A lava tube called home

Hey, I only recently mentioned lava tubes on the Moon as the obvious place for a future Moon base, and here's one that's been identified. 

What cheering news ....

Vox notes that Young Adult dystopia fiction is "out" (which is a bit of a pity for that long delayed final movie in the Mazerunner series), but it's been replaced by something worse - teen suicide:

In the early 2010s, young adult dystopias were so prevalent as to be a cliché. They were major best-sellers, and the basis of major film franchises. The Hunger Games made Jennifer Lawrence a household name. 

Those are not the stories that are making waves now. After the election of Donald Trump, as 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale climbed the best-seller lists, the emerging consensus was that the American people craved fiction about the destruction of the world to help them express the terror and uncertainty they felt about the future. But YA dystopias — the books that just a few years ago appeared to grant publishers a license to print money — have not experienced the same sort of sales bump. And no new YA dystopias have emerged to take the place of old stalwarts like Divergent and The Hunger Games.

Instead, a new kind of story is filling the niche in pop culture that YA dystopias used to occupy: the teen suicide story. Throughout this year, a new obsession has formed around books and TV shows like 13 Reasons Why, and stories about the spread of the (likely fictional) Russian game Blue Whale. The fatalism and self-destructive fantasies that our culture once expressed in teen dystopias have begun to come out in teen suicide narratives.

It's a pretty good article, if rather depressing.

Lots of adults of my vintage have been complaining for decades that most young adult fiction published (and studied in high school English) is depressing - concentrating on broken families and relationship crises of one kind or another.   I suppose, though, that most of it was meant to be ultimately about surviving it.

I don't really understand why there isn't some concerted pushback by authors or publishers to try and deliberately revive optimism and adventure in YA fiction.   (As young adult science fiction used to be in the 50's and 60's.)   But fantasy should be given a break - it doesn't teach realistic optimism for the world as it is.

Rather ironically, the way to be optimistic now regarding the future of the planet is to actually hope that the social conservatives who complain about fictional pessimism are defeated in their stupid, stupid conspiracy fantasy that the world isn't heating.   It's an odd situation - the way to be optimistic is to kill off those who claim to be anti-pessimists.   (Not literally, of course.  Kill off their ideas.   Gulags may or may not be necessary.)

Update:  just thought of another irony -  there seems to be a good case that it's the ageing white social conservatives who are disproportionately dying in the US from the opioid epidemic, and that it is their psychic pain of being left behind that makes them willing users of the drugs that often kill them.  So young people are dying because they are pessimistic about the world the oldies are leaving them (well, that and the damaging effect of social media);  older people are dying because the world is changing too much for them in other ways.   It's like a perfect storm of national discontent.  

A clean energy question

Given that it seems you can now get solar panels and battery storage at useful levels for around $12,000 to $15,000 (perhaps cheaper, if you don't use the Tesla powerwall), and that the cost of an average-ish house build here is (I would guess) around $250,000*, why doesn't it make sense for government to mandate it in house construction?    I mean, it's like a 5% increase in the cost of building, but with the money paid up front coming back in saved power costs to the owner-occupier anyway.

And while we are at it, what about compulsory solar hot water too?

There might be some locations and house positions where it would not work - but I suspect if you are putting it in from the start, you can make it work well enough in most cases. 

*  Update:  actually one site puts it at $300,000, which only helps my argument

In some optimistic, "we can do it" clean energy news...

*  NPR has an article about how Alaska actually has a lot of experience at running successful mini grids to buffer power outages (not always with clean energy, but still.)   One thing I was surprised to read in it was the successful use of flywheel technology to buffer demand:

In 2007, the utility set a goal of 95 percent renewable power. It built a handful of wind turbines, plus a bank of batteries to supplement the community's hydro power. That worked for a while. But then came a new challenge: the Kodiak port wanted to replace its old diesel-powered crane with a giant electric one.

The 340-foot tall shipping crane would be a massive power hog. Demand would spike every time it lifted a container off a cargo ship. When Rick Kniaziowski, the terminal manager for the shipping company Matson, first asked about getting it, the head of the local utility said no.

"His eyes got really big," Kniaziowski says. He was told, "Everyone's TVs are going to brown out, and they're either going to hate you or they're going to hate us.'"

But the utility looked around for a solution, and it found a European company, ABB, that offered a new kind of energy storage: flywheels.

There are two here now. From the outside, they look like a couple of white trailers behind a chain-link fence. But inside, they're cutting edge sci fi. In the corner of each trailer is a "six and a half ton of spinning mass," says KEA's Richcreek. "It's in a frictionless vacuum chamber hovered by magnets."

Here's how it works: When there's excess power on the grid, it spins the flywheel. The flywheel stores that energy as motion, and then pumps it back out the second a big surge is needed. When the crane isn't operating, the flywheels respond to fluctuations in wind power, working with the batteries to stabilize the grid. Kodiak is one of the first places in the world to use flywheels this way.

 *  The BBC has a short video up about the benefits of floating solar power.   I want someone to push my idea that part of the Snowy Hydro 2 project be powered by floating solar panels on the upper dams, powering the pumps that will bring water uphill for later release.   Send me the money now for this great idea!

*  Over at MIT, they are working on very high temperature ceramic pump components, with the idea being that super heated metals (rather than lower temperature molten salts) can be used to store excess renewable energy.

*  In the US, they are finding that improvements in wind turbine efficiency are so good it makes sense to refurbish some wind farms well ahead of their original estimated 30 year life.

It's all too complicated

I have a confession to make:   I feel I don't understand Australian energy issues enough to be able to write about them.

I didn't really get my brain around the Finkel proposal for a Clean Energy Target and how it was meant to work.   The main sign that it probably wasn't a bad idea was the fact that Tony Abbott, Alan Moran, Judith Sloan - all ideologically motivated climate science deniers - didn't like it.   But the problem is, the well intentioned environmentalists have come up with not great ideas before (emissions trading schemes instead of simpler and transparent carbon taxes), so energy policy just has this aspect that you can't always trust anyone to have the best idea.

Even today, with a vague sounding Turnbull energy plan, we have the mismatched pairing of Tony Abbott (poisonous shallow policy windvane) thinking it a win, as well as Peter Martin (moderate relatively reliable economics journalist).  But Greg Jericho - who I think would agree with Martin's takes about 90% of the time, tweets with apparent approval a Renew Economy post that is scathing of the policy.

I need more time for more commentary before I feel I can have a strong opinion.

In other TV viewing

I watched the first episode of the ABC's new attempt at a movie (and now TV) review show - Screen Time.

I have issues with it.

The main one is that, while I know any review/arts show on ABC or SBS is not going to have any reviewer who is  not of the left/liberal persuasion,  you at least had the feeling with Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton that they did not always see eye to eye on certain things such as acceptable levels of violence in film, and sometimes on feminist or other issues too. 

But this panel, perhaps because they are all so close in age, give no real sign at all of ever disagreeing seriously on anything.  There was perfect unanimity, for example, that shows depicting women talking frankly about sex (going back to Sex and the City, but also as reflected in Girls, and a recent show I haven't seen) were all great, groundbreaking stuff that was always refreshing and so well written, etc etc.  No one tried to slip in the (truthful and common) critique that Sex and the City was produced by a gay man and routinely felt more like listening to a circle of gay men talking sex than realistic mature women.  Sure they have the Pakistani male comedian on too, but he appears as liberal as they come.  Sort of a version of Waleed Aly - someone who viewers might ostensibly think by virtue of cultural background might occasionally express a conservative-ish view, but who can be safely relied upon never to do so and upset the happy panel vibe.   

Benjamin Law is on the panel too - a guy who can talk intelligently when he's not continuing his tweets about poo and gay sex, but whose own talent as a sitcom writer is, in my opinion, vastly overrated in a similar way as is virtually all comedy done by gay people working at the ABC and SBS.  The problem is, I think his views are going to be forever predictable.

I also really had a problem with the clips they showed from TV and movies in a time slot between 8 and 8.30 pm.   One from Girls in which a guy masturbating was made exceptionally clear, with the organ itself just barely out of shot?   A ridiculous pool sex scene from Showgirls?    Why did this think this was a good time slot to be showing these?

So, yeah, I did have a problem with the format, the people involved, and the selection of clips used.   

I don't think it is going to work.

Uh oh

I was half watching the Australian Story on Monday night about boxer Jeff Horn and his hard won fight with Pacquiao in Brisbane a few months back.  

First, I didn't realise until I saw more video of the fight that Horn did look so close to collapsing in whatever round it was.  Didn't realise there was so much blood flowing either.

But - the main thing of note was the concern his wife and family has that he doesn't cause himself brain damage by sticking around the ring for too long.   And then, Horn himself said something like "some nights I find I can't remember what I did during the day, and I worry is it just because I am so busy?"   He said he has "had himself checked out" and he is fine,  but really, it seemed to me that he and his family do indeed have something to worry about. 

It was not disclosed how much he made from the fight, but really, I think it would be a good idea if he went back to teaching...

Wrong accusation not corrected

I find it hard to believe that any politician or public servant takes Sinclair Davidson seriously any more (well, maybe public servants never did), when he makes an accusation that they have done something wrong, he is quickly corrected about facts in comments, and then never puts an update in the post to alert readers that, yeah, he wasn't aware of something that negates his original claim.

This is yesterday's example.  

But there remain posts on the blog from years ago that were clear cases of plagiarism by a "guest" poster, and that has never been the subject of an update in the post itself. 

It's a strange way to run a blog if you want to be known as someone careful about facts,  or integrity in publishing plagiarism.

PS:  still waiting for stagflation to arrive, 6 years on, too.

China lends money

In The Atlantic, an article about China's rise as an international infrastructure developer:

Now it’s China’s turn. The scale and scope of the Belt and Road initiative is staggering. Estimates vary, but over $300 billion have already been spent, and China plans to spend $1 trillion more in the next decade or so. According to the CIA, 92 countries counted China as their largest exports or imports partner in 2015, far more than the United States at 57. What’s most astounding is the speed with which China achieved this. While the country was the world’s largest recipient of World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans in the 1980s and 90s, in recent years, China alone loaned more to developing countries than did the World Bank....

Most of its funding will come in the form of loans, not grants, and Chinese state-owned enterprises will also be encouraged to invest. This means, for example, that if Pakistan can’t pay back its loans, China could own many of its coal mines, oil pipelines, and power plants, and thus have enormous leverage over the Pakistani government. In the meantime, China has the rights to operate the Gwadar port for 40 years.

Doesn't it seem to Americans that "America First" protectionism in terms of trade under Trump is only going to help China in its task of achieving world economic dominance?

Kimmy continues

I'm still watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (first series) on Netflix, and found last night's viewed episode "Kimmy Rides a Bike" particularly funny.

It is definitely an oddball show, and one where the unrealistic silliness of some (most?) of the jokes sometimes doesn't work, but at other times, it does to hilarious effect. 

This episode I refer to features heavy satire of incompetent lawyers (based on the OJ Simpson case); gulliby religious mid-Americans; and the Soul Cycle fitness chain which (as far as I know) has not yet extended its tentacles to Australia (correction: not very far, at least).   The over the top unveiling of the true nature of the cycling guru was so, I don't know, audaciously silly I am still thinking about it today...

The case for Titan (which doesn't convince me)

At NPR, a planetary scientist writes about the advantages of colonising Titan rather than Mars (or the Moon.) 

But the one clear benefit - a thick atmosphere that means protection on the surface from space radiation, and no need for a pressure suit as such - seems to me to overly offset by the freezing atmosphere which keeps water ice frozen solid and makes lakes full of frozen methane.   (Also - it's a long, long trip.)

Until you have great constant thrust rocket engines, I just can't see the value of talking about colonisation of such a distant part of the solar system.

And, as I have argued many times before, if the Moon turns out to have enough ice near the poles or elsewhere, and you have to wear a space suit on either Mars or the Moon on the surface, you may as well live on the closer neighbour, especially if there are convenient lava tubes in which to build underground. 

Oddly, the one thing the Trump administration and I agree on is a desire for a Moon base.    But the wishes are like those we have seen made by Presidents over many decades since Apollo:  all rather pie in the sky unless Congress pays for it and NASA is given a clear direction that isn't about to be overturned by the next administration.  Slate had an article recently against the idea, and that is the first sign that it won't happen.  Not yet, anyway.

The new political correctness attacked by an insider

A bisexual female philosopher complains about the atmosphere in US academia at the NYT:

...it is with some trepidation that I admit that the current political climate in academia confuses me. The more I read about trigger warnings, safe spaces and petitions to retract scholarly articles, the more my head spins. On top of that confusion, I harbor a fear of expressing views that will offend other progressives, scholars and teachers who may also be fighting oppression. And I fear being subject to public shaming on social media, and receiving private hate mail (I still am, after my response in May to the controversy over Rebecca Tuvel’s article in the journal Hypatia). In short, I find myself in an educational environment in which outrage, censoring and public shaming has begun to replace critique, disagreement and debate.

She partly blames social media:

 Although social media can be effective for organizing, and for forming communities (on both the left and the right), it is also often fueled by emotional reaction rather than thoughtful response. Life is flattened to fit the screen, and cute cat videos play next to photographs of the latest atrocity. Social media works by leveling and ripping bits of life from their contexts as a form of entertainment or news — the more outrageous, the better. As consumers, we engage in the virtual performance of pathos and moral virtue with our likes, crying or angry Emojis, and the circulation of outrage or sympathy through sharing petitions or calls for donations.

Not a good sign...

....when your likely new Right wing Chancellor of Austria:

keeps reminding you of the main character in American Psycho

Sure the lapels are narrower, but apart from that, the look is very similar.   (And he's 31.   That ridiculous nerd Caleb Bond will be working on a fashion maker over as a result of this.   His mini Piers Akerman with acne look is not going to cut it.)

A great explanation of Fox & Friends

Just read this in Slate.  It's both amusing and accurate:

These are remarkably stupid times. For a glimpse of why, consider the daily patter of Fox & Friends—or, rather, consider that I am even asking you to consider Fox & Friends. The show is by now known for being terrible television, something that is neither entertaining nor informative, that is best watched as the coffee brews and then forgotten as soon as the cup is empty. Or at least that once was the case. Since its 1998 premiere, Fox & Friends has largely existed, in ostensibly amiable morning-show form, to flatter the resentments of the network’s core fan base of elderly cranks who resent the existence of other channels. But one of those cranks is now president, and, consequently, Fox & Friends is having a moment.....

The hosts are a supergroup of sorts, and their signature tune is reactionary resentment. Fox & Friends is always hearkening back to the good old days. “Remember when the name of the Redskins was the biggest controversy in the NFL? Those were the good old days,” said Kilmeade on Thursday. “Remember when ESPN used to have sports on it? Those were the good old days,” said Doocy on Tuesday. “Twenty years ago, or maybe it was 30 years ago, when Johnny Carson was there at the Tonight Show, you couldn’t really tell his politics, because he just was an equal-opportunity joker about all that stuff,” said Doocy on Monday morning, in response to Jimmy Kimmel’s recent political opining on his own late-night show. “Things have changed,” agreed Earhardt.

Fox & Friends is bad in all of the ways that most morning television is bad—excessively perky and smarmy and dumb—while adding its own special authoritarian twist. There are workout segments and cooking segments and music segments, interspersed randomly with deranged political commentary and militaristic iconography.

In other Tesla news...

No one seems 100% sure of what to make of Tesla firing several hundred employees last week, but it is good to keep in mind it actually employs 33,000 in total, and 10,000 or so at its main factory.   That's more than I would have guessed.

Anyway, yesterday in Brisbane, I was driving behind a Tesla with the Queensland number plate NCC 1701, which amused me.

If you don't understand why, I'm a bit ahead of you in middle aged* nerd quotient. 

*  I'm working on the basis that anything between 40 and 60 is now the new middle aged. 

Alcoholic news

I enjoyed a schooner of very nice alcoholic ginger beer at a craft brewery on the weekend.   Very spicy.  Not overly sweet, although my wife begged to differ.    The brewery?  Aether at Milton.   (Didn't get around to their beer beer, but the meat heavy menu wasn't bad, too.)

I occasionally enjoy a sweeter alcoholic drink, but different brands of apple cider tend to be rather similar, I find.   I did enjoy a cherry pear cider from Tasmania a couple of months back, though.  Did I post about that?  No matter, it was this:

Back to craft beers, though:   also at Milton, the Newstead brewery (which had its original outlet at Teneriffe) has a much nicer bar and cafe now just opposite Suncorp Stadium.  Went there for the first time a fortnight ago, and again last weekend.  Their antipasto platter and chips and pizza were all very nice, as were the three different beers I tried.    A very pleasant craft beer place.    

Handy infomation

My son is approaching legal drinking age, although the level of interest in actually drinking is not very clear.   In any event, I should get him to read this soon.  (I didn't really know the detail about the slowness of breathing):

Still, there are a few simple ways to spot when someone’s blood alcohol level has entered the dangerous territory of alcohol poisoning.

UVA has developed the acronym ‘PUBS’ to help its students remember the signs someone may be dangerously drunk. Call 911 right away if someone is:

• Puking while passed out
• Unresponsive to stimulation (pinch or shaking)
• Breathing (slow, shallow or no breathing)
• Skin (blue, cold or clammy)

If a drunk person is asleep and breathing normally, something called the ‘Bacchus’ move is a way to help them stay safe and keep their airway clear. Using their own left arm as a pillow, roll the person onto their left side and drop their right knee forward to help stabilise them. Check often to make sure they’re breathing normally and regularly. The Mayo Clinic suggests a gap of more than 10 seconds between breaths is a sign of alcohol poisoning.

The Big Bang Theory gets it right

Peter Woit over at Not Even Wrong notes that a recent episode of Big Bang Theory gets the current worrying dead end-ish state of physics right.  For example:

SHELDON: What? Look. (sighs) Not all science pans out. You know, we’ve been hoping supersymmetry was true for decades, and finally, we built the Large Hadron Collider, which is supposed to prove it by finding these new particles, and it-it hasn’t. And maybe supersymmetry, our last big idea, is simply wrong.
LEONARD: Well, that sounds awful. Now I get why everyone hates me.

Penny later comes in:

PENNY: So you guys are upset because the collider thing disproved your theories?
LEONARD: It’s worse than that. It hasn’t found anything in years, so we don’t know if we’re right, we don’t know if we’re wrong. We don’t know where to go next…
PENNY: Come on. You guys are physicists. Okay? You’re always gonna be physicists. And sure, sometimes, the physics is hard, but isn’t that what makes it boring?

It's impressive to have a comedy that is accurate about something like that...

Weasel words confirmed

I said the NRA was using weasel words in its announcement that it thought bump stocks should "be subject to additional regulations".  This is confirmed:

The NRA came out against Sen. Dianne Feinstein's bill, which would make it illegal for companies and individuals to buy the firearm accessory, and Rep. Carlos Curbelo's bipartisan bill, which would ban bump stocks. "We oppose the gun-control legislation ... These bills are intentionally overreaching and would ban commonly owned firearm accessories," the NRA said. But "the ATF should review bump-fire stocks to ensure they comply with federal law."

The NRA is saying the ATF should do something it already determined it cannot do:  

But the ATF did finish a classification review of a bump stock, also known as a slide fire, in January 2010. It concluded that the device was a firearm part, not a machine gun, and therefore it was not regulated under the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act. 

The NRA is just playing games, as it always does.

Only interested in culture wars

Man, haven't the wingnut blogs gone into ecstatic overdrive about Weinstein.   It's given them (what they think) is valid cover to avoid talking about Trump's economic nonsense/BS from the Hannity interview (see previous post), his weirdly personal and vindictive take on aid to Puerto Rico (what is his problem with that place?), and the obvious fact that it is an open secret in Washington that large numbers of Republicans think Trump is nuts and unstable and needs constant "minding" by people who aren't impulsive and as wilfully ignorant as the current leader of the free world. 

It is, of course, just a sign of the sickness in Right wing politics that point scoring is more important than sensible policy or the very worrying situation of internal warfare within the Right.  

Anyway, I liked this Slate bit about Trump's stupid statement on Hannity:

I sometimes wonder if it’s worth cataloging the vapid things Trump says about the economy. On the one hand, he’s the president. It should matter if he thinks the national debt goes down when the stock market goes up, even in a vague, philosophical sort of way (and to be clear, it does not). On the other hand, anybody reading a center-left website like Slate.com knows that America’s guy in the Oval Office is terminally uninterested in fact or data, except insofar as a number paints his presidency in flattering terms. Remember how the unemployment rate was a fiction, until it wasn’t anymore? This is a man who can only view history and current events as fragments of light endlessly refracted through the prism of his ego. He draws logical connections where none apparently exist, living according to an almost premodern perspective that by merely mouthing an idea, however inarticulate, he makes it real. Maybe this is his power—maybe he really is the übermensch, breaking the chains of our middle-class morality, including the idea that what we say should have some grounding in the world around us, hoisting our politics into the realm of pure myth. 

Or maybe this was just word salad, a confused and careless man following his own babble to its own nonsense conclusion, “in a sense.” Thus sprach POTUS.

 Where is cult follower Kates's explanation of what Trump meant?

Update:  there have been a few article around like this one lately, pointing out that this doesn't actually make sense:

The article notes:

While it’s unclear what media Trump is consuming if he hasn’t seen wall-to-wall, practically deafening coverage of stock-market gains, he is correct that we are in the midst of a historic, if inexplicable, rally, and that unemployment is at a multi-year low. Unfortunately, he either doesn’t understand or is powerless to stop himself from seeking adulation for the very things that experts say point to an economy that doesn’t need a giant, deficit-funded stimulus in the form of big, yuge tax cuts. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Maya MacGuineas told NPR, “If we have a tax cut right now at a time when the economy doesn’t need stimulus and our debt is at near record levels, that will do a lot of damage for the economy and it will be a huge missed opportunity.”