Utopia, you are standing in it!

The next generation – U2502, a Type XXI with a smaller Type XXIII alongside. They would have been a formidable threat but unreliability delayed their entry into service.

German efforts to bring fast submarines into the Battle of the Atlantic. None of these newer boats was operational in the battle but it is worth considering what might have happened. The development is a fine example of the adage, ‘Requirements pull, technology pushes.’

The initial push came from Professor Hellmuth Walter, who, from about 1933, put forward a number of proposals for fast submarines using very concentrated hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant for the burning of fuel oil while submerged. This combination could be used either in a diesel engine, recycling the exhaust gases, or in a turbine. Walter wanted peroxide with a concentration of 80 per cent, when the strongest solution available was 45 per cent. This problem was overcome…

Judith Radner, a scholar who researches material culture looks at the dirty history of soap.

Soap is an essential part of our life. In modern day, it is a part of our daily hygiene routine. We use it everyday to bathe, wash hands and so on. Now, in time of COVID-19, it has become a life-saver, helping us to mitigate the risk of infection. But what do we know about the history of soap? When and where did soap originate? How did it evolve into its modern form? How did it become a part of our daily life?

Despite the fact that Social Security is an ever-increasing fiscal burden with a 75-year cash-flow deficit of nearly $45 trillion, many politicians in Washington have been trying to buy votes with proposals to expand the program (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, etc).

A new working paper from the European Central Bank gives us some insights on what will happen if they succeed.

Authored by Daniel Baksa, Zsuzsa Munkacsi, and Carolin Nerlich, the study look at the long-run impact of related policies in Europe, using Germany and Slovakia as examples.

Here’s their description of the study.

In view of the adverse macroeconomic and fiscal implications of ageing, many European countries have implemented significant pension reforms… More recently, however, the reform progress has stalled, and despite an unchanged demographic outlook, several European countries reversed, or plan to do so, parts of their previously adopted…

Guest Post by Shikha Dilawri

Recent calls to decolonise universities have engendered thoughtful interrogation of the colonial legacies of these institutions and reflection on how to address their material effects today. Taking its cue from these initiatives – including the recent inquiry into UCL’s role in legitimising eugenics – as part of the effort to encourage practices of decolonising at the LSE, this piece seeks to explore the entangled relationship between the LSE and the eugenics movement during the early 20^th century. This examination, which draws in part on archival material from the LSE library, takes as it starting point Beatrice and Sidney Webb, prominent members of the Fabian Society and celebrated founders of the LSE, to illuminate the school’s complicity in advancing an unjust racial hierarchy. In exploring how the Webbs, as well as subsequent figures and initiatives in which they were involved during the early years of…

After insisting for months that they were not guilty of bribing their daughters’ way into the University of Southern California by presenting fake resumes as athletes, actor Lori Laughlin and her husband, fashion designer Massimo Giannulli, have pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. The details are in the article below from CNN (click on screenshot). The upshot: both of the privileged and wealthy parents are going to jail, though not for that long.

An excerpt:

Felipe II (May 21, 1527 – September 13, 1598) was King of Spain (1556–98), King of Portugal (1581–98, as Filipe I), King of Naples and Sicily (both from 1554), and jure uxoris King of England and Ireland (during his marriage to Queen Mary I from 1554 to 1558). He was also Duke of Milan, and from 1555, lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands. As a member of the Austrian Habsburg Family, Felipe II was also an Archduke of Austria.

Filipe II, King of Spain, Portugal, Naples and Sicily.

The son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (King Carlos I of the Spanish kingdoms) and Infanta Isabella of Portugal, Felipe was called Felipe el Prudente (“Philip the Prudent”) in the Spanish kingdoms; his empire included territories on every continent then known to Europeans, including his namesake the Philippines. During his reign, the Spanish kingdoms reached the height of their…

Future generations will wonder why this one destroyed the planet, while claiming to save it, using completely useless industrial wind turbines and solar panels.

Whether it’s dumping hundreds of thousands of toxic solar panels and windmill blades into landfill, or the toxic lakes in China where the rare earths are processed that make them, the so-called ‘green’ energy revolution is anything but.

Touted by ex-PM Malcom Turnbull and his hapless sidekick, Josh Frydenberg as the Nation’s mega-battery, the heavily-hyped Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme (shelved in the 1970s because it was uneconomic then) has been heralded as the saviour for the Australian wind industry.

The line goes something like this: if we use 3 MWh of wind power to pump water through 27 km of tunnels, over an elevation of 900m, later, when power consumers actually need it, Snowy Hydro could return 2 MWh to the grid.

Never mind…

BREAKING : ‘A Very Rare And Exciting Event’ To The Rescue | Climatism

SNOWFALL will become “A very rare and exciting event…
Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”
Dr David Viner – Senior scientist, climatic research unit (CRU)

“Winters with strong frosts and lots of snow
like we had 20 years ago will no longer exist at our latitudes.”
– Professor Mojib Latif (2000)

“Good bye winter. Never again snow?” – Spiegel (2000)

“Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” – IPCC (2001)

“End of Snow?” – NYTimes (2014)

***

WE all associate snowstorms with cold weather. But, the effects of snow on our climate and weather last long after the storm has passed. Due to snows reflective properties, its presence or absence influences patterns of heating and cooling over Earth’s surface more than any other single land surface feature.

CLIMATE models from the 1970s have consistently predicted…

Oil and gas company OMV Taranaki has won consents to undertake the drilling of up to 10 exploration and appraisal wells, as well as the associated discharges, within its petroleum exploration permit in the Maui Field in the Taranaki Basin.

This is  seen  as a  vital  step  for the  energy  industry  in NZ,  because  reserves  of  oil and  gas  could  run out  within 11  years  at  present  rates of  consumption.  And  with  the  economy  under the whip,  any  extension  of  those reserves   would come as a  welcome  fillip.

OMV  will be  aiming  to  build    on  its  success  in the  last drilling season   with  its  wildcat  well  Toutouwai-1, 50km  off the  Taranaki coast,   penetrating  several  layers of   hydrocarbons.   Because  of  the Covid-19 pandemic it  had to withdraw  from  further  work proving  up  the Toutouwai   discovery.

Wind power is the joke where the punchline is a mixture of rocketing power prices and a grid on the brink of collapse. None of which is particularly funny for those suffering from one and threatened by the other. As to the latter, this country’s maniacal obsession with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar has Australia at ‘situation critical’.

Depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid so far this month.

Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia its entire capacity routinely delivers just a trickle of its combined notional capacity of 7,295MW.

Collapses of over 3,000 MW or more that occur over the space of a couple of hours are routine, as are rapid surges of equal magnitude, which make the grid…

Following last week’s Cabinet reshuffle, several ministers will be getting to grips with the challenges of their new departments. However, unlike the nineteenth century, they are at least spared the extra burden of seeking renewed endorsement from their constituents. Under a law passed in the reign of Queen Anne (1707), anyone accepting ‘an office of profit under the Crown’ – which included not only ministerial posts, but also a wide range of lesser positions – had to vacate his parliamentary seat and seek re-election. Those moving between offices also faced a by-election. In 1859 Thomas Milner Gibson had to stand twice in quick succession for Ashton-under-Lyne: on 27 June, after being appointed as president of the Poor Law Board, and then again on 9 July after being moved to the presidency of the Board of Trade. Ministerial by-elections made up more than a quarter of all by-elections taking place between…

American women who work for wages or a salary, on the average, earn 77 cents when American men earn one (1) dollar, also on the average.

You have to be careful of averages. They are not naturally vicious but they are often used to deceive. That is, people routinely overestimate themselves and don’t slow down enough to understand what they are seeing and hearing when an average is mentioned.

Here is a little practice exercise: Suppose all women who lack education beyond high school quit work completely. (They might go on welfare or they might find hard working husbands, maybe currently illegal immigrants – Not a bad idea actually, if I say so myself!) If this happened, what would become to the 77 cents on the dollar?

(The answer is several paragraphs below.)

Consider also that “on the average” means, of course, that there are many women who earn more…

by Judith Curry

Some interesting papers that I’ve spotted over the past week.