tomhath shares a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, the first small modular reactor received a design certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meaning that it meets safety requirements and could be chosen by future projects seeking licensing and approval. The design comes from NuScale, a company birthed from research at Oregon State University that has received some substantial Department of Energy funding. It's a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide steel cylinder (23 meters by 5 meters) capable of producing 50 megawatts of electricity. (The company also has a 60-megawatt iteration teed up.) They envision a plant employing up to 12 of these reactors in a large pool like those used in current nuclear plants. The basic design is conventional, using uranium fuel rods to heat water in an internal, pressurized loop. That water hands off its high temperature to an external steam loop through a heat exchange coil. Inside the plant, the resulting steam would run to a generating turbine, cool off, and circulate back to the reactors. The design also uses a passive cooling system, so no pumps or moving parts are required to keep the reactor operating safely. The pressurized internal loop is arranged so that it allows hot water to rise through the heat exchange coils and sink back down toward the fuel rods after it cools. In the case of a problem, the reactor is similarly designed to manage its heat automatically. The control rods -- which can encase the fuel rods, blocking neutrons and halting the fission chain reaction -- are actively held in place above the fuel rods by a motor. In the event of a power outage or kill switch, it will drop down on the fuel rods due to gravity. Valves inside also allow the pressurized water loop to vent into the vacuum within the reactor's thermos-like double-wall design, dumping heat through the steel exterior, which is submerged in the cooling pool. One advantage of the small modular design is that each unit holds a smaller amount of radioactive fuel, and so it has a smaller amount of heat to get rid of in a situation like this.

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Will we have Thanksgiving together this year?

Had to do a lot of driving today, so I listened to a bunch of podcasts including two from political consultants. Joe Trippi interviewed former California governor Jerry Brown and the Lincoln Project podcast talked about polling and how evenly divided the bases of the political parties are. Brown talked about how hard it was going to be for Biden to govern. They would need to be creative to find a way around the deadlock. Then I wondered why? Aren't they missing something? Isn't Covid-19 offering the chance to bring us together? Ronald Reagan once asked his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev if aliens attacked, would he pause the Cold War and work with Reagan to fight them? Gorbachev said hell yes he would. Isn't Covid exactly that kind of opportunity? Why isn't the Lincoln Project running ads that informs voters that if we had a merely competent president, one who got out of the way of the government, we would be doing a lot better. Not only would far fewer people get sick and die, but we could go out to dinner and a movie. We could take a vacation. We could have a party. We could have Thanksgiving dinner with our family and celebrate Christmas together this year. We could hug our family and friends. All that's standing in the way is our working together. I've felt all along that the virus is making us smarter, and part of that is getting us to work together because that's smart. Would one of the PACs be willing to try that message? Show pictures of people all over the world, everywhere but the US, enjoying their lives, and ask would you like this for America? All you have to do is work with each other. That's really all it would take. There's only one candidate offering that.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Apple has begun letting its iPhones carry out contact-tracing without the need for users to download an official Covid-19 app. As an alternative, owners are being invited to opt in to a scheme called Exposure Notifications Express (ENE). This keeps a 14-day log of other phones detected via Bluetooth and serves an alert if one or more of their users is later diagnosed to have the virus. The local public health authority will determine what the notification says. It might tell the user to download a more fully functional app for further guidance. However, it also gives officials the option of not developing an app of their own, in which case the user could be directed to go to a testing centre or to call a hotline for more information. IPhone owners who become ill without having received a warning message can still cause a cascade of alerts to be sent to others. But since they will not have an app to start the process, this will be done by tapping on a text message sent by the public health authority to their smartphone after a positive diagnosis. The facility is being rolled out as part of the latest update to Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 13.7, which has just been released. Android is expected to have a similar scheme that will launch later this month. "It will go by the same name, but rather than go down the app-less route, Google has opted to automatically create a basic coronavirus tracing app for public health authorities based on the criteria they provide," reports the BBC.

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Netflix today announced its plans to turn Cixin Liu's "Three-Body Problem" trilogy into an original, English-language science fiction series. From a report: The show will be executive produced and written by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (the "Game of Thrones" showrunners signed a multi-year deal with Netflix last year that is reportedly worth more than $200 million), along with Alexander Woo, who previously served as showrunner for "The Terror: Infamy." "The Last Jedi" director Rian Johnson and his producing partner Ram Bergman are on board as executive producers (Benioff and Weiss spent some time working on a since-abandoned Star Wars trilogy), while Liu and his American translator Ken Liu (no relation) will serve as consulting producers. "I have the greatest respect for and faith in the creative team adapting The Three-Body Problem for television audiences," said Cixin Liu in a statement. "I set out to tell a story that transcends time and the confines of nations, cultures and races; one that compels us to consider the fate of humankind as a whole. It is a great honor as an author to see this unique sci-fi concept travel and gain fandom across the globe and I am excited for new and existing fans all over the world to discover the story on Netflix."

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When authorities arrested Graham Ivan Clark, who they said was the "mastermind" of the recent Twitter hack that ensnared Kanye West, Bill Gates and others, one detail that stood out was his age: He was only 17. Now authorities have homed in on another person who appears to have played an equal, if not more significant role, in the July 15 attack, New York Times reported Tuesday, citing four people involved in the investigation who declined to be identified because the inquiry was ongoing. They said the person was at least partly responsible for planning the breach and carrying out some of its most sensitive and complicated elements.His age? Just 16, public records show. From the report: On Tuesday, federal agents served the teenager with a search warrant and scoured the Massachusetts home where he lives with his parents, said one of the people involved in the operation. A spokesman for the FBI confirmed a search warrant had been executed at the address. The search warrant and other documents in the case are under seal and federal agents may decide not to charge the youth with a crime. If he is ultimately arrested, the case is likely to be handed over to Massachusetts authorities, who have more leverage than federal prosecutors in charging minors as adults. (The New York Times is not naming the teenager at this point because of his age and because he has not been charged.)

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Facebook plans to block people and publishers in Australia from sharing news, a move that pushes back against a proposed law forcing the company to pay media firms for their articles. From a report: The threat escalates an antitrust battle between Facebook and the Australian government, which wants the social-media giant and Alphabet's Google to compensate publishers for the value they provide to their platforms. The legislation still needs to be approved by Australia's parliament. Under the proposal, an arbitration panel would decide how much the technology companies must pay publishers if the two sides can't agree. Facebook said in a blog posting Monday that the proposal is unfair and would allow publishers to charge any price they want. If the legislation becomes law, the company says it will take the unprecedented step of preventing Australians from sharing news on Facebook and Instagram.

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Every year or so, Crunchbase News likes to take a look at what's hot in startup naming. The process involves reading names of over 1,000 recently founded and funded startups in English-speaking countries, looking for trends. It then get a naming expert's take on the situation. From the report: Probably the standout trend for the past year is the feel-good word. This could be a noun, adjective, adverb, or verb. The qualification is that it evokes something positive, commonly an admirable trait or desirable state of being. Examples include Mighty (workflow for remote teams), Cured (health care software), and Elate (operations platform). Part of the reason simple, positive words are cropping up more is that startups are less concerned about getting a dot-com domain with their exact brand name, said Athol Foden, president of Brighter Naming, a naming consultancy. They'll take an alternative suffix (Cured is Cured.health, for example) or add a word to the domain name (Elate, for instance, is goelate.com). [...] Another popular branding approach is the straightforward description. Companies are picking names that describe exactly what they do. Some examples are: Grow Credit, a service for building credit histories, New Age Meats, a startup cultivating meat from animal cells, and The Browser Company. In Foden's view, there's something to be said for these simpler, clearer names. They tend to be easier to remember than a made-up brand name, and everyone knows how to spell them. [...] One of the most enduring startup naming strategies is the creative misspelling. By dropping vowels, adding consonants, or taking other steps, companies can get a name that's both familiar-sounding and unique. Over the past year, we've seen plenty of companies with misspelled word names raise seed funding. The lineup includes Cann, a maker of cannabis-infused tonics, Puzzl, a payroll provider for hourly workers, and Shef, an income-earning platform for local cooks.

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Jeff Grubb, writing for VentureBeat: One of the things I would like you to associate with me is a skepticism of 4K gaming. I play in 4K on my PC using a 32-inch monitor that I sit a few feet away from, and that is great. But outside of that scenario, the 2160p resolution is wasted on our feeble human eyes -- especially when it comes with a sacrifice to framerate and graphical effects. And yet, I admit that Nvidia's marketing got to me when it showed gamers playing 8K games using the new RTX 3090. The idea of gaming at such fidelity is exciting. One of the elements that makes exploring 3D worlds so enthralling are the details, and -- well, you can get a lot of that at 4320p. But 8K gaming is still, of course, absurd. And the lengths that Nvidia had to go to show it off is evidence of that. In its RTX 3090 promotional video, Nvidia had a number of livestreamers and influencers sit down to experience gaming at 4320p. The results seemed to impress everyone involved. The participants provided a lot of gasps and exclamations. But to get that reaction, the event had those influencers sitting just feet away from an 80-inch 8K LG OLED. And it takes something that extreme to get even the minimal benefits of that resolution. Even at 80 inches, you'd have to sit within 3 feet of the panel to notice a difference in pixel density between 4K and 8K. Now, I'm not saying I don't want to play games this way. I'd love to try it. And if I had an unlimited budget, maybe I'd dedicate a room in my manor to something like this. But even then, I would know that is silly.

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Kelerei writes: Microsoft Flight Simulator players spotted a giant mountain-high obelisk in Australia last month. While Flight Simulator has done a great job at recreating the real world, this unusually huge structure doesn't exist in real life. Players have now discovered that its existence stems from a simple typo. University student Nathan Wright made an edit to OpenStreetMap data for part of his degree work last year, adding more than two hundred stories to a building that's actually just two stories. Wright meant to type 2, but instead he typed 212 in the data section for floors. "I think it's so funny as it was the first time I was using OpenStreetMap," says Wright in an email to The Verge. "I was using it for a university task and had to add data for class. I didn't think I would have to see it again." His university work is now internet famous, especially with the Microsoft Flight Simulator community. The typo made its way into Microsoft's Bing Maps data, which Asobo Studio, the developers behind Microsoft Flight Simulator, uses to map out the world in the game. Flight Simulator uses Azure-powered procedural generation technology, combined with Bing Maps data, to recreate virtual buildings like this 212-story obelisk.

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If you like Succession, here's a great interview with Cherry Jones. She played the Nan Pierce, owner of PGM (which is really the NYT), who Logan Roy (in real life, Rupert Murdoch) wanted to buy. It's a really good interview and of course it's about Succession so it's even better.

Police across Canada are increasingly using controversial algorithms to predict where crimes could occur, who might go missing, and to help them determine where they should patrol, despite fundamental human rights concerns, a new report has found. From a report: To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada is the result of a joint investigation by the University of Toronto's International Human Rights Program (IHRP) and Citizen Lab. It details how, in the words of the report's authors, "law enforcement agencies across Canada have started to use, procure, develop, or test a variety of algorithmic policing methods," with potentially dire consequences for civil liberties, privacy and other Charter rights, the authors warn. The report breaks down how police are using or considering the use of algorithms for several purposes including predictive policing, which uses historical police data to predict where crime will occur in the future. Right now in Canada, police are using algorithms to analyze data about individuals to predict who might go missing, with the goal of one day using the technology in other areas of the criminal justice system. Some police services are using algorithms to automate the mass collection and analysis of public data, including social media posts, and to apply facial recognition to existing mugshot databases for investigative purposes. "Algorithmic policing technologies are present or under consideration throughout Canada in the forms of both predictive policing and algorithmic surveillance tools." the report reads.

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Isn't it funny how no one is running an ad that says basically if you're stuck at home and ever hope to get out vote for Biden/Harris. I think we all know with Trump after a year or two if we're still alive, we'll volunteer to get the virus if we can just go to a party or go out to dinner and a movie.

Today's song: Won't Get Fooled Again. Lyrics.

OK, so -- I think it's time for TV to pick up the cue from Twitter and follow all the advice they've been dumping on Facebook. When someone says something like this, I don't care if he's president, you have to cut him off. Otherwise you're responsible for what happens.