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I was right, damn it!

As I predicted in yesterday's column, the "big breakthrough" in nuclear fusion research is simply that they passed the energy break-even level.

Yes, we have been able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than it took to create it in the first place.

However, as I also suggested, this BBC story states "experts say there is still some way to go before fusion powers homes".

Ya reckon?

It seems that the successful over-unity experiment is one based on inertial confinement where a small capsule of fusionable material is hit with high power lasers to heat it into a plasma.

The sudden heating of the gas also causes the pressure to rise so rapidly (because it can't get out of its own way quickly enough due to inertia) that fusion occurs.

The downside of this method is that it is a very transient burst of fusion which, in this case, created only "just enough to boil a few kettles" which means perhaps less than a megajoule (300W/H).

There is an awfully long way to go from one brief spark of fusion that produces microscopically more energy than was input -- and generating enough continuous energy to hook something up to the grid.

On the basis of today's announcement I think the "practical fusion reactors are just 20 years away" statement remains valid, as it always has been.

Now something a little different, from the archives of my brain (a small department that is rapidly emptying due to the effects of entropy)...

Everything is now on the web, certainly from a business perspective. That's great, and yet maybe not.

This will probably prove just how geeky I was as a kid but I recall that during the christmas holiday break I'd spend quite a few hours writing letters (yep, good old fashioned letters) to interesting looking businesses. I'd ask these businesses for any printed material they had on their company and its products.

We're talking technology companies, aviation companies, engineering companies... just about any kind of company that might have something I'd find interesting.

The result would be a tsunami of mail that would arrive in about early February. (Remember that back in the 1950s/60s, everyone took January off and many businesses didn't even open their doors again until early Feb as part of the "holiday break").

Not only did this avalanche of envelopes addressed to "Master B. Simpson" make me feel kind of important but it also gave me hours of joy as I sifted through the contents.

I was often very pleasantly surprised that electronic distributors and the like would send me their printed catalogs, often inches thick with hundreds of pages and thousand of products listed.

It was fantastic fun.

What a shame that, thanks to the internet, that little annual joy I'd created for myself, can't be enjoyed by kids of today.

Not only is the postal system pretty much just a relic of its former self but these days any such queries would simply receive a "see our website" response. How boring is that?

I don't know why this memory popped into my head yesterday but it was fun just recalling the mountain of mail I'd get and the bookcase in my bedroom that was filled to overflowing with catalogs of components and devices that, as a nine-year-old, I could only dream of having for real.

Carpe Diem folks!

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