Oh, Jewemy!

Jeremy Paxman’s new podcast The Lock In is very welcome. Not only does he have interesting people on it but also – perhaps because he is now free from the culture of the BBC – he allows people to answer his questions without interruption. Which makes those answers very much more interesting, not only because you get to hear the whole answer, but also because his interviewees are not cowed into a defensive position, but are encouraged to say what they really think, and why.

But it is very considerably marred by the advertisements, which come every few minutes, advertising products in which I have no interest at all. They are especially annoying because the volume of the advertisements is set very much higher than the volume of the podcast, so if you set the volume so you can hear what the people are saying, the advertisements come in like raging fly storms.

Thermal imagery

Watching the local eagles here[1], one has to wonder how they are so successful at identifying thermals, which keep them aloft without the need for them to flap their wings.

I know from flying a glider[2] that a thermal can take you up at about the same rate as a lift in a building, which is really quite fast. And air is quite heavy. Not as heavy as water, of course. But still quite heavy. And although hard to spot with the naked eye, there is quite a lot of particulate in the air. Can the eagles see this stuff? In other words, can they look around and spot these great big columns of air (and particulates) rushing upwards? They certainly have very good eyesight.

And if they can do it, is there not some sort of technology which would allow us to do it? Something along the lines of a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer perhaps? After all, night vision goggles, and even Polaroid sunglasses, enable us to see things which we cannot otherwise see.

Better Under Ground

Is this how London Underground train carriages will look once Boris has “Built Back Better”?

Locked up? Not exactly: Locked down.

South Australia is going into lockdown as from midnight tonight.

This response to the latest “surge” in the disease. Someone is in hospital. Just one. Not an intensive care. But hey, hospital is hospital! No one has died this time around. But three dozen people have tested positive. Which might or might not mean that they actually have Covid. They are not actually ill.

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4,546 people were tested yesterday. So there will presumably be more positives coming up.

Quite a big slug of the revenue obtained by the South Australian government is from tax on pokies. Gambling machines. They also make quite a bit of money from fining people. Most of this is derived from people driving on the roads at a sensible speed, which is more than the speed limits. But so far, they issued 2,164 expiation notices relating to Covid, and 807 other fines. These are effectively government blackmail notices: “Pay up promptly on the expiation notice, or the fine doubles, and if you still don’t pay, we prosecute”. So that is quite a good business.

Dominion over US

There is much controversy about the Dominion voting machines and software used in this month’s presidential election in the United States. It seems unlikely that all the allegations levelled against them by the Trump camp are true; certainly, they are vigorously denied by the company itself.

But something that is clearly documented, and admitted by the company, is that it has given a substantial sum to the Clinton Foundation.

That is not a good look.

Views vary about Bill Clinton. Some people regard him as a sort of elder statesman. Others characterise him as a bent lawyer who has been disbarred.[1] Neither Bill Clinton nor Hillary Clinton have been prosecuted for their involvement in corruption in Arkansas, despite considerable suspicions. But whatever side you take on the Clintons, it is surely inappropriate for a company which is supposed to be in the business of impartial elections to be donating to the Clinton Foundation just as Hillary Clinton was limbering up for a presidential run.

Check, Mate

A well documented[1] but steadfastly ignored feature of our species is that the distribution of intelligence is different as between males and females. Whilst there is not much difference in average IQ between the genders, female IQ tends to be more closely clustered around the normal whereas male IQ is somewhat more broadly spread.

That means not only that there are more really stupid men then really stupid women (good news for feminists[2]) but also that there are more male geniuses than female geniuses (bad news for feminists[3]). This does not mean, of course that there are no female geniuses: merely that they are comparatively rare.

Playing on this theme has been the excellent Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, which somewhat loosely retells the story of Bobby Fischer, but with the central character now a young woman. Series 1 takes us up to Reykjavík (recast in Moscow) and the popular adulation of the young hero (now heroine, compellingly played by Anya Taylor-Joy). Particularly well done is the conjuring up of life in the United States in the 1960s.

Zalliness

Someone called Zali Steggall, who is an independent but greenie member of the Australian Parliament, has introduced a climate change bill. She has helpfully prepared a summary, and is looking for contributions to the consultation.

It is difficult to know where to start, but here is a draft, with her summary in black and my comments in red.

In absolute terms, of course, there is a degree of pointlessness to all of this. The Bill has no prospect of getting up, and there is no prospect of changing the beliefs of the neo-religious. Nevertheless it is, I feel, the sort of civic duty to try to inject a bit of common sense into the debate.

Climate Change (National Framework for Adaptation and Mitigation) Bill 2020

Climate change is real for Australia, with immediate and deepening risks to our natural environment, economy and way of life.

The climate is, of course, always changing. This planet has been both much hotter and much colder than it is today.

The greatest risk is that we are now overdue another ice age; indeed, the present interglacial period is already longer than previous interglacial periods (typically about 10 millennia). But it is not a particularly immediate risk.

It is perfectly true that the climate became slightly warmer in the latter part of the 20^th century. Far from that creating a risk to the world’s economies, the world has never been in better economic shape, with extreme poverty now a fraction of the levels seen 30 years ago.

Bidie-in Terference

If reports be true, it is the doing of UK prime minister’s bidie-in (curt. Andrew Neil) which has prevented the promotion of his Director of Communications. She doesn’t like him. And now he has lost his job altogether.

This is not a good thing. She is not cleverer than Boris, even if she does wear the trousers behind closed doors at Number 10. Not by a long chalk. If she can keep Boris happy, and healthy, she is doing something for which the nation might well be grateful.

But she should not interfere in government.

Why Count the Blot?

It is common ground that people in a democracy should have confidence in the fundamental honesty and fairness of their elections.

Well, not quite common ground. You might well not think that if you are a member of the Chinese Communist Party, or an Islamic fundamentalist, or someone who believes in Marxist revolution like the organisers of Black Lives Matter. Or even just a muddleheaded flopsy content to cheer along with any lazy shibboleth that happens to be in fashion. But let’s suppose you are on that common ground (if you are not, you may as well not bother reading the rest of this post).

So. What is the best way to maintain confidence in the United States presidential election system? There are basically two approaches:

• to identify instances of electoral fraud, prosecute them, and prevent them from happening again, or
• to deny that there is any electoral fraud.

Most of the media right now is going for option B. But is this really a smart long-term approach?

There are, of course, a number of reasons why the Republicans in the United States are unhappy about the recent presidential election result. One is that Donald Trump is a really bad loser. He is a bully, a bombast, disrespectful and ambitious.

A more widespread complaint is that very many of them think that the election was rigged. I will come onto the basis for this in just a moment; it is partly to do with the constitution, partly to do with lack of transparency (they have a system where the vote count is supposed to take place in front of “observers” or “challengers” from each party) and partly to do with good old-fashioned fraud.

Hard Wired

My wonderful housekeeper and her assistant do tend to be just a little bit fierce with their dusting round the back of my work computer, and so I decided to put the connections at the back of my UPS on a more solid basis  (it can be a bit temperamental). This included the need to fit an IEC C 13 trailing lead connection onto a power strip instead of the usual mains plug.

Australia uses the IEC AC wiring colour code, and so of course I carefully followed that:

• in the real world, earth is typically brown in colour, so the brown wire connects to the live;
• yellow is the colour conventionally used for warning signs – something dangerous – and so the yellow and green wire connects to the earth;
• blue is the colour of my true love’s eyes, so the blue wire connects to the neutral.

set of hazard warning signs on white background

Every time I do this, I wonder what sort of demonic mind would have chosen these colours. And so this morning, I looked it up.  According to Wikipedia