As other commenters note, these missiles are not new. But they are much shorter range. Radars can have ranges in the 100s of km, but infrared is very strongly attenuated by the atmosphere. Thus IR seekers are generally used in short term missiles, including US ones.

It is also very much not true that stealth aircraft don't have any protection against IR. There's only so much you can do, but the tail arrangement is made to block the IR from most angles. You also can't see the hot engine inlet because again, it is hidden behind other bits. There may be other features, some clever cooling etc that I'm not aware of.

Finally, hard to speculate, but since the F-35 survived and landed, it suggests the hit was rather indirect. Which in turn suggests the mitigations against IR seekers.

With SMRs there's nothing stopping you from sticking 10 on one site, where previously you'd put 1 or 2.

I have always found this an odd argument. Granted, thermodynamically, nuclear plants' efficiency scales with size. But allegedly fuel only makes up 10% of the lifetime cost of a plant. Even more if you think construction costs overrun.

So let's say you make a plant that is smaller and requires 50% more fuel, but is also 10% cheaper to build. You're already ahead by 4%. And SMRs at least promise far more than 10% savings.

The argument that SMRs could be cheaper due to economies if scale is often dismissed as pie in the sky - and maybe it is - but this is also precisely what brought down the cost of renewables. Germany bought their wind turbines a mere few years ago and paid way more than they would have done today.

The more interesting nugget for me is about this project they mention: https://modin.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html called Modin, which apparently went to the effort of analysing common pandas uses and compressed the API into a mere handful of operations. Which sounds great!

Sadly for me the purpose seems to have been rather to then recreate the full pandas API, only running much faster, backed by things like Ray and Dask. So it's the same API, just much faster.

To me it's a shame. Pandas is clearly quite ergonomic for various exploratory interactive analyses, but the API is, imo, awful. The speed is usually not a concern for me - slow operations often seem to be avoidable, and my data tends to fit in (a lot of) RAM.

I can't see that their more condensed API is public facing and usable.

> The thing about Space is that it's just so huge. Unbelievably so. And the real challenge? You have to make all your delta-V for orbital speed by pushing gas very fast. In one go.

TLDR, once you have the uranium, it is still hard to build a bomb that's light and small enough to be fired in a ballistic missile. The Hiroshima bomb (Little Boy), of gun type, is about the simplest thing you can build, and still it weighted 4 tonnes, was 3 m long and 70 cm wide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy). Not because Americans were stoopid, but because it takes a lot of effort to make these things small. It also was very inefficient with it's use of the fissile material - it needed 64kg of highly enriched uranium, most of which didn't react at all, and it's a fundamental limitation of this design. So if Iran really has 600kg of highly enriched uranium, that's enough for 10 of those puppies. 10 too many of course...

The next step up is an implosion device, where conventional explosives compress a blob of fissile metal. That was Fat Man of Nagasaki, and was about as big/heavy as the Little Boy. But used only 4kg of fissile metal for the same bang, roughly. But to make this work is a lot of science that Iran would either need to figure out, or dunno, but from Pakistan or North Korea. And even then it's massive and heavy and doesn't fit on the tip of a ballistic missile. For comparison, modern US warheads weigh around 200-300kg while delivering 20-30x the boom of the WWII bombs.

All of which is to say, just having the uranium is clearly necessary, but far from sufficient from having a weapon you can use.

Still... It seems taking it away by force isn't working, and if anything, confirmed to Iran that it needs it. So... Good luck to the rest of us. And in any case their main target Israel has its own nukes, I'd imagine plentiful, well researched and efficient, bringing us back to MAD, which somehow safely saw us through Cold War.

So I was almost disappointed when I read it properly.

On the one hand it's a science: controlled experiments, calculated dosages, all based on an understanding of low level biology, fancy imaging methods, measuring currents in people's bodies and so on.

On the other hand, there seems to be plenty of "he seems fine to me", "tests came back fine but something seems off to me so let's try another test", "doesn't seem to be responding to this drug, let's try the other one", "in my experience this drug works better than that one". It seems like a pretty big chunk of subjectivity is actually a part of the field.

It either means there are lots and lots of descendants, a bit like with Genghis Khan, or it's a fluke of galactic proportions.

Still, cool story!

It's not even a given at this point that all these trades come from one person. In fact I doubt they do - because most brokerages would simply not allow you to put this trade. It could well be a huge trade, but a fraction of the 6200 that changed hands, then HFT algos jumping in in the action.

Which is all investigable, and should be investigated.

There's no doubt it's very dirty business. I just find it lazy thinking to say, hey this one is very suspicious therefore definitely criminal.

I'm not trying to split hairs here. There's been plenty of weird coincidences and each should be investigated, and on the balance of probability at least one may well be insider trading at the highest echelons. And in any case, in any financial job you need pre clearance for trades, often justifying why you're doing them if they are odd enough. There are minimum holding periods, day trading is not allowed, and the full record auditable by regulators. It is insane to me that politicians are not subject to such rules and it must change.

But to conclude that a weird trading pattern is definitely insider trading is IMO cheap. It's like TV drama where the unemployed, wife-beater-wearing husband definitely killed the wife, end of story.

The real tragedy IMO is that this is really avoidable. It would take very basic, very standard regulation to stamp this out, and we wouldn't be debating this in a technology forum.

It's a shame we can't have nice things. An actual non-abusive social medium for people to share things like this - I'd use it. But I see that as soon as there is money on the table, it's a race to the bottom, sooner or later.

But what is really not funny is the scale of human suffering that is happening and will follow. Civilians killed in Iran, Lebanon - and what the hell, even in Israel, maybe they aren't in the 90% who support this war. Completely pointless material damage. All the people in Tehran who will get cancer from breathing in crude oil fumes - and according to Trump himself, 85% of Iranians oppose the regime. The damage to GCC economies, who didn't want this to happen. The damage to global economy from the spiking oil prices, unpredictability - and the very real poverty this will push people into. The weakening of arsenals against other adversaries, including Ukraine's defence against Russia. The boost to Russia's budget from spiking oil prices and indefinite-looking suspension of sanctions.

And all this assuming this doesn't turn into WWIII.

So on balance, not funny I think.

Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.

Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.