The fissure is still growing and is about 4 km now, and I’ve been following along the national radio RÚV[1]. There is a map of the fissure and the live stream angles there[2] (hopefully the link works). Based on it looks like the southern reach is near Gálgaklettar (N 63° 52' 4", W 22° 24' 20") and the northern reach is passed Stóra Skógarfell (N 63° 53' 53", W 22° 21' 39").
As a technical founder this book on negotiation was highly valuable: "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It". Negotiation is a skill you need as a startup founder that is not necessarily needed for technical work.
"Innovators Dilemma" - helps put in perspective acceptable state of early products and good strategies for deploying new innovative products
I thought that Voss's work as an FBI negotiator negated a lot of his advice. With the FBI, the building is surrounded, and the criminal is forced to negotiate with him. There are no alternatives, and there's a threat of violent action being taken against the criminal if the negotiations are refused or dont go the way Voss wants.
In business, the person on the other side has alternatives and they can walk away at any time. They don't even have to talk to you. You can be rejected because of the most minor thing or nothing at all. People say "no" all the time, and you can't send your coworkers into the building to murder them for it.
Voss just ignores the violent threat the criminal faces, and pretends the criminal is talking to him freely. But everyone in his negotiations knows every word he says is backed up with the threat of violence.
I dropped it about 2/3 through because too much of it was reading as plainly-bullshit. "I got a great deal on my truck by just saying 'how can I do that?' over and over! Here's how it went!" LOL, no you didn't, and no it didn't, and now I'm wondering whether literally any of your other stories were even a little true.
I got a very little bit out of it, but the useful bit could have been a blog post. The rest was egotistical crap that seemed to mainly be content-marketing for his business.
It's been a while and I cant remember if that was a hypothetical applying his approach to a non-criminal negotiation, or if he was saying it was a real incident... but I remember reading it, and thinking: the only way that works is if the FBI is waiting to arrest you if you refuse. If he was saying those examples were real, I agree it sounds like bullshit. It's at best, a tactic that might be rarely useful.
I'll throw in some thoughts about Never split the difference -- there's a lot of useful perspective in that book, and I appreciated it. However, speaking 'technical founderese', the book is solely about a kind of negotiation that almost never occurs in business life: a single iteration game theoretic game.
In real life, especially when you're younger than 60 and in business, every negotiation is part of an iterated game -- you are, much more than negotiating any single deal / job offer / contract term, figuring out who you want to work with, making friends and allies and partners along the way.
In those terms, most of that book is toxic, or at least sociopathic. That's fine if your only job is to get terrorists to put away their guns. But, it's definitely less fine if you are cutting a deal with someone who you will definitely intersect with multiple times in your life. And that's most people, it turns out. :)
Anyway, I think the book is super interesting, but I think technical types or those with a bit of ASD may find the relational approach hurts them more than winning any particular negotiation.
Cool use of gamma-ray imaging technology! The underlying technology is a coded aperture to give a random response on the detector that can be used to reconstruct the direction of the gamma-ray source. I think they are using a moving mask with a single detector in the middle. They probably didn't know if the source had broken apart and caused more contamination when they found the general area. So the imaging allows you to know from a distance if the source has been distributed without going into a potentially loose contamination area.
Shameless plug: our company makes gamma-ray imaging systems and combines them with LiDAR mapping to make real-time 3D radiation maps: https://www.gammareality.com/
Basically we can make "nuclear street view" in real-time while driving around, or walking it around on Spot.
Cool tech! Spent a chunk of a past life building radiation detection equipment and mapping it in various ways - it's neat to see the state of the art moving forward. Is your LAMP device using coded aperture (in that tiny form factor?) or some other technique for mapping directionality?
I worked at LBNL as a research scientist and spun a startup out of there. It was a great place to work in some respects, lots of really smart people, awesome brainstorming, seeing Nobel prize winners around. But if you like getting things done quickly it’s quite a challenge due the the bureaucracy (ex ordering simple things could take an extra couple weeks going through lab purchasing). I once described it to a friend who worked at a FAANG company and they said “Oh so it’s like working at a big company but without the advantages of a big company”.
Working at our startup almost feels like working at the lab (ie we have scientists and are doing hard tech), but we can also move fast and don’t have the bureaucracy. So maybe consider working at a hard tech startup with a heavy science base!
When I loaded the website it was slowly going incrementally through different intel generations. So I thought for a second they were offering versions with older intel chips. But the page was just animating slowly.
For those wondering, will not really work over long distances (> 100 m) since fast neutrons will thermalize quickly in air and other materials. This means they scatter around approaching a random walk and lose energy, which makes the transmission beam harder to detect.
This is really mostly feasible for ~single wall transmission.
How far can you go until the losses are over 160 dB? Reason I'm asking is that LTE Cat-M (low-bandwidth IoT) go that low, or lower [0]. GLONAS (GPS) receivers deal with over 180 dB of loss [1]. It depends on the power level in the transmitter, and how well the receiver can lock on to very faint, but expected, patterns in the noise. One of the tricks is to re-transmit, sometimes literally thousands of times.
The neutrons used here have a maxwellian energy distribution associated with fission. A single bit will contain neutrons with energies from nearly thermal up to a few MeV. These neutrons are not relativistic at all. For reference a 1 MeV neutron travels a meter in about 70 ns. This means the spread in the neutron spectrum and the transmission distance will conspire to place a fundamental limit on the data rate. Can't have neutrons from neighboring bits mixing together too much. This doesn't even include intermediate scattering which will make things harder.
Not really, depending on what method is used there are several outstanding issues:
Assuming magnetic plasma confinement:
- plasma stability issues: it is not really know how to maintain a stable plasma in an energy efficient way that can maintain a reaction that produces a net positive energy generation. When hearing about interesting exotic fusion reactors, one should wonder about the plasma stability (ie the plasma goes into a failure mode and hits the wall or leaks out of the confinement).
- materials issues: the materials don’t really exist that can sustain extended periods of radiation damage. This is also a limiter in many exotic fission reactor designs.
Laser confinement also has some issues.
So conceptually we know it should work but maybe a couple of the needed technologies are not ready. This is similar to Leonardo da Vinci knowing that helicopters should be possible in the 1400s but many of the required supporting technologies weren’t ready.
