Greg vP

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• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Very similar performance to the average journalist's. No wonder they are all hyperventilating about AI taking everyone's jobs. Anyone whose work requires accuracy or contact with the physical world can just carry on....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Sports? Are there any tropes involving sports? Or is this just a subtype of bildungsroman? It'd be a view into an alien mind, for the typical SF reader...well, for me. What are the cultural assumptions underlying sports, anyway? Space station...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  Argh, I see you made the very same point in your comment #24....
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  I read "Solaris" as a kind of love story. But of course it has been interpreted in many, many other ways....
• Commented on Place your bets
  In the antipodes, the term for what chatGPT and its ilk do is "bullshitting". The difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that the liar wants you to believe what he/she/it says, or at least to behave in a...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  On MBAs, my impression is that the qualification provides a good if superficial overview of all the disciplines needed to operate a modern business, of which there are quite a few. Its main failings are that a little knowledge is...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Re: Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Most people seem to be blind to the military implications of the Falcon 9, but I don't think Chinese staff officers are. This is a rocket that has done more launches this year than everyone...
• Commented on I can't even
  1374: antibiotic resistance I remember my mum (who was a biochemist) telling me that before the sulfa drugs (i.e., in the '10s and '20s) they used silver-based antimicrobials. From a quick web search it seems resistance to "colloidal" silver is...
• Commented on I can't even
  Greg @ 1367: TB in NZ We still vaccinate AFAIK. The worrisome reservoir is not Pacific Islands, but 1) South and Central Asia, and 2) the feral Australian possum, common rat, and mustelid (stoat, weasel) populations, which interact with cows...
• Commented on I can't even
  1328: Most admins would specify their PCs to have "Wake-on-LAN" enabled in the "BIOS" for overnight updates. Your shut-down PC is probably still using a quarter of a watt or so, possibly more, unles you pull the plug. Also energy...
• Commented on I can't even
  Charlie @ 1014, big picture/geopolitics: (Not all dictatorships are oil kleptocracies. China is authoritarian and a dictatorship -- at present -- and the Party hierachy are wealthy, but their wealth isn't based on energy concentration. China has always been wealthy,...
• Commented on I can't even
  I hear a lot from commenters unaccustomed to EVs that charging stations are "inconvenient" because not "ubiquitous and widely accessible" -- but the obvious question is: How do they know? Thus, how do you know? In my home town, which...
• Commented on I can't even
  John @914: It all makes sense if you believe, as I do, that the Tory Party (and 55 Tufton Street) have adopted 1840s England as their goal. Dark, dank, dirty, dilapidated, crowded, disease-ridden tenements overstuffed with ragged, malnourished, and hypothermic...
• Commented on I can't even
  I agree, John. The current situation corresponds to the time with ICE cars when owners bought tins of gasoline from the general store and stored them in their stables/garage. Ten thousand or so battswap stations (in the UK),that you drive...
• Commented on I can't even
  Yeah, the Leaf batteries have way exceeded expectations, despite having a universally derided pack design that "should" cause the batteries to cook themselves. And lithium batteries are much more durable than nickel-metal hydride, according to Wikipedia. We shall see. BTW...
• Commented on I can't even
  A couple of weeks ago the economic historian Adam Tooze revived the term "polycrisis" to label the situation in Pakistan. A polycrisis is lots of crises all at the same time. In Pakistan's case: bitter divisions in its political class...
• Commented on I can't even
  Duffy @851: But even the best li-ion battery wears out over time and stops taking a charge. This creates its own hazwaste disposal/recycling headaches, which nobody seems to be factoring into the overall cost of the transition to EVs. This...
• Commented on I can't even
  Must be nice to have public transport to shake your fist at....
• Commented on I can't even
  Thanks to all for comments on EV charging. You have yet again confirmed the old internet adage, "the best way to find something out is to confidently assert something wrong in a forum thread". Thanks again. Damian @832 et seq.:...
• Commented on I can't even
  [i]There will never be a similar ubiquity of charging stations. (Talking about the UK). There are 20888 charging locations with 57613 connectors in the UK, not counting the electricity supply that virtually everyone has in their home. There are 8378...
• Commented on I can't even
  what kind of PM Nigel Molesworth would be. The goriller of 3b sure had imagination, as any fule kno. Shurely better than the present incumbent. Please check out Nerine Skinner on YouTube, if you can stand watching (short) videos....
• Commented on I can't even
  But there was also some real stuff happening. A lot of engineering work has been done and is being done, and handling mass quantities of hydrogen seems less daft than it did a couple of decades ago.* Maybe. There...
• Commented on I can't even
  Is this a reasonable write up of the status of UK politics just now? It misses out some critical stuff -- the rise of regional nationalisms within the UK (including English nationalism, which wraps itself in the union flag...
• Commented on I can't even
  Spawning another topic, any thoughts about the Crimean Bridge kaboom? What happened, whodunnit, what the sequelae are likely to be? What happened: Embarrassment to Putin; plausible deniability. Whodunnit:- Chechen separatists. Sibir separatists. One or other of the Azerbaijanis or Armenians....
• Commented on I can't even
  Re: kerosene, hand-wavium Charlie is right. Kerosene is the most energy-dense fuel we have. It's also incredibly safe and easy to handle for something so energetic, it has undemanding storage requirements (room temperature, thin-walled containers) and it is tolerant of...
• Commented on I can't even
  Re biofuels:- Fortunately we won't have to put up with them for much longer: they are zombies, dead but still walking. The paper in Joule by Way, Ives, Mealy and Farmer ("Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition") is...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Of course. I was being facetious. Amateur astronomy will have to change, though, and there may be opportunities as well as threats....
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Yes and I wonder if the blocking effect of the arrays would actually act as a sunshade. You can't beam out more energy than you put in so it may even have a cooling effect. I'd guess we want a...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  At $20 there are lots of fun things that suddenly start to look feasible. Putting your own private 8 inch or 12 inch space telescope into orbit will actually be cheaper than buying the hardware. (OK, Kessler cascade still an...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Jack has belatedly realised that recent events are existential threats for Twitter. I strongly hope this is too little, too late....