Unusual tactics

The Sydney Morning Herald claims:

An explicit sex video allegedly involving a NSW player has been leaked as part of a plot to sabotage the Blues on the eve of the State of Origin series.

If there's 90 minutes of such material around, their use in lieu of the match broadcast might even drawn in big Victorian viewing numbers for a change. 

Einstein in the tropics

Yesterday I learned, via a documentary on Channel News Asia about Singaporean history, that Einstein had briefly stopped off there in 1922, on his way to Japan.   He met with prominent Singaporean Jews (there were about 623 there at the time - more than I would have expected) to ask for donations for the creation of a Hebrew University.   He was already famous at this time, but got his Nobel prize a week after the visit.

Here's a photo of his reception with his wealthy hosts:

 Looking at the photo, the thing that immediately strikes me is how overdressed everyone seems to be for the tropical heat and humidity of Singapore, pre-airconditioning.   Europeans in the tropics in those days were made of sturdy stuff...

Pig guilt

I saw on the ABC last week that some Chinese pig farms have taken to burying hundreds/thousands of pigs alive as a culling method to try to prevent the spread of African swine flu.  

Googling the topic, I see that video has also circulated late last year apparently showing pigs in a pit (live, the video says, although they don't move much) being set alight.  

As a person lately feeling twinges of guilt over eating mammals, this is not helping.

He's very strange

As with Trump, Duterte (the globe's other nutty, democratically elected but authoritarian inclined national leader) says so many oddball or  offensive things that they are barely registering with the public anymore.

Hence, I have not noticed much attention given to this: 

THE PRESIDENT of the Philippines told a crowd in Japan he used to be gay but was cured by 'beautiful women' – before inviting four women on stage to kiss him.

President Rodrigo Duterte, 74, began his speech on Thursday by telling the crowd his critic Senator Antonio Trillanes IV was 'similar' to him because they were both gay.

But, he said, he had actually been 'cured' by beautiful women and 'became a man again' when he married his first wife Elizabeth Zimmerman, according to CNN Philippines.

I guess that, like Trump, bragging about his sexual history with women is very important to him.  He just throws in additional details of a sex life we really don't need to know about.

100 ongoing jobs?

Apparently, a Senator last week said Adani would have 100 ongoing jobs (after the construction phase, which will provide all of 1,500 jobs.)

Read about the extremely rubbery Adani figures at this post.

Electromagnetic pulse and the Right

Slate notes that the possibility of an EMP attack on America (by a nuclear weapon or two being let of high above the country) has become a long standing obsession of the Right in particular, and asks why.

I hadn't realised the apparent partisanship of this concern before, but they make a good case.

In any event, as the article does admit, preparatory action to harden electrical networks against it are a good idea, given that it may help with unexpected things like another Carrington event from the Sun.

Tornadoes, hurricanes and climate change

The USA seems to be having a lot of problematic weather lately - floods and tornadoes mainly.

Roy Spencer has been going for years about how people are wrong to think that climate change is making tornadoes worse - he talks about the wind shear component that should decrease as the atmosphere warms.   And I see that he has another go this year at pooh-poohing the idea that this year's high number is due to climate change (at Fox News, of course.) 

But mainstream climate scientists think the story is more complicated, and suspect that climate change is having some effect on tornadoes - although they admit this is a very difficult thing to study given their nature.

Here's a balanced article about it:   Is climate change fuelling tornadoes?   Some climate scientists are quoted, and the conclusions are:

Many of them pointed out that it can be tough to detect tornado trends because comprehensive records only go back a few decades and there's a lot of variability in tornado activity year to year. But they said some shifts are starting to show: while tornado intensity doesn't appear to have changed, there are more days with multiple tornadoes now, and there may be a shift in which regions are especially prone to tornadoes.

Even if future storms in a higher temperature don't spawn more tornadoes, there will likely be more damaging severe storms anyway:

 More broadly, Brooks said, researchers are looking at severe storm development, because even without tornadoes, giant thunderstorms can produce damaging hail and destructive winds. There's a robust signal that global warming will make the atmosphere more likely to spawn such storms.

 And the wandering jet stream is not off the hook, too:

Prolonged tornado outbreaks also could potentially be linked with global warming through a jet stream pattern that is becoming more frequent and that keeps extreme weather patterns locked in place, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research scientist Stefan Rahmstorf suggested on Twitter. 

Speaking of wind shear, I also see a recent paper on research indicating climate change may lead to more rapidly intensifying hurricanes (as well as wetter ones.)   

The irrational Delingpole

Professional Right wing denier of climate change Delingpole says that a dubious sounding treatment (regular massage of the limbic system) for a dubious diagnosis ("chronic" Lyme disease) has been making him act nutty:

If I’ve been incredibly rude to you or snappy or tearful lately, if I’ve taken offence where none was intended, or I’ve wildly overreacted to something you said on social media, I do apologise. It wasn’t the real me you experienced in those moments: it was the mad brain that sometimes seizes control of me.

The reason I have these episodes — as I keep having to explain to my bemused victims, after the event — is that I’m currently undergoing intensive medical treatment which gives me these weird and powerful mood swings.

But then, he talks about he's been borderline insane many times over many years:

Now that I’m on the healing path I’ve finally been able to take stock of my life and understand what a huge toll my Lyme years have exerted on me physically and mentally. There was a period — still too raw and horrible to talk about in detail — when I wonder whether I shouldn’t have been sectioned. Only recently, when I learnt that Lyme can cause psychosis and I looked up the symptoms, did I realise that this was what I probably had. I was in a dark and terrible place; I certainly wasn’t fit to make important decisions. God, if only I’d known what was happening to me, that it wasn’t my fault and that I needed help.

And gullible conservatives have found this guy's view on climate change convincing....

Hydrogen planes, not battery?

There's a start up planning on making a small, boxy commuter "flying car" powered by hydrogen fuel cells.   The mock up doesn't look all that inspiring (looks like a slightly bigger version of a passenger drone):

but what's said in the article about the energy density of fuel cells is interesting:

The argument for fuel cells boils down to energy density: One pound of compressed hydrogen contains over 200 times more energy than one pound of battery, says Alaka’i founder Brian Morrison. That means the Skai can meet the speed, range, and payload requirements that Alaka’i thinks will make it competitive, while saving a lot of weight—a top line consideration for anything that flies. Though the company won’t reveal specifics surrounding the power system, it suggests that it and its fuel cell provider (also not disclosed) have made “breakthroughs” with the technology that enable this performance.

Hydrogen fuel cells are proving themselves able to significantly boost run times for vehicle systems, with certain small unmanned aircraft jumping from 30- to 45-minute run times with batteries to more than two to four hours with fuel cells, says Thomas Valdez, a chemical engineer with Teledyne Energy Systems. And they offer a safety benefit by eliminating the risk of thermal runaway. Even a punctured tank is no big deal: “Pressurized hydrogen would very quickly dissipate in the air, so it won’t pool or catch fire the way conventional fuels do,” Valdez says.

I would still think a pressured hydrogen tank would be the safest thing in a crash.   But nor is normal aviation fuel, of course.

Anyway, one way or another, it seems our future cities will look a bit Blade Runner-ish.

Excellent sarcasm, Ben

How to keep poor people from fleeing poverty - make them poorer

I haven't bothered yet looking at the twitter reaction to Trump's plan to put tariffs on Mexico that will rapidly rise to 25% unless Mexico stops illegal immigration.

But surely someone had already said it - isn't a bit perverse to seek to keep poor people in Mexico by helping ensure their country gets poorer via punitive trade tariffs?  

A blockchain fail

I trust the wonderful world of blockchain conferencing and waffle-ful papers is still being enjoyed by Sinclair Davidson and Chris Berg?   At least it gets them out of Australia and their other pet project of trying to drum up support within the Liberals for ending funding of the ABC, so I don't mind them wasting their time overseas, really.

Anyway, I post about it again because it seems that if the German banks have much say in it, blockchain technology doesn't have a bright looking future:

A trial project using blockchain to transfer and settle securities and cash proved more costly and less speedy than the traditional way, Germany’s central bank president said.

The experiment, launched by the Bundesbank together with Deutsche Boerse in 2016, concluded late last year that the prototype “in principle fulfilled all basic regulatory features for financial transactions.” Yet while advocates of distributed ledger technology say it has the potential to be cheaper and faster than current settlement mechanisms, Jens Weidmann said the Bundesbank project did not bear those out.

Still no cold fusion

So Google has been looking into cold fusion again since 2015, but come up with no good news. 

Nature notes, surprisingly, that it is not definitely the end of the line for the possibility of cold fusion:

Is that the final nail in the cold-fusion coffin? Not quite. The group was unable to attain the material conditions speculated to be most conducive to cold fusion. Indeed, it seems extremely difficult to do so using current experimental set-ups — although the team hasn’t excluded such a possibility. So the fusion trail, although cooling, is not yet cold, leaving a few straws for optimists to clutch on to.

It's pretty remarkable that it is proving so hard to write this field off entirely.

Trump's "friend" misbehaving, again

Well, can Trump find a way to forgive his "friend" for some more friendship challenging behaviour?  

North Korea has executed its special envoy to the United States as well as foreign ministry officials who carried out working-level negotiations for the second summit with Donald Trump in February, holding them responsible for its collapse, South Korean reports say.

In which renewable energy saves the world (without that much storage)

If this latest idea is right, it suggests that renewables are more capable of saving the world than I had realised.  

An article at The Conversation argues that their modelling indicates that, rather than worry about building a lot of storage for renewables, just build with a big enough over-capacity instead, and don't use the excess when it's produced.   Sounds questionable, but then again, who knew that adding a metre to an equator-covering rope would raise it 13 cm around the whole world? Not me, so I'm not relying on intuition ever again, or at least, until it suits me.

I would have thought the overcapacity would have to be spread out a fair bit, but they don't even seem to be arguing that.  For example:

A legitimate question to ask is what would be the area required for a full deployment of oversized solar PV. For Minnesota, in the most extreme 100% PV generation scenario assuming oversizing by a factor of two – or doubling the solar needed to meet current demand – this area would amount to 435 square miles, assuming solar panels with state-of-the-art efficiency of 20%. This area represents less than 1% of the state’s cultivated crops and half of the high- and medium-density urbanized space.

Again - sounds a touch too good to be true, but, you know, that rope thing is starting to make me believe anything.

Anyway, let's go back to some of my earlier ideas about how to get along with more solar.  Because if you are going to build to overcapacity, you are going to be wanting to install a lot of extra solar compared to what we have now, and in some places, do you really want to cover up good land with panels?   So:

*  Remember my previous posts about floating solar on water?   Specifically, there seems to be no good reason not to cover large parts of water storage dams (such as Brisbane's Wivenhoe and Somerset dams) with solar panels on plastic floats.   I doubt that they represent any real pollution risk to drinking water, and plastic floats are surely pretty cheap.   Less evaporation from the dams too.

Why is no one in Australia listening to what is a patently good idea??

Remember - I also argued for Snowy 2 to use floating solar panels to pump storage water.  (Although maybe wind there is a better bet?)

* I also have posted before about compulsory State government building codes requiring a minimum amount of solar power and storage - why wouldn't that be a good idea in most of Australia?

In fact, I see that the Greens have adopted such a policy.

And it has now been adopted in California.

This could only help with the "build to overcapacity" idea too, surely?

* If you have to build large solar farms in the country side, I've also posted before (in 2015) about raising them above the ground and spreading them out enough to still be able to use the land underneath for farming or grazing.

* Not sure that I have ever posted about it before, but if you are going to spread out large solar power farms (say, in the middle of Australia where the land is not productive), then you need a good electricity network that is going to reduce losses over transmission distance.  High Voltage Direct Current cables have long been mooted as good for that, but their advance seems to be happening pretty slowly.

Gosh, look at the photo at that link for some real oversized gear.   I'll throw it in here because it reminds me of the ridiculous oversized equipment on Forbidden Planet:

And in conclusion:

With this latest idea, combined with what I've been suggesting over the last few years, it seems I've pretty much solved the world's renewable energy problems, if only people would listen to me!


Thank you.

PS:  I see that a Bill Gates clip from last year of him making a cranky sounding statement that people were kidding themselves if renewables and storage could power the world is doing the rounds.   I suspect he just has settled on nuclear as being essential and won't be budged.   And didn't he mention steel making?

Well, why doesn't he look harder into proposals to make steel either with no coal at all (see Sweden), or even the CSIRO's proposal to make it with biochar as a way to cut down the CO2 by a large amount.

I can envisage some places where renewables are difficult to use on large enough scale (that Russian city in the Arctic circle during winter, for one!).  But just because Bill Gates has what sounds like a sensible hunch, it doesn't always pan out.   Has his "condom of the future" competition had any dramatic effects, for example?  Not that I know of...

More health problems with e-cigarettes

Vox has a good summary about the health issues, although it doesn't mention the unusual one that I noted before but doesn't seem to have attracted much attention (about lead coming from the heating element of some brands):

Vaping may be more dangerous than we realized

Sinclair Davidson meanwhile is still posting pro-vaping stuff at Catallaxy.  I wonder if he vapes.  Could explain a lot.

If only Rupert Murdoch would take it up - I'd be all for that.  I'd also be happy for him to develop a late age interest in hiking Mount Everest.  

The dubious Ita

Look, Ita Buttrose had an affair with lumpy, married boss Kerry Packer - why should I trust her judgement on anything else after that?

Her comments about the ABC yesterday were somewhat worryingly vague, even muttering about unconscious bias and "more diversity of views".   (Show us the Right wing commentators with talent as broadcasters, Ita - if Sky News at Night and talk back radio are any guide, they don't exist.   Or if one wants to argue (ridiculously) that Alan Jones has obvious talent because look at his audience numbers - well, as if he is going to take a pay cut to work at the ABC.)

She was appointed by Morrison and a government that still had members who spend every waking moment unhappy that the ABC does not have hosts who agree with them.   And the Murdoch press is running a "must further defund the ABC/SBS" campaign in The Australian already, as if the motivation for that is not glaringly obvious.

I don't think Ita is going to be good in the job, somehow.

Another American peculiarity

Emotional support animals on airplanes, I mean.  Has any other country got suckered into this to anything like the Americans?   I mention them because of this remarkable story in the Washington Post:

An attack on a plane by a fellow passenger’s emotional-support dog left Marlin Jackson needing 28 stitches, according to a negligence lawsuit filed Friday against Delta Air Lines and the dog’s owner. In the suit, Jackson claims he bled so badly that a row of seats later had to be removed from the plane.

Jackson had just taken his window seat in the 31st row for a June 2017 flight from Atlanta to San Diego when the dog, sitting on the lap of the passenger next to him, lunged for his face, pinning him against the window of the plane so he couldn’t escape, the lawsuit alleges....

Before he took his seat, Jackson asked Mundy if the reportedly 50-pound dog — a “chocolate lab-pointer mix,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution — would bite, and the dog owner said Jackson would be safe.

“While Mr. Jackson was securing his seatbelt, the animal began to growl at Mr. Jackson and shift in Defendant Mundy’s lap,” the lawsuit reads. “Suddenly, the animal attacked Mr. Jackson’s face, biting Mr. Jackson several times. … The attack was briefly interrupted when the animal was pulled away from Mr. Jackson. However, the animal broke free and again mauled Mr. Jackson’s face.”

Massey said teeth punctured through Jackson’s gum, above his lip and beneath his nose. He has suffered permanent scarring, the complaint says, and his attorney said he still experiences numbness in the area, and has intermittent speech issues.

This has not been the only time one of these dogs has bitten, apparently: 

The alleged attack is one of numerous reports in the past few years of emotional-support animals causing trouble for airline passengers, incidents that have pushed airlines to crack down on which animals they allow on planes.

In the months following the attack, Delta tightened rules around emotional-support and service animals. The airline required passengers beginning in March 2018 to provide “confirmation of animal training,” proof of the animal’s immunization records as well as a letter from a doctor or licensed mental health professional regarding the request for the support animal.

When Delta announced the change, it cited an 84 percent spike in reported animal incidents since 2016 “including urination/defecation, biting” and the incident involving Jackson.

No laughing matter

In one of their ongoing highlights of ridiculous American hospital charges, NPR has the story of a woman (a midwife, no less) who had a pretty normal birth, and got a charge on her hospital bill for nearly $5,000 for having used nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for pain relief during the birth.

All very ridiculous (and the charge was revised down, when challenged, to around $500), but I was more interested in the fact that the gas is only coming into common use in birthing in the US recently.

My wife used it when (trying to) give birth to our son, now 19 years ago.  It seemed simple, safe and helpful.  But here's the story from the US:

Part of that problem comes down to the recent resurgence of the practice in the United States. In 2011, two hospitals in the U.S. offered nitrous oxide for childbirth. Now an estimated 1,000 hospitals and 300 birthing centers provide it, said Michelle Collins, a professor and director of nurse midwifery at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing.

The use of nitrous oxide has long been common during childbirth in the United Kingdom and Canada, in part because of its low cost. Many people in the U.S. have learned about the practice while watching the popular British period drama Call the Midwife, set in the 1950s. Epidural anesthesia largely displaced nitrous oxide in the U.S. in the 1970s.

Hmm.   Moved from a cheap, self administered, form of pain reduction to a highly medicalised one that removes all pain (if done properly) but also carries (I think) a very small risk of serious complication?

Is there something culture specific about the degree to which Americans seem to want to go to avoid even the hint of pain?   I mean, why hasn't the prescribed opioid problem been replicated in other countries?   Is it innate, or a result of what strong capitalism in medical practice pushes people to expect in their (the doctors') own self interest?   I mean, even the way medicines are advertised there just seems so odd to Australians.   (Mind you, I recently heard a breast enlargement ad here on FM radio recently - if I were able to ban that I would.)

I may have mentioned before, but I suspect Japan might be at the other extreme of expectation of tolerance of discomfort (or used to be, at least) as I was told by a specialist there some years ago that he did gastro-endoscopy, and without any form of anaesthesia at all.   But then again, I think Japanese women get to stay in hospital for days after birth.  Here, I just heard of a young woman who had a two hour labour, gave birth at 2am and was discharged at 9am (!)  (But there were midwife visits at home daily for the next week or so.)

Anyway, I still think Americans are a bit odd with the pain issue.

Straight talking from James Comey

I like the way James Comey speaks bluntly in his Washington Post column:

It is tempting for normal people to ignore our president when he starts ranting about treason and corruption at the FBI. I understand the temptation. I’m the object of many of his rants, and even I try to ignore him.

But we shouldn’t, because millions of good people believe what a president of the United States says. In normal times, that’s healthy. But not now, when the president is a liar who doesn’t care what damage he does to vital institutions. We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts.

The rest of his article explains, again, why it is absolute nonsense being peddled by the conspiracy loving Right (facilitated in large part by the massive propaganda campaign of Murdoch's Fox News) to be calling it a "treason" or a "coup".