Good afternoon. Here at the “gulf” it’s been a mixture of sun, rain showers and (mostly at night) lightning shows. Today, earlier sprinkles gave way to sun and a good morning on the reach, until another brief shower sent us in at lunchtime, Temp is 84 degrees.
The mothership provided an update on the “forgotten war” — the civil war in Sudan that is inflicting severe “food insecurity” — famine — affecting millions of people. Because each side is using hunger as a weapon of war, food aid is nearly impossible to provide.
The FP is headlining :”autoworkers want their union back.” Of course, the UAW has been much more liberal in its politics than its rank and file members, for years.
After another attempt to get to Thor's 523 account, I called the College Foundation of North Carolina, and the person who asked me for my social security number and birth date, after I'd already entered them in the phone menu, said it might work if I close out everything else in my browser. Apparently their website is Extremely Special and only works if it has your browser's full attention.
I don't recall ever having to do this before, which leads me to believe that they've loused up the website since I paid for Daughter B's new computer back in May. "Why," she says, sounding exactly like her late mother, "does everything on earth have to be such an expletive hassle?!?"
Helped my mother sort out something similar recently involving our state’s version of the 529s. The issue took hours to resolve, much of it wasted in phone trees and with operators for the management company who didn’t understand the problem. The bottom line was that our state’s management firm has about three different web URLs that are very, very similar. If you start down the wrong one, there’s nothing that tells you you need to check out the other sites, but it just keeps kicking you out as having invalid account and user information. 🙄🙄🙄
GAH. I hope to not have to deal with this for a while, but Drama Queen was talking about taking a couple of classes at community college this semester, as well as one at UNC-Charlotte, so there may be another tuition bill. I think her dad is the account owner on hers, though. My mother set them up at different times with different co-owners.
It turned out that, in order to get to the screen to request Thor's tuition back, I had to close out everything else on my browser. I hope I'll be able to get my Google form with my soil quizzes back from the bowels of Google.
Then, I tried to open the account for my granddaughter, and that required another phone call to the same person, who had no idea why the website was telling me "Enrollment Process Not Available, please call this number." But she explained that I could print a form out and mail it. I filled the form out, but the mail was already picked up today, so I can't put it out until tomorrow because of the stealing from your mailbox problem.
At least I won't need to think about it again for fifteen years or so.
I spent two hours trying to reconcile my latest expense statement for Rome. 6 uses of the UD issued credit card. But there is a 7th charge from two months ago from our UD-authorized flight vendor. It's for $7, but is also outside the approved trip time frame. So I wrote 7 emails asking advice on how to clear it out. Offering to pay cash is not an option, BTW.
Grading is done, but I plan to re-review student grades on their personal essays, to assure I applied a consistent rubric. Students had to write 9 short vignettes, related to applying course material to their trip. Specifically, they had a list of 28 biases we discussed in class. Students were to identify a time on the trip when they experienced one, what problem did it create, what they learned, and what they will do different in the future. Most students struggle on what to change next time, other than "be aware this bias could be occurring". 🙄Most played it safe "status quo bias: I went to the same restaurant often". "affinity bias"; I liked American tourists.
Meeting at 1pm. It is listed in person and on zoom, I'll head down in person in 35 minutes.
The meeting wasn't bad. A new administrator, so I explained what we do in two of my MBA courses. He wasn't aware. But we had a pleasant talk afterwards.
After 7 emails, the person who sent the form back remembered we reconciled it in April, and this was just a "ghost" receipt, so he deleted it, and told me to resubmit my expense report without it...that took 17 seconds, plus another 18 to tell him I did so! 😀 I could have cut it back two seconds by not adding the emoji, but it was worth it.
Teengirl went and did stable stuff in the rain. I took a nap in the car. Now, I need two write two more soil quizzes and two lists of student presentation topics. They will be assigned topics by random draw.
It's sunny here today, though some smoke and fog was forecast early for outlying areas. I'm going to run some errands and, later, cook some burgers on the grill.
Collective reasoning can be superior to what machines can provide. (First of all, the machines aren't necessarily reasoning. If they have not been programmed to do some form of reasoning, then that's not what they're doing.) If collective reasoning means examining differing opinions and aspects of an issue and, as a group, seeking to harmonize or reconcile these perspectives in deciding an outcome or action through a process, then collective reasoning is what can get you to the best decisions given the circumstances. In other words, it's the opposite of groupthink, in which people are not thinking so much as going along.
For something I thought worth my time - the Ross Douthat article about Joan of Arc. I absolutely loved Mark Twain's book on Joan. Ross raises the question - assuming Joan was divine intervention, why would God want to save France?
"But if Joan challenges skeptics to explain how a career like hers could be possible without supernatural aid, she also challenges Christians and her other religiously inclined fans to explain why, exactly, God sent her to save France. Indeed, the best skeptic’s argument probably rests there: not in trying to deny the miraculous-seeming record, but in challenging the believer to explain why God wanted or needed these specific events to happen."
Something else lost with our reliance on these systems is perception skills. Very sadly turning us into automatons - seeing what the systems tell us to see, not experiencing the world in it's richness. Leading to a duller more pointless existence.
For example, we don't have to appreciate a bird's unique colors or shape or flight pattern, instead we pull out the Merlin app. We don't have to become spatially aware of peaks, creek crossings, orientation guardrails to navigate - we use AllTrails. Similarly with a city - how it's fabric is a weave of Little Italy, the artists or bakers neighborhood - we only know how to get from point A to B by Google Maps. Music, cuisine, architecture becomes homogenized and less rich as they are more and more reliant on the systems to produce them. Instagram tells us what we should be like because those other people look so cool.
One of the more enjoyable presentations was by Dr. Straube, Professor of Building Science at...some famous school in Toronto. He was pointing out the stupidity of some of the activists...politely of course...by describing the intense energy devoted by the activists to controlling the particular chemical components of various popular foam insulations, while completely ignoring the fact that the house is filled with carpet, flooring, cabinets, paints, finishers...basically everything... that are made with the same despicable materials in vastly greater quantities than anything in the foam insulation. He also spoke how focusing on one hot button measure takes things into the weeds, and I got my moment in the sun by citing Goodheart's Law, which states "When a good measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure"...and the good Dr. applauded and quickly scribbled a slide and put it up onto the screen for the conference to ponder. I got to sit and bask in my moment of greatness.
The thrust of Dr. Straub's narrative leads directly into my thesis that our building industry is actually a fashion industry.
So is the auto industry. Top automotive designers come from Pasadena College of Art and Design, RISD, Rhode Island School of Design; Pforzeim. People LOVE styling..
I have the same opinion about architecture..my husband wanted to be one of those( but instead became ophthalmologist/ medical illustrator)so I have lived in a couple of homes he helped design..a drawer in a laundry room could not be pulled open because of an angled wall but it looked good,a built in platform bed with 5 inch floor clearance looks great but the cleaning lady( me) has to lie on floor with swifter to remove dog hair because all of vacuum cleaners exceed the clearance BUT it looks good..don’t get me started! Form over Function is not my cup of tea
I used to be great at learning my way around a new place in a reasonably short period of time. Now, with GPS, there's no reason for me to actualy REMEMBER how to get someplace. I just plug in the address and off I go. Map reading skills are really dwindling, but I have not yet lost mine. Two years ago in Amsterdam our Verizon went on the fritz for some reason and I had to use a map to get around. Took longer to plan the route, consult frequently with the map, but we did it.
All of the points in the article lead me to practice guitar everyday and try to learn a new song every couple of weeks.
I don't have a car. When I have to figure out how to get someplace I've never been, using public transportation and/or walking, I use the Google Maps Street Views to see in advance what the place I'm going actually looks like so I can recognize it when I get there.
One thing leaping out at me from the conference.... our energy transition delusion. All the stuff we talk about was driven home with data....grid can't handle it, upgrading the grid is a decades long billions of dollar exercise even if there was an agreed upon plan, then there's the local grid which can't handle it anyway, so it's upgrades through all neighborhoods which requires transformers which we don't even come close to having enough of them now with years long backlogs to get them, and even if it all got done, it would mean a best case minimum 5x increase in utility cost, with some areas being possibly double that.
Understand, the conference is populated with hard core net zero electrify everything attendees, with lots of advanced engineering degrees providing the info. This isn't a WSJ mindset conference.
For an example outcome of the delusions, I received this notice from Xcell Energy today - telling me I can save the world. In reality, saving them from the failure to plan for reliable power.
" August 06 is an Energy Action Day!
You can make a difference. By reducing energy use during peak demand, you can save money and reduce carbon emissions. Plus, you are helping keep energy reliable for you and your community."
"the conference is populated with hard core net zero electrify everything attendees"
Is there something about building science that causes people to have a "hard core net zero electrify everything" mindset? One would think that these would be people who realize that electricity doesn't grow on trees, but has to be generated by various methods, some of them more polluting than others.
Just like other special interest groups that capture and take control of narratives by grabbing the microphone and being louder and speaking longer about their prerogative than the folks that are busy building stuff...building codes, building narratives, code promulgation organizations, architectural schools and related educational groups and all that stuff is being captured by the net zero activists.
There were a number of "normal" builders, with a notable contingent of them being from Texas...no surprise. There was one exchange where one of the Texans got up to respond to a woman that looked my age, smelled like Patchouli oil, with bright blue hair, that had voiced an emotional paean to saving the Earth. The Texan got a round of applause, with a rough guess of 1/2 the conference kinda grumbling at the audacity of the guy contradicting the bright blue hair woman.
Like everything else, there's some increasing percentage of folks that believe in magic.
There’s a lot of energy behind activism, the energy of sincere passion.
As with natural resources, causes that inspire activism aren’t as clear-cut and straightforward as the old ones: alleviating hunger and poverty, banning slavery, championing equal treatment under the law.
It seems like each successive generation envies the protests and activism of prior ones. The causes might be harder to discern, but that doesn’t reduce the desire for somewhere to invest their passions.
Lots of magical thinking in the building industry. Crazy, right?
She’s a licensed architect focusing on “resilience and sustainability”. Credentials out the wazoo. Resilience and sustainability are the new buzzwords in architecture.
One of the interesting presentations was light engineering, i.e., how to bring light into a structure while keeping total glazing to <40% of the enclosure, which is the maximum ideal for reducing energy consumption. Floor to ceiling glass makes it easy but you’re heating the outdoors. Lots of science and engineering figuring out light transmission.
Architecture is surprisingly interdisciplinary, with structural engineering, energy engineering, every other engineering discipline, fire science, etc. it goes in all directions.
That’s the sort of skepticism that Mark P. Mills has fleshed out in his presentations. It’s pretty breathtaking. And “net zero” sounds delusional beyond belief: pure magic to solve all the myriad technical issues involved.
Escalating electric costs are already filtering down to households due to the expansion of solar and wind farms. See also “The Energy Bad Boys” on Substack:
The Bad Boys might not be altogether right about this stuff, but I don't know. It's a shifting target with the usual taking of sides with no allowances for alternative opinions.
Per math...not good at it, never have been, I like calculators. I exercise my brain in lots of ways, and continually struggling with something I'll never master doesn't make sense.
Please forgive me if it came across as patronizing. Not my intent at all.
I come at math from having hated it but liking to make stuff. Realizing that math was a language opened doors to my understanding and I have been on a soapbox ever since.
Math is a language for communicating quantities and ratios. I would argue that you have a solid grasp of the material but not the "grammar."
This is part of what I was trying to get at yesterday: grammar is less important face to face or within a small specialized community. That community has its own rules and understanding of usage that doesn't necessarily translate well to academic standard practice. What works in one environment is not guaranteed to work in another.
I know how algebra works, so I can type a formula into Excel that will produce the number I'm looking for. All I'm asking the machine to do is the adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing part that takes longer in my head because I have to sort of say the numbers out loud to myself and remember to carry the two, and there's a chance I might get it wrong. But there are times when I do those operations in my head, or on paper, just to keep in practice or because I don't have Excel open at the moment.
Call me when you need someone to design and hook up the plumbing to make it work. We do not all need to know how to do that stuff. I've found the worst people to design the layout and wire a house are the electrical engineers, etc., etc.
"Letting machines do the thinking for us deprives us of acquiring the skills of critical thinking and all their related abilities."
I agree with this. Why learn to do math calculations? It's good for the brain, like lifting weights (carefully) is good for the muscles. We have a certain amount of innate intelligent, but we also have developed intelligence. For example it's been demonstrated that children who have heard fewer words in early childhood demonstrate lower intelligence throughout their lives. Our brains need to work.
Failure to work with our reasoning skills can leave us without much in the way of reasoning skills. On the other hand, when we look at people with elite academic credentials - Senator Elizabeth Warren, for only one example - we find that they don't demonstrate much in the way of reasoning skills, but only "emoting" and "jumping to conclusions" and "tendentious blather."
Did these people get through years of high-status schooling without actually learning to build an argument using facts and logic, or did they have those skills but decide to abandon them?
It might be that it was lots of high status and not so much schooling. It seems most (all?) of our institutions are about status and not what those institutions are doing.
Based on my personal experience,the more degrees listed behind a name, the less that degree holder knows about anything listed…a degree but little if any real life experience in those areas .For example J Smith MD,PhD,JD,MPH,MBA ,age 45..has that person ever held a job of significance in any of those areas ?
Good morning. It's been raining again, but not constantly like yesterday. I'll text the stable around 7:00 to find out if D's work shift will be happening. I tried to get into the state's 529 plan website to request reimbursement for Thor's tuition, but it errored out. This keeps happening, presumably because everyone in the state is trying to do the same thing. I'll try again later.
a lovely 111F again...
Ugh. 😆
Good afternoon. Here at the “gulf” it’s been a mixture of sun, rain showers and (mostly at night) lightning shows. Today, earlier sprinkles gave way to sun and a good morning on the reach, until another brief shower sent us in at lunchtime, Temp is 84 degrees.
The mothership provided an update on the “forgotten war” — the civil war in Sudan that is inflicting severe “food insecurity” — famine — affecting millions of people. Because each side is using hunger as a weapon of war, food aid is nearly impossible to provide.
The FP is headlining :”autoworkers want their union back.” Of course, the UAW has been much more liberal in its politics than its rank and file members, for years.
It sounds like you're having a reasonably good time.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles.
After another attempt to get to Thor's 523 account, I called the College Foundation of North Carolina, and the person who asked me for my social security number and birth date, after I'd already entered them in the phone menu, said it might work if I close out everything else in my browser. Apparently their website is Extremely Special and only works if it has your browser's full attention.
I don't recall ever having to do this before, which leads me to believe that they've loused up the website since I paid for Daughter B's new computer back in May. "Why," she says, sounding exactly like her late mother, "does everything on earth have to be such an expletive hassle?!?"
Helped my mother sort out something similar recently involving our state’s version of the 529s. The issue took hours to resolve, much of it wasted in phone trees and with operators for the management company who didn’t understand the problem. The bottom line was that our state’s management firm has about three different web URLs that are very, very similar. If you start down the wrong one, there’s nothing that tells you you need to check out the other sites, but it just keeps kicking you out as having invalid account and user information. 🙄🙄🙄
GAH. I hope to not have to deal with this for a while, but Drama Queen was talking about taking a couple of classes at community college this semester, as well as one at UNC-Charlotte, so there may be another tuition bill. I think her dad is the account owner on hers, though. My mother set them up at different times with different co-owners.
It turned out that, in order to get to the screen to request Thor's tuition back, I had to close out everything else on my browser. I hope I'll be able to get my Google form with my soil quizzes back from the bowels of Google.
Then, I tried to open the account for my granddaughter, and that required another phone call to the same person, who had no idea why the website was telling me "Enrollment Process Not Available, please call this number." But she explained that I could print a form out and mail it. I filled the form out, but the mail was already picked up today, so I can't put it out until tomorrow because of the stealing from your mailbox problem.
At least I won't need to think about it again for fifteen years or so.
GAH.
I spent two hours trying to reconcile my latest expense statement for Rome. 6 uses of the UD issued credit card. But there is a 7th charge from two months ago from our UD-authorized flight vendor. It's for $7, but is also outside the approved trip time frame. So I wrote 7 emails asking advice on how to clear it out. Offering to pay cash is not an option, BTW.
Grading is done, but I plan to re-review student grades on their personal essays, to assure I applied a consistent rubric. Students had to write 9 short vignettes, related to applying course material to their trip. Specifically, they had a list of 28 biases we discussed in class. Students were to identify a time on the trip when they experienced one, what problem did it create, what they learned, and what they will do different in the future. Most students struggle on what to change next time, other than "be aware this bias could be occurring". 🙄Most played it safe "status quo bias: I went to the same restaurant often". "affinity bias"; I liked American tourists.
Meeting at 1pm. It is listed in person and on zoom, I'll head down in person in 35 minutes.
I hope it's a not-terribly-tedious meeting.
The meeting wasn't bad. A new administrator, so I explained what we do in two of my MBA courses. He wasn't aware. But we had a pleasant talk afterwards.
After 7 emails, the person who sent the form back remembered we reconciled it in April, and this was just a "ghost" receipt, so he deleted it, and told me to resubmit my expense report without it...that took 17 seconds, plus another 18 to tell him I did so! 😀 I could have cut it back two seconds by not adding the emoji, but it was worth it.
Teengirl went and did stable stuff in the rain. I took a nap in the car. Now, I need two write two more soil quizzes and two lists of student presentation topics. They will be assigned topics by random draw.
It's sunny here today, though some smoke and fog was forecast early for outlying areas. I'm going to run some errands and, later, cook some burgers on the grill.
Collective reasoning can be superior to what machines can provide. (First of all, the machines aren't necessarily reasoning. If they have not been programmed to do some form of reasoning, then that's not what they're doing.) If collective reasoning means examining differing opinions and aspects of an issue and, as a group, seeking to harmonize or reconcile these perspectives in deciding an outcome or action through a process, then collective reasoning is what can get you to the best decisions given the circumstances. In other words, it's the opposite of groupthink, in which people are not thinking so much as going along.
For something I thought worth my time - the Ross Douthat article about Joan of Arc. I absolutely loved Mark Twain's book on Joan. Ross raises the question - assuming Joan was divine intervention, why would God want to save France?
"But if Joan challenges skeptics to explain how a career like hers could be possible without supernatural aid, she also challenges Christians and her other religiously inclined fans to explain why, exactly, God sent her to save France. Indeed, the best skeptic’s argument probably rests there: not in trying to deny the miraculous-seeming record, but in challenging the believer to explain why God wanted or needed these specific events to happen."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/opinion/joan-arc-miracles-god.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cE8.84lo._-4Y8FI6Wj9a&smid=url-share
Very interesting article.
Something else lost with our reliance on these systems is perception skills. Very sadly turning us into automatons - seeing what the systems tell us to see, not experiencing the world in it's richness. Leading to a duller more pointless existence.
For example, we don't have to appreciate a bird's unique colors or shape or flight pattern, instead we pull out the Merlin app. We don't have to become spatially aware of peaks, creek crossings, orientation guardrails to navigate - we use AllTrails. Similarly with a city - how it's fabric is a weave of Little Italy, the artists or bakers neighborhood - we only know how to get from point A to B by Google Maps. Music, cuisine, architecture becomes homogenized and less rich as they are more and more reliant on the systems to produce them. Instagram tells us what we should be like because those other people look so cool.
Bummer.
One of the more enjoyable presentations was by Dr. Straube, Professor of Building Science at...some famous school in Toronto. He was pointing out the stupidity of some of the activists...politely of course...by describing the intense energy devoted by the activists to controlling the particular chemical components of various popular foam insulations, while completely ignoring the fact that the house is filled with carpet, flooring, cabinets, paints, finishers...basically everything... that are made with the same despicable materials in vastly greater quantities than anything in the foam insulation. He also spoke how focusing on one hot button measure takes things into the weeds, and I got my moment in the sun by citing Goodheart's Law, which states "When a good measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure"...and the good Dr. applauded and quickly scribbled a slide and put it up onto the screen for the conference to ponder. I got to sit and bask in my moment of greatness.
The thrust of Dr. Straub's narrative leads directly into my thesis that our building industry is actually a fashion industry.
So is the auto industry. Top automotive designers come from Pasadena College of Art and Design, RISD, Rhode Island School of Design; Pforzeim. People LOVE styling..
Yeah, it is.
I have the same opinion about architecture..my husband wanted to be one of those( but instead became ophthalmologist/ medical illustrator)so I have lived in a couple of homes he helped design..a drawer in a laundry room could not be pulled open because of an angled wall but it looked good,a built in platform bed with 5 inch floor clearance looks great but the cleaning lady( me) has to lie on floor with swifter to remove dog hair because all of vacuum cleaners exceed the clearance BUT it looks good..don’t get me started! Form over Function is not my cup of tea
It seems like a bed high enough to push a vacuum under would be very high off the ground.
Dyson.
I used to be great at learning my way around a new place in a reasonably short period of time. Now, with GPS, there's no reason for me to actualy REMEMBER how to get someplace. I just plug in the address and off I go. Map reading skills are really dwindling, but I have not yet lost mine. Two years ago in Amsterdam our Verizon went on the fritz for some reason and I had to use a map to get around. Took longer to plan the route, consult frequently with the map, but we did it.
All of the points in the article lead me to practice guitar everyday and try to learn a new song every couple of weeks.
I don't have a car. When I have to figure out how to get someplace I've never been, using public transportation and/or walking, I use the Google Maps Street Views to see in advance what the place I'm going actually looks like so I can recognize it when I get there.
I use google maps when I am lost, but otherwise I try to walk a city to learn it, and to figure out how things connect.
Yup. And mistakes are part of the learning process.
One thing leaping out at me from the conference.... our energy transition delusion. All the stuff we talk about was driven home with data....grid can't handle it, upgrading the grid is a decades long billions of dollar exercise even if there was an agreed upon plan, then there's the local grid which can't handle it anyway, so it's upgrades through all neighborhoods which requires transformers which we don't even come close to having enough of them now with years long backlogs to get them, and even if it all got done, it would mean a best case minimum 5x increase in utility cost, with some areas being possibly double that.
Understand, the conference is populated with hard core net zero electrify everything attendees, with lots of advanced engineering degrees providing the info. This isn't a WSJ mindset conference.
Very interesting.
For an example outcome of the delusions, I received this notice from Xcell Energy today - telling me I can save the world. In reality, saving them from the failure to plan for reliable power.
" August 06 is an Energy Action Day!
You can make a difference. By reducing energy use during peak demand, you can save money and reduce carbon emissions. Plus, you are helping keep energy reliable for you and your community."
It's true that, if you're being billed by the kilowatt-hour, you save money by using less electricity.
"the conference is populated with hard core net zero electrify everything attendees"
Is there something about building science that causes people to have a "hard core net zero electrify everything" mindset? One would think that these would be people who realize that electricity doesn't grow on trees, but has to be generated by various methods, some of them more polluting than others.
Just like other special interest groups that capture and take control of narratives by grabbing the microphone and being louder and speaking longer about their prerogative than the folks that are busy building stuff...building codes, building narratives, code promulgation organizations, architectural schools and related educational groups and all that stuff is being captured by the net zero activists.
One would think that, wouldn't they?
There were a number of "normal" builders, with a notable contingent of them being from Texas...no surprise. There was one exchange where one of the Texans got up to respond to a woman that looked my age, smelled like Patchouli oil, with bright blue hair, that had voiced an emotional paean to saving the Earth. The Texan got a round of applause, with a rough guess of 1/2 the conference kinda grumbling at the audacity of the guy contradicting the bright blue hair woman.
Like everything else, there's some increasing percentage of folks that believe in magic.
It surprises me that believers in magic would be in attendance. Does the blue haired older lady have useful building science expertise?
There’s a lot of energy behind activism, the energy of sincere passion.
As with natural resources, causes that inspire activism aren’t as clear-cut and straightforward as the old ones: alleviating hunger and poverty, banning slavery, championing equal treatment under the law.
It seems like each successive generation envies the protests and activism of prior ones. The causes might be harder to discern, but that doesn’t reduce the desire for somewhere to invest their passions.
“What do we want?”
“We don’t know!”
“When do we want it?”
“NOW!”
Lots of magical thinking in the building industry. Crazy, right?
She’s a licensed architect focusing on “resilience and sustainability”. Credentials out the wazoo. Resilience and sustainability are the new buzzwords in architecture.
Are they classifying architecture as a science? That's a little surprising.
One of the interesting presentations was light engineering, i.e., how to bring light into a structure while keeping total glazing to <40% of the enclosure, which is the maximum ideal for reducing energy consumption. Floor to ceiling glass makes it easy but you’re heating the outdoors. Lots of science and engineering figuring out light transmission.
Very science-y.
Architecture is surprisingly interdisciplinary, with structural engineering, energy engineering, every other engineering discipline, fire science, etc. it goes in all directions.
So, it is very science-y.
That’s the sort of skepticism that Mark P. Mills has fleshed out in his presentations. It’s pretty breathtaking. And “net zero” sounds delusional beyond belief: pure magic to solve all the myriad technical issues involved.
Escalating electric costs are already filtering down to households due to the expansion of solar and wind farms. See also “The Energy Bad Boys” on Substack:
https://energybadboys.substack.com/
Not a fan of the journalists Energy Bad Boys. Who never were technically trained, can't spell electron; and a shill for their owners.
But your kilowatts will vary.
There arguments about reliability are laughable frankly
Do you have a source you like off the top of your head? Just curious - I know very little about that stuff
Economics about power - Noah Smith. MIT. Eternally.
https://enerknol.com/research/ 'ENERKNOL
Thanks very much!
The Bad Boys might not be altogether right about this stuff, but I don't know. It's a shifting target with the usual taking of sides with no allowances for alternative opinions.
Per math...not good at it, never have been, I like calculators. I exercise my brain in lots of ways, and continually struggling with something I'll never master doesn't make sense.
Please forgive me if it came across as patronizing. Not my intent at all.
I come at math from having hated it but liking to make stuff. Realizing that math was a language opened doors to my understanding and I have been on a soapbox ever since.
You’re fine. I appreciate your input.
Thanks.
Math is a language for communicating quantities and ratios. I would argue that you have a solid grasp of the material but not the "grammar."
This is part of what I was trying to get at yesterday: grammar is less important face to face or within a small specialized community. That community has its own rules and understanding of usage that doesn't necessarily translate well to academic standard practice. What works in one environment is not guaranteed to work in another.
Beyond basic arithmetic drills, a person needs to understand mathematics processes to know what numbers and operations to put into a calculator.
I know how algebra works, so I can type a formula into Excel that will produce the number I'm looking for. All I'm asking the machine to do is the adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing part that takes longer in my head because I have to sort of say the numbers out loud to myself and remember to carry the two, and there's a chance I might get it wrong. But there are times when I do those operations in my head, or on paper, just to keep in practice or because I don't have Excel open at the moment.
That's what I meant.
Call me when you need someone to design and hook up the plumbing to make it work. We do not all need to know how to do that stuff. I've found the worst people to design the layout and wire a house are the electrical engineers, etc., etc.
That seems reasonable.
"Letting machines do the thinking for us deprives us of acquiring the skills of critical thinking and all their related abilities."
I agree with this. Why learn to do math calculations? It's good for the brain, like lifting weights (carefully) is good for the muscles. We have a certain amount of innate intelligent, but we also have developed intelligence. For example it's been demonstrated that children who have heard fewer words in early childhood demonstrate lower intelligence throughout their lives. Our brains need to work.
Failure to work with our reasoning skills can leave us without much in the way of reasoning skills. On the other hand, when we look at people with elite academic credentials - Senator Elizabeth Warren, for only one example - we find that they don't demonstrate much in the way of reasoning skills, but only "emoting" and "jumping to conclusions" and "tendentious blather."
Did these people get through years of high-status schooling without actually learning to build an argument using facts and logic, or did they have those skills but decide to abandon them?
It might be that it was lots of high status and not so much schooling. It seems most (all?) of our institutions are about status and not what those institutions are doing.
They have lots of credentials.
Based on my personal experience,the more degrees listed behind a name, the less that degree holder knows about anything listed…a degree but little if any real life experience in those areas .For example J Smith MD,PhD,JD,MPH,MBA ,age 45..has that person ever held a job of significance in any of those areas ?
Good point.
Yes....sigh....
Good morning. It's been raining again, but not constantly like yesterday. I'll text the stable around 7:00 to find out if D's work shift will be happening. I tried to get into the state's 529 plan website to request reimbursement for Thor's tuition, but it errored out. This keeps happening, presumably because everyone in the state is trying to do the same thing. I'll try again later.
Five inches of rain in a day was enough to cause serious flooding!
that's 18 months here of rain
Low water crossings, stream drainage blockages, etc. Some of these places flood with every significant rain.