Dan Steingart

Dan Steingart

@steingart.bsky.social

Icy Cold Blast

241 followers121 following245 posts

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Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

It's scary when bedrock is busted. Many nearest neighbors of the same charge in bulk and bulk-ish conditions call into question a fundamental tenet of my understanding. But rest assured that thermodynamics predicts these states; these are not guesses based on motivated reasoning.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

So what's next? Well, this research dovetails beautifully with what we've been doing in DOE's ESRA (which funded some of us working on this) and sets up a whole series of questions we look forward to digging into. Stay tuned.

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Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

When Rich suggested Li+ forms effective clusters of (e.g., 3-ish Li+ as nearest neighbors), my brain melted a bit. Electroneutrality is violated, and we're not even at a double layer? Reader, I was skeptical. Sure, quantum fluctuations are wild, but are they relevant?

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

The team brought receipts. Quantum chemistry indicates the possibility. MLIP shows it applies to a range of commercially relevant systems. And a smoking-gun NMR shows these clusters exist in your cell phone battery. And me, scratching my head and saying, 'whoa'.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

I now see claude speak everywhere. A running thread. Note that many of these pages are interesting and filled great ideas and cool results. But I wish it didn't sound like a ChAId.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

Is this the watermarking?

Dan Steingart@steingart.bsky.social

I find that Claude’s writing style, in code at least, has gotten very clickbaity. Increasingly verbose and jargony. I/ we wrote skills and code to fix the problems, but I find the style annoying even in problem-solving mode. anyone else?

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

I find that Claude’s writing style, in code at least, has gotten very clickbaity. Increasingly verbose and jargony. I/ we wrote skills and code to fix the problems, but I find the style annoying even in problem-solving mode. anyone else?

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

What bothers me most about the article is that it paints Rob as a Pollyanna. He is anything but. He is a gadfly, and his 1:1 pedagogy is unmatched in making people better at what they do. There are charlatans selling everything. Rob ain't one of them. Rob taught me how to engage and defuse them.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

The whole point of the wedge approach was to spread risk and not bet on a single approach. I feel the PP piece, at best, underplayed this and, at worst, misrepresented it.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

Finally, Rob Socolow has inspired more people to engage in environmentalism and climate research than anyone else I know. Was he wrong about CCUS? Maybe? Likely? But if not for him, the conversation around climate change would be years behind.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

My challenge with the ProPublic piece is that it assumes one knows the answer before one does the work. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and hoping for a better result.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

But what's the definition of giving up before you try? Because, IMHO, this is what the PP piece is asking of the scientists and industrialists, in 2000, breaking bread across a significant chasm and asking, for the first time, how can we slow this awful thing down?

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

I wish I were wrong about CCUS, as it would be great if it could work. And I can tell you, in 2003, we weren't as certain as we are today about its challenges. This is how science and technology go: you try something, you assess its efficacy, you make a decision.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

It was in those meetings, years before cheap batteries became a clear reality in 2015, that I mapped out the potential cost curves for lithium-ion WITH bp scientists and dedicated myself to developing technologies and methods to accelerate that potential.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

Back to CCUS: it was in those CMI meetings that my skepticism of CCUS was bolstered, not because people were selling me on it, but because we were running the calculations openly.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

I think CMI was great. I have always been skeptical of CCUS. Rob, Steve, and CMI debated the merits rigorously. This is what academics do. Those meetings were exhilarating. I was in turns fuming, hopeful, and deflated. I was ultimately more determined to make better batteries.

Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social
Streetsblog NYC@nyc.streetsblog.org

Braking news: Federal officials have ordered the troubled micromobility company Fly E-Bike to recall devices that feature a flawed braking system that does not meet federal standards — despite Fly's promise that it did. nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/02/11/m...

nyc.streetsblog.orgMore Troubles for Fly E-Bike: Feds Order Costly Moped Recall - Streetsblog New York CityFederal officials have ordered Fly E-Bike to recall all Fly 10 mopeds, the latest troubles for the micromobility company.
Dan Steingart
@steingart.bsky.social

For what it’s worth, I’ve learned during my time as department chair that the most complex and most important part of leadership is de-escalation. I have not seen this mentioned over the past few days, so there it is.