Category: learning curve

I read a thing

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I read a thing. I can’t bring myself to admit upon which website I read this thing, because it’s deeply, deeply embarrassing. Think Daily Mail (see 6000 miles… passim), but maybe – somehow – even worse.

I know, right?

Anyway, my reason for being on this site was genuine enough. Simply to marvel at the bizarre and desperate opinions of one of the columnists, having spotted an excerpt on a rather cryptic link on social media. And yes, the opinions were pretty awful, the piece was unnecessarily vindictive and unpleasant, and it made me feel that my time in hoping that I was probably going to read some hateful rubbish, wasn’t wasted. I probably got some endorphins from (rightfully) feeling that my opinions on that subject (and probably every other subject) were better than theirs, too.

Then I made an error and I clicked on a link. It took me to another opinion piece on the same site – equally obsequious and obnoxious – but at least this one had an amusing paragraph in the middle:

I like to think that I am a pleasant enough house-guest. Often when going to stay with friends I ask if there is anything I can bring that my hosts don’t have in their neck of the woods. When visiting friends in Scotland, for example, I might offer to take with me some fresh fruits or vegetables. When visiting friends in Norfolk, it might be someone not related to them. But if ever my hosts suggested I should bring my own poop bucket, I would find a way to escape the event: call in sick, cite a spot of ‘the old trouble’ or remind them that getting out of London is always so difficult.

Because whatever your idea of fun might be, it cannot possibly include a scenario in which you carry a bucket of your own stools. Even the most ardent readers’ letters will not persuade me otherwise. On this matter I am strict.

I’m not sure it needs context. It’s probably even funnier without.

But then I’ve been inwardly giggling at a very childish London Underground pun all morning after our Curry Club dinner last night, so I’m clearly in a very silly mood.

But silly or not, I won’t be visiting that website again.

I’ll take the bus

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No issue with differently-abled people in the workplace. Delighted to embrace the idea, in fact.
We can all benefit from learning from each other.

But there has to be a line drawn somewhere, surely?

I’m not 100% sure that’s actually Braille underneath – there doesn’t seem to be enough letters, and some of them – the “o” in lounge, for example – don’t exist in the Braille alphabet. But maybe there are international versions of Braille and maybe the spelling is for a language wot iz forrun. Maybe the Pilot Lounge has nothing to do with actual pilots and is just a lounge with a fancy name.

More likely than any of these things though: maybe I’m overthinking this a lot.

BA 2.86

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Oh good. A new variant of Covid-19. <party emoji>

If it seems like we haven’t had one of those for a while, it’s because we haven’t. Well, not an interesting one, anyway. This one though – sadly – is of interest.

Why? Well, it has 35 mutations on its spike protein. That’s the bit that our immune system recognises. 35 mutations means that it’s likely to be disguised (at least partially) from our immune systems, meaning that we’re more likely to become infected with it: even if we’ve had the vaccine or if we’ve had Covid (of any variant) previously. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have any defence against it though. More likely just a bit of a slower, poorer one.

We don’t know a lot at the moment: we’re not really looking for Covid as much as we have been before, so this could be sneaking in a bit under our radar. We’ve only seen 9 cases* in 5 countries, which seems like nothing, but at least 6 of those cases have no travel history, suggesting that they acquired the virus locally to them. It can’t just have appeared from nowhere: that indicates community spread.

And those 9 cases (UK, Demark, USA, Israel, and now South Africa) show very similar genetic sequences. That means that they haven’t had much time to mutate or change, and that indicates a rapid spread.

We’re not seeing millions of hospital admissions though, which might (hopefully) mean that this is not going to cause serious illness or mortality. But it’s likely there just isn’t enough of it yet for that to be a foregone conclusion. It is being found in wastewater screening, which probably means that there is a growing reservoir of undetected cases out there.

Honestly, scientists have been waiting for the next wave. There was never any chance of Covid just going away. And we’re still (yes wow, “still”, even after 3½ years, lol), in the early equilibrating days of what will almost certainly be a long-term virus/human relationship. Each party is still weighing up its opponent and figuring out its next move. Metaphorically, at least.

It remains to be seen if this variant will trigger a new public health crisis or will fall away without troubling us too much. At this point, the jury simply doesn’t have enough information to make any decision, and so we wait and we keep learning from the information we can get.

At the moment, it’s very much watch this space. And maybe hope for a not guilty verdict.

* I had to update this figure twice while writing this post.

I’m a big fan…

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The world’s largest wind turbine has recently been commissioned and it’s HUGE.

The trouble with huge things standing in free space is that it’s very difficult to give them any context to indicate just how huge they are. You need something to relate it to, like these ordinary buildings and the Eiffel Tower:

And so we have to rely on numbers.

China Three Gorges Corporation announced that the 16-megawatt MySE 16-260 turbine had been successfully installed at the company’s offshore wind farm near Fujian Province on July 19. The behemoth is 152 meters (500 feet) tall, and each single blade is 123 meters (403 feet) and weighs 54 tons. This means that the sweep of the blades as they rotate covers an area of 50,000 square meters (nearly 540,000 square feet).

But that still doesn’t really mean much unless you add in some more numbers for context.

So let’s look at a couple of local wind farms and see.

Darling Wind Farm has 4 turbines, darling, each producing a maximum of 1.25MW. That’s only about 8% of the new Chinese beast. And they each have a rotor diameter of 62m. That’s a quarter of this new record holder.

Klipheuwel will be familiar to anyone who does the N2 run from time to time. That’s the 9-turbine wind farm near Caledon. Bigger and more modern than Darling, darling, they look huge, and have a nameplate capacity of 3MW each. That’s 18.75% of the Big Boy above. But actually, they are tiny in size, with a rotor diameter of 113m, versus 246m for the MySE16-260.

Analysts are suggesting that given the speed at which renewable energy technology is progressing, we should expect the next step up to be a 20MW turbine, to be announced before the end of the year.
I can’t wait to see the stats for that one.

On wine

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Here’s some interesting advice, especially for someone like me who likes to save good wine for special occasions:

Don’t save the good wine for a good day. Good wine is wasted on a good day.
On a good day, all wine is good wine. Bad wine is good wine.
Drink the good wine on a bad day. That’s what it’s for.

I’m not 100% sure I agree, but it is a variation on the theme of a quote that I have heard before:

Don’t save special wine for a special occasion.
Make an occasion special by drinking special wine.

At the end of the day, this does all just sound like the shills for Big Wine have been paid to get you to drink lots of the best wine as soon as possible.

But I’m not really sure if I have a problem with that.