Too many blogs are boring. Is Suspended disbelief one of them?
I went to wordle and all got is this tag cloud:
Now, it does seem that this blog takes too seriosly itself: cost, global, animal, costs (again), human. Oh yes, there is Humour, as big as Art but only on top of morality. And some reason for concern: Religion is bigger than Rights.
My prefered: the lower case of emotion and power, terms for which size doesn’t matter.
I tried to upload a comment to the interesting post the cost of electricity of the blog “Think Through” of Gianluca Carrera but its scripts required to be logged in to comment, so I post my opinion here.
The post refers to a paper of 2004 by the Royal Academy of Engineering. Surprisingly, the only costs of the generation and distribution of electricity mentioned in the report are:
• Capital expenditure, i.e. the initial level of investment required to engineer, procure and construct the plant itself.
• Fixed costs of operation and maintenance, e.g. staff salaries, insurance, rates and other
costs, which remain constant irrespective of the actual quantum of electricity generated;
• Variable costs of operation and maintenance, e.g. lubricating oil and chemicals, which
are consumed in proportion to the actual quantum of electricity generated; and
• The cost of fuel (if applicable) consumed in generating electricity.
I did not find in the original paper any calculation of the cost of management of the nuclear waste for generations, which incidentally is and will be paid for by the taxpayers. In fact, it does not include the managament of the waste of any power generation in its four categories, nor the risk of the dependency of a few fuel providers worldwide for any of the types of power generation.
Global dimming is the reduction of +4% in the amount of global direct irradiance at the planet’s surface from the sixties to the end of last century. It is caused by aerosol particles released by human activities.
The global dimming has been so far understimated by scientists. The cooling of air pollution has masked the real dimension of the warming of CO2. The practical effect is that their predictions of the raise of temperatures.
Global dimming is beneficial for public health but it is declining since the nineties so we should brace ourselves for yet more surprises in the scale and immediacy of global warming and its effects.
These are definetively not good times for simple minds. The old masters used to paint scenes of the Bible to explain the religious misteries to the people who could read. How should the elite explain now the complexity and subtleties of our environmental challenges to us Internet users and television watchers?
The Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a concern as big as its size on the map of Africa.
Alan Doss (picture), the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the MONUC, ignored repeated calls by Díaz de Villegas, Commander in Chief of the MONUC for a few week at the end of 2008, to suspend a “Plan of the Separation” signed by the government of Kinshasa days prior to Díaz de Villegas´s appointment.
We sometimes forget that morality and ethics are not the monopoly of religions and their administrators. They are not even unique to humans. Ethologist Marc Bekoff from the University of Colorado thinks that morality is developed during play of social mamals to help learn the rights and wrongs of social interaction.
The article ”Six ‘uniquely’ human traits now found in animals” gives a few examples of animals showing that they are capable of use culture, mind reading, tools, morality, emotions and personality to their benefit.
What a surprise by Michael Wolff at the Spectator: Rupert Murdoch’s Secret is that he hasn’t got one. His greatness seems to consist in that he has not aspire to trascend to history books. The immaterial yet powerful man does not seem to care about himself. Good for him.
The media tycoon is a city editor at heart who merely relies on instinct to create and manage his vast empire. No plan, no agenda, just deal making on the hoof. Who would have guess that his empire doesn’t bring order in the chaos.
In Communcation Theory, entropy is a numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome; R. Murdoch is entropic!
Listening to songs in YouTube is a bad idea. The video clips have a poor quality but the quality of the song is horrific. Compare the video of London Calling by The Clash with the sample audio file at Wikipedia. The latter is a clear, clean and stereo audio track.
Continue reading…
David Sexton wrote at the Evening Standard last week that “these Olympics have been organised to trick the world into thinking better of a totalitarian tyranny”. The later expression made me think about the term “totalitarian democracy“, a common type of modern government.