I don't know how societies set "primary goals". After spending 15 years in a tenure track -- tenured position, I thought setting goals well was important.

I take pleasure in how mathematics and science help me understand the universe better than I understood it before I studied the fields. I believe that my understanding has helped me contribute to society.

Yes! US agriculture (Mostly a red state industry) needs potash. Google AI says that most potash comes from (in order) Canada ("is the primary global exporter and supplies nearly 80% of U.S. imports"), Russia, Belarus, China, and "smaller volumes are supplied by countries [...]".

If I were king of Canada, I would restrict supplies of such materials needed by red states.

I had a summer visiting professor job at Intel at the time doing signal processing. They set me up to use MatLab under Windows95. I installed Linux and code from Numerical Recipes to get around various limitations. Andy Grove had just banned Macs because they didn't use Intel chips. They believed the WinTel duopoly was giving them "more money than God." (A phrase that I first heard at Intel that summer)

Sort of related. Across the street from my cousin's house in Portland, OR, a car ran over the curb and into landscape features that knocked off the car's bumper and license plate. The perpetrator then backed up and drove away. My cousin's doorbell camera caught it all. Police are not interested, saying no one can prove who was driving. Who needs a license plate reader when you can get a license plate?

> Police are not interested, saying no one can prove who was driving.

How about asking the owner?

That seems like a good idea to me. No matter what the owner says, I would want to know about the incident if I were providing liability insurance on the vehicle.

The second law of thermodynamics implies that one must spend energy as work to move thermal energy up a temperature difference. So the net effect of an air conditioner is to increase the total amount of thermal energy.

For a long time I've been reading that the closure of Hormuz is going to constrain consumption soon. I understand the economic theory that reducing supply of an inelastic commodity greatly increases the price. The article says that inventories have insulated us from high prices so far. I am surprised by how large and effective those inventories have been. And I am surprised that futures prices are not higher. Can anyone here suggest explanations?

It is almost entirely explained by China cutting imports significantly. They are running down their inventory waiting for prices to drop again. Consumption was previously constrainted in much of Asia, for example 4 day work weeks etc. The US has also lowered their strategic petroleum reserve to new lows.

If, hypothetically, the war ended tomorrow, then we could resume Business As Usual and slowly start rebuilding reserves. The Powers That Be (governments, oil corporations, etc.) have a vested interest in this: while a price spike ostensibly makes money for the oil corporations, it also drives people to invest in green energy, buy electric cars, or make lifestyle changes that reduce long-term consumption. Meanwhile, the politicians benefit from the illusion that everything is under control.

There are still enough reserves to maintain this illusion AND do a fairly orderly "jack up prices, drive down demand" transition if and when it proves necessary.

TL;DR: The whole point of these reserves is to provide this sort of stability

I signed up for software carpentry instructor training at the SciPy conference in 2015. I expected to learn about their curriculum. Instead, I found that they taught pedagogy. There were articles to read in advance. I should have taken that class before I spent 15 years teaching at university rather than afterwards.

What aspects of pedagogy did you find most relevant? It does seem sad that in our industry, one where practical learning is necessary, that learning how to learn isn't really taught well. Often the worse ways to learn are those that seemed to be encouraged, mostly because it's the easiest way to monetize content.

It was so long ago that I've forgotten most of it. I was impressed that it was based on evidence based literature. Here is a link to the training now https://carpentries.org/instructor-training/ I am disappointed that I don't see a reading list.

Unless it's changed since I was active, The Carpentries does not monetize content.

When I worked at Los Alamos, the head of counterintelligence was a former CIA ops guy. He seemed warm and intelligent; just an all around good guy. In presentations, he explained that his job at the CIA was to exploit that appearance to ruin people's lives. He said his approach was to gain the trust of a mark, and then provide him with what ever was required to get him to betray things he loved. The presentations were effective, enlightening and spooky.

So, I agree: All spies are bastards.

This article was in Springer's The Mathematical Intelligencer in 1980. The next article in that volume was "Strange Attractors" by David Ruelle. When I read Ruelle's article in the early 1980s, I noticed Knuth's article. By the time I got to writing my third paper on strange attractors in 1988, I was using TeX.

Helium will leak out of some structures that hold methane. Shale will trap methane and let helium escape. Layers of salt trap both. Thus horizontal drilling and fracking to recover oil and methane from shale produces very little helium.