sushibowl

Butter corn miso ramen is a thing in Sapporo. Probably invented to promote regional products (Hokkaido is famous for corn and dairy) to tourists.

AC is not common in Europe. There's a variety of heating systems: gas boilers, direct electric heating, district heating, etc. Heat pumps are a growing market though.

Unfortunately, when you do find a text article explaining the thing it's often unnecessarily long and padded out with meaningless fluff, just so more advertising can be stuffed within the contents.

Technically any Catholic male is eligible to become pope, it doesn't even have to be a cardinal. But yeah cardinals are the only ones voting so they always elect one of their own (with a few historical exceptions)

Given what happened to freelancer, I think the only way you should give Chris Roberts your money is if he agrees to lead the project for two years, then quit and hand it over to someone who can actually finish it.

As a European, the idea of a bank having a drive-through is just absolutely wild.

Another big factor is that every plant is effectively a completely custom design. Because of how few nuclear plants are constructed, every new one tends to incorporate technological advancements to enhance safety or efficiency. The design also has to be adapted to the local climate and land layout. This makes every single plant effectively one of a kind.

It also tends to be built by different contractors, involving different vendors and electric utilities every time. Other countries have done better here (e.g. China and France) mostly due to comprehensive government planning: plopping down lots of reactors of the same design, done by the same engineers. Although these countries are not fully escaping cost increases either.

You are completely correct that regulation is also a big factor. Quality assurance and documentation requirements are enormously onerous. This article does a pretty decent job explaining the difficulties.

https://greglewisinfo.com/2020/04/18/the-b-17-saved-by-a-miracle/

The ultimate source appears to be a guy's memoirs:

I came across this story in Elmer Bendiner’s marvellous 1980 memoir, The Fall of the Fortresses, while researching the lives of USAAF crews flying out of England during WW2.

I'm still very sceptical. This guy is not even the primary source actually:

Bohn said the shells had been sent to the armorers to be defused but had then been rushed away by an intelligence officer.

Bohn had tracked down the officer and had hounded him until eventually he had told Bohn the full story – before swearing him to secrecy.

Now, sabotage like this undoubtedly happened, although the scale is impossible to verify. However I think this specific story has just way too flimsy a chain of evidence to put any faith in. Good story though.

Seriously though. Weasel words. If journalists adopted even 20% of Wikipedia's manual of style, news would improve by orders of magnitude.

I think holding more helium in a smaller space is the opposite of what you want. The lifting force is equal to the weight of the air being displaced, so you want as little stuff as possible in as big a volume as possible.

Maybe if you went the other way round and compressed the atmosphere?

What you're talking about is essentially an EMP. They don't generally emit continuously. Instead you just set off a single strong pulse which induces such high currents in receiving antennas that they melt or otherwise damage connected circuitry.

At these levels of power, any amount of conductive material tends to start acting as an antenna. If you set up a continuous transmitter you're going to have trouble not damaging your own delivery and power mechanisms.

The most common way to generate one is to set off a nuclear bomb that has been finetuned to release most of its energy as electromagnetic radiation.

I did not come away from this article with a very positive opinion on Clarkson. He strikes me as the type of guy who is incapable of recognising a problem that he himself is not personally facing. Climate change wasn't real until he tried his hand at farming. Driving electric vehicles won't solve the climate problem, science will (did science not develop the battery technology needed to move away from gasoline cars?). Farmers are struggling and will be forced to sell to millionaires and capitalists (is he himself not the capitalist that bought a hobby farm from a struggling farmer?).

I don't think he's seeing his own hypocrisy here. Farmers have been facing these problems for years and no one paid attention. He calls up his buddy in Westminster, immediately gets a full cabinet meeting, and as if by magic the government starts moving in his favour (taking away power from local government, I might add).

This isn't a black and white issue and there is merit to Clarkson's point that local government can get captured and corrupted by personal conflicts and interests. But I don't agree with the image he appears to project as a defender of the common man and poor farmer. He's a millionaire who has never given a single shit about farmers until he personally owned a farm.