Utopia, you are standing in it!

While writing the post on the upgrade of the Hornsdale Power Reserve, I became curious how South Australia balances its grid. Looking into the data, it became pretty clear that it aren’t the batteries that doing the balancing. According to the fuel mix data of AEMO, the battery storage output is insignificant compared to the huge swings in output of solar and wind power.

There are several balancing strategies possible. For example, in a previous series on the German energiewende, I found that Germany’s strategy is to use fossil fuels (gas, coal and even lignite) when there is not enough solar & wind and export the surplus to the neighboring countries when there is too much solar & wind.

South Australia also has a high share of solar and wind, so how do they do it?

If you asked me the height of Mount Everest, I could tell you without missing a beat: 29,029 feet (I don’t know it by heart in meters, but it’s 8,848 m).  That’s been the accepted height since the 1954 Survey Of India, which established the height using a number of observation stations and triangulation (trigonometry). Since then, there have been a few other measurements, all yielding heights close to the 1954 data: a 1999 National Geographic measurement gave 29,035 feet (seven feet higher), while a 2005 Chinese survey yielded 29,017 (that was the rock height, neglecting the roughly ten feet of ice and snow covering the summit).

There’s no doubt that Everest’s summit is the highest spot on earth measured from sea level (Chimborazo in Ecuador, however, is the highest mountain measured from the Earth’s center), but people want an exact figure. This article in the new National Geographic (click…

Introduction

This month sees the publication of our book The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy: European Monarchies Compared, published by Hart. This two part Blog reflects on some of its main conclusions.

Our comparative study looked at seven other constitutional monarchies in Europe, in addition to the UK. In 1900 every country in Europe was a monarchy, save for just three: France, Switzerland and San Marino. By 2000 most countries in Europe had become republics, with the only exceptions being the Scandinavian monarchies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the Benelux countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Spain and the UK. These monarchies have survived partly for geopolitical reasons, most of the other European monarchies having disappeared at the end of the First or Second World Wars. But they have also survived by continuously adapting to the needs of modern democracy: monarchy depends ultimately on the support of…

I guess I’ll have to post twice on a race-related topic today, though I’m trying to avoid too much of this kind of stuff. Yet people keep sending me links to overly Woke initiatives, and this one was too good to pass up. It’s just one example of how every academic subject is being racialized these days. It’s certainly happening to evolutionary biology, but you’d think that math would be immune to identity politics.

Think again. The Seattle Public School system is planning an initiative that will fuse math education with Critical Race Theory from kindergarten through high school, effectively turning math class into Ethnic Studies class. (This initiative apparently comes from a branch of scholarship called “ethnomathematics.”)  If you think I’m exaggerating, have a look at the official math standards framework (below) and the two articles below that.

The new curriculum;

The first piece is from Education Week…