The Weekly Weird - 2015-09-04

Newsblur is being a little @#$% right now so I know there are things I meant to include here but can't find them.

• Don't tell me what your priorities are, show me your budget and I'll tell you what's important to you: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/fear-of-russia-drives-highvoltage-power-projects-in-the-baltics
• I hate videos like this, just reminds me how uncoordinated I am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJZBgbH9_Lk
• Fusion will now be only ten years away! It turns out you measure Fusion good-ness with a triple product of temperature, density and confinement time and if you get it to some magic value ( nτT ≥ 5 x |tripleproduct| for D-T fusion, whatever that means) you get to make a trillion dollars, build a space elevator and change your name to Tessier-Ashpool. How close are we? Well the JET experimental tokamok made it to 1/5 of that and ITER is planned to beat it, they just need a few more billion dollars! As trite as the "25 years away and always has been" jokes are by now it's not like we've really been funding it or anything. And even with that that whole triple product thing is going pretty well anyway! (Most of this is from the comments on the excellent mefi post)
• The Scottish Play is coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyFAn5IaFS0 I love the modern settings of Shakespeare but I'm especially happy this isn't one. Sometimes you just need swords. I'm also hearing enough about Hamilton that I'm just going to have to go see it: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/theater/review-hamilton-young-rebels-changing-history-and-theater.html?_r=0
• The virus that didn't destroy the internet (h/t dwang): http://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html

• This is the CIA's parking lot: https://i.imgur.com/jvFmfx7.jpg You might think that's an SR-71 but it's actually the one-seater CIA predecessor, the A-12. That's the same model that's on the Intrepid btw.

  • Ok, now you've done it. The Blackbird and kin is absolutely the most awesomest aircraft ever so now I'm going to natter on about it for a bit. (All these stories are from a single book which is \~impossible to find. If anyone has a line on a copy of Sled Driver for less than the obvious amazon price, I'm in the @#$% market)
  • It's best known for its pure, brute speed
  • But the altitudes it can reach are nothing to sneeze at

  • It's just as impressive when flying...less quickly.

  • Like all things, though, they do break occasionaly.

• I'm not sure how I feel about this: http://www.businessinsider.com/campanion-app-surging-in-popularity-2015-9

• Opsec is hard: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/online-drug-dealer-betrayed-by-poor-opsec-pleads-guilty-to-importing-molly/
• I...what? http://i.imgur.com/ouKHV2S.gifv
• Double wat: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-09-01-the-most-obsolete-infrastructure-money-could-buy