Utopia, you are standing in it!

We had a bit of excitement here on Monday when, sitting at my desk, I got three successive email alerts from the campus authorities that there were criminal suspects loose on campus. The final one was that they were apprehended. But the first ones, like this, were a bit scary:

Shelter in place! That sounds ominious. Eventually we got the all clear, and it turned out that, according to the Chicago Maroon, there was a crime, a crash, and a chase (click on screenshot):

Summary from the paper (it was an armed robbery):

At around 11:48 a.m., a stolen black Dodge Charger believed to have been involved in the robbery of a GameStop ran a red light on the intersection of Midway Plaisance and South Woodlawn Avenue, supposedly while chased by police. In the process, it ran into two additional cars, damaging both significantly. The driver of one of the vehicles escaped…

On this date in History: February 13, 1689. William III-II and Mary II were created joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland.

William III (Dutch: Willem; November 4, 1650 – March 8, 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from 1672 and King of England, Ireland and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II. He is sometimes informally known in Northern Ireland and Scotland as “King Billy.”

William III-II, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic. King of England, Ireland and Scotland.

Mary II (April 30, 1662 – December 28, 1694) was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, co-reigning with her husband and first cousin, King William III and II, from…

Germany led the way, and others soon followed: erratically delivered wind and solar now dominates Europe’s power grid. Naturally enough, power prices have rocketed and grid managers are left to deal with the chaos delivered by sunset and/or calm weather.

Rapid surges and/or collapses in voltage and frequency – consequent upon surges and collapses in wind and solar output – require instant and very costly ‘interventions’.

These interventions involve ramping up the output from conventional generators (gas or coal-fired plant) whenever the sun sets, the skies cloud up or the wind drops. Conversely, conventional plants are knocked off-line and forced to ramp down when solar and/or wind output picks up.

The additional cost to power consumers is staggering, and continues to mount.

Pierre Gosselin takes a look at the unfolding disaster, starting with Switzerland.

The Green Energies Of Instability…Swiss Power Grid Requires 200 Fold More Intervention Than 8 Years Ago!

I don’t mean to be Pinker’s Fanboy, but I’ve had some recent correspondence with him that I thought would be enlightening to readers, and got his permission to share it. (The first exchange was about Pinker’s supposed misuse of quotations in Enlightenment Now, which turned out to be a kerfuffle about nothing.)

Now we’re on to a Guardian piece that claims that Bill Gates—and by extension, Pinker—are wrong to claim that poverty has decreased in the world over the last two centuries. It started with this tweet from Bill Gates, who, on the way to the Davos Summit, summarized in a tweet six indices of improvement that he saw on the Our World in Data site. Here’s Gates’s tweet: