I bought a new steam iron and it's good to be ironing with steam again. [Oh my. I just checked and it would appear that I have been putting up with using a water spray bottle while ironing, instead of using a continuous stream of steam, for just over 5 years! How did I last so long?]
Gone with Tefal this time - this one:
I am a tad sceptical, but we will see.
I had been wondering about this: in frigid climates, if people drive electric cars, how long can the battery keep the interior warm if they are stuck in traffic for a very long time, as was the case recently in Virginia?
It turns out a guy on Youtube ran a test on two Tesla models, at least, and the results were pretty impressive. Starting at a 90% charge, and keeping the inside at a nice 21 degrees C (70F), and without any human body warmth to help maintain the interior temperature, the test indicated the batteries should last well over a day, perhaps 36 hours. (And in reality, people might turn the heater down to under 20 degrees if they have concerns about how much power was left.) This is better than I would have expected, to be honest.
Here's the video:
I have no doubt at all that Biden is the one who is getting punished in public opinion polls for things not within his control:
* the intransigence of two conservative Democrat Senators. Manchin (who tells lies about the filibuster) and Sinema do appear to be just awful people who, if they had principles, would get out of their party;
* a COVID variant which the behaviour of the Right has made much worse;
* inflation which is thought to be at a temporary high.
So Joe Rogan, who I have never cared to listen to, got very publicly corrected on a COVID/vaccination risk point, and didn't like it, as explained in these tweets:
Man, I'm sick of the COVID messaging/expertise wars. I read the article yesterday in the AFR (which I can't link to now as paywall is up), about the fight between Nick Coatesworth and "Ozsage", which started:
A year ago, when he was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth told colleagues to watch out for a group of doctors and academics who, he felt, were so concerned by SARS-CoV-2 they would advocate for excessive measures against the virus.Yet Coatesworth himself was partially wrong in his pooh-poohing of 25,000 a day from Omicron:
University of NSW modelling has suggested NSW could have up to 25,000 new cases a day by February - eight times higher than the current number.
However, Dr Coatsworth slammed that figure as not 'accurate', challenging claims by clinical immunologist Dr Dan Suan that the state was 'sleepwalking into an Omicron disaster'.
Sure, you might say he turned out to be right "in the big picture" on his very early guess (because, really, that's all it could have been) that Omicron would result in much lower hospitalisation and might, maybe, be (kind of?) the end of COVID. (Although, as far as I can tell, it is still completely unknown how much protection an Omicron infection might give against future variants.)
I've complained from the start of the pandemic, pretty much, that people on all sides seemed to be overconfident of their positions on the basis of very clearly complicated and early information that would be very hard to sort out and take years in some cases to understand well.
If anything, it has made me think of the importance of consensus in science and policy matters - you will always get a range of opinion even from normally credible experts, and there will always be the influence of personal and social political philosophy on expert's views as to how to respond. But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as valid expertise on which to draw reasonable policy responses.
The important thing, I think, should be is to look at a science and policy consensus position, and always have sufficient regard to the uncertainties of novel and evolving events.
The report by NOAA has some good analysis of the cost of weather/climate disasters in the US over recent years. I took this screenshot from it:
My daughter started feeling over her COVID on Sunday, with no symptoms yesterday and today. She (and the rest of the family) are supposed to have RAT's today, the 6th day after her positive test was taken, but the problem was - how to get them. Apparently, there was a fair chance we could get them free if we went to a testing clinic, but as far as I know, people are still lining up for hours (whether in or out of a car) to get processed. (Last week, apparently, a friend of my daughter and her Mum went at 3 am to line up in their car for a test - and there were already 30 cars ahead of them. It took until 9 am!)
So, although the official rules for isolation say that I wasn't supposed to leave the house, as I had taken a negative RAT last Friday, and did not have any symptoms since, yesterday I decided to check 4 or 5 chemists near me, mainly 3 Chemist Warehouse outlets. No tests were to be found, and I went both in the morning and afternoon. People were practically stalking delivery vans, asking the guy if his delivery included tests. (I did ask too, at a smaller chemist.) People are obviously very happy to use these tests, and pay for them, if only they were available.
But then, behold, Facebook did something useful for once, and I got a text at about 7.30pm from my worker that they were available at Coles nearest me. They were selling only one pack per customer (or two tests), and so my wife (no symptoms either) came with me. Success!
About to test my daughter...she will be irate if it's positive!
Update: I reckon the test came back a clear "invalid". Ugh. I don't entirely trust this brand. My son's test didn't seem to give a clear result either.
Update 2: my wife and I tested negative, clearly. That's good, at least. Meanwhile, the government advice as to coming out of isolation for even the diagnosed is somewhat ambiguous. Clearly, though, they are changing the rules almost every day to deal with the problem with testing such a large number of people who would like a test, but can't get their hands on one.
I had to stop following this guy on Twitter, because his scores of oddball tweets every day were just too much to put up with, for the occasional one that I might be of genuine interest. But someone else has re-tweeted this, and it did remind that I don't think I have posted before about his absolutely nutty obsession with the (alleged) outrageousness of children wearing masks. Fortunately, some people in tweets are starting to tell him he's ridiculous:
I still don't know why it is that Sky News UK is allowed to be sensible and responsible in terms of its reporting and commentary on things like climate change and COVID, while Rupert wants Sky News Australia (at least at night) to be a wingnutty branch of Fox News in its takes.
Anyway, this explanation and analysis today of excess deaths in the UK from COVID is well done:
It illustrates why I think the correct line to take with wingnuttery in the Australian blogosphere that insists this was never a "serious" pandemic is just "you are too stupid to engage with". (The only trouble being, they vote!)
I think this is quite a balanced take on the matter of the increasing cost of natural disasters to the world, and the relationship with climate change, from DW News:
[This post contains spoilers, to a degree.]
Talk about a curate's egg (good in parts) of a movie: the much discussed Don't Look Up on Netflix.
On the upside:
* all of the actors are really good, and I thought that Mark Rylands as the self involved tech billionaire was excellent. He's the sort of actor who seems to inhabit roles, rather than act them.
* some of the satire of Trumpian politics worked well - especially the dumb son as Chief of Staff. Meryl Streep herself wasn't bad, but the role as written was ambiguous - you never really could tell if she was just dumb, like Trump; or smart but just so self-involved as to be dangerous.
* sure, I get the overall intention of a satire where the political opportunism and media messaging (and tech's manipulation of what interests in the public) is more important than the actual information; but for broad satire to work it has to feel a tad more credible to me.
On the downside:
* I think there are two key problems - the first being that the screenplay seemed to bend over backwards to avoid the risk of characters being identified exactly with any living person or institution. So, for example, the Trump-ian President is shown getting a hug from Bill Clinton in a photo - is that just there so the writer can say "see, I'm not saying she's necessarily a Republican"? The tech billionaire - you got a sense he was designed to vaguely remind us of Steve Jobs, but a dumber version. (That guy's dead, so defamation wouldn't have been a problem if the character was more like him. It would have upset Apple fanboys, however.) We all know that the worst tech billionaire is probably Zuckerberg, but the character as written was not given any of his obvious features (in terms of age or terrible haircut), so it seems to me it was again "playing it safe". And the terrible morning TV show - surely Fox News should be the target, but they took a fair amount of care to make it something more generic. If I worked on one of the mainstream morning breakfast shows in the US, I would be a bit insulted by this aspect, actually.
* The second problem - is it too much to ask of satire to be more scientifically accurate? I think - without looking it up - that the chances of a comet being found to have valuable minerals is next to nil. An asteroid - sure - but if the movie had gone with that, they wouldn't have had the ability to make the joke that the disaster was literally staring the idiot part of humanity in the face. (Also, I suspect in real life, the comet would have been obvious in the sky earlier than it was in the film.) I didn't care for the silliness of the plan to cut up the comet, either. And really, very popular disaster films have made the public (and even media stars) aware of what the end of the world by giant meteor or asteroid strike would look like - it's just not really credible to have this news immediately downplayed on virtually any media network - even (dare I say it) Fox News.
I suspect that a more realistic scenario would have worked better as satire - say, that it was an asteroid, and that the problem turned out to be an ageing, libertarian inclined astronomer with Republican connections coming up with his own calculation that it was only a 50% chance of it hitting - not the 99% chance that NASA gave. (Or he could calculate that it would hit the North Pole and not really endanger the planet - just some unfortunate Russian Northern cities that can be evacuated.) And the President and her party runs with the contrarian advice...
It wouldn't be as broad a satire, but that would (in my opinion) be a good thing.
Google, via the Youtube algorithm, decided to get me looking at 1950's science fiction again, and so the other night I watched most of This Island Earth, of which I think I had only previously seen bits and pieces.
It is pretty deliciously silly, but it was in bright Technicolor and features an actor with the name "Rex Reason". I fell asleep in the last third, but saw the "climax" (it's a film with a remarkable lack of dramatic arc) which features the crash of the good alien's spaceship into the ocean, and - cut to credits. Lots of old science fiction had the really abrupt ending, I seem to recall. Perhaps because they often ran with another feature, so it's not as if it's the only thing the audience came to see.
So today, Youtube decided I would like to watch Commando Cody - Sky Marshal of the Universe - not a movie but a serial of 12 episodes given I think both theatrical then TV release. This guy:
He was the original rocketman character, and I have an early memory of getting a thrill from the flying suit sequences. And you know, I still kind of like the way they did them - I think it must be a dummy flying along a wire line, or something, but you can't tell exactly how it was done. (Have a look here, at the 3.50min mark to see the bits I am talking about.) The print quality of this on Youtube is high, but as for story - the space villain is ridiculously Flash Gordon in design.
Still, it's worth a laugh. Just as in This Island Earth, there's a lot of nuclear science being done in tiny laboratories. I guess the movie makers in the 1950s had much idea about the size of the Manhattan Projection.
A few posts back, I noted a list of potentially interesting looking movies due for release in 2022.
I should balance that by noting how God-awful a couple of trailers for some forthcoming big budget movies look - the first being Moonfall, by "the End of the World is my only interest" schlock director Roland Emmerich. As Ars Technica writes in its commentary on the trailer:
Hello, police? I'd like to report a murder—the sacrifice of credible science on the altar of entertainment,
The other really, really bad looking trailer is (unfortunately) featuring the very likeable Tom Holland, who apparently now does Spidernam level stunts even in movies in which he's not in that costume. Look how silly this looks:
It's based on some well loved games which I had never heard of. Not sure that there is any good movie that's ever been created that way.Jonathan Freeland in The Guardian, on the very "The Trump menace", makes some commentary about Biden which rings true:
It’s worth recalling here how shaky the president’s position was from the start, seeking to govern with a diminished, razor-thin Democratic majority in the House and a 50-50 deadlocked Senate. Despite that, he has passed some major bills and made some big, even transformative moves. As the former speechwriter to George W Bush David Frum puts it: “In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57.”
And yet, it’s not enough. Biden passed a vital infrastructure bill, but his larger package of social spending and action on the climate crisis is stalled. His poll ratings took a hit with the speed of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan after August’s chaotic US withdrawal. And his 4 July declaration that America could celebrate its “independence from Covid-19” now looks horribly premature.
You can make a strong case that none of these things is Biden’s fault. His spending bill is stalled thanks to two Democratic senators who simply refuse to get on board. (Given their politics, Biden probably deserves credit for getting them to back him as often as they have.) The withdrawal from Afghanistan was under a deal agreed by Trump; indeed, Trump’s exit would have come earlier. As for Covid, what could any president do when more than a quarter of the country – overwhelmingly Trump supporters – refuse to get vaccinated?
I would also add, that if teacher's unions are causing even Democrat voters to get angry over their refusal/reluctance to re-open schools, they have much more reason to be concerned about teacher's health in a country where a high certain percentage of students will be denied access to vaccination by their un vaccinated parents, and with Delta still a threat.
Poor old JC - he never knew who to listen to on climate change, and while he still argues with racist idiots at the Catallaxy replacements, on the lost Trump election, he has adopted the super convenient line of the truly stupid: "No, it's up to you to convince me that my suspicion is wrong. And you can't!":
