Covid day 4 - and back to Graham Greene

Happy to report that very sore throat has abated considerably.  Was still bad last evening, but after a few hours sleep I medicated at midnight with a couple of old cold and flu tablets I found lying on the bedside table, then started one of the dusty novels* near them, followed by a good sleep, and woke up with throat feeling much better.

Nose still not blocked, just annoying post nasal drip continuing, but I have had worse cases of that from a normal cold.  

Speaking of sleeping habits, this seems an enforced way of getting into a biphasic nighttime sleep pattern.  I currently don't mind it, too, and the midnight reading seemed pleasantly free of distraction.  But I still think it's an anti-social pattern, suitable mainly for hermits.

* Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory.  I was admiring again, in the first chapter, how good he is at scene setting, and wondering how authors get the knack for doing it well.  Because it seems to me quite a talent as to how to slip in details of the physical environment intermittently, at just the right level of detail, so as to not find it intrusive to narrative, but instead letting it build up the mind's picture in a gradual but convincing way.

I see that, as I would have expected, Greene did visit Mexico before writing the novel (and hated it), so  the physical details of locality are not all invented.  Science fiction writers have a harder time, I guess, since they first need to make up something to describe, and it's not as if they can look at anyone else's photos to help. 

Abe reviewed

It's always a shock when a nutter in Japan kills someone, and yesterday's death of Shinzo Abe was a particularly dire example.

To be honest, I had not been certain of his political legacy, but Noah Smith's very positive assessment of him is well worth reading.  

Covid update

This is day 3 of not feeling well, although day one was very mild.  

The worst effect by far is a very sore throat that is only relieved by aspirin or paracetamol every 5 or 6 hours.  I always find aspirin more effective, but I am a bit reluctant to take it for too long.  Mind you, with most illnesses I'm rarely taking anything for more than a day.

But yeah, I don't remember the last time I had a sore throat that meant I had to take something in the middle of the night.  It's been a long, long time.

Apart from that, post nasal drip is a bit worse, but at least I can breathe through my nose.   It's affecting my digestion too: lots of gas and a bit crampy.  

Still don't think I have been running a temperature, but body is a bit achy sometimes.   Or that might just be from lying down so much?   

Anyway, could be worse, but could be better too.  😬

She is awful

I mean, nearly every word that comes out of her mouth is offensive, but this takes some beating...

Feeling positive

The bars, the bars...

I don't feel so bad, though.  Sore throat this morning, nose runs sometimes.  Not running any fever.

Maybe I can post more often!

Feeling unwell

I see that it was July last year that I had a cold, or something, which didn't turn out to be COVID.   Same thing happening now, perhaps: mainly just a thick head with a bit of post nasal drip; throat feels a little sore but not dire; coughing really can hurt the sinuses in the forehead, but fortunately, I don't have to cough often.  Oh, and I did feel not warm enough in bed on a night of sufficient covers that I should have been OK, but I don't think I have felt feverish today.   Lets see how I feel tomorrow...

The tritium problem

I saw mention of this somewhere else - perhaps on a Youtube video I never linked to? - but there's an article in Science which makes it clear that it is a very serious problem for the prospects of fusion as a viable energy source:

A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank

 Fusion advocates often boast that the fuel for their reactors will be cheap and plentiful. That is certainly true for deuterium: Roughly one in every 5000 hydrogen atoms in the oceans is deuterium, and it sells for about $13 per gram. But tritium, with a half-life of 12.3 years, exists naturally only in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere, the product of cosmic ray bombardment. Nuclear reactors also produce tiny amounts, but few harvest it.

Most fusion scientists shrug off the problem, arguing that future reactors can breed the tritium they need. The high-energy neutrons released in fusion reactions can split lithium into helium and tritium if the reactor wall is lined with the metal. Despite demand for it in electric car batteries, lithium is relatively plentiful.

But there’s a catch: In order to breed tritium you need a working fusion reactor, and there may not be enough tritium to jump-start the first generation of power plants. The world’s only commercial sources are the 19 Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors, which each produce about 0.5 kilograms a year as a waste product, and half are due to retire this decade. The available tritium stockpile—thought to be about 25 kilograms today—will peak before the end of the decade and begin a steady decline as it is sold off and decays, according to projections in ITER’s 2018 research plan.

The article does mention that there are other fusion fuels theoretically possible, but require something like ten (ok, seven) times the heat to work:

TAE Technologies, a California startup, plans to use plain hydrogen and boron, whereas Washington state startup Helion will fuse deuterium and helium-3, a rare helium isotope. These reactions require higher temperatures than D-T, but the companies think that’s a price worth paying to avoid tritium hassles. “Our company’s existence owes itself to the fact that tritium is scarce and a nuisance,” says TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer.

The alternative fusion reactions have the added appeal of producing fewer or even no neutrons, which avoids the material damage and radioactivity that the D-T approach threatens. Binderbauer says the absence of neutrons should allow TAE’s reactors—which stabilize spinning rings of plasma with particle beams—to last 40 years. The challenge is temperature: Whereas D-T will fuse at 150 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen and boron require 1 billion degrees.

I know it is risky to ever bet against technological advances - but on the other hand, someone in the 1940's who pooh-poohed a science fiction magazine's cover showing flying car highways in the sky in the 21st century  would be looking prescient.  

Hence, I'm strongly tempted to bet against fusion ever being a viable energy source, in any century.

Told you so

I complained a lot about the 2011 Brisbane flood investigation that gave many people the impression that the flood was solely caused by improper operation of Wivenhoe Dam.   Having personally driven around the dam a couple of days before the flood, in remarkable rain, I never believed it.    (We tried to have a day out, and drove up to Mount Glorious for lunch.  The rain started again on the return trip, and it was intense and long lasting.)  What I thought could come out is that lots of houses which were flooded to a certain height may have had the height reduced, but still have been extensively flooded regardless of how the difficult decisions the dam operators were making were made.  Why should those people get any compensation at all?

And it turns out that this is exactly what has happened.   People who thought they were going to get money are getting none, or trivial amounts, and they are  not happy that Maurice Blackburn either  didn't explain (or explain clearly enough is probably more likely?) that winning the case may not mean that everyone who was affected and joined the action would get money.

Law firm Maurice Blackburn said the payouts were determined by the flood adjustment factor, which is essentially how badly a property would have been affected if the dams had been handled properly.

"The case was run on the basis that there would have been some flooding in Brisbane, no matter what, even if the dams had been operated properly," principal lawyer Rebecca Gilsenan said.

"The difference, or the degree of difference, literally differs for every single property.

"About half of the claims in the case wouldn't have flooded at all on the model that the court ultimately upheld.

"People are finding out now and in some really unfortunate cases, they're finding out that the flooding would not have been a whole lot different.

Ms Gilsenan said they were not able to tell individual people what would have happened to their property along the way.

"Because we didn't have a model yet that had been upheld by the court," she said.

"People were told in theory that this would be an issue and damages would need to be adjusted but people didn't know individually what would happen to them."

One high profile guy sums it up like this:

He had to split his interim payment with his ex-wife and received $797.67, despite his Goodna home sustaining $556,000 worth of damage.

"The less you got damaged, the more you're going to get," he said.

"I mean it's laughable.

"We were not told that we may get nothing, even if we won the case.

"[Maurice Blackburn] advertises 'We fight for fair'. Is this fair?"

Well, it is, actually. If your house had 3 m of water through it, and different dam operation could have lowered it to 2 m, you don't deserve compensation.

 

Something to be thankful for

I just found the pair of reading glasses I keep at home, after misplacing them for about a month.

I might write a post soon about the annoying stage my eyes are currently at...

A remarkably cold winter

I've been meaning to post this for weeks now, but this is easily that coldest Brisbane winter that I can recall, probably for decades.

A week or two ago it was waking up to 3 degrees on a Saturday and Sunday, and although it was sunny and clear it still seemed to take to midday to start feeling warmth from it.  Yesterday and today it's like living in a Melbourne (or Tasmanian) winter:  grey, wet and while the minimums are not as bad as under clear skies, never warming up more than 2 or 3 degrees all day.  14 degrees yesterday, and my weather app says that now (1.40pm) it's 12 degrees.  

Remarkable.

American pessimism and optimism

It's pretty remarkable, isn't it, that a mass shooting at a 4 July parade in a well off part of the US comes in at news story number 5 or 6 in Australia this morning (and only a short time devoted to it), because we are so used to such news.  (Yeah, there are local floods crowding it out, but still, it does seem a case of "oh, another outrageously violent event in a nation that is too stupidly in love with guns.  Meh.")    

By the way, I see that the prime suspect sounds like a disturbed young man who has imagined the crime for a long time - just the sort of person who doesn't get to live out his violent fantasies in other countries where it is much, much harder to get the tool necessary to make it a reality.

Yes despite this, I am in a general sense still on side with Noah Smith's overall take on being (kinda) optimistic that the USA will get over its current problems, and the most dire predictions not come to pass.   He sums it well in this free post at his Substack.

 

Filipino style beef empanadas

Inspired about 6 weeks ago by a delicious Filipino style beef empanada bought at West End markets, I tried making them myself this weekend.

There are a lot of difference versions of how to make the dough in particular, and very often with non metric measurements.   For my future reference, this worked fine for a fried empanada (don't know how they would go baked, but frying does make for a more interesting texture, I reckon.  Basically, it's this recipe, although it took a bit more water:

3 cups plain flour

115 g unsalted butter (cold and cubed)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoon sugar (although I only used one)

1 egg

3 (maybe more?) tablespoon ice water 

You can guess how this is made:  mix the dry ingredients, rub in the butter, beat the egg with water and add to made a pretty firm dough.  Wrap in cling wrap and put in fridge for 15 min before using.

As for the filling:  I just followed an amalgam of a few recipes, but yeah, using 500 g of mince makes more than you can use with that much pastry.   Fried one medium onion, about 4 or 5 garlic cloves, in with the small cubed potato and carrot, then mince.  A substantial amount of tomato paste.  Add raisins (I thought I was overdoing it with 1/3 cup, but no), about half a cup of beef stock, lots of pepper, a half cup of peas, let it simmer and liquid reduce, check seasoning.  Oh, I used a couple of tablespoons of soy too, and maybe a tablespoon of worcestershire sauce too. Sounds a lot of saltiness, if you included the tomato paste, but it was 500 g of mince.

I also put a baton of cheese in the middle of the filing in the empanadas, which doesn't appear in any recipe, but was in the ones I bought at the markets.

They were nice, but not as nice as the market ones.   I have to have another and examine its contents more carefully.

A joke as a sign of sentience?

He perhaps should be spending a bit more time walking rather than sitting and chatting to his ambiguously sentient AI buddy, but nonetheless, this interview with the Google guy who went public with his AI claims is really quite interesting, and makes me feel like we are at least close to living in a science fiction movie:

 

I particularly liked how it was an apparent AI joke that influenced his thinking.   And one about Jedi!

The guy does appear genuinely thoughtful, and not a complete nut.   

Big power project apparently can work

When I first heard about it, I thought that this project sounded fanciful, because I didn't imagine the power transmission over that long a distance (and via undersea cable) would be efficient enough.  But it would seem I was wrong:

SINGAPORE: The company behind a megaproject to deliver up to 15 per cent of Singapore’s energy requirements via a 4,200km undersea cable from northern Australia aims to start construction in 2024.

The project took a step closer to being realised last week, after being deemed investment-ready by Infrastructure Australia, a statutory body that advises the country’s government on key projects of national significance.

This potentially opens the US$20.7 billion intercontinental cable operation - called the Australia-Asia PowerLink - to investment that could include public funds.

Before construction can begin, all financing documents will need to be signed and prior conditions for the availability of financing will have to be fulfilled.

Sun Cable wants to build the largest solar farm and battery storage facility in the world in Australia’s Northern Territory and send clean power to the regional city of Darwin as well as Singapore.

Singapore is currently a gas burning nation, so it must be feeling the pinch at the moment:

It comes as Singapore looks to expand its renewable energy options and moves to import power as a solution to lowering its carbon emissions footprint - it currently generates about 95 per cent of its energy from burning natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.

Anyway, the undersea cable is HVDC, which is maybe the only way it could work?:

“We need that ability to transmit electricity on an intercontinental basis to get from where that resource is abundant to where those large loads are and where they're growing fast. And that's what the evolution of high-voltage direct current submarine cable technology allows,” he added.

This article talks about HVDC undersea cables.  Seems there are only relatively short ones around, so I hope the challenges of 4,000 km of such cable are not too much to overcome.  

Message to Monty

Monty, Monty, Monty.

I see you tried to engage dover beach with your "defending institutions" argument.   

It has gotten you no where, of course, because all he is interested in is institutions defending (or rather, forcing on the citizens as a whole) his conservative Catholic values on abortion, marriage, etc.  

Here's the thing:  people like him who can watch the violent riot and death calls at the Capitol, and all of the evidence from the Congressional hearing, and still think Trump was the one unfairly treated, are just plainly too stupid to bother arguing with.   They are willfully blind and are more sympathetic to Christian flavoured fascism than anything else, because it gets them the laws they want forced on everyone.    

They love you dropping in because it gives them a thrill that you think they are worth engaging with. 

They aren't.  

The only thing I think you should ever say to them is just "you are too stupid to argue with."

To Trumpist idiots, this makes him sound like a hero in an action movie

I noticed on Twitter some people saying that Trump lunging from his seat to try to stop the driver of his vehicle taking him to the White House instead of the Capitol would not be possible, because of a screen between the back and the driver.

The Washington Post is onto that already, and it appears this is not going to work as a defence.   

The most depressing and stupid thing to realise from that article, however, is that Trump getting physical with his staff probably appeals to a significant section of his nutjob base, as to them it makes him sound like an action hero who nearly thwarted his kidnapping:

On that message board, some conceded that her testimony actually showed another way in which Trump had faced unfair treatment. One poster said the story showed that “the Deep State coup plotters” of the Secret Service had “effectively kidnapped the President of the United States of America against his wishes” as part of a “C.I.AMilitary Industrial Complex coup d'etat.”

Some there argued she should be “locked up for lying under oath,” while another poster there suggested her wild testimony was just Washington as usual.

“Even if she’s telling the truth,” the anonymous patriots.win poster said, “where’s the f---ing problem?”

Allahpundit points out, by the way, that it would be unlikely the committee would let Hutchinson give this evidence if it didn't know it was going to be backed up by one of the first hand witnesses.    

The other bit of evidence, not being given enough attention, I think, is that not only did Hutchinson talk about the aftermath of one plate throwing incident, she said he did something similar several times.

Update:  Allahpundit is now going on about how damaging it will look if the secret service isn't backing her up, as some leaks are now suggesting.   Meh.   It was never going to be evidence at a Trump trial, anyway.  

An entertaining dream

Before I start forgetting the details completely, I seemed to have a long, but basically enjoyable, dream last night which went something like this.

I was a younger version of myself, returning at night to the house I grew up in (I think my parents were still alive) only to find that the suburban block it was on was the subject of some sort of military action.  I ran away, but eventually decided to give myself in, finding that the new rulers (of uncertain origin) were putting local residents in trains for re-location elsewhere.  I was worried about how this felt like the Holocaust, but the trains were quite OK.   

We were then on a cruise ship, again quite OK standard, and being shipped to Germany.

The thing was, no one knew exactly who the aggressors were, in what appeared to be a global wide conflict of some type.

Scott Morrison appeared in one scene, and I asked him, in public, that when he was PM he must have had some idea where this threat may come from, so couldn't he tell us who the aggressors likely were?  He said "nope", he had no idea at all, there was no warning of this conflict.

Sinclair Davidson (!) then featured amongst a group of others in front of which I declared I had worked it out:  the orders for this were probably coming from the sentient global AI that the internet had become.   I mean, people were just following orders given via emails on screens - the global AI could easily be producing those.   

I did spend a bit of time asking what the best term for our new AI overlord was, as I thought some science fiction writer had come up with one, but I couldn't remember it.  No one else could either.

The relocations, by the way, were more about balancing where the best places for humans to live for efficient use of resources - there was no evil intent about it as such.

And that's about it...

What a country

A story from the Washington Post, and what an appalling one:

A man fatally shot an employee and injured another at an Atlanta Subway restaurant over the weekend because he had “too much mayo on his sandwich,” police said Monday morning.

The shooter fired a handgun at two workers, a 26-year-old woman who died of her wounds and a 24-year-old woman who was in critical condition, Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. told reporters. The injured woman’s 5-year-old child was in the restaurant at the time.

As the top comment says, in the context of the Supreme Court last week deciding people carrying handguns was cool:

This is precisely the consequence of last Thursday's dreadful SCOTUS decision - apparently their "appetizer" for all the dreadful decisions they had lined up for us - and of all the hypocrisy for a right wing that supposedly believes in states' rights and didn't allow New York to protect its citizens from exactly this kind of impulsive fatal violence ... These 'carry' laws are all an unmitigated outrage and yet instead its the protective laws that SCOTUS goes after. The founding fathers would be appalled. This is not remotely what the 2nd amendment was ever intended to allow. And the pretzel illogic that is used by every single Justice appointed by a GOP President on the current court is the most transparent bunk covering their actual Trojan horse cabal to overthrow American democracy, not just from the inside but from the ultimate tribunal of the inside. Two Bushes and a Trump managed to find and plant the most anti-democracy, anti-sanity Justices imagineable for this systematic dismantling of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the majority of us at least.

 

The problem with multiverse movies (or perhaps I should say, stories)

Just a quick note, based on having watched a Youtube video that explained that the Marvel cinematic "Universe" (now really a cable TV plus cinema universe - not to everyone's satisfaction) is doubtlessly heading towards a series of stories (already in comic book form) in which the multiverse plays a key role:

The storyline involves the destruction of the Marvel Universe and various other alternate universes (including those seen in the Ultimate Marvel and Marvel 2099 imprints, the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, the Marvel 1602 universe, and the "House of M" storyline), with each universe's respective Earth combining with each other into Battleworld, a planet that exhibits the aspects of the various universes. The planet itself is divided in many territories that are mostly self-contained and where a "pocket universe" composed of a specific storyline or universe reside and evolve. Various versions of individual Marvel characters can be present multiple times on the Battleworld. For example, there is a Tony Stark present in many of the territories where the Kingdom of Manhattan has both the Earth-1610 and the Earth-616 versions, and many versions of Thor serve as a peace-keeping force. The stories depicted in the miniseries about each domain's characters' powers and personal histories vastly differ from the ones portrayed in the main Marvel universe(s).  

Now, I'm already not the biggest fan of superhero movies, and my enjoyment is very dependent on them not taking themselves too seriously.   (The next Thor movie looks to be a continuation of the rather comedic last one, so I'll still see it if it has good reviews.)

But even so, isn't it obvious that the problem with multiverse storylines is that when anything is possible, it quickly starts to become boring?    There are too many options.   You might get away with dealing with the multiverse in one movie, or maybe two, but if you keep on going, how can you really keep it dramatically (or creatively?) interesting.  

And is it possible that audiences are already starting to sense that, despite the box office success of the last Dr Strange movie?

 

Great calls

Someone on Twitter noted these today:

 

More from the Douthat column:

....the scenarios that have been spun out in reputable publications — where Trump induces Republican state legislatures to overrule the clear outcome in their states or militia violence intimidates the Supreme Court into vacating a Biden victory — bear no relationship to the Trump presidency we’ve actually experienced. Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup, because a term like “plotting” implies capabilities that he conspicuously lacks.

 What a specious argument it was...