The transition to clean energy - time for specifics, isn't it??

I've been meaning to say this out loud - that is, here! - for a couple of months now.

With all of the talk of CO2 emissions targets needing to be set and met, now on quite short time frames, it still seems to have the feeling of mere wishful thinking for any nation until they start to specify exactly how it will happen.   

And why is it we still don't seem to be at the stage that nations can start to do that? What is the hold up?  Is it because we  let the private sector have too much independence in sorting out clean energy generation?

I know you hear of papers written with assurances that renewable energy can do it all - but there are lots of choices in the implementation of renewable energy, and when is any government going to get very specific about it?

Current power plants have know useful life spans:  why can't we yet say how and when the replacement will be built and start operating?

I know grid scale storage is going to be important, and I also know flow batteries are looking promising - can't government agree to intensive research in which form of flow battery is best and will be installed with the next big (say) solar farm.   

I'm just spitballing here, but in a country like Australia, here are what seem to me to be some obvious steps:

a.    work out how much further we can get with domestic rooftop solar and domestic battery storage -  presumably there is still plenty of room to reduce large power plant output by more of it;

b.   work out the clear incentives for maximising rooftop solar.   As I have said several time, I can't see why it should not be mandated on new house construction, for one.  

c.    engage in the flow battery question - work out the most promising contenders and get them to trial them here, if necessary;

f.    work out where solar farms can go that are going to service the large cities - floating solar on dams or bays if you want to reduce transmission distance, and combined solar and agriculture on useful farmland.   If necessary - work out where solar in the desert can go and if the HVDC cable is going to run to get it to where the population is;

g.   work out what can be done with more wind, especially in the southern parts which have less sun in winter;

h.   work out the national grid that's make it all work.

It seems to me that if ever there is a country that should be able to get by on full solar/wind combination with enough storage, it's Australia.   But I want to see the specific plans as to how we are going to get there.

The danger of being pregnant in the US

Yeah, this seems kinda surprising:

Pregnant women in the United States die by homicide more often than they die of pregnancy-related causes — and they’re frequently killed by a partner, according to a study published last month in Obstetrics & Gynecology¹. Researchers revealed this grim statistic by using death certificates to compare homicides and pregnancy-related deaths across the entire country for the first time....

The researchers found that US women who are pregnant or were pregnant in the past 42 days (the post-partum period) die by homicide at more than twice the rate that they die of bleeding or placental disorders — the leading causes of what are usually classified as pregnancy-related deaths. Also, becoming pregnant increases the risk of death by homicide: between the ages of 10 and 44 years, women who are pregnant or had their pregnancy end in the past year are killed at a rate 16% higher than are women who are not pregnant.

I guess to take the "glass half full" approach - does this at least indicate that the medical care of pregnant women there is a better than expected?

Climate change, Obama, Trump, and then COVID has broken (a large part of) the Right

So this is broadly how it has gone:    

a.    climate change denial acclimatised the Right into believing grand conspiracy theories (even though it was not explicitly called such, but what else could it be when scientific body after scientific body, from all nations, continued year after year to not only acknowledge the science was right, but became more certain about it?)

b.  Obama triggered underlying American racism and Hilary Clinton became a hate figure over feminism;

c.  Trump came along as a leader endorsing the open statement of populist racism, anti-feminism and climate change denial, as well as making explicit a long simmering Manichean view of politics that all opposition to Right wing views is inherently evil and works undercover to destroy the God fearing people with their (ridiculous) figurehead Trump.  Conspiracy belief is thus elevated to new heights. 

d.  COVID response is completely politicised primarily due to Right wing conspiracy belief, which transcends even the views of their idiot leader (Trump) when he recommended vaccination.  [I suspect people will quibble about this, and say that libertarian opposition to lockdown is not a nutty as anti-vax conspiracy - I would say that ideological blinkers of libertarianism are only marginally less dire than anti-vax conspiracy - they are still virtually impossible to argue with.]

e.   All of this has been able to fester and spread like never before because of both social media and the greed and power hunger of Rupert Murdoch and a cast of smaller broadcasters.     

 

I just thought I would put this summary down again, after reading the absolute rubbish circulating on the post - Catallaxy blogs.   (I hesitate to link to it, but this one today by the increasingly obnoxious Arky is typical.)   They are in a particular period of pain at the moment because of the Scott Morrison turn around on climate change, with the dis-ingenous endorsement of the Murdoch press. 

It never occurs to them that they simply made the wrong call on climate change, and instead of acknowledging that, they choose to double down on grand conspiracy.  You know, the education system is just liberal/Marxist indoctrination, etc.  And this is readily extended to their approach to COVID - the previously long standing institutional sources of expertise are not to be trusted, just like they cannot be on climate change, and amateurs in their sheds (mostly men) are capable of just a good an analysis as anyone else.    And most stupidly, they think it is all about people wanting power over them, when it is they who are supporting authoritarian regimes around the world, as long as they share their conservative world view.    

A ship of (mostly) old fools, and with a strong streak of religious conservatism thrown in now as well.

Completely unable to be engaged in reasoned argument.

Not sure I trust the Poles with the care of turkeys

I see that England is doing so well under Brexit that they can't even raise enough turkeys for Christmas:

 

A news item from last month explains:

Millions of British Christmas dinners are to be saved by turkeys imported from Poland and France after UK farmers were forced to slash production because of fears of labour shortages. UK supermarkets and restaurants will have to import hundreds of thousands of the birds from the EU for Christmas after British farmers reared at least 1m fewer birds, the poultry industry has warned. 

Richard Griffiths, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, said big turkey producers belonging to the group had slashed production by about a fifth this year after Brexit cut off their supply of cheap labour. These producers normally rear about 5.5m of 8m to 9m turkeys consumed at Christmas annually, he said.

Imported turkeys would likely come from Poland and France, said Paul Kelly of the KellyBronze free range turkey farm in Essex. “The supermarkets have supported British turkey over the past 15 years and we have been able to supply 100 per cent [of the demand],” he said. “Now we will be forced into buying turkeys from the EU.”

But also - it doesn't look from the video that the Poles are particularly good at raising turkeys in humane conditions.   Maybe they are only temporarily crammed to virtually standing room only?   I hope so...

French men and their testicles

This is pretty amusingly oddball (ha, a bit of a pun):  this video from France 24 starts with a collective of young-ish, French men who meet to sew harnesses to, um, make their testicles ride high and hot as a means of male contraception.  (!)

It does go on to note that French men (and I presume, their doctors) are remarkably reluctant to have vasectomies - the rate is apparently 20% in Britain, and 1% in France.   (Can't remember if that is age related - men over 40 perhaps?  I see the figures in Australia are apparently 25% of men over 40.)

The national cultural differences relating to contraception are pretty remarkable.  In Japan, it seems it is still only 1.3% of women who are on the pill - compared to about 15 % in America (according to the top story on my Google search.)  Oddly, I can't easily see figures for the number of Japanese men who have vasectomy.  I did find a recent study of its effects in Chinese men, though.  Seems that physically, they were fine, but had more psychological issues.  Complicated!

 

Good news noted

The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was found liable on Monday for damages in lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, over Jones’s claim the massacre was a hoax.... 

Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for relatives of eight victims who sued Jones in Connecticut, said: “What’s clear from Judge Bellis’s ruling is that Alex Jones and the Jones defendants have engaged in a long, continuous course of misconduct in this case designed to prevent the plaintiffs from getting evidence about Mr Jones’ business and about his motives for publishing lies about them and their families.”

A Texas judge recently issued similar rulings against Jones in three defamation lawsuits, finding Jones liable for damages after defaulting him and his companies for not turning over documents.

Good.

And a hobo with a podcast is being done for contempt:  

Steve Bannon has surrendered to US federal authorities to face contempt charges after defying a subpoena from a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

There's not much good news around these days, so you have to take what crumbs there are and celebrate them.

Squid ink

I'm three episodes into Squid Games, and having my doubts about continuing.

I don't know - I've just always found a serious credibility gap with dystopian-ish stories in which large numbers of people are involved in despicable behaviour.  That may sound like an odd thing to say in light of the evidence of the 20th century - or even the absolute nuttiness of wingnut America at the moment.   But at least people in those real life examples thought (or think) they have reason on their side.  It seems hard to see how you fit any kind of moral reasoning into the behaviour of both players and masked staff in this show.  

And masks - put a mask on an evil (or good) character and I start to find its credibility wanes.   I don't think it matters who - Batman, the murderer in the last season of Babylon Berlin, the bad guy in V for Vendetta (which I have never watched, mind you):  mask wearing stops me taking the story very seriously.  Why?   Maybe it's because it never happens in real life? 

Some possible exceptions people might want to bring up:  Darth Vader?  Well, it always sounded like a ventilator, and helmets in space are OK, so I'm not sure it counts.   Zorro?  He wasn't really that serious a character in the first place.  Same with Spiderman - the movies are never really meant to be that serious, especially in the Tom Holland incarnation.  I can forgive a lot if a movie is light in tone, or largely comedic [Deadpool]; but that hardly describes SG.

To be honest, I am a little uncertain about the acting in this show, too.  Sometimes it seems a bit over the top.  The acting in Kingdom, by far the best Korean Netflix series I have seen, was better and didn't seem pushed too far, despite the zombie content.

I  might go another episode (or more), but I am more inclined to just read about how it goes from here.

   

This is nuts

 

Who's more prominent in Australia - conservative, conspiracy mongering, Catholics; or conservative, conspiracy mongering Protestants?  

I preferred Big Trouble in Little China

I wonder how that John Carpenter movie would hold up on re-viewing?

Anyhow, I'm talking about having watched the surprisingly well-reviewed (92% on Rottentomatoes, and 71% on Metacritic) Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.    (It's now streaming for free on Disney, after only being on the cinema starting maybe 6 weeks ago?)

I'm glad I didn't make my first trip to the cinema for nearly 2 years to see it, as I was seriously underwhelmed.

It's not exactly bad - it's just that it's not very good.  I don't think the script, which was meant to be heavy with family drama, was particularly good.  And the action continually suffered from the Marvel issue of not always being able to do heavily CGI action in such a way to make it feel it carries any sense of danger, or at least, pleasing movement.  (It's funny, but it's hard to work out sometimes why for me some obviously CGI action works well enough, and other times it doesn't.)

As with Black Panther, the climatic battle I found an uninteresting, badly edited visual mess,  and going all in with Chinese mythology and dragons seems a bit of stretch for me, even in a movie series where the multiverse is a thing.   

I ended up wondering why I like Dr Strange a lot, but didn't care for this.  Maybe I'm more into Asian mysticism than Asian mythology, and the Dr S movie was very eye-catching with its innovative looking visual effects.   (I still like seeing the sparky portal - it's charming.)   

I hope I have a better reaction to the James Bond film - I hope to see that by this time next week.

  

 

Danger and humour

They still Might be Giants

Gosh:  it's been years since they appeared in one of their music videos (unfortunately - it's nice to see them acting peculiarly on video again!)   But here they are, with an immediately likeable song:

It's hard to explain how significant this band is to people who have never heard of them - I mean, clearly, they are well known amongst the creative types in Hollywood, given the number of things they have been asked to do in TV and the elsewhere. But it is so pleasantly intriguing: it's almost like the John's and their fan base both like them being a modest success forever, rather than hitting an early peak and flaming out.  In fact, they pretty much explained this is a correct take on them in a recent interview with PBS: 

Cannibal chickens (and more) considered

In an article about whether free range chickens are as cheery as we might imagine them to be, there's this:

Feather pecking is when chickens peck and pull out other hens' feathers.

This can lead to cannibalism, where chickens eat the wounded flesh of the injured hen.

These three factors kill a lot of free-range hens. One Australian study found cannibalism was a major cause of death in free-range hens, second-only to being eaten by predators.

Dr Hartcher, who researched feather pecking for her PhD, says death by cannibalism is an "awful way to go".

"We understand more about it than we did a few decades ago but we still don't fully understand how to control the problem," she says.

I would have guessed that keeping too many chickens in too small a space may be a reason behind it, and  I see from another website that is one trigger, but there are many others:

These stressors include crowding, bright light intensity, high room temperature, poor ventilation, high humidity, low salt, trace nutrient deficiency, insufficient feeding or drinking space, nervous and excitable birds (hereditary), external parasites, access to sick or injured birds, stress from moving, boredom and idleness, housing birds of different appearance together and birds prolapsing during egg-laying.

 How do you cure "boredom and idleness" in a chicken, I wonder.   I would have thought letting them scratch around free range on grass would go a long way to curing that, but maybe it's more the lack of good quality chicken cinema and poetry readings?   

They're an odd animal. 

Update:  OK, let's just have a whole gross out afternoon, by reading this list of 10 cute animals you didn't know were cannibalistic.   I did know of hamsters, and had heard of pigs too.  But rabbits and red squirrels?   It's a particularly cute bunny they have chosen to picture, too.   Most of the examples are of babies being the victim of mothers, though, and I guess we tend to feel that crazy hormonal stuff maybe gives those individual Mums some sort of excuse.  Males (or females) who go killing other mother's offspring, though - harder to like them!   

As for primates and cannibalism - chimps seem to be the nastiest of all. 

I'm almost starting to wonder why we don't have cases of modern humans feeling evolutionarily compelled to do something similar.  

Calling out lies

I am finding it refreshing, this new found confidence in Labor, and much of the media, to call Scott Morrison a liar:

 

The armed Right wing in the USA

I find the argument in this article pretty convincing:

Prepare for the Shock Troops

What happens when gun culture merges with a nationalist personality cult?

A key extract from the end:

There was a time when few Americans would have supported racist vigilantes—a time when most gun owners would have used Kyle Rittenhouse as a way to scare young people into being responsible with firearms. But there was also a time—not long ago—when self-appointed militiamen who believed in QAnon conspiracies were the stuff of fiction. Today they’re running for office.

What we are seeing is nothing less than the normalization of early-stage authoritarianism.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently bragged about developing more than 20,000 “shock troops” for the next election. We’ve been seeing these troops in action, in isolated incidents for four years. We saw them collectively on January 6. We’ve read the reports from their think tanks planning for violence. They’re asking, right now, “When can we use the guns?”

After four years of chaos, Americans would rather get back to their lives believing that the crisis has passed. But it hasn’t.

The lights are still flashing red.

 

 

Scientists taking it personally

In Science magazine, there's an article about disagreement amongst physicists about whether one particular experiment really did show interactions with dark matter.   The problem is, it hasn't been replicated elsewhere, and it seems that the "no it didn't" group think they may have worked out what the first group did wrong.

You can read all about that at the article, but I wanted to note the very personal way the leader of the "yes it did" camp takes criticism:

Rita Bernabei, a physicist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and DAMA’s leader, declined to be interviewed. But she dismissed the new explanation in an email: “We have already demonstrated that the assumptions there reported are untenable and the conclusions are worthless.”

Interesting, but looks kinda crazy

Obviously, a fair bit of money has been put into this already, but the precision with which it has to work is surely a worry.  (I mean, you can imagine the internal damage if the timing of the release if off by the tiniest, tiniest, bit.)

On reasons for voting for Trump

I thought this thread contained much truth:

 

True American patriot

 

Some lunar oxygen calculations

An article at The Conversation explains how there's a lot of oxygen on the moon - unfortunately, all in the soil and needing a lot of heat to extract.  But still, the maths are interesting:

If we ignore oxygen tied up in the Moon’s deeper hard rock material — and just consider regolith which is easily accessible on the surface — we can come up with some estimates.

Each cubic metre of lunar regolith contains 1.4 tonnes of minerals on average, including about 630 kilograms of oxygen. NASA says humans need to breathe about 800 grams of oxygen a day to survive. So 630kg oxygen would keep a person alive for about two years (or just over).

Only 800g of oxygen a day?  I would have guessed it was more than that, probably influenced by things like the thought of the weight of a full scuba tank!  Of course, there are going to be other gases involved too.  The ISS has a 79% nitrogen atmosphere. 

Anyway, more rough estimates from the article:

Now let’s assume the average depth of regolith on the Moon is about ten metres, and that we can extract all of the oxygen from this. That means the top ten metres of the Moon’s surface would provide enough oxygen to support all eight billion people on Earth for somewhere around 100,000 years.

This would also depend on how effectively we managed to extract and use the oxygen. Regardless, this figure is pretty amazing!

Indeed.

 

   

Precipitation issues in China

First:  quite a lot of snow:

 

 Another video of buildings not coping with it:

  

 

 And an article in The Guardian about recent heavy rains:

 ‘It’s alarming’: intense rainfall and extreme weather become the norm in northern China