiencing delays of 3-4 times longer than originally planned. Worse, they even have more financial and security risks than classical designs simply due to unknowns. Since these designs contain lots of newer and relatively untested ideas – there’s lots of risk of issues nobody thought of. These risks are especially true for long-term cost of operations/maintenance and end-of-life decommissioning.

Read more here

I bought the D&D cookbook “Heroes’ Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook” on a whim. To my surprise, it actually had some fun, and decent, recipes.

Besides the book, there was a whole TV series in which minor celebrities make the dishes and try them out. Pretty fun. You can watch it on Plex for free.

Jonsbo Mod5, DeepCool Quadstellar Infinity, Azza Pyramid. There’s some funky computer cases out there. Some even approach looking like modernist works of art. But there’s lots of oddball misses like pyramids and Ottomans. Even Apple has had a fair amount of duds for each of their design successes.

I’d love to see some artists really think about computer aesthetics. Some of the designs from the 1950’s or Kubrick’s 2001 look better than what we have today.