Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system. Outside of big cities, the coverage is spotty, and even reasonably large towns are only connected by reserved-only trains every couple of hours that get booked out days in advance. The almost complete lack of digitization is also remarkable (reservations have to be made with machines in the stations). There are other annoyances such as the public transport in Tokyo shutting down completely at midnight. In contrast, the Swiss government-owned system delivers usable connectivity to almost any human settlement, even most mountain villages. The ticket prices are also not so different, which is surprising considering the large difference of salaries in the two countries.
It's worth mentioning that swiss is a nation of 9 million, whereas Japan has 128 million people. I'm not sure how comparable it is. You probably don't need to pass through a lot of settlements for any public projects in swiss, for example.
I think it's more politics and economics.
Switzerland is quite a lot richer than Japan and is extremely decentralized politically.
That creates strong incentives to provide good public services even to mountain villages.
It also helps that Switzerland isn't experiencing population decline. The Swiss population as a whole is growing quite rapidly and from what limited data I could find even rural regions are growing.
I think land acquisition doesn't really play a huge role.
They are both mountainous countries where rail projects have to squeeze in valleys or bear the expense of tunnelling.
I was thinking that Japan and Switzerland likely have good rail networks because the buildable land is severely constrained by geography. In those cases mountains, and connected only by thin linear corridors (valleys and near coastlines). Look at this map of Japan: The green areas aren't just natural areas, they are too mountainous to build cities.
In other places with large, flat expanses, human civilization spreads out to an extent that expensive railroads just can't serve the needs/desires of people. You could artificiallly constrain it, but you know what? People in general just don't like being told what to do.
But you still have to pick up the tickets at the machine. Additionally, my mobile phone internet is not recognized as "being in Japan", so I can't access the QR code needed for the ticket without wifi. You can work around it (save the QR code when you have wifi), but it all just seems so inefficient compared to all the countries where you can _book_ your tickets using a mobile app.
This sounds great, especially as it's linked to the IC card. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything similar for JR West or JR Kyushu, which I will be using in the next few weeks. Hopefully they will implement the same system in the future.
"Japanese public transport is good, but no match for the Swiss system."
I did some internet searches and Tokyo seems to always come in first when comparing rail systems. Switzerland comes in 3rd sometimes. Reasons for Tokyo being ranked first seem to be utilization, safety and punctuality.
Public transportation shutting down at midnight might be an annoyance to some, but it is a blessing to those that reside very close to the metro lines.
I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms of each pair in parallel. There is no interaction between the atoms of different pairs and no individual control. The experiment demonstrates a very robust gate scheme, but is a long way from a programmable computer.
Fusion is a number of dollars away, not years. It gets almost no funding because it’sa science and engineering experiment that most likely will not lead to economically viable power plants in a market dominated by renewables.
My impression back then from those profs was that it (fusion) would be inevitable but you do have to think long term, really long term. I'm old enough now (55) to understand that mentality.
I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen.
AFAIK superconductors are a major limiting tech. But we are slowly getting better ones, both by discovering more and by learning to mass produce superconducting wire.
With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.
There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.
... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.
In case others are confused: the old HN title has been changed, and the new HN title is directly from the paper (and definitely not overhyped).
Reading the ETHZ article as well as the paper, they both seem pretty accurate and descriptive. Really sad HN is not discussing the actual cool research that was done, but not surprised since physics is outside HN's core competencies.
What is overhyped about: "A new trick brings stability to quantum operations". Are people complaining about the HN title as if it's the article's title?
I have questions. Is he attempting to build a quantum gate array? Seems kind of unfair to compare one person's efforts with a well-established university, if so. :P
"Quantum radar" is a toy experiment with zero practical applications. The experiments achieved a "quantum advantage" by using entangled photons which only works in the single-photon regime. Since microwave photons are pretty small, this implies incredibly low transmission powers. With the typical return loss of an airplane (stealth or not) detected by a radar antenna, one would have to average for centuries to detect something (assuming the airplane stays there for said centuries). This assumes perfect entanglement with no other imperfections.
We can probably remove the quantum hype and still arrive at the same circumstance. Stealth does not make you invisible, just insufficient for locking on. In theory, it is supposed to make the jet indistinguishable from a bird or similar small object, but it's a cat & mouse game like anything else. It could likely be possible to fire a loitering A2A into the general vicinity of a stealth craft and it thermally finds targets of opportunity.
Essentially none of this is true. The war of the currents was between Edison and Westinghouse, not Tesla. Tesla's downfall was that he turned into a crackpot who rejected modern science, such as Maxwell's equations, and started defrauding investors. Edison was an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, and the electric chair used AC simply because it is much more deadly.
Westinghouse was using Tesla's patents. Get your facts right.
Every so often, I see or hear a new narrative of history that does not align with reality. I used to wonder how this could happen, but one of my sons explained to me that in his college history courses (in multiple accredited universities), the professors would teach their version of history, using their notes as the course material. They circularly cite other like-minded revisionist material, and most of their students just accept what the professor says as fact. He has seen this again and again in both lower and upper division courses.
This is a disturbing trend, and aside from "woke culture" indoctrination, I don't know what's behind it, or why these professors are not held to basic academic standards.
> The war of the currents was between Edison and Westinghouse [...]
Thank you for quashing the gross misinformation. I was going to post this, but searched and found your comment. `\m/`
(I learned of the "Current War" in the 70's, since the Edison Museum was in my "backyard" -- and was a common destination of local school field trips.)
The French energy sector is more than 50% fossil [1]. If France decarbonizes over the next decades, it will be due to renewables, not nuclear. While the government and population have been extremely pro-nuclear for a long time, the economics just don't work out. The current plan is to barely build enough reactors to replace old ones going off-line over the next decades.
That seems to be mostly because of oil use which is coming from transportation. Electrical generation is dominated by nuclear and renewables. Electrification of transport will help, provided they don't generate the additional electricity needed by burning gas or coal...
That's why I used the word electricity and not energy. It isn't perfect, but still much better than the majority if the world and even Europe. The fact that even the French themselves cannot replicate it anymore speaks volumes about the weakness of the current political system. As a counter example, the Chinese can and do.
In 2024, China produced 8 times more electricity from renewables that from nuclear [1], and the renewable share is growing much more quickly. Nuclear is as dead in China as it is elsewhere in the world.
China has a huge advantage over the majority of Europe: abundance of mostly empty land with a lot of sunlight, it's unrealistic in places like Norther Europe. But I'm not talking about nuclear alone, it was the best answer in the 70s and 80s, nowadays we need a healthy mix of nuclear, solar and wind. But above everything else we need a government willing to make significant changes and make them fast.
Chinese population is concentrated in the East. The Western half of the country is pretty much empty. Lots of sunny semi-desertic/desertic areas, too so they do have a lot of actually empty land well suited for solar (China is more to the South compared to Europe: Beijing is about same latitude as Madrid...) and wind.
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