Utopia, you are standing in it!

As soon as the government released its modelling of the pandemic a few days ago, I realised something was badly wrong. The modelling showed infections increasing even under lockdowns, which obviously wasn’t happening. The crucial parameter here is R, the number of new infections generated by each existing infection. If R is greater than 1, the number of infections grows exponentially, but if R is less than one, it declines, eventually approaching zero. The knife-edge case is R=1, when the number stays constant.

On checking the paper on which the modelling was based, I found that it did indeed assume R>1, even with social distancing. This was less surprising when I realized it was based primarily on data from the initial outbreak in Wuhan, before the lockdown in China had taken full effect. (I later discovered that the report had been given to the government in February, which makes its…

This story was originally published in the November, 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine.

The fighting for Aachen was fierce. American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days. Tanks then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, the imperial seat of Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. Bloody building-to-building combat ensued until, finally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands.

Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Army Maj. Floyd W. Hough and two of his men arrived in early November. “The city appears to be 98% destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. A short, serious man of 46 with receding red hair…

A MILITARY HELICOPTERwas on the ground when Russell Guy arrived at the helipad near Tallinn, Estonia, with a briefcase filled with $250,000 in cash. The place made him uncomfortable. It didn’t look like a military base, not exactly, but there were men who looked like soldiers standing around. With guns.

The year was 1989. The Soviet Union was falling apart, and some of its military officers were busy selling off the pieces.

This article details one of the most ambitious—and secretive—cartographic endeavors of all time and how it came to light in the West. Continue reading at Wired, where it was originally published.

As night follows day, rocketing power prices are the inevitable consequence of the inevitable transition to subsidised and unreliable wind and solar.

The burden of all that glorious virtue signalling falls disproportionately on those on low and fixed incomes. Add the normal path of decrepitude, frailty and illness to impecuniousity and you’ve got a recipe for a national health disaster.

Enduring frigid weather in unheated homes is one of the biggest killers of the elderly. With power prices now so prohibitive, the poor and vulnerable drop like flies every winter as they ration their power use or find themselves cut from the grid, incapable of paying for power, at all.

That first world countries now see hundreds of thousands of households suffering energy poverty as a new ‘normal’ is criminal. Particularly when all of this was perfectly predictable and perfectly avoidable.

As the elderly face the existential (passing) threat of COVID-19, spare…

After writing previous post, the RenewEconomy article kept going through my mind. The author of the article suggested that the response of the Hornsdale Power Reserve to a tripping coal fired power unit was extraordinary, when in reality it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I wondered why on earth the author was so lyrical about what was in fact a poor performance…

Then it suddenly struck me. It might well be a misinterpretation of how the event was represented.

Let me explain.

There were two graphs presented in the article. The first one is the frequency versus the response of the Hornsdale Power Unit and it stood central in previous post. There is however a second graph in the article and it is this graph that could easily lend itself to misinterpretation. It shows the sharp decline of the tripped coal unit combined with the response of…