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Showing posts from September, 2024

A revolving door?

  A revolving door? “Brad Smith To Succeed Kim Lebak As President/General Manager Of N3B Los Alamos” https://losalamosreporter.com/2023/06/05/brad-smith-to-succeed-kim-lebak-as-president-general-of-n3b-los-alamos/

LLNL “inclusiveness”?

“At LLNL, people are our most important asset…We work to develop their skills and create an inclusive environment that supports an array of professional and personal backgrounds. Together, we sustain our legacy of…” “Inclusive environment” for LLNL “people”? Did LLNL “people” have an opportunity for timely input to the NNSA as to the benefit or harm of extending the LLNS contract for 5 more years? “Sustain our legacy”? This is why many employees working at LLNL, despite polished mission statements and talking points (words), continue to believe they are treated like commodities (actions) resulting in further erosion of employee morale.

Three Mile Island restart

  There is a plan to restart Three Mile Island to provide power to Microsoft for its AI and cloud computing efforts: https://www.inc.com/reuters/three-mile-island-nuclear-plant-to-restart-after-microsoft-ai-power-deal.html

Golden Goose award

  This is interesting -- there is a golden goose award that supports basic research: https://www.goldengooseaward.org/ https://www.goldengooseaward.org/history Congressman Cooper foresaw an award that would recognize the tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact.

NNSA “Field Offices”? Really?

Is the American tax payer well served when our purported NNSA “Field Offices”are essentially populated with long term, Livermore, Los Alamos, etc. residents (buying local homes, kids going to local schools, going to local functions, parties, etc.) that commingle with NNSA contractors they are supposed to be objectively evaluating? Why aren’t these people forced by NNSA policy, into a 6-12 month field office rotation schedule? Because this is not currently the case. As non-rotating NNSA employees, do NNSA Field Office employees basically become a non-objective arm of the contractor, they are suppose to be evaluating?

New chatbot with reasoning capabilities

 There's a new chatbot with reasoning capabilities, which is better at working out solutions in math, physics, and computer science: https://openai.com/o1/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242439/openai-o1-model-reasoning-strawberry-chatgpt

Harvesting wind power

  This is a nice video on using trees to harvest wind power. https://youtu.be/BSxK5VagSb8?si=oV6Jg8seunYjB09F Perhaps in the future the trees in question could be genetically modified to make this work even better.

Crazy Los Alamos traffic!

  Charles “Charlie” McMillan the former LANL director was killed in car crash today in Los Alamos. The driving in the town is just crazy now and there seems to be more and more accidents and really aggressive drivers.

LLNL “True” Story? Whose truth?

“LLNL True Story” should be renamed to reflect blog topic and comment filtration, since most new topics and comments, will be filtered out if they do not compliment the Democratic Party narrative. Maybe the new blog name could be “LLNL Story: A democrats perspective”?