Have you seen most of the Zambonis (here I use the term generically to cover all ice resurfacers) in the world. I can pretty much guarantee that the median age of them is more than ten years. It is not unreasonably to expect the total cost of ownership to come out net positive for an electric.
The olympics didn't purchase these machines outright solely for use during the games. The NYTimes article pointed out that an area company purchased the machines, then leased them to the IOC for the games.
Pure economics aside, there is the air quality argument. Gasoline and diesel-powered machines put out a lot of not-very-nice exhaust. Even the propane ones will leave the air a little stale. Unless you are using an outdoor skating rink, having a Zamboni that doesn't emit exhaust is a nice thing for the athletes and the owners. You can't necessarily put a price on it, but you can bet that for something like the olympics people notice.
So who was the poor shmuck paid by Carly for Congress that had to wear the sheep outfit with the red LED eyes and crawl around the field on hands and knees? I'm guessing it was the intern.
The biggest event on the Mt Washington auto road is actually a running race held each summer. It's an intermediate distance road race - about 8 miles (12.7 km) long. But it's uphill all the way: there's 4600 ft (1400 m) of elevation gain, which tends to make it feel more like a half marathon. Also, it's held on the mountain that claims to have the "world's worst weather." It is not atypical for the course start to have temperatures in a 60s at the start of the race under clear skies, only to have the runners finish in near-freezing temperatures, fog, and 50 knot winds.
In spite of that, the winner of the race generally can finish in only one hour. Last year's winner made it in just under an hour.
There was nothing wrong with repairs to the Hubble. If they skimped and scraped, it has yet to bite them in the ass. The repairs to the Hubble are the most outstanding bit of spaceflight humans have done since leaving the moon. Each mission was a success - extending the life of the telescope and giving it greater and greater capabilities. It was always meant to be so.
If you are referring to the original flaw in the Hubble mirror, I think you'll find it not so clear cut, either. The company that ground the mirror took a technical risk in using a custom-built CNC polishing machine for the job. The risk paid off - it was the most perfect mirror ever polished. It was just polished to a perfectly incorrect shape. The problem lay with the polishing company both trusting their instruments too much, and also not enough. They didn't cut corners, per se, they just didn't do their job properly in the face of drastically slipping schedules and cost overruns.
Maybe a case can be made for looking up a witness's past history, but even then I don't think so. If I knew a witness personally before the trial, knew he had a history of lying, knew he hated the defendant or was jealous of him or was in love with him, whatever kind of influence you can think of, that is part of my knowledge and part of how I decide what is true and what is false
If you knew a witness personally, any competent lawyer would have you rejected from the juror pool for that trial. If the relationship isn't known to counsel beforehand, or not brought up during jury selection, you have a moral obligation to recuse yourself as soon as that witness comes up. There are alternate jurors empaneled for just this kind of occasion.
"Imagine if we were all nuked into the stone age and only crawled out of the bunkers 5-10 years later. Getting back to the state of fabricating 3GHz x86 chips would take a long time and lots of investment"
Though, I would hope that it takes less time to do it the second go 'round than the first time. Maybe we'll skip over the "faster clockspeeds are always better" phase of development next time.
I don't know about everyone else, but the image that shows up in the Layer 8 blog has the crew module squashed down so that it appears shorter than it is wide. This is the result of image distortion. The actual NASA press release has the original image with its correct aspect ratio, along with a short video about the testing that shows some of the static rig and test equipment.
A comment on one of the input methods the MacWorld article touched on: an on-screen virtual keyboard. Unless you have some tactile response, an on-screen virtual keyboard almost requires you to look at it to see what you are typing. However - and this is a point that the article author may not have fully grasped - being that it is a tablet and not a laptop, you're already going to be looking at the keyboard, because you are looking at the screen, because that's the usually the place you're looking at on a tablet computer.
This doesn't meant that I relish the notion of doing much writing on any tablet computer with a virtual keyboard. But, it isn't as bad as, say, a laptop with a touchscreen top and bottom.
No one is disputing that you can do wireless power transfer. Tesla first demonstrated it well over 100 years ago. However, this airnergy (good grief, what an idiotic name!) thing is pure snakeoil, as many have been able to demonstrate with about five minutes of back-of-the-envelope calculations. WiFi is not a place to harness significant energy - it's too weak at its source, and it's too diffuse. You might be able to use it to power a low-power sensor network, but definitely not something like a cellphone (or even charge a cellphone battery over time).
At my college there was a large engineering design course as part of the graduation requirements. The individual projects that teams of 1-4 students took on were solicited from and sponsored by actual companies.
One project the year I took this course sought to develop a way to harness the power of people typing. The company sponsoring the project wanted to patent the hell out of the technology and use it to run a laptop computer indefinitely. That was all well and good until someone spent five minutes doing back-of-the-envelope calculations and realized that, even with 100% harnessing and conversion efficiency, you'd be luck to harness one watt of power - and that was with someone typing 75 words per minute. This might have been enough to power a bluetooth keyboard, but definitely not even the most power-efficient laptop in the world.
So after that little debacle, the project team launched an entirely new avenue: a handcrank generator that would attach to a standard-issue military flashlight. The idea was to use the flashlight as part of the crank, being already there, fairly rugged, and with a right-angle bend in it. With next to no design effort, their first prototype could be cranked to produce about 30 W of electricity for a decent amount of time, depending on who was cranking it.
This worked well enough as a design project, and the team's final design was fairly impressive. But as a possible product it was dead-on-arrival.
Stuck cylinders can be cleared much in the same way that you can clear a clogged bit of plumbing - access the pipe at the nearest joint/junction to the clog, ram a stiff but flexible probe down there, use the air pressure as best you can, and get on with your life. If all else fails, you can remove the clogged segment and replace it. Depending on what it is, the lost payload may be a real bummer; perhaps irreplaceable. That amounts to a bad day for a couple of people; not a catastrophe. If it is an essential lab test, they'll pull another sample. If it is an essential drug, they'll whistle more up from the pharmacy. If it is not an essential anything then, well, it isn't essential.
An interesting footnote: many hospitals have "hot labs" for handling radiopharmaceuticals - drugs that have radioactive isotopes in them. These are often used for diagnostic tests rather than treatment. The isotopes involved are usually short-lived, with halflives on the order of an hour or two. As a result, the drugs are manufactured on demand for a particular patient, then shipped up to the diagnostic lab via pneumatic tube. The prepared syringe gets put in the same carrier as ordinary payloads, except these carriers have shielding (usually lead, but sometimes other materials). The shielding is there not because of the concern of irradiating people as the drugs gets whisked by in the tube system - it goes by too quickly to deliver any significant dosage. Rather, the shielding is there in case the carrier gets stuck - delivering radioactivity to one particular place in the hospital. This presents a technical challenge due to the significant additional weight of the carrier - hundreds or thousands of grams - which can make these carriers more prone to getting stuck.
As a customer trying to get the best price for the energy it uses or produces, Google is much too small a player to distort the market. Datacenters use about 1-2% of the electricity produced in the US. Google is a large portion of that, but considering all the datacenters out there, I would be surprised if Google was even one half of the market. So, they are a customer for less than one percent of the total electricity generation in the US, spread out over all utility markets in the country. That's probably too little to distort the market.
On the other hand, within very small markets, like where they actually have datacenters, they may well be the largest local consumer. If utilities were still small fiefdoms, this could be a problem. But electricity flows across states and state lines, so it would be hard for Google to corner a market even in these small locales.
If Google were to become a major energy broker, like Enron was before its self-destruction, then we could have a problem. But we're not there yet, and that won't happen overnight, so there's no need for panic just yet.
For all the bitching and moaning that a lot of the Slashdot crowd does about Apple and how overhyped/overrated/overpriced/over-everything their products are, I think most would have to grudgingly agree that Apple has driven innovation in the marketplace. This is a story that has been repeated a number of times:
1) A class of product exists in the marketplace, but has only received lukewarm adoption for a variety of reasons.
2) Apple enters the market with their own device, which has a bunch of features that may or may not have been seen in other devices, but on the whole is a very well integrated package. Somehow, they saw a way to make the product work.
3) Consumers see Apple's product, like it, want it, and buy it in large numbers.
4) Profit for Apple.
5) Competitors see Apple's success in that market segment and begin to rush in with their own products. Some are just copycats: adding or removing a feature or two from Apple's benchmark. The smart ones see what made Apple's product a hit, absorb the new technological paradigm, and introduce their own innovative take on it.
6) Consumers see the competitor products, like (some of) them, want(some of) them, and buy (some of) them in large numbers.
7) Profit for competitors, maybe.
8) Profit (continuing) for Apple, maybe.
9) Consumers have many choices or amazing gee whiz products that are vastly superior to what existed before Apple's entry into the marketplace. Win.
It certainly doesn't always happen this way. But it has happened often enough.
I've lived in the Midwest, in New England, on the great lakes, climbed lots of mountains, and even spent time on the Greenland ice sheet. There's all manner of snow in this world, and it is possible, even easy, for snow to stick to "perfectly smooth and sealed and vaguely concave" surfaces. Ever had snow adhere to the sides of your car? Think de-icing planes is just a fun way to kill time on the tarmac? Snow and ice are able to adhere and build up onto just about every surface, in any orientation, under some set of naturally occurring conditions. There are things you can do to make it harder for that to happen, but it's impossible to prevent fully.
Those who are interested to read more about the global nuclear complex are encouraged to read a recent book A Nuclear Family Vacation. It is written by a husband-wife duo, both of which are professional writers/journalists, both with a professional focus in defense. They spent a number of family vacations visiting landmarks of nuclear significance: the Trinity Test Site, Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge, Kwajalein atoll, Cheney's "undisclosed location" bunker, Cheyenne Mountain, a Soviet test site in Kazakhstan, a Soviet secret city (like Los Alamos), and even eventually visited Iran's enrichment facility near Isfahan. Along the way, aside from the basic travelogue reporting of what's there, they reflect a bit on the enormity of the whole system, how it worked, and the miracle that we're still alive. They also discuss the current state and future of the US nuclear arsenal, the reliable replacement warhead program, and point out that there are still plenty of nukes out there, and Armageddon is still only about 30 minutes away.
At the end of the Baroque trilogy, there are a few pages devoted to the actual crafting of the manuscript. I was first written out in longhand, then transcribed onto a computer (emacs, I think) for manipulation and editing, then sent off to the publisher for everything the publisher does (typesetting, page boundaries, etc.). That section also contained a picture of the entire longhand manuscript - it stood about a foot high - several reams of 8.5x11 paper. It made my hand cramp just thinking about it.
The value is less in the time dilation you get at such high speeds, but rather the equivalent mass. The particles of interest to these scientists have a characteristic mass, which by E=mc^2, means they also have a certain characteristic energy.
(at relativistic speeds I seem to recall it isn't as simple as E=mc^2, but that's the gist of it).
If a particle is really heavy, a low-energy particle accelerator is highly unlikely (basically never) going to find it. This is, in part, why many of the heaviest fundamental particles weren't discovered until recently - sufficiently energetic particle accelerators didn't exist.
In the case of the Higgs Boson, particle physicists don't exactly know how heavy it is. Based on a variety of previous experiments, they have placed lower (and upper?) bounds on its weight. Because we haven't yet found it in our most powerful accelerators, it stands to reason that it is at least more heavy (i.e., more energetic) than 1-2 TeV. Most, but not all, physicists believe the LHC, at 7 TeV, should be energetic enough to find the Higgs boson - if what we think we know about it and particle physics is all correct.
It could be that a chunk of the CME was cold and not very luminous, but another chunk farther out was (the corona is very bright and hot, after all). Stereo images in multiple spectra, and it is well known that portions of the corona are much hotter than the surface of the sun, so it could be that in particular wavelengths the corona can cast shadows onto the sun's surface.
In any event, this was a comment made by a project scientist - a solar physicist - someone who probably knows more about the subject than you or I.
A correction from the summary: the two spacecraft are nearly 128 degrees apart, not 90. They were launched into slightly different heliocentric orbits that cause the angle between them to increase by about 21 degrees per year. They've already passed through the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the Sun-Earth system. In Feb 2011, they'll be on opposite sides of the Sun, then start to converge once again.
It took me long enough to get my head around the intertwining of space and time in relativity. Now you're telling me that they might also be decoupled in special circumstances.
There is a program to restart tritium (and, by extension, 3-He) production at one of the Oak Ridge reactors. The problem, however, is that this can't be done with the push of a button. The reactor may need some retrofitting to accommodate the 6-Li stock, then there's the equipment to capture the tritium and purify it, then the wait for enough of it to decay to 3-He before you have a usable quantity. It's something that you'd hope someone would have had the foresight to have up and running, oh, a decade ago, but alas there isn't someone with that kind of foresight calling these shots.
This is very similar to the occasional hiccups in the supply of medical radioisotopes. Most of the world's supply is produced by a relatively ancient heavy-water reactor in Canada. To reduce the risk, assure supply, and generally be smart, I would have expected the United States to develop its own production capabilities at some nuclear plant a long time ago.
But, again, although there seems to be enough diffuse understanding of this problem in government, it isn't concentrated enough to create the necessary supercriticality to cause anything to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen most of the Zambonis (here I use the term generically to cover all ice resurfacers) in the world. I can pretty much guarantee that the median age of them is more than ten years. It is not unreasonably to expect the total cost of ownership to come out net positive for an electric.
The olympics didn't purchase these machines outright solely for use during the games. The NYTimes article pointed out that an area company purchased the machines, then leased them to the IOC for the games.
Pure economics aside, there is the air quality argument. Gasoline and diesel-powered machines put out a lot of not-very-nice exhaust. Even the propane ones will leave the air a little stale. Unless you are using an outdoor skating rink, having a Zamboni that doesn't emit exhaust is a nice thing for the athletes and the owners. You can't necessarily put a price on it, but you can bet that for something like the olympics people notice.
So who was the poor shmuck paid by Carly for Congress that had to wear the sheep outfit with the red LED eyes and crawl around the field on hands and knees? I'm guessing it was the intern.
The biggest event on the Mt Washington auto road is actually a running race held each summer. It's an intermediate distance road race - about 8 miles (12.7 km) long. But it's uphill all the way: there's 4600 ft (1400 m) of elevation gain, which tends to make it feel more like a half marathon. Also, it's held on the mountain that claims to have the "world's worst weather." It is not atypical for the course start to have temperatures in a 60s at the start of the race under clear skies, only to have the runners finish in near-freezing temperatures, fog, and 50 knot winds.
In spite of that, the winner of the race generally can finish in only one hour. Last year's winner made it in just under an hour.
There was nothing wrong with repairs to the Hubble. If they skimped and scraped, it has yet to bite them in the ass. The repairs to the Hubble are the most outstanding bit of spaceflight humans have done since leaving the moon. Each mission was a success - extending the life of the telescope and giving it greater and greater capabilities. It was always meant to be so.
If you are referring to the original flaw in the Hubble mirror, I think you'll find it not so clear cut, either. The company that ground the mirror took a technical risk in using a custom-built CNC polishing machine for the job. The risk paid off - it was the most perfect mirror ever polished. It was just polished to a perfectly incorrect shape. The problem lay with the polishing company both trusting their instruments too much, and also not enough. They didn't cut corners, per se, they just didn't do their job properly in the face of drastically slipping schedules and cost overruns.
If you knew a witness personally, any competent lawyer would have you rejected from the juror pool for that trial. If the relationship isn't known to counsel beforehand, or not brought up during jury selection, you have a moral obligation to recuse yourself as soon as that witness comes up. There are alternate jurors empaneled for just this kind of occasion.
Though, I would hope that it takes less time to do it the second go 'round than the first time. Maybe we'll skip over the "faster clockspeeds are always better" phase of development next time.
I don't know about everyone else, but the image that shows up in the Layer 8 blog has the crew module squashed down so that it appears shorter than it is wide. This is the result of image distortion. The actual NASA press release has the original image with its correct aspect ratio, along with a short video about the testing that shows some of the static rig and test equipment.
A comment on one of the input methods the MacWorld article touched on: an on-screen virtual keyboard. Unless you have some tactile response, an on-screen virtual keyboard almost requires you to look at it to see what you are typing. However - and this is a point that the article author may not have fully grasped - being that it is a tablet and not a laptop, you're already going to be looking at the keyboard, because you are looking at the screen, because that's the usually the place you're looking at on a tablet computer.
This doesn't meant that I relish the notion of doing much writing on any tablet computer with a virtual keyboard. But, it isn't as bad as, say, a laptop with a touchscreen top and bottom.
No one is disputing that you can do wireless power transfer. Tesla first demonstrated it well over 100 years ago. However, this airnergy (good grief, what an idiotic name!) thing is pure snakeoil, as many have been able to demonstrate with about five minutes of back-of-the-envelope calculations. WiFi is not a place to harness significant energy - it's too weak at its source, and it's too diffuse. You might be able to use it to power a low-power sensor network, but definitely not something like a cellphone (or even charge a cellphone battery over time).
At my college there was a large engineering design course as part of the graduation requirements. The individual projects that teams of 1-4 students took on were solicited from and sponsored by actual companies.
One project the year I took this course sought to develop a way to harness the power of people typing. The company sponsoring the project wanted to patent the hell out of the technology and use it to run a laptop computer indefinitely. That was all well and good until someone spent five minutes doing back-of-the-envelope calculations and realized that, even with 100% harnessing and conversion efficiency, you'd be luck to harness one watt of power - and that was with someone typing 75 words per minute. This might have been enough to power a bluetooth keyboard, but definitely not even the most power-efficient laptop in the world.
So after that little debacle, the project team launched an entirely new avenue: a handcrank generator that would attach to a standard-issue military flashlight. The idea was to use the flashlight as part of the crank, being already there, fairly rugged, and with a right-angle bend in it. With next to no design effort, their first prototype could be cranked to produce about 30 W of electricity for a decent amount of time, depending on who was cranking it.
This worked well enough as a design project, and the team's final design was fairly impressive. But as a possible product it was dead-on-arrival.
(This space left intentionally blank)
Stuck cylinders can be cleared much in the same way that you can clear a clogged bit of plumbing - access the pipe at the nearest joint/junction to the clog, ram a stiff but flexible probe down there, use the air pressure as best you can, and get on with your life. If all else fails, you can remove the clogged segment and replace it. Depending on what it is, the lost payload may be a real bummer; perhaps irreplaceable. That amounts to a bad day for a couple of people; not a catastrophe. If it is an essential lab test, they'll pull another sample. If it is an essential drug, they'll whistle more up from the pharmacy. If it is not an essential anything then, well, it isn't essential.
An interesting footnote: many hospitals have "hot labs" for handling radiopharmaceuticals - drugs that have radioactive isotopes in them. These are often used for diagnostic tests rather than treatment. The isotopes involved are usually short-lived, with halflives on the order of an hour or two. As a result, the drugs are manufactured on demand for a particular patient, then shipped up to the diagnostic lab via pneumatic tube. The prepared syringe gets put in the same carrier as ordinary payloads, except these carriers have shielding (usually lead, but sometimes other materials). The shielding is there not because of the concern of irradiating people as the drugs gets whisked by in the tube system - it goes by too quickly to deliver any significant dosage. Rather, the shielding is there in case the carrier gets stuck - delivering radioactivity to one particular place in the hospital. This presents a technical challenge due to the significant additional weight of the carrier - hundreds or thousands of grams - which can make these carriers more prone to getting stuck.
As a customer trying to get the best price for the energy it uses or produces, Google is much too small a player to distort the market. Datacenters use about 1-2% of the electricity produced in the US. Google is a large portion of that, but considering all the datacenters out there, I would be surprised if Google was even one half of the market. So, they are a customer for less than one percent of the total electricity generation in the US, spread out over all utility markets in the country. That's probably too little to distort the market.
On the other hand, within very small markets, like where they actually have datacenters, they may well be the largest local consumer. If utilities were still small fiefdoms, this could be a problem. But electricity flows across states and state lines, so it would be hard for Google to corner a market even in these small locales.
If Google were to become a major energy broker, like Enron was before its self-destruction, then we could have a problem. But we're not there yet, and that won't happen overnight, so there's no need for panic just yet.
I believe that the sequence I laid out and the hilarious classic Apple Life Cycle are not mutually exclusive.
For all the bitching and moaning that a lot of the Slashdot crowd does about Apple and how overhyped/overrated/overpriced/over-everything their products are, I think most would have to grudgingly agree that Apple has driven innovation in the marketplace. This is a story that has been repeated a number of times:
1) A class of product exists in the marketplace, but has only received lukewarm adoption for a variety of reasons.
2) Apple enters the market with their own device, which has a bunch of features that may or may not have been seen in other devices, but on the whole is a very well integrated package. Somehow, they saw a way to make the product work.
3) Consumers see Apple's product, like it, want it, and buy it in large numbers.
4) Profit for Apple.
5) Competitors see Apple's success in that market segment and begin to rush in with their own products. Some are just copycats: adding or removing a feature or two from Apple's benchmark. The smart ones see what made Apple's product a hit, absorb the new technological paradigm, and introduce their own innovative take on it.
6) Consumers see the competitor products, like (some of) them, want(some of) them, and buy (some of) them in large numbers.
7) Profit for competitors, maybe.
8) Profit (continuing) for Apple, maybe.
9) Consumers have many choices or amazing gee whiz products that are vastly superior to what existed before Apple's entry into the marketplace. Win.
It certainly doesn't always happen this way. But it has happened often enough.
I've lived in the Midwest, in New England, on the great lakes, climbed lots of mountains, and even spent time on the Greenland ice sheet. There's all manner of snow in this world, and it is possible, even easy, for snow to stick to "perfectly smooth and sealed and vaguely concave" surfaces. Ever had snow adhere to the sides of your car? Think de-icing planes is just a fun way to kill time on the tarmac? Snow and ice are able to adhere and build up onto just about every surface, in any orientation, under some set of naturally occurring conditions. There are things you can do to make it harder for that to happen, but it's impossible to prevent fully.
Those who are interested to read more about the global nuclear complex are encouraged to read a recent book A Nuclear Family Vacation . It is written by a husband-wife duo, both of which are professional writers/journalists, both with a professional focus in defense. They spent a number of family vacations visiting landmarks of nuclear significance: the Trinity Test Site, Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge, Kwajalein atoll, Cheney's "undisclosed location" bunker, Cheyenne Mountain, a Soviet test site in Kazakhstan, a Soviet secret city (like Los Alamos), and even eventually visited Iran's enrichment facility near Isfahan. Along the way, aside from the basic travelogue reporting of what's there, they reflect a bit on the enormity of the whole system, how it worked, and the miracle that we're still alive. They also discuss the current state and future of the US nuclear arsenal, the reliable replacement warhead program, and point out that there are still plenty of nukes out there, and Armageddon is still only about 30 minutes away.
At the end of the Baroque trilogy, there are a few pages devoted to the actual crafting of the manuscript. I was first written out in longhand, then transcribed onto a computer (emacs, I think) for manipulation and editing, then sent off to the publisher for everything the publisher does (typesetting, page boundaries, etc.). That section also contained a picture of the entire longhand manuscript - it stood about a foot high - several reams of 8.5x11 paper. It made my hand cramp just thinking about it.
The value is less in the time dilation you get at such high speeds, but rather the equivalent mass. The particles of interest to these scientists have a characteristic mass, which by E=mc^2, means they also have a certain characteristic energy.
(at relativistic speeds I seem to recall it isn't as simple as E=mc^2, but that's the gist of it).
If a particle is really heavy, a low-energy particle accelerator is highly unlikely (basically never) going to find it. This is, in part, why many of the heaviest fundamental particles weren't discovered until recently - sufficiently energetic particle accelerators didn't exist.
In the case of the Higgs Boson, particle physicists don't exactly know how heavy it is. Based on a variety of previous experiments, they have placed lower (and upper?) bounds on its weight. Because we haven't yet found it in our most powerful accelerators, it stands to reason that it is at least more heavy (i.e., more energetic) than 1-2 TeV. Most, but not all, physicists believe the LHC, at 7 TeV, should be energetic enough to find the Higgs boson - if what we think we know about it and particle physics is all correct.
It could be that a chunk of the CME was cold and not very luminous, but another chunk farther out was (the corona is very bright and hot, after all). Stereo images in multiple spectra, and it is well known that portions of the corona are much hotter than the surface of the sun, so it could be that in particular wavelengths the corona can cast shadows onto the sun's surface.
In any event, this was a comment made by a project scientist - a solar physicist - someone who probably knows more about the subject than you or I.
A correction from the summary: the two spacecraft are nearly 128 degrees apart, not 90. They were launched into slightly different heliocentric orbits that cause the angle between them to increase by about 21 degrees per year. They've already passed through the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the Sun-Earth system. In Feb 2011, they'll be on opposite sides of the Sun, then start to converge once again.
No no: we believe this bug is currently working as intended.
It took me long enough to get my head around the intertwining of space and time in relativity. Now you're telling me that they might also be decoupled in special circumstances.
Ow! My brain hurts.
There is a program to restart tritium (and, by extension, 3-He) production at one of the Oak Ridge reactors. The problem, however, is that this can't be done with the push of a button. The reactor may need some retrofitting to accommodate the 6-Li stock, then there's the equipment to capture the tritium and purify it, then the wait for enough of it to decay to 3-He before you have a usable quantity. It's something that you'd hope someone would have had the foresight to have up and running, oh, a decade ago, but alas there isn't someone with that kind of foresight calling these shots.
This is very similar to the occasional hiccups in the supply of medical radioisotopes. Most of the world's supply is produced by a relatively ancient heavy-water reactor in Canada. To reduce the risk, assure supply, and generally be smart, I would have expected the United States to develop its own production capabilities at some nuclear plant a long time ago.
But, again, although there seems to be enough diffuse understanding of this problem in government, it isn't concentrated enough to create the necessary supercriticality to cause anything to happen.
Thanks to you, I have now learned a lot more than most people should about commercial jetliners losing all power. Great work!