April 2023

With the colder months approaching, indoor air quality often collapses to pretty dire levels. It’s one of the main reasons we get more colds and flus in winter, and it’s very dangerous for Covid. A not very well known fact helps. Air flows much more easily in winter, with the bigger difference in temperature between outside and inside. It sets up draughts. You only need to open a window 5cm in winter (about half what you see in this picture) to get the same sort of airflow you get in summer, with the window wide open. I plead with teachers in particular to do this. Far and away the greatest improvement to education scores documented in the science was due to improving the air quality in classrooms. I rarely see a classroom that is ventilated at ALL. Many have windows, but they’re almost never opened. Even in warmer months. A disaster for Covid, but even without the pandemic kids will be much more alert and will learn more, with fresh air constantly flowing into the room.

This is American data. You can see that nearly half of the people surveyed even today are not comfortable with public events, because of the risk of Covid. The idea the majority of people wanted ‘freedom’ back and were happy to get infected has always been a lie. A tiny, very noisy minority started that story, and repeat it often and loudly. It’s a con. As people get their 2nd, 3rd, 4th and even more infections, with the terrible health consequences that will have for many, we’ll see how long this charade lasts.

Phew, lucky this wasn’t an EV, it might have caught fire 😂

This weekend you can watch the ultimate example of a hybrid car - Formula 1. The fastest cars in the world. F1 cars are hybrids. They’ve been hybrid for nearly a decade, and not only did it make them much more fuel efficient (F1 cars now never refuel in a race), it also made them hugely more powerful. Before they were hybrid, they had about 850 horsepower. The hybrids are over 1000 hp. I chuckle when people think hybrids are granny cars, good only for saving fuel. They’re the ultimate performance car.

You see these charts in lots of workplaces. And quite a few people do the stretches. The ideas behind stretching are really quite bizarre though, here’s another go at it. The idea that your muscles and other connective tissue get too tight, and you then need to stretch them out again. It’s like nobody stops to think, *why* did those muscles get tight? Tissue (muscles and other connective tissue) is living, it’s you. It will behave and change to match what you are doing. If you’re sitting narrowly hunched over a keyboard all day, staring at a screen, your tissue will ‘shrink’ up to support you in that hunching. If you then do a more open activity, like getting up and going for a walk, you’ll feel tightness. Because now you’re asking your body to support you in that much more open activity. So the same tissue that was supporting your hunching, now needs to be able to expand to support much wider movement. So it feels tight. Stretching it using exercises like these assumes it’s a passive inert thing. Like a spring or bit of fixed elastic. Stretch it out and hey presto, tightness gone. Except people never, ever, stop stretching. Every day. It should tell us something isn’t right about the ideas, but it doesn’t. I’ve posted before. That tightness you feel IS your body ALREADY stretching. If you just leave it be, while you go about your more open activity, the tissue will use that stretching (tightness) to change and adapt to your new more open way of doing things. It’s your body already doing what you think you need stretching to do. Here’s one last way to see the truth of this. You need to hold any of the stretches in these charts for at least 2-3 minutes to have any real impact on the muscle fibres and fascia, to begin them changing their behaviour in a lasting way. Nearly everybody does the stretches for less than a minute. It’s more a subjective comfort thing, it’s not really changing the tissue. But if you just let that tightness be there and open up your activity more, be less hunched, be more open to what’s around you, it will do the stretching for you, *all day*. Leave it alone, stop trying to ‘stretch’ yourself. If you’re always tight, it means you’re always narrowed. You need to be more open, not to stretch.

The rai line over the mountains was electrified in the 1950s. Nearly 80 years ago, we understood that electric motors are not only much more efficient, but need much less maintenance and are also more powerful. We’ve wasted a century ignoring these basics. The only reason freight trains are still diesel now is because electrification stopped at Lithgow. The original reason the line was made electric was the transport of coal over the mountains, not passengers.

Autonomous driving cars are very close, in fact you can see Bill Gates driving in one in this short video. Around London, so a very challenging environment. It performs beautifully. Cars and trucks are the only form of mass transport that haven’t been automated in this way, which is why they’re also the least safe method of transport. 1-30 tonne vehicles hurtling along with only humans in charge is a recipe for carnage. My own car can already do this in most situations, and you quickly appreciate it, it’s always got your back if your attention lapses. I could fall asleep at the wheel and the car would still look after me. Even small improvements make a huge difference. The other aspect to this which isn’t spoken about as much is the capacity for traffic management, if thousands or even millions of cars can then also talk to each other.

Older houses often had unflued gas or coal fires, and without these vents people would potentially die from the exhaust gases. I’ve had a few air con specialists tell me to seal these up, because they ‘lose heat’. But actually I think they point to something we’ve forgotten, that’s really important. Ventilation. Fresh air. Obviously a big issue with Covid, but even without it many houses now have very little fresh air, particularly in colder months. Older homes had high ceilings and these high vents, not to control heat (a common explanation), but to create an updraught. Which can help control heat, but the focus was much more about keeping fresh air moving through the room. They’re ‘trickle vents’. They allow small amounts of air to move through them, so that even in winter you can heat and have ventilation, at the same time. Some window manufacturers now build trickle vents into window frames, for the same reason, though you don’t get the same updraught. By creating a vertical movement of air it also helps move germs and pollution upwards, away from other people. This can be more effective than cross-ventilation, which is often used but creates a horizontal flow of air, that can carry dirty air from person to person.

Interesting, so banning from the entire school, or just the classroom? This will actually be a pretty seismic change.

The same Senator who was lecturing the other day about how gravity keeps the heat from escaping the Earth, and that's what's causing climate change.

The GIO found out the smirking petrolheads are waiting to pounce at every opportunity, with their fact-free slogans ready to go.

Not sure rugby league can survive this.

I saw an interview with David Bowie, where he said The Velvet Underground were a much more important band than The Beatles. I dunno, every Velvet Underground track I’ve ever heard sounds like rubbish. Lou Reed seems a bit of a wanker. And then I thought, who bloody cares anyway, as an adult? Favourite bands is teenage identity politics. The hierarchy of cool is one of the nastiest and most tedious parts of human life.

That ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy is good stuff.

Was in a building where most people have been living the ‘Covid is over’ stuff for over a year, happy and chirpy as if life is back to good ol’ normal. Then a member of the public entered the building, wearing a mask, and declared they were Covid positive. The immediate shift in mood was amazing. You could smell fear, anxiety, anger. Some even started spraying Glen 20 in the air. People say Covid is over in the same way they drive the most popular car, or wear the most popular clothes. They want to fit in, to not stand out from the crowd. It’s a social thing, not a scientific thing. ‘Covid is over’ is ‘trending’, that’s all. Underneath that many know it’s a lie, and fear infection just as much as always. As they should.

Multiple families I know struggling with multiple infections. Conjuncitivitis and tonsillitis common. Hand, foot and mouth disease too. And others. Many when I talk to them repeat the slogans politicians created to deal with this, ‘the kids weren’t exposed to these bugs in lockdowns, so now they’re all catching up with infections’. What’s called the ‘immunity debt’ idea. Immunity debt is a myth. Political spin. Getting conjuncitivitis and tonsillitis for example doesn’t give you immunity to getting them again, over and over. These families are sick because they’ve had Covid, and Covid has damaged their immune systems, making them more susceptible to other infections too. What’s scary is that they’re all lining up for even more Covid infections, following the other myth that this will give them immunity, to Covid, eventually. It won’t, it will just keep trashing their immune systems. Some will never recover.

We're about to see coal-fired power fall off a cliff. What isn't clear in the public debates, this is already happening. Nobody is waiting to make the decision, it was made long ago. For the 'when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow' people, note how little storage is needed in the overall mix, compared to energy available. And look how much MORE energy will be available than we've ever had before, more than twice as much. Supply was never the issue.

Happy Birthday Mike. Busy day I see :)

Go Tiffany. Unfortunately there are 1000 Craigs, for every Tiffany.

Happy Birthday!

A terrible crash between 2 utes on the Barton Highway, 4 dead. 94 percent of motor vehicle crashes are caused by dangerous errors made by drivers. Many of them excellent drivers too, it’s not about skill. With autonomous driving/driver assist technology, most crashes wouldn’t even happen.

Australia makes about $70 billion a year exporting iron ore, for other countries to turn into steel. If we created the steel here with renewable energy, and then exported it, we could turn that $70 billion easily into $700 billion. (Steel costs 10 times as much as iron ore.) The worldwide demand for ‘green steel’ will be astronomical, off the scale. Look how much steel the world uses. This is how Australia can become a superpower, and fast. Literally, super-power. Our capacity to produce renewable energy makes us the Saudi Arabia of the 21st and 22nd centuries. If we’re smart enough, and don’t listen to morons.

Lithgow has had some very wintry days already this autumn, dark and wet. A good test for the solar. The last two days a good example. On both days the solar produced easily enough to run heating, washing, clothes dryer, dishwasher, fridges, stove, lights, TVs etc. And it re-charged the battery for overnight use. There was still, after all that, plenty left to export back to the grid as well. That’s what the graphs show, significant surplus every day, back to the grid. Enough to power a small home. It might have powered yours. Cost to us - better than zero. We made money.

The KIA EV6 GT (all electric) outperforms challengers from Audi, Porsche and Mercedes. At a third of the price. 0-100 km/h in 3.5s.

Servos are transforming into drive-through grocery stores. Fuel is already only a marginal part of their business, and will become negligible in the next decade.

Wood fires in the home are like the ultimate triumph of fantasy over reality. 80-90% of the heat goes straight up the chimney. If it’s an open wood fire, the updraught the chimney creates then sucks even more heat out of the rest of your house, straight up the chimney. Your house gets *colder*, by lighting an open wood fire. A closed wood stove helps against that, but those also send 80-90% of their heat straight up the chimney. If you’re paying a few hundred bucks per tonne (not uncommon) for firewood, 90% of that money again goes straight up the chimney. If you’re cutting it yourself, 90% of your effort goes straight up the chimney. The smoke is also more toxic than cigarette smoke. The neighbours hate you for it, and your family is basically chain smoking all day and night. A closed wood stove doesn’t help a lot there, because the smoke particles are so fine they escape easily, and also exit your chimney and find their way back into the house, because no house is airtight.

The Blayney gold mine is piping water from Lithgow. Bathurst now is looking to tap the same line, and even put a second pipe in the trench, for Bathurst to take its own supply from Lithgow. I’ll bet this will turn nasty in the next drought.

More on wood heating. It has its benefits, it’s a renewable resource for example, and can capture emissions when you replace cut wood with new plantings. (How often that happens is a bit questionable.) Here’s another interesting way to compare options - energy use. Firewood produces about 20 MJ/kg. The average Australian household using firewood for its majority heating uses 3-4 tonnes of firewood per year. If you convert that to kWh, the measure we use for electricity consumption, that’s about 17,000 kWh of energy used to heat those homes, per year. Have a look at the average electricty consumption of Australian homes, by State. A house using firewood for heating uses 2-3 times as much energy to do that, as the average household uses in total in electricity, every year. (And that includes households using that electricity for heating.) It’s very inefficient, in terms of energy, and that also doesn’t factor in gathering it, chopping it, stacking and drying it. Not to say it isn’t an option for many Australians, particularly in the regions. But wood is up to $500/tonne, and even if you have your own supply it costs about $20/tonne to have it ready to burn (fuel costs for transporting the wood etc.). That’s about $60-$80 for heating for a year, on the absolute best case scenario (not counting your own time and effort gathering and preparing the wood). For comparison, heating our home this year will cost pretty much nothing, including zero effort in collecting, cutting and stacking/drying firewood. So cost saving from burning wood isn’t maybe the argument some make it out to be. I know growing up we began with open wood fires, moved to combustion stoves, and then dad getting fed up with all the work around gathering and chopping/stacking the firewood, stoking the fire all day and for nights, having to get up in the morning and get it roaring again, cleaning out fireboxes etc. Swapped it all for a one-button push job, instant heat, at whatever temperature we wanted. Everybody was happier. (As a P.S., watch where you stack your firewood. Firewood stacks are one of the greatest sources of termite invasion into homes.)

While the Liberals and Nats are a coalition in much of the country, in Queensland they're a single, merged party, the Liberal National Party. It's now the only State where the federal LNP wins many seats, driven by a very rural population in Queensland and a lot of oldies retired along the coast there. Peter Dutton and before him Scott Morrison have had to try to speak to that constituency. It's highly conservative and reactionary, and has maybe terminally damaged their vote in NSW and Victoria. It may make the LNP unelectable as a federal government, with shifting demographics in the rest of the country. The current Dutton opposition to the Voice is another example, plays very well with rural Queenslanders and retirees on the Gold Coast. But terribly in much of the rest of the country. In the meantime the Murdoch press and talkback radio keep trying to push the LNP even further towards this very small set of beliefs, in Queensland. It's a recipe for the end of the Liberals. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2023/04/11/julian-leeser-frontbench-voice/?utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%2020230411&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra&lr_hash=

For those interested in solar and EVs, it’s a full-time job keeping on top of the amount of BS social media generates about them. Here’s another myth, that solar panels cause a disturbing number of house fires. Hilariously, the tiny number (1.5%) of house fires that were started by solar installations weren’t linked to the panels at all. They were linked to the DC isolator switches that installers were forced to install, because people campaigned that they were needed for the safety of firefighters. Which turned out to be social media-driven BS. The laws have now been revoked.

I’m a materials engineer. Most people have never heard of it, but it’s the heart of the modern world. The basic engineering principles in most fields haven’t changed a lot in centuries. What’s changed is new materials. Materials engineers also run blast furnaces and electric arc furnaces, some of the scariest things you can imagine. Like hell on Earth. Look at the beautiful outcome, those smooth rolls of steel.

Starlink is so good, that even NBN recommends it to people who are in areas with poor internet.

Scrolling past all of the happy social lives on FB made me think of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Compare the two images. The variety of passion and emotion in Da Vinci’s picture, and the monotonous single ‘living our best lives’ vibe that oozes out of social media photos. You could say the social media photos are posed and don’t reflect the diversity of emotions that were happening at the time. That’s true. Though you don’t have to sit in too many bars or clubs for long to see that the ‘everybody is happy’ vibe is dominant, even when not posing. Another example of what some social researchers describe as the gradual replacement of our lifespan with a permanent adolescence, across all age groups. No conflict, no disagreement, just having good times, without making anybody feel challenged or uncomfortable. Each to their own, as the idiot saying goes. It’s like being stuck in a happy zombie movie. Bring the true passion back to our lives, the joy at tackling the hard stuff, of disagreement, of fighting through the challenges to achieve something bigger than ourselves. Idiot happy culture calls that ‘negativity’, because it never grew up. The damage we’re doing to our society by sharing nothing but curated happiness. It destroys peoples’ mental health faster than anything else, when they think all the difficulty they actually experience in their lives is somehow abnormal. Toxic positivity.

The idea you need a million dollars in retirement is ludicrous. Vast amounts of money and resources going to the retired that should be going to re-building our collapsing infrastructure.

This graph again, that astronomical climb is the Industrial Revolution. What isn't said about it is that it was a response to massive human problems, like disease, starvation, poverty, pollution etc. It changed everybody's lives. That's what's happening right now, with things like renewables. A new industrial revolution, in response to even bigger new challenges. The idiots who oppose the changes to protect 'the economy' (or because they think it's 'greenies') don't see that industrial revolutions are the only things that made 'economies' in the first place. Look at that flatline for thousands of years before the last one. Our economies are all flatlining again. We need the new industrial revolution, and even faster than the last one.

WIndows still going in, huge job. Trims to add, inside and out. One of the things I love about these particular windows is the uPVC the frames are made out of. Very common in Europe. It’s a polymer, a superb insulator (much better than any other window frame material), completely waterproof, isn’t damaged by sunlight, needs no painting or other maintenance. Beautiful, smooth, white. Another example of materials science changing the world. As for how the windows are performing, I can get up on cold mornings now and not even need the heating. And rooms that are heated before bed are retaining a lot of heat, still warm in the mornings. All great for comfort, and for the wallet.

The benefits of a battery. Been a wintry few weeks in Lithgow, lot of cloud and rain, but the solar still produces more than enough power. This morning when I got up the battery was still 54% full, from yesterday’s charging, and that’s with everybody except me home for the holidays, using power all day. Now at 45% after 90 minutes of heating, cooking breakfast etc. (Still dark.) That 0.1 kW usage includes two reverse-cycle heat pumps currently running to make the house maximally comfortable for the boss when she gets up (she’s cold-blooded). With the new windows they barely come on, so it all adds together to create even more savings and comfort.

A good one to use if you're teaching about inflation.

Cars fixed a major environmental problem. Horse shit. At the time cars were introduced, major cities were overwhelmed with the amount of horse shit in streets, as you can see in the photo. Cars went on to make the air in cities toxic instead. It’s time for the next industrial revolution.

Autochrome was one of the first technologies to produce colour pictures. This picture was taken in 1915. It hasn’t been colourised. A bit jarring to see this and feel like it’s today, when it was taken 108 years ago. This is Kitty Stieglitz. 8 years after this photo was taken, she gave birth to a son. The postpartum depression she experienced was so severe, she was institutionalised for the next 48 years. She died in the institution in 1971.

Three more autochrome pictures. Mother and baby, 1910. Man, 1907. Young woman, 1913. Autochrome was invented by the Lumiere brothers, who are also famous as early pioneers of cinema. They used potato starch to help capture colour images.

Lionel Richie’s promo shot for the upcoming Coronation Concert. He looked older in the 1980s.

The unfixable destructive paradox of travel is that it forces somebody else’s home to change, to cater to you. No matter how low impact you want to be. Some European cities for example are fed up with the tourists who ‘go local’, pretending to be more respectful of the local culture by living with the locals. But it displaces everything about the delicate local social structures. Bali experiencing this at rapidly increasing speed. Byron is probably terminal. The answer? Make your own homes and cultures magical places, instead of being a parasite on others’ home-grown paradises, which they’ve cultivated for generations. We won’t do that, because we have no understanding now of presence, of being grounded where we live. Even the people who say they are are really just sightseeing, bushwalking and camping in their own landscapes like tourists, often uttering greeting card drivel about being one with nature. Finding it all so numinous etc. Like those who drape themselves over natural wonders for photos, it’s social media-driven narcissism. Most travel is a bit like that, it’s ‘look at me here, travelling’. Fodder for the social media feed, curating our public personalities.

Happy Birthday Mel :)

The English journalist Christina Patterson has been fighting a very brave fight against trans activism. She makes the excellent point, one I’ve posted here a few times, that the concept of trans is the social media-driven explosive extrapolation of a tiny minority of genuinely suffering people, with a condition called gender dysphoria. Patterson says nearly everybody now labelling themselves as trans is actually suffering not gender dysphoria, but social contagion. Every age has its social contagions. This one is destroying many young peoples’ lives, with drugs and surgery irrevocably changing their bodies. Patterson is also no conservative, which the team sports politics of our day would always fall back on. She’s a ‘Leftie’. While the ‘Righties’ also dislike trans theory, this is nothing to do with Left or Right. It’s about calling out dangerous ideas whose only basis is social media contagion.

The work in progress. Can see the fresh roof, solar panels, heat pumps, and windows underway. (I even threw in an Oxford comma, as a bonus.)

Yup. The worst failure of governance in all Australian history.

Chipmunk eating an almond for the first time.

Lithgow isn’t even at this point. It seems to be denying anything is happening at all.

Young people have $74 billion of HECS debt. At a time when housing is completely unaffordable, wages have been going backwards for decades, and the country is desperately short of skilled workers. You could not devise anything more stupid (literally) than a tax on education. But here we are. Society will collapse, taking its moronic slogans with it.

It's fun getting an electricity bill when you made twice as much as you owed. And it's even (much) better than that, because you also made all the money you didn't pay for electricity.

A question for people who live in NSW. This advice from NSW Health has never changed. So why is hardly anybody wearing masks? Do we all know better than the health professionals? Do you reckon we might be playing with fire there?

Nobody can get staff, it’s a genuine crisis. The thing is, we knew this was coming. It’s demographics. Our population was ageing, and is now old. There are nowhere near enough workers to support that older population, who will expect gold standard care. Meantime that same too-small pool of younger workers is being smashed with high student debts, completely unaffordable housing, wages below inflation, and now mass and repeated infection with a lethal virus. While the overwhelming majority of society’s wealth sits with the retired, who don’t need it, absolutely unprecedented in human history. Calling the young lazy is only going to make them angrier. And they have every right to be not just angry, but furious. It can’t end well. Aged care homes are closing already now, they can’t function. 800 Australians are retiring per DAY. It’s hard to see this ending any way but total social collapse.

Hybrids are marketed to the public almost exclusively as fuel-saving vehicles. Some reflections on driving one now for nearly a year, and why I think that marketing is a mistake. Firstly because for quite a few manufacturers, they don’t save a lot of fuel, they haven’t done the engineering development and just throw together the petrol and electric without much actual ‘hybrid’ going on. But a much more important reason is that the true genius of a hybrid is one that petrolheads should love. They’re the ultimate performance vehicle. Have posted before about how they use the strengths of electric and petrol motors to deliver maximum torque and power across the entire rev range. No petrol, diesel or even EV can match them for that. It’s why F1 cars are hybrid, and high performance sports cars. It’s glorious in an ordinary car, maximum torque and power at every speed. When you drive a (Toyota) hybrid the power is always just there, smoothly appearing to meet the demand, without any of the mad see-saw, yo-yo revving you get in geared cars working their way up and down the gears, struggling to reach peak power on the torque/power band. The vehicle just glides along, with instant torque and power when you need it. You hear the petrol engine revving, but not to drive the wheels, just to generate energy, which the onboard computer then blends with energy from the battery to feed you precisely the power you need, at every moment. Via the magic in the pic below, the hybrid synergy drive, with its 4 clutches and planetary gear set. It’s like you’re floating along the road. Put your foot down and the car explodes with acceleration. At every speed. You’ll also use half the fuel. It’s astonishing in so many ways that we weren’t all driving these years ago.

Happy Birthday! Have a wonderful day :)

I'd factored in using surplus solar (credits on the electricity account) generated over summer, spring and autumn in winter, to make up for any grid power needed then because of much shorter days, and needing to heat. What I hadn't realised is just how good the new windows would be. The place is warm most of the time with no heating going at all. Will likely not need to pay for electricity across the entire year. I wandered into Alice's room the other day, and thought she had a heater on, there were waves of warm air. She didn't, all of the warmth was from her computer's fans. That small amount of heat had made the whole room toasty, now the new window was insulating against heat loss.

The Tesla Powerwall home battery has had another price drop, this time to $12,900 (uninstalled). Still the best home battery, including for its outstanding software. The software is as if not more important than the hardware with solar and batteries, provided you buy decent hardware brands.

John Farnham’s term with LRB wasn’t very successful. But it was I think the greatest singing in the history of rock music. Farnham was at his peak, and the harmonies were like nothing anybody else has ever done live. Graeham (that is the spelling) Goble, LRB’s main songwriter, said it was the highlight of his career, and his own singling improved tenfold singing with Farnham, whom he describes as the greatest singer ever born. Have a listen, to him singing alone, and the harmonies. John Farnham went on to become a household name, and that’s obscured his phenomenal talent a bit. He’s a monster, not just with his vocal ability but with the intelligence of how he phrased things. I remember Jimmy Barnes inviting him around to his house, and Barnes saying he nearly shit himself when Farnham opened his mouth and started singing.

Yep! Electrify and insulate your home. No other investment will make you as much money, as the article says, it’s thousands per year. Generate some or most of your own electricity and the savings multiply hugely. And it’ll improve your quality of life at the same time.

The Americans are shifting to two-thirds of all car sales to be EVs in just 9 years, by 2032. From a starting point of only 5-6%. Notice the EPA there doesn’t need politicians to agree to it, it just sets vehicle emissions standards much higher, and the transition happens all by itself. What we need to do here as well.

A taste of how sophisticated and how disgusting cybercrime now is. Criminals now use AI to imitate loved ones’ voices on the phone. A friend relayed that her nephew had been called by one of these scammers, with his mother’s voice, saying she thought she was dying, and please call her on a given number. The number was one of those where you pay a fortune per minute, set up by the scammers, so that they pocketed the money for the call. One suggestion to counter this is for families to have a code word that can be repeated in a call between family members, to test if it’s legitimate. Thanks to Molly for the tip.

The myths about public and private. All innovation and economic growth has its origins in the State. The State even invented the ‘private sector’. Biden understands this, and now industry is starting to boom again there. Australia needs to rapidly strip away the fundamentalist belief in the ‘market’ to do anything at all. It’s a myth. It destroyed our car industry, and pretty much our entire manufacturing industry. Government needs to drive the change.

This seems to work. Wow.

"Why are you still wearing that mask?" Because I don't want to have to inject insulin every day? Does that work for you? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/18/up-to-one-20-new-diabetes-cases-could-linked-covid-study?CMP=share_btn_tw

We’re re-living a debate that’s more than a century old. This time petrol won’t win.

A serious question. What service do banks now provide? I struggle to think of a single one. You give them your money, which is then theirs to invest as they like, to make significant profits. They pay no real interest, certainly well below inflation. They offer mortgages, but their cheap credit at the same time causes house prices to explode, making the mortgages unaffordable (but making them rich beyond imagination). Now, when the bank is robbed by cyber criminals, guess who actually gets robbed? The customer. A clear failure of the bank’s services, but the customer pays for the loss. They’re parasites on the face of societies. Remember the Banking Royal Commission, the disgusting corruption it exposed? Nothing meaningful has been done, and they’re back to doing all the same things again. This is why older people, whose families still have memories of the Great Depression, to this day will not trust banks. It’s a very sound instinct.

It's hard to get people to see the magnitude of the emergency climate change is, because they're focused on daily weather rather than climate, and mixing up heat and temperature. For example I'd bet very few would guess that Sydney just had the longest run of days over 20 degrees C - 184 days - in 110 years. All the rain and cloud would make many if not most not even realise that. The same with saying global temperatures are rising by 0.5 or 1 degree. People equate that with weather, and think pffft, nothing. But the entire *globe* warming by that amount is a HUGE amount of new energy entering the atmosphere. It's not 1 degree in a particular day, it's the entire atmosphere's baseline shifting upwards by that amount, for the entire year. Imagine the heat it takes to heat the whole atmosphere by even 0.5 degrees. I see this with heat pumps. People are astonished that it can be zero degrees outside, and yet a heat pump can still extract enough heat to easily warm your home, from that freezing air. They can do it at -20C too. Heat is not temperature. Outer space is less than -270C (-455F for the Americans), so zero degrees here on Earth is a COLOSSAL amount of heat, to push us above that -270 of open space. That's what heat pumps access.

Fraction of electricity generated by renewables in 2022, by State. Queensland - 22.6% NSW - about 30% Victoria - about 30% WA - about 30% South Australia - 71.5% Tasmania - 99.1% Nationally more than 35% of our electricity was generated by renewables, in 2022. That's up from 17% in 2017. A doubling in 5 years.

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I sometimes say Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Rod Sims, ex head of the ACCC (a very conservative, ‘economic’ institution), spells out why very well here. In fact per capita we should be the richest nation in all of human history, with the advantages we currently have. We wasted the past 20 years waiting for the ‘market’ to do all of this, and all that happened was that foreign countries stole a lot of that wealth from us, aided and abetted by politicians of the market. While the same politicians cheered on 19th century technology like coal and gas, 200 years out of date. Please read this, you’ll see how fabulously rich Australia can become, with proper leadership from this point on. Nothing to do with ‘Greenies’, get rid of all of that social media rubbish. Or ‘saving the planet’. This is the new Industrial Revolution, and we should be leading it. Nobody else has our advantages. It makes me so angry that we lost decades to get this started.

Chile gets it. They have even more lithium than us. Leaving it to the ‘market’ (which is a fantasy) would just mean foreign firms coming in, mining the lithium and flogging it offshore, with piddling amounts to us in royalties and taxes, as happens here with our gas and iron ore. Most of our coal is also owned by foreign countries. All those BS slogans like ‘the private sector’ and ‘leaving it to the market’ are smokescreens for having your riches stolen from you by offshore companies.

A good example of the power and versatility of electric motors is a household cordless drill. One of these has about twice the torque (turning force) of a professional track cyclist. And you can hold it in one hand.

Vale Barry. Sir Les’ DIY proctology videos were a favourite.

I love glass. Materials engineering, the cutting edge of all engineering, and modern life. (If your kids are looking for something to study, it’s a brilliant field.) Here’s another glimpse into that work, the production of flat glass. We all see vast sheets of beautiful flat glass used everywhere these days. How they make it is fantastic. The ingredients for the glass are melted, and then poured onto a huge ‘bath’ of molten tin. As the liquid glass settles on that bath, it becomes perfectly flat, and hardens. It then slides off onto rollers, where it cools, and is then cut. This is a picture inside the molten tin bath. You wouldn’t want to be in there. My focus in materials engineering was ceramics. There are whole universities dedicated to ceramic engineering, in the US. Nobody here knows what it is, if you ask. Without the refractories made from ceramics, which line furnaces like this and the blast furnaces I shared a while back, things like steel and glass couldn’t be made. And of course glass itself is a ceramic. Only ceramics can resist the enormous temperatures. They use refractories on the bottom of spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere too, to stop them being incinerated. But ceramics also include much modern electronics (like superconductors, which I did my honours work on). You can even make ceramics that bounce.

Those who confidently say ‘Covid is over’ will be delighted we’re now getting 5 waves a year.

I was thinking about how bad the situation is now with maths in schools, seeing Bunnings selling firewood for $20,000 per tonne. Nobody seemed to care.

You can also use a home battery with no solar panels at all. For example, you could use it to store off-peak electricity overnight, to use in your house during the day. That alone can cut your electricity bill in half. WIth the Tesla batteries, you can do both, charge them with both solar and off-peak power, in the dark days of winter, if you need more electricity. It will do all the calculations for you in its brain, to determine the optimum time to charge and discharge, to give you the lowest electricty bill. This is why the software is as important as the hardware.

Story in a respected paper today about a woman who gifted her husband a threesome for his 40th birthday. Says she wanted to because 'she didn't want to die an idiot.' Sometimes I think I'm just getting older and out of touch. And sometimes I'm sure the world is getting dumber, spectacularly fast.

Derren Brown is remarkable. Explain this.

Barcelona at night.

Australians have been taken for a ride by offshore fossil fuel companies. Other countries make more in relative terms from their fossil fuel exports in a year than we’ve made in the past 30. That’s no accident, the governments we’ve had in that time were deeply compromised by donations from the same industry. The last government even employed members of that industry as part of the National Cabinet process. Australia has been robbed. The Howard government pissed about 300 billion dollars of mining revenue up a wall in election bribes. The governments that followed have been doing the same with oil, gas and coal.

Have a look at this. SST is sea surface temperature. Where do you think the vast amounts of heat 150 years of burning fossil fuels creates goes? Over 70% of the planet is covered by water, the oceans. The oceans have been storing a huge amount of this heat. The middle dotted line is the average SST for 1982-2011. Yellow is 2022 data. Black is 2023. It looks like oceans have reached the limit of the heat they can hold and are releasing it back out - the black line. We’re being cooked. That huge mass of water hid the amount of heating going on. This will rapidly accelerate global warming.

The loon petrol head brigade joined forces here with the crazy 5G loons, and a variety of other conspiracy nuts. Social media, mobilising stupidity now on a mass scale. Usually funded at arm’s length by the fossil fuel industry. Here for example much of the anger was around the ‘15-minute city’ urban planning idea. A brilliant idea, that cities should be designed so that most of what you need is in 15 minute walking distance from where you live. Weaponised by the loons, regurgitating slogans funded by the fossil fuel industry, into some idiot idea of being locked down in your suburbs, and you should be able to drive your car anywhere you like etc. You can see cars and being a completely anti-social prick so often go together.

Happy Birthday )

It’s always surprised me that Lithgow has a reputation for being an unpleasant place to live. The valley is beautiful. It’s also known as a ‘hole’, probably by people who failed geography in high school. It’s a valley. That valley is higher than about 80% of Blue Mountains towns and villages (and is in fact the highest point, if you include the highest point of Lithgow), and is 300m higher than Bathurst, for example. One of the things that’s beautiful about living in Lithgow is that you can pretty much walk anywhere in town in not too much time. The valley does that, it puts natural limits on the sort of suburban sprawl cars produce. So the geography defeats the car, which is rare in modern cities. There is some spread now outside the valley, but the main core of town will always be that walkable city. You don’t get that feel at all in towns West of here, which are all dominated by cars.

CATL is the world’s biggest producer of lithium-ion batteries. This week it did something huge. It announced its new batteries have a storage capacity of 0.5 kWh per kg. That’s about double existing batteries. This will mean EVs can now easily have a range of 1000km, with no added weight. Battery technology is advancing at light speed, and costs are plummeting. In the meantime petrol and diesel clunkers reached their peak efficiency 150 years ago.

Another innovation from materials engineers is self-cleaning glass. A thin layer of titanium dioxide is applied to the outside of the pane of glass. The titanium dioxide uses sunlight to break down any organic dirt that attaches to the glass. Titanium dioxide is also super-hydrophilic, meaning water doesn’t form drops on it, but instead forms sheets, which then washes away dirt. Compared to ordinary glass on the right of the picture, which forms drops and doesnt wash dirt away. Why your windows (house or car) don’t get cleaner when it rains, it’s not self-cleaning glass so forms drops, which leaves spotty dirt patterns.

I’d like to do a few posts on climate change. The whole topic is infected with political slogans, but the real knowledge is fascinating. Probably the greatest slogan is that ‘the climate always changes’. People arguing that this is a natural process, so nothing to worry about. It is true that the Earth has had periods of much greater global warming than right now, during the time of the dinosaurs for example. CO2 levels then were about twice what they are now, over 800ppm. The Earth has two main climate phases. One is called Greenhouse Earth, or Hothouse Earth, which was what the dinosaurs experienced. No continental ice, even the poles had forests. An absolute proliferation of life, though also large low-oxygen zones in the seas (you need ice at the poles in particular to make ocean waters circulate). The other is Ice Ages, where there is continental ice. We’re in an Ice Age right now. The amount of ice can vary widely during an Ice Age, and right now it’s diminishing rapidly. The danger of climate change scientists try to warn us about isn’t that we might end up with a Greenhouse Earth, like the dinosaurs. Life can flourish in those conditions. It’s the speed of the transition that is lethal. Huge numbers of humans for example live in coastal cities, which will be underwater. And dinosaurs had millions of years to evolve to cope with that extra heat, but with fossil fuel burning we’re bringing about these changes in only a few centuries. It’s the SPEED of the change that threatens human civilisation itself.

One of the most common criticisms from the anti-renewables Flat Earthers is that solar panels waste good agricultural land. But they don't, in fact they improve it hugely. Sheep are much happier and healthier, as are the pastures. Watch this short video, fascinating. We provide scandalously little shelter for farm animals in Australia, virtually zero across much of the country.

'Remastered' in music industry terms means 'it's the same music, but please pay us for the same album all over again'.

One day, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine walked through a neighbourhood in London. People greeted and exchanged words with the Prime Minister. A street sweeper greeted Mrs Churchill in particular, and the two stayed aside for a while enjoying conversation. Churchill asked his wife what she had to discuss with a street sweeper for so long. “Ah... he was in love with me a long time ago," she said. Churchill smiled and said, "You see, if you had married him, you would be the wife of a street sweeper today." Mrs Churchill looked at her husband in amazement and said… “But no darling, if I had married him, he would be Prime Minister today."

It'd be a good topic to use to teach about inertia. That brain is going to smash into your inner skull no matter what you have on your head. Up to 40,000 times in a playing career. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/apr/26/wearing-headgear-for-sport-does-not-protect-against-concussion-australian-experts-warn

Australia a global laughing stock with EVs. Being left far behind, in this and in so many other things. We have only a handful of years to pull our heads out of our collective arses.

The Streets as Shared Spaces program in NSW is part of a global urban design push towards ‘placemaking’. Taking back urban space from the car. Making those spaces shared spaces again, for everybody, not just cars. You’ll hear a lot of whining and whinging from the car-lovers, as streets are made car-unfriendly. Let them whine. Tokyo’s efforts in the picture below. Cars have destroyed towns and cities. Towns and cities are finally fighting back. The ‘15-minute’ city is part of the same movement. As with EVs, there will come a day soon where we wonder what we were thinking, being enslaved to internal combustion engines, destroying the quiet, making the air filthy, destroying our urban spaces, making us $50 billion a year poorer buying fuel from Texans and Arabs.

There may be museums who will want a new petrol or diesel you buy today, when it comes time for a trade-in.

The man who made a career out of pretending to be a woman, ended his life under fire from a lot of other men who think they are actually women. History will vindicate him.

Good test for the new windows. I’m sitting doing my morning reading of the news, with no heater on. Temperature inside very comfortable. With the old windows it would have been freezing without the heating.

For my friends who are Panthers fans, a co-worker just stood next to Jarome Luai and Ivan Cleary buying coffee here in Bathurst, and didn't have a clue who they were, and why everybody seemed to be making such a fuss as they headed off to the park to sit and drink it. Cameron

Covid has been over for well over a year now. Somebody better tell it. Hospitalisations up 35% in the past 3 weeks. If you're wondering why NSW Health can't get staff, here's one of the elephants in the room.

Liddell was Australia's largest coal power station when it was built 52 years ago. It closed today. Last year it broke down (needed restarting) 23 times. That's an average of about once a fortnight. How's the slogan go? Affordable, reliable power? Lol. Meantime solar drove the wholesale electricity price NEGATIVE regularly in the past year. It means consumers were *paid* to use electricity. The amount solar owners will be paid to export their surplus is also about to increase by nearly 90%.

A study compared the response of an artificial intelligence bot (ChatGPT) and doctors, to patients. The AI won hands-down, for both quality of information, and empathy of response. There’s some fear about AI, probably because the world is so stupid now it understands everything through Hollywood movies. Any intelligence at all, from any source, is what we desperately need.

Here’s a direct example of doctor vs AI, from the research.

Happy Birthday :)

I thought this photo was a nice example of the toxicity of social media to our social lives. A standard sort of photo you see shared, a happy couple, others would see it and feel a whole range of emotions, depending on their own social life too. Some may feel jealous, or inferior, or some may even get happiness from it. Like most social media, it’s a lie. Not long after this photo was taken, the man in this relationship killed the woman, who was also heavily pregnant, and then his body was found floating in a nearby lake. A murder-suicide. It matters deeply that we stop trying to actually live our social lives, through social media. It’s why I rarely if ever post personal information. Obviously this is an extreme case, but the deeper point here is that it’s all curated, even subtly. It provides no insight whatsoever to the actual reality of peoples’ lived lives. It shapes peoples’ feelings and emotions and thoughts profoundly. The most personal thing you can share is what you’re thinking. Which hardly anybody does, possibly because it is so personal. But by not doing that, by sharing mostly what we’re all doing, it’s fucking with our heads. There’s no link between what we’re seeing and what the actual meaning is of what we’re seeing. It feeds compulsive comparison, which is extremely unhealthy.

Councils have no money, and their staff are walking out the door in search of higher salaries. The only way they can afford this sort of additional charge is to charge higher rates, for which they'll then be blamed. In the meantime, $250 billion of tax cuts to wealthy Australians are still due in the next couple of years.

An extensive listing of things that make an actual difference to reducing emissions. The longer the bar, the more useful.

When you get solar installed, a good installer will give you projections of how much you will generate per day, for every month of the year. This is ours, for those interested. They’ll also give you an estimate of how much money you’ll save, shown here too. You can see the seasonality of sunshine (length of day and angle of sun in the sky), the big dip in winter. Though even at 26 kWh per day we get more than enough for an average household. You can also use ‘time of use’ electricty rates for grid power, should you need it, which gives you cheaper power in off-peak times. If you have a battery, the battery can be asked to store energy in those off-peak times, and then deliver it to you in peak times, to save you money. It figures that all out by itself with its software, how to minimise your bill. I posted the other day that you could buy a battery for example, with no solar, and use it to store off-peak power, for you to use in peak times. There are lots of smart options.