I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here.
A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of screaming kids.
In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush.
Or, at least, that's what I thought.
Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She's not slicing fruit; she's arming herself with knowledge.
The PSP's web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time.
But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.
Not everyone has a big monitor, or a multi-core CPU burning through the teraflops, or a broadband connection.
The photographer Chase Jarvis coined the phrase "the best camera is the one that’s with you". He meant that having a crappy instamatic with you at an important moment is better than having the best camera in the world locked up in your car.
The same is true of web browsers. If you have a smart TV, it probably has a crappy browser.
If your laptop and phone both got stolen - how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online - will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won't render?
What vital information or services are forbidden to you due to being trapped in PDFs or horrendously complicated web sites?
Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they're in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary - but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility).
Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created?
I chatted briefly to the young woman afterwards. She'd been kicked out by her parents and her friends had given her the bus fare to the housing benefits office. She had nothing but praise for how helpful the staff had been. I asked about the PSP - a hand-me-down from an older brother - and the web browser. Her reply was "It's shit. But it worked."
I think that's all we can strive for.
Here are some stats on games consoles visiting GOV.UK
“I chatted briefly to the young woman afterwards. She'd been kicked out by her parents and her friends had given her the bus fare to the housing benefits office. She had nothing but praise for how helpful the staff had been. I asked about the PSP - a hand-me-down from an older brother - and the web browser. Her reply was ‘It's shit. But it worked.’
“My,” my father says, “Earth is really full of things!”
It does not feel like a criticism, even if the things he is referring to are mostly useless. In this colorful realm, it’s my job to tidy up a world that’s reminiscent of my real-world apartment any time one of my disorders compels me to upend every last drawer at once. The things in question are a broad range of objects that amalgamate in any living space: stationery, thumbtacks, toilet paper, batteries, orange peels, tubes of lip balm, potato chip cannisters, and spiders. While a few of these objects—such as Shogi tiles and Hina dolls—would be less commonplace in non-Japanese households, a cucumber is a cucumber regardless of where you’re from, and a mess is a mess.
Someone has to clean it up. Your father, who made the mess to begin with, can’t be expected to do it. He is the King of All Cosmos, and has other whimsical, catastrophic plans to look forward to. He has already broken the universe beyond repair, thanks to a naughty bout of drinking that resulted in him somehow erasing every star from the sky. It turns out this has made him very unpopular with the denizens of the universe, and he has to find new stars somewhere, so why not just make them from all those useless things piling up on Earth?
You might resent him for it, and certainly, when Dad asks you to tidy dozens of live crabs from a backyard only to then imply you’ve done a poor job of it, he is a hard person to appreciate. He may be the quintessential Bad Dad. Like many parents who are quick to delegate the terrible fallout of their selfishness to their offspring, the burden of fixing the universe falls to you. “You owe Us for your existence,” he informs you. “We collect on the debt. Yes?”
How could anyone argue with that inane logic? Besides, in the charming, batshit world of Katamari Damacy, he’s the only dad you’ve got. And if it takes rolling trash, then furniture, then animals, then people, then vehicles, then cities into stars to earn his approval? Well.
For all that this premise sounds bleak, anyone unwittingly exposed to the Katamari aesthetic would never suspect it. In Katamari, the world is made of bright colors, cubed edges (years before minecraft, mind you), and whimsy, set to a fantastic Shibuya-kei soundtrack, which is some unlikely mishmash of genres ranging from jazz to rap to pop. There is much to love about a cult-classic game franchise like Katamari. Whatever more I may say will be more junk rolled into the ever-growing sphere of its long-standing reputation as a triumphant pioneer in the indie-game canon.
But go on, kids! Make stars from the trash your parents gave you…
Dust to Stardust?
Credit: Bandai Namco Entertainment
I am very late to the game when it comes to admiring Katamari Damacy. The first game was released in 2004, and my family had only just purchased its first shared gaming console, a PlayStation 2. I remember the early ads for Katamari because they exist in the same surreal pantheon of bizarro advertising as that one wild Quiznos sub commercial and the infamous Skittles Midas Touch ad. In the commercial, a secretary walks into a beige lobby and tells a salaryman to follow her. He closes his briefcase and leans forward as if to stand—only to remain seated, pulling the entire sofa with him. The sofa folds into the woman, who becomes stuck to it as well, and then folds out the door and absorbs the cleaning lady. In essence, anything a katamari rolls into becomes part of the growing mass, kicking and mewling and flapping. The commercial is memorable because it breaks one barrier the game never does: the live-action commercial depicts this disturbing fate using human beings rather than pixelated cartoons. It’s a delicate line between dreams and nightmares.
The truth is that Katamari presents the goofiest of body horrors, but body horror all the same. We are all familiar with religions or creeds that tell us we return to the universe after death; or if we aren’t religious, we at the very least know the Law of Conservation of Mass: matter can neither be created nor destroyed. As creatures composed of organic stuff, we have a lot more in common with the junk in our houses—nail polish bottles and toilet brushes and our silly little tchotchkes—that we might like to admit. Eventually, we all decay and merge with the world again. Take your pick of oracles—Carl Sagan or Moby or any random fantasy novel—and consider the message they convey: we are all made of stardust.
And maybe it isn’t trying to be that deep, but Katamari goes one step further. What if the stars are instead made of us? I am oddly charmed by this more ambitious doom. Rarely is the transition from cognizant individual to squirming mindless mass so abrupt, or, well… amusing? I am delighted whenever I absorb a screaming schoolboy or a pompadoured Yankee. The twinge of guilt I feel when I roll over another tomcat and hear his questioning “Meow?” as he becomes one with my rolling hell-cluster is immediately quelled by the knowledge that he and all his new companions will make for a beautiful star.
It might come as no surprise that this whole beautiful disaster of a game was the brainchild of an art student. The series creator, Keita Takahashi, was a talented graduate from Musashino Art University, the same university that produced auteur Satoshi Kon, Hello Kitty creator Yuko Shimizu, and horror author Ryu Murakami. Takahashi was known for his eccentric, playful sculptures, among which was a goat-shaped planter that drained water through its udders. He grew bored with sculpture and began working in the art department of Namco in the late ’90s, where he found himself brainstorming new games. According to Takahashi, the seed of the idea for Katamari began with fond recollections of an old arcade game—I mean, 1880s old—tamakorogashi. You’ve played some iteration of it, probably; remember those plastic keychains with metal balls inside, and the objective was to spin or tilt the damn things until each ball rolled into a corresponding hole? Tamakorogashi is also credited as one of the major inspirations for modern pinball.
Perhaps it is a testament to the oddity of Takahashi’s brain that he realized his ambition to create a game that was “not formulaic” by designing a game around so mundane a concept as cleaning up a mess. Of course, we could all clean up our houses instead of playing, and find our lives better served: “You don’t need cleaning in a video game, son: we have cleaning at home!”
But that’s not the point. The point is that even the dullest, simplest chores in life can be reimagined and transformed into something playful. With a stable of young game designers at his side, the Katamari Damacy project slowly gained traction. It was not an easy sell, and Namco remained unconvinced until Takahashi secured a student aid grant to help develop the project further.
It has since spawned a critically acclaimed franchise containing more than twenty games, and has been frequently cited as a major inspiration for independent game designers. This impact is probably greater than I have any real sense of—I have played a lot fewer indie games than most avid gamers, which is why it took me twenty years to fall for the Prince and his Bad Dad. Even so, I have felt the impact of Katamari in unlikely places. In the horror game Inside, for example, there comes a point when the player character, a frightened little boy, begins merging with other human beings to form a screeching mass of rolling flesh.
The word “katamari” means “cluster,” and “damacy” means “soul.” That’s a great title, because this stuff has a real soul, buried under layers of sheep and shopping carts and a kraken or two. The objects we surround ourselves with do help us ground ourselves in the world and define who we are, after all—you can pry my collection of yokai-cat figurines or my Blythe dolls from my cold dead hands.
Here in Japan, there exists extensive folklore about a specific type of yokai (spirit) known as tsukumogami. The word translates to “object ghosts.” According to legend, objects that reach 100 years in age are granted sentience. While many yokai have sinister intentions, most tsukumogami are innocuous, playful creatures: the awakened koto that plays forgotten memories at night, a talkative tea kettle used as a peace offering in a historic tale. While tsukumogami stories maintain a unique charm, most cultures share stories about magical objects. In the immortal words of a charming candlestick in one Academy Award-winning animated film, “Don’t believe me? Ask the dishes.”
While tsukumogami stories deliver a variety of moral lessons, many warn owners not to neglect their possessions. Things, however cheap or simple, should be taken care of. Culturally, this notion remains a core principle in Japan. Anyone who goes thrifting in Koenji can tell you that secondhand items are usually in impeccable, often brand-new shape. In general, despite the gachapon refuse and endless layers of plastic wrapping and disposable utensils, Japanese values place a lot of emphasis on the concept of mottainai: waste not, want not. Compounding this, perhaps? It is exceptionally difficult to get rid of trash in Japan, thanks to strict rules about rubbish sorting and specific pickup days. People who are overwhelmed, depressed, or busy are bound to miss these days and find themselves slowly surrounded by piles of plastic bags. You might be familiar with anime or news reports about hikikomori dens, where people withdraw and live in isolation. While many families take part in a traditional deep cleaning before the New Year, those who don’t maintain bonds with family sometimes avoid any such activity. In Japan, it is quite rare to be invited into someone’s apartment, and much more common to meet in a third space. In short, it is all too easy for one’s home to become a guilt-ridden temple of hidden waste.
But there is zero shame in the messes of Katamari. Roads cluttered with cones and thermoses and yards buried beneath toys and cleaning supplies and appliances are vibrant landscapes, as fun to explore as they are satisfying to clear. Nothing is hidden away, and the larger your katamari grows, the more it can absorb, until even pets and people become part of it. If our stuff is junk and so, ultimately, are we, why should we feel bad about it? We are what we are. It doesn’t mean everything is meaningless. Every object is catalogued with measurements and a blurb as it joins your cause, evidence that a life is being lived, shedding candy wrappers like our bodies shed hair and skin. Gross? Who cares.
I do not think that Katamari is trying to make one clear statement about consumption. Instead, I think it takes an insightful look at the chaotic world we’re all inhabiting and finds the beautiful levity in it. It might be impossible for us to really clean up our planet, and maybe it’s ludicrous to try, but by golly, this little guy is trying anyhow, so who cares if his dad is a hater? The true catharsis in Katamari comes not from tidying up a room, but tidying up the mind along with it.
Don’t you ever stop, lonely rolling star! Keep going.
Konmari vs. Katamari?
Credit: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Professional organizer Marie Kondo suggests that every object thrown away should be thanked for its service before being disposed of. Teddy bears should be blindfolded before meeting the trash bag so we don’t incur guilt looking into their eyes one last time. Unwanted gifts on our shelves should be appreciated not for what they are, but for the sentiment, which frees us from having to keep that damn ugly sweater. Give each object a salute and then chuck it, until you are surrounded only by those things that make you happy. This approach to organizing a life has been effective for me and countless others.
The katamari approach is less mindful but just as satisfying. It does not hurt that it is imaginary. The therapeutic benefits exist all the same. The soundtrack alone is the aural equivalent of touching grass.
The mess in these games is ultimately unconquerable, especially for a subpar player like me. Katamari is known for its unique controls. Using two Joy-Cons is as essential as rowing on both sides of a rowboat if you don’t want to go in circles. In real life, my coordination could never. But with practice, navigating that rolling adhesive ball becomes easier and easier. It’s rare to sense improvement so concretely in gaming. It’s weirdly encouraging, and maybe that’s another lesson: Managing the mess of daily life is a challenge, but it can get easier. The point is to keep rolling, because what the hell else can we do?
I should really clean my apartment. It will only get messy again, sure, but there will be a brief few days when the sunlight hits the apartment walls just right and the cat dander does not overwhelm me—and then I can sit on the sofa and play Katamari in peace.[end-mark]
Thousands of electric vehicles in Waymo’s autonomous robotaxi fleet may eventually give up their used batteries for a very different purpose—contributing up to hundreds of megawatt-hours of stationary energy storage to local power grids.
That prospect comes from a “strategic supply agreement” announced by Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions on June 4. B2U has been repurposing thousands of used batteries from various electric vehicles by installing them in large stationary energy storage projects. Such energy storage facilities can capture excess renewable energy during low demand periods and release such energy when local power grids are experiencing peak demand periods.
“Our business is getting the full residual value out of electric vehicle batteries after they're no longer suitable for automotive use,” Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solution, told Ars. “Waymo puts a lot of miles on EVs and their model is expanding rapidly, and so we're just very pleased and honored to be able to work with them.”
The agreement would allow B2U to repurpose Waymo batteries that become available at the end of a vehicle’s lifespan, along with obtaining used batteries that are being swapped out from operational vehicles. Waymo’s “proactive maintenance” for its autonomous vehicles includes identifying opportunities to “refresh the battery to improve efficiency overall for our fleet,” Adam Lenz, head of sustainability and environment at Waymo, told Ars. “That’s when we look to these second-life applications, because there's still a lot of life left in the battery,” he said.
Waymo did not specify the average mileage at which it swaps out batteries or retires vehicles from service. But Waymo robotaxis drive around much more each day than the typical EV, which means the Waymo fleet is likely to experience faster usage-related degradation of battery capacity over time. The company confirmed to Ars that “some of these vehicles have now been serving riders for years and have mileage beyond what a normal consumer drives.”
A 2025 analysis of over 22,700 electric vehicles across 21 models found that average battery capacity loss was about 2.3 percent per year, according to the telematics company Geotab. That translates to such batteries still having more than 81 percent of their original capacity after eight years.
Waymo’s current fleet of nearly 4,000 vehicles mainly consists of Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles that have a 90 kWh lithium-ion battery. The company has also begun rolling out the Ojai robotaxi made by the Chinese automotive brand Zeekr with a 93 kWh battery.
“Put a little haircut on that in terms of degradation and the effective capacity that would be left in those batteries when they’re suitable for repurposing, and we’re still talking about pretty significant capacity per battery,” Hall said.
The growing Waymo robotaxi fleet could lead to “pretty large numbers in terms of megawatt hours of capacity that can be deployed pretty quickly” for stationary energy storage supporting power grids, he suggested.
The agreement gives Waymo discretion over when and how many used batteries will be turned over to B2U. But the companies confirmed that B2U has “already started receiving smaller initial quantities of batteries” from the Waymo fleet. Over time, the agreement could give B2U “hundreds of megawatt-hours” of additional storage capacity from Waymo’s thousands of electric vehicles, Lenz said.
Local grid synergy
The B2U grid storage solution could do more than simply extend the usefulness of lithium-ion batteries from Waymo’s fleet by several years. The new partnership is intended to support B2U projects in regions where Waymo’s autonomous robotaxis operate—meaning the used Waymo batteries could bolster the local power grids that Waymo vehicles rely upon for charging.
“What we think is really cool and unique about this opportunity is that these are the batteries that are helping serve our riders in these communities, and then they're actually going to B2U to then be deployed in local grids that are near communities that we serve as well,” Lenz told Ars. “So there's a nice circularity here for our commitment to clean technology and supporting renewable energy on the grids.”
Used Waymo batteries will be received at B2U’s Lancaster facility in Los Angeles County, which already houses more than 1,300 repurposed electric vehicle batteries. From there, the batteries will also be deployed to other B2U energy storage projects at sites across California and Texas, including a 24 megawatt-hour energy storage project in Bexar County, Texas, that could support Waymo’s growing deployment in San Antonio.
The all-electric fleet of Waymo robotaxis prevents 530 tons of CO2 emissions with every 500,000 weekly trips, according to company estimates. Waymo has typically sourced the electricity required for charging its vehicles from local wind and solar power generation projects, and by sometimes purchasing renewable energy certificates to cover any gaps.
One exception to that clean energy prioritization has been Waymo’s partnership with ride-hailing giant Uber in Austin, Texas. Uber installed a “temporary charging solution” for Waymo vehicles serving Austin riders that involved mobile L-Charge generators running on natural gas, which subsequently drew local attention and complaints because of the generator noises.
In any case, Waymo’s agreement with B2U fits with a more promising and broader trend of the United States installing record amounts of battery energy storage. A report by the Solar Energy Industries Association showed that US battery energy stationary storage installations reached 9.7 gigawatt hours in the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year—the “largest Q1 in history” and a 32 percent year-over-year increase.
B2U is already managing more than 4,000 EV battery packs across its energy storage projects, including used Nissan Leaf batteries that were first installed in 2020 and are still going strong after approximately 2,500 cycles. The company currently has a “nice supply of batteries, but it’s great to add to this supply because the demand for storage is very high,” Hall said.
This article was updated on June 4, 2026 to correct a misspelling of the company name B2U.
The age of robotaxis, long the preserve of science fiction, is now a reality, at least in a handful of American cities. It took just over a decade to get from the DARPA Grand Challenges to the start of Waymo's commercial service in California, albeit initially with a safety driver on board.
Proponents of the technology, which has attracted at least $100 billion in investment, say robotaxis will be safer than human-driven vehicles. And last year, Waymo's data showed its cars were involved in many fewer crashes than human drivers, with much lower insurance claims, although recent issues with school buses and flooded roads show the technology isn't perfect.
But safety isn't the only selling point: Autonomous vehicles are said to cut traffic. But data from Waymo's reports to the California Public Utilities Commission shows that, at least in that regard, robotaxis are no better than ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber.
Is there anyone in there?
The study, published in Transport Findings by MIT Transit Lab Assistant Director of Research Awad Abdelhalim analyzes data from August 2023 through December 2025, a roughly 1,000-day period. During that time, Waymo's robotaxis completed 13.8 million trips for 19.3 million passengers over a total traveled distance of 86.3 million miles (138.8 million km), growing at a rate of around 15 percent a month. Abdelhalim wanted to see what proportion of those rides were made by empty robotaxis—known as "deadheading"—and how the number changed over time.
Initially, only 36 percent of Waymo's miles were driven with a passenger onboard. But by the end of the study period, that had increased to around 56 percent and then plateaued, Abdelhalim found. So about 44 percent of Waymo's driven miles are conducted with empty EVs.
I'm not entirely surprised; on each of my recent visits to San Francisco, the sensor-festooned Jaguar I-Paces have been thick on the ground, but rarely did I spot any humans riding in them.
In fact, there are two different kinds of deadheading: empty vehicles driving around waiting to be assigned a ride and empty vehicles driving to collect their passenger(s). And Waymo has been steadily reducing the number of miles driven empty en route to a pickup as it increases the size of its fleet. The number of deadhead miles per trip has also been declining, in part due to Waymo's introduction of freeway service, the author suggests.
A similar analysis conducted late last year on Waymo's CPUC data from January 2024 through September 2025 by Matthew Raifman, who studies policy and autonomous vehicles at UC Berkeley, also found that 44 percent of Waymo's miles were driven with empty vehicles and that two-thirds of those empty miles were robotaxis driving around waiting to be assigned a customer.
No better, no worse than ride-hailing
Interestingly, similar arguments about reducing traffic were once made about ride-hailing. In 2014, other researchers at MIT published a study claiming that ride-hailing could reduce car ownership and cut traffic. Two of the authors later walked back their conclusions after evidence showed that ride-hailing actually increased traffic and CO2 emissions, partly because it was cheap enough to encourage trips people otherwise wouldn't have taken. They noted that robotaxis would probably fall into the same trap. (A 2018 study found that almost half of the increase in vehicle miles traveled in San Francisco was attributable to ride-hailing services.)
In total, about 40 percent of the miles traveled by a Lyft or Uber driver are deadhead miles, suggesting there's little difference in congestion whether there's a human behind the wheel or not. Incidentally, this fact helps explain some of the statistical safety advantage of a robotaxi—if the average number of occupants of a robotaxi is always lower than the average number of occupants of a ride-hailing vehicle, the expected injury rate for the robotaxi should be correspondingly smaller.
Meanwhile, effective congestion reduction could be achieved through a robust expansion of public transport. The same number of people on a bus take up much less room on the road than if they were spread out in passenger cars, and the numbers get even better for trains and subways. But public transport doesn't come cheap. Waymo might have raised $16 billion earlier this year for its robotaxis, and at least $100 billion has been invested in the sector since the 2010s. Meanwhile, the American Public Transport Association called for $268 billion in investment over five years, and a report by Transportation For America puts the price tag for a "world class" transit system at $4.6 trillion over the next 20 years.
Here at Ars, we've taken pleasure in reporting on versions of Doom that run on everything from wireless earbuds and printers to Windows' notepad.exe and even inside Doom itself. So when we hear that a piece of game-playing hardware from the '90s (or later) can't run Doom, our ears perk up.
That hardware is the Neo Geo, an early '90s game console that players of a certain age will remember for its eye-watering launch price and its relatively strong pixel-pushing power for the time. Despite that relative power, though, a fascinating new video from Modern Vintage Gamer argues that the Neo Geo's architecture makes it particularly ill-suited for a port of id's famously easy-to-port game.
At first glance, the Neo Geo seems like it should be up to the task of running Doom. The Motorola 68000 CPU inside the console is the same one powering the Commodore Amiga, which has seen quite a few homebrew Doom ports over the years.
But aside from a lack of memory, the Neo Geo was designed specifically and exclusively to handle sprite-based 2D graphics stored on a cartridge. The CPU simply writes tile numbers, positions, and "shrink values" (for scaling) into VRAM, then lets the video processor fetch the appropriate sprites from the character ROM for display. That character ROM isn't even addressable by the 68000 CPU's bus, meaning the system can't sample textures or read specific sprite pixels for post-processing, either.
Unfortunately for potential Doom porters, the Neo Geo also lacks the kind of bitmap graphics mode that helps get around these sprite-based limitations. The system doesn't have any frame buffers or Amiga-style bitplanes that would allow for unrestricted drawing of pixels to any part of the screen. That means even an entirely software-based Doom renderer on the Neo Geo would have no direct way to draw its results to the screen.
Neo Wolfenstein
While those limitations might hold back a Neo Geo Doom port, the system may still be able to handle a simpler FPS like Wolfenstein 3D. Modern Vintage Gamer put together a simple Neo Geo raycasting demo for a video that approximates that game's 90-degree walls, flat floors, and ceilings.
The "walls" in this raycasting demo are simply 4-pixel-wide sprites that have been scaled up by the Neo Geo hardware.
Credit:
Modern Vintage Gamer
The raycaster works by sending out rays from the player's position to detect the distance to the first wall the player can see in that line. That data then determines the heights and colors for each of a set of 80 4-pixel-wide sprites arranged horizontally across the display, which act as pieces of wall. Since the Neo Geo's scaling hardware can efficiently stretch those sprites vertically without much overhead, the raycasting data can be quickly converted into a chunky approximation of a first-person view.
MVG's simple, unoptimized Neo Geo raycaster currently runs at just eight frames per second via emulation without any of Wolfenstein 3D's enemies or game logic. And the raycasting system would still be wildly insufficient for Doom elements like raised platforms, staircases, elevators, textured walls and ceilings, etc.
For all those reasons, MVG believes the only practical way to get Doom running on a Neo Geo is to pack additional hardware into the cartridge, much like the Super FX2 chip that powered the limited SNES port of the game. Failing that kind of extra processing power, he wagers that the system will likely remain Doom-free for the foreseeable future.
"I don't want to say it's impossible because as soon as you say that something is impossible, the gauntlet has been thrown down," MVG added.
A federal judge in Denver on Monday blocked federal officials from breaking up Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by handing over a renowned supercomputing center to the University of Wyoming, in a 38-page injunction raking the Trump administration for enacting political revenge on Colorado.
Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson issued an injunction because the National Science Foundation divesting the supercomputing center was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,” according to the ruling. Jackson said his injunction was necessary because the lawsuit filed in March by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, or UCAR, was likely to succeed, and that too much damage had already been done to the supercomputing center’s operations.
The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center has “already lost significant number of experts in supercomputing, for example, with the chance of losing many more,” the judge wrote.
The National Science Foundation declined comment on the injunction late Monday, through head of media affairs Mike England.
UCAR, a consortium of more than 100 universities and the contracted manager of NCAR operations, “has made a showing of irreparable harm through the significant ‘brain drain’ that it is already experiencing as a direct result” of the National Science Foundation’s attempted transfer, the judge wrote. “It will also continue to lose critical employees — including scientists, engineers, and systems administrators — that are essential to the continuous and proper functioning of the NWSC.”
The original lawsuit and the injunction say the supercomputing center is a “pillar” of the nation’s atmospheric research. Judge Jackson agreed with the UCAR lawsuit’s claim that breaking off parts of NCAR, dismantling projects and potentially firing thousands of employees was intended by Trump and agency officials as direct political revenge.
UCAR’s suit employed the same arguments that Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser used in dozens of lawsuits: that Trump sought retribution for Colorado voting Democratic in elections and for imprisoning former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters after she was convicted of orchestrating a security breach of her county’s election system in 2021 in a failed attempt to uncover voter fraud.
In his injunction, Jackson accepted UCAR’s timeline of how the attacks on NCAR developed in early 2026, noting that the administration had previously floated general ideas for turning over federal agency duties to other entities.
“No action followed until President Trump publicly criticized Governor Polis for refusing to release Ms. Peters after his own pardon did not achieve that result. The next day, (Office of Management and Budget) Director (Russell) Vought publicly announced the breakup of NCAR on social media,” Jackson wrote. (Trump could not legally pardon Peters because she was convicted on state charges; only Polis could pardon her or commute her sentence.)
“The Court finds that UCAR is likely to succeed on its claim that NSF’s decision to divest it of stewardship” over the supercomputing center violated federal procedures.
“First, the agency has offered no explanation for its decision. Second, the agency failed to abide its own process to consider public feedback before proceeding with the transfer,” Jackson wrote. He cited NSF’s “flagrant disregard” of its own rules and procedures.
The injunction is necessary while the lawsuit plays out, Jackson added, because allowing the transfer would prompt more employees to leave and decimate the supercomputing center.
“UCAR further warns that, as a result of the transfer process now underway, it may have to close the facility and conduct mass layoffs,” the judge wrote.
“The resulting loss of institutional knowledge and technical expertise would create substantial risks to the operational stability of the (center) and the forecasting and modeling systems that depend on it,” Jackson wrote. “The United States military, federal agencies, and private-sector partners rely on the work performed and data produced at the (center) to make critical operational decisions.”
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. Like many parents who are quick to delegate the terrible fallout of their selfishness to their offspring, the burden of fixing the universe falls to you. “You owe Us for your existence,” he informs you. “We collect on the debt. Yes?”
The "walls" in this raycasting demo are simply 4-pixel-wide sprites that have been scaled up by the Neo Geo hardware.
Credit:
