Post #1949392
2026-05-03 18:14 UTC
Replies (3)
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@saethlin@hachyderm.io 2026-05-03 18:30
This post is about https://douglasbrunt-author.com/mysterious-case-of-rudolf-diesel. You should read it. Rudolf Diesel thought that his engine would bring power to the masses. And his engine had clear advantages over the competing technologies which were coal and gasoline. Diesel engines burn fuel with less exhaust than coal without the flammability of gasoline. And they don't need those fiddly spark plugs. And yet Rudolf Diesel almost completely failed to commercialize the technology. Sure there are diesel engines in use today. But think it would be hard to predict the shape of the adoption curve of gasoline and diesel based on seeing the early engines at trade shows. Or even the first models for sale on the market.
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@saethlin@hachyderm.io 2026-05-03 18:54
If you haven't already seen the 2026 Ember report, you should at least look at the figures: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/ I remember hearing *so much* about how we will need a mixture of different renewable sources, and maybe that's true. But only solar is being adopted at an accelerating rate. Solar and wind have been cheaper than fossil fuels for about a decade now. I wonder if we will remember 2025-2026 as the start of the big solar energy adoption.
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@saethlin@hachyderm.io 2026-05-03 19:27
Shingles vaccination seems to reduce dementia: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01256-5 As best I understand it the theory here is that the improvement is from having a more effective immune response to virus reactivation. So there should be an even greater benefit for those who cannot have reactivation at all because they were vaccinated against chicken pox. HPV vaccination reduces rates of a handful of cancers: https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.10507 Again, as best I understand it the theory is that part of the HPV replication strategy is to hack up the infected cell's DNA to make it replicate more. Hack too much and you become a wart. Really go ham and you get a malignant tumor. And vaccination probably has a generalized anti-cancer effect: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41819102/ There was a lot of hype about mRNA vaccines after the effectiveness of Moderna's vaccine against SARS-COV-2, but I don't think I've heard any of this incredible news outside of TWiV, a niche virology podcast.