6 ms·

I haven't come across any meaningful news on this project since the article linked here. I search every month or so. I do that with several projects that had a

I haven't come across any meaningful news on this project since the article linked here. I search every month or so. I do that with several projects that had a moment of hype. I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. It's the kind of thing I have a natural interest in, as I think it's where the cool things happen. Is there such a site? Dedicated to tracking the status of these kinds of things on an ongoing basis?

johndevor 11y ago
This sounds like a great idea. I'll check back on you in a month to see if you've actually developed it. ;)
jadeddrag 11y ago
I use the google alerts service.
- kriro 11y ago
  So do I it's actually a pretty useful service that I have incorporated into my regular news consumption way too late :) I currently have an Alert for "Magic Leap" for example.
x5n1 11y ago
That's the thing with these type of hyped things. General Fusion is another company that was going to do something 5-7 years ago and has received much funding from energy companies and has yet to put out anything substantial. http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-fusion-1.1949072 http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-fusion...
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  Perhaps the funding has produced exactly what was asked for.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    I am not a conspiracy nut, I don't think they actually have anything yet. There was a 90s Keanu Reeves movie called Chain Reaction that had that exact plot but I don't think this is the case here. The opportunity is too big to just sit back because if it can be cracked, someone will crack it soon.
    - haspoken 11y ago
      There does exist such a thing as the Invention Secrecy Act to suppress patents that the government wants to keep secret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act Quite a few patents every year, and certainly a small fusion generator would be of interest to the government.
      - raverbashing 11y ago
        You just need to warn other countries that may be trying it. Once there is a way things get invented, especially things that don't need a structure around them to be sustainable (like cell phones, for example)
      - x5n1 11y ago
        As I said, if someone can crack it they will. If the US wants to sit on the technology they can do so at a great cost to themselves and the world. We need cheap, safe energy for the world. It has the ability to literally save the world.
- Sodel 11y ago
  I was lucky enough to get a tour of their facility last June. One half was assembling and testing the most colossal plasma injection guns, driven by the biggest capacitor bank I have ever seen in my life. The other half of the facility contained the anemone-shaped plasma compression chamber from all their promotional images. (And far more impressive than the dinky prototype from the article above.) They had a shelf full of cracked steel pistons, and I'm still not sure how they plan to solve that problem when the full-scale machine uses 200 of them instead of just a dozen or so. (An aside, if anyone from General Fusion is reading this: my inventor friend suggested shooting slugs of molten lead into the molten lead core, instead of using the current steel-piston approach.) I guess I'm just saying that between the facilities, and what our host (one of the project managers) was talking about, I'm satisfied that they're not dawdling. These are just some inherently hard problems they're working on.
tedivm 11y ago
The site would be awesome. On a more immediate note, have any of the project you're tracking ever taken off or turned out to live up to the hype?
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  That's a good question. Nothing comes to mind, but then things that live up to early promise probably just seem "obvious" in retrospect. Actively tracking the status over time might make it easier to remember those cases. There are some things, like Amazon delivery drones, that are seeming a lot more plausible than they were initially given credit for. It might be interesting, beyond basic news tracking for these topics to do some sort of "plausibility survey" along the way was well. See how people's opinions shift. Obviously that's a lot more work to do it right, but it could also be a lot more useful in the long run.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    The successes seem to require the leadership having both incredible competency AND ironclad personal belief that the problem should be solved at almost any cost. These mega-problems are hard. And, even down a road to eventual success, there are likely to be a lot of "we have to lay off the entire team for 6 months because we have no funding" or "everything about this current situation makes exiting and cutting our losses the smarter move" moments. I can't imagine that gets any easier when you're talking about physical artifacts that require a much higher minimum feasible investment to even try.
- marktangotango 11y ago
  SpaceX; I started following them at about Falcon-1 launch attempt 2, I'd say they've lived up to the hype.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
politician 11y ago
I was kind of hoping for EMC2's Polywell to succeed.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
minthd 11y ago
If you're into building such site, one thing missing from most technology stories is an in-depth explanations(or even smart analysis by the right bloggers) about the technology and how it works, and not the watered-down stuff that usually goes around. I'm sure the community here would love such a site, i know i would. And you don't have to write it , just aggregate stuff, and i'm sure users would be happy to share.
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  I constantly think about a set of adult learning course for science things such as "math you need to know to understand relativity properly", be great to see this for other areas as well...
- ethbro 11y ago
  Most of the problem is that a lot of the *Weekly type of aggregator sites that report this kind of material seem to have an editorial aversion to linking off-site. I'm curious how many news sites actually have a "stories can only include hyperlinks to content our own site" policy. (Note: BBC News seems to be an exception, but still fails to include an obvious link a lot of the time)
reitanqild 11y ago
> I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. In case anyone is interested I recently came across zeef.com. It is (in my view) a place to make more ot less authorative pages on subjects; you can collect links, make automatic collections from RSS feeds etc.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I've long had a soft spot for low probability, high-return science. I've looked around the net also, but not recently. The problem in the past was 1) sites set up by folks looking to scam people, and 2) people who were emotionally not well and unable to discuss such matters critically without getting into conspiracy theories and emotional-reasoning-based discussions. Both of those things kill it. If somebody could come up with a way to have reasonable and critical open-minded discussions of things like this? Sign me up.
dzhiurgis 11y ago
Not sure if could be very useful in tracking, but I enjoyed reading and refreshing my knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies
TheCondor 11y ago
I think the problem is that these folks tend to not publicize failure. It caters to cranks after a while, all the promises with no clear acknowledgment of the failure, just that they ran out of money and had to shut it down.
- johndevor 11y ago
  Conversely, I think people have no problem making promises. As a part of that, they could advertise their promises and hopefully glean some sort of accountability by making these promises public.
atomatica 11y ago
Transatomic has a page that charts their progress in designing and then building a molten salt reactor. http://www.transatomicpower.com/whats-next http://www.transatomicpower.com/whats-next
- feld 11y ago
  Thanks for linking this. I was hoping someone was publicly tracking progress on molten salt reactors.
jhartmann 11y ago
nextbigfuture.com is pretty good in that regard, a little political sometimes and sometimes some things from the edges of science but the admin does a good job on tracking news for emerging tech.
bargl 11y ago
One of the hosts of .NetRocks does a lot of "Geek Outs" where he researches a topic then presents his research on the episode. He's done two or more on this topic. He did one specifically on this release (and other information) http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1145 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1145 But I'd suggest you watch the first one he did on this topic. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037 Also if you are a C# developer you should probably be listening to this show on a regular basis anyway. Because it rocks. And they do cover a pretty wide range outside the .Net stack. Note: I have no affiliation with the show, I just really like it. Edit: I think it's a great idea to create a site to centralize all this information. If you do, you might find contacting Richard to be helpful to aggregate data. Sorry that was the point of me posting, but I got rushed and forgot.
drjesusphd 11y ago
Do you mean fusion specifically? I've considered starting something like that, but I'm not sure if there's a wide enough interest.

johndevor 11y ago

This sounds like a great idea. I'll check back on you in a month to see if you've actually developed it. ;)

jadeddrag 11y ago

I use the google alerts service.

kriro 11y ago
So do I it's actually a pretty useful service that I have incorporated into my regular news consumption way too late :) I currently have an Alert for "Magic Leap" for example.

x5n1 11y ago

That's the thing with these type of hyped things. General Fusion is another company that was going to do something 5-7 years ago and has received much funding from energy companies and has yet to put out anything substantial. http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-fusion-1.1949072 http://www.burnabynow.com/news/27-million-for-general-fusion...

bottled_poe 11y ago
Perhaps the funding has produced exactly what was asked for.
- x5n1 11y ago
  I am not a conspiracy nut, I don't think they actually have anything yet. There was a 90s Keanu Reeves movie called Chain Reaction that had that exact plot but I don't think this is the case here. The opportunity is too big to just sit back because if it can be cracked, someone will crack it soon.
  - haspoken 11y ago
    There does exist such a thing as the Invention Secrecy Act to suppress patents that the government wants to keep secret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act Quite a few patents every year, and certainly a small fusion generator would be of interest to the government.
    - raverbashing 11y ago
      You just need to warn other countries that may be trying it. Once there is a way things get invented, especially things that don't need a structure around them to be sustainable (like cell phones, for example)
    - x5n1 11y ago
      As I said, if someone can crack it they will. If the US wants to sit on the technology they can do so at a great cost to themselves and the world. We need cheap, safe energy for the world. It has the ability to literally save the world.
Sodel 11y ago
I was lucky enough to get a tour of their facility last June. One half was assembling and testing the most colossal plasma injection guns, driven by the biggest capacitor bank I have ever seen in my life. The other half of the facility contained the anemone-shaped plasma compression chamber from all their promotional images. (And far more impressive than the dinky prototype from the article above.) They had a shelf full of cracked steel pistons, and I'm still not sure how they plan to solve that problem when the full-scale machine uses 200 of them instead of just a dozen or so. (An aside, if anyone from General Fusion is reading this: my inventor friend suggested shooting slugs of molten lead into the molten lead core, instead of using the current steel-piston approach.) I guess I'm just saying that between the facilities, and what our host (one of the project managers) was talking about, I'm satisfied that they're not dawdling. These are just some inherently hard problems they're working on.

tedivm 11y ago

The site would be awesome. On a more immediate note, have any of the project you're tracking ever taken off or turned out to live up to the hype?

waterlesscloud 11y ago
That's a good question. Nothing comes to mind, but then things that live up to early promise probably just seem "obvious" in retrospect. Actively tracking the status over time might make it easier to remember those cases. There are some things, like Amazon delivery drones, that are seeming a lot more plausible than they were initially given credit for. It might be interesting, beyond basic news tracking for these topics to do some sort of "plausibility survey" along the way was well. See how people's opinions shift. Obviously that's a lot more work to do it right, but it could also be a lot more useful in the long run.
- ethbro 11y ago
  The successes seem to require the leadership having both incredible competency AND ironclad personal belief that the problem should be solved at almost any cost. These mega-problems are hard. And, even down a road to eventual success, there are likely to be a lot of "we have to lay off the entire team for 6 months because we have no funding" or "everything about this current situation makes exiting and cutting our losses the smarter move" moments. I can't imagine that gets any easier when you're talking about physical artifacts that require a much higher minimum feasible investment to even try.
marktangotango 11y ago
SpaceX; I started following them at about Falcon-1 launch attempt 2, I'd say they've lived up to the hype.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

politician 11y ago

I was kind of hoping for EMC2's Polywell to succeed.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

minthd 11y ago

If you're into building such site, one thing missing from most technology stories is an in-depth explanations(or even smart analysis by the right bloggers) about the technology and how it works, and not the watered-down stuff that usually goes around. I'm sure the community here would love such a site, i know i would. And you don't have to write it , just aggregate stuff, and i'm sure users would be happy to share.

andy_ppp 11y ago
I constantly think about a set of adult learning course for science things such as "math you need to know to understand relativity properly", be great to see this for other areas as well...
ethbro 11y ago
Most of the problem is that a lot of the *Weekly type of aggregator sites that report this kind of material seem to have an editorial aversion to linking off-site. I'm curious how many news sites actually have a "stories can only include hyperlinks to content our own site" policy. (Note: BBC News seems to be an exception, but still fails to include an obvious link a lot of the time)

reitanqild 11y ago

> I've thought about setting up a small site for it. Tracking promising sci/tech stories with unknown likelihood to ever actually come about. In case anyone is interested I recently came across zeef.com. It is (in my view) a place to make more ot less authorative pages on subjects; you can collect links, make automatic collections from RSS feeds etc.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

I've long had a soft spot for low probability, high-return science. I've looked around the net also, but not recently. The problem in the past was 1) sites set up by folks looking to scam people, and 2) people who were emotionally not well and unable to discuss such matters critically without getting into conspiracy theories and emotional-reasoning-based discussions. Both of those things kill it. If somebody could come up with a way to have reasonable and critical open-minded discussions of things like this? Sign me up.

dzhiurgis 11y ago

Not sure if could be very useful in tracking, but I enjoyed reading and refreshing my knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies

TheCondor 11y ago

I think the problem is that these folks tend to not publicize failure. It caters to cranks after a while, all the promises with no clear acknowledgment of the failure, just that they ran out of money and had to shut it down.

johndevor 11y ago
Conversely, I think people have no problem making promises. As a part of that, they could advertise their promises and hopefully glean some sort of accountability by making these promises public.

atomatica 11y ago

Transatomic has a page that charts their progress in designing and then building a molten salt reactor. http://www.transatomicpower.com/whats-next http://www.transatomicpower.com/whats-next

feld 11y ago
Thanks for linking this. I was hoping someone was publicly tracking progress on molten salt reactors.

jhartmann 11y ago

nextbigfuture.com is pretty good in that regard, a little political sometimes and sometimes some things from the edges of science but the admin does a good job on tracking news for emerging tech.

bargl 11y ago

One of the hosts of .NetRocks does a lot of "Geek Outs" where he researches a topic then presents his research on the episode. He's done two or more on this topic. He did one specifically on this release (and other information) http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1145 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1145 But I'd suggest you watch the first one he did on this topic. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1013 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1022 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037 http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1037 Also if you are a C# developer you should probably be listening to this show on a regular basis anyway. Because it rocks. And they do cover a pretty wide range outside the .Net stack. Note: I have no affiliation with the show, I just really like it. Edit: I think it's a great idea to create a site to centralize all this information. If you do, you might find contacting Richard to be helpful to aggregate data. Sorry that was the point of me posting, but I got rushed and forgot.

drjesusphd 11y ago

Do you mean fusion specifically? I've considered starting something like that, but I'm not sure if there's a wide enough interest.