Glacial Progress in Nuclear Fusion

Good news from the $5.3 billion array of giant lasers known as the National Ignition Facility -- after nearly five years of trying, it finally ignited! In two tests out of hundreds -- one in September, one in November -- they induced their balky fusion machine to produce more energy than was put into it. Just produce, mind you, not actually capture. The project leader, who revels in the name of Dr. Omar Hurricane, called this a "turning point." But then he more honestly backtracked and said, "This sounds very modest, and it is." Nobody has ever done this before in a controlled situation, so I suppose it is a technical feat, but that still leaves us about fifty technical feats short of a working fusion reactor.

1,000,000

Sometime early this morning this blog logged its one millionth page view. Yippee! It has been only 13 months since we crossed 500,000, so the pace is accelerating.

At least, that is the way Google counts it. I also use another counting service and they say I have only logged 800,000 page views. But, hey, that means I get to celebrate again next year, right? The business of counting page views seems to be a lot more complicated than you might think, since Google and Statcounter both regularly log groups of hits that the other doesn't register. But, anyway, now the log I see every time I log in says more than a million. Since the median blog has zero readers, that feels like something of an accomplishment.

I seem to get 100 to 150 visitors a day to the main page, representing about twice that many regular readers. the rest of the page views are people directed to particular pages by Google, or sometimes by a link somebody else has posted. A lot of these casual readers are students; you can see that one of my biggest post this month has been my review of The Fall of Rome, which must be assigned in a lot of classes.

Now I have to think of a way to celebrate.

Here We Go Again with the 70-Year Budgeting

This time it's the Economist, which usually has more sense than this. You have to wonder about a mind that thinks it can predict the state of the American economy, the cost of health care, life expectancy, and the budgetary policies of the government (all at once) 72 years into the future. I call bullshit on this and all other budget predictions that run for more than five years.