tomo,
Snopes stepped into it big time there. In a matter of hours they delivered their whole repertoire: True became Unproven became False. Lovely.

Perhaps a small update to their About Us is called for:

Snopes is the internet’s definitive fact-checking resource.

s/definitive/typical/

Lower down that page the word "Transparency" features. That word always gives me a little burst of cynicism: so transparent you might call it invisible.

Latest EconTalk is discussing Lord Moulton's Law and Manners speech. Pretty good effort for an impromptu speech. He divides behaviours into three domains: those governed by law, those entirely up to the individual, and those that are constrained by things outside the law. The last group was the real topic. Initially he described it as Obedience to the Unenforceable, but ultimately put it to the domain of Manners, and he was worried:

... lest we should hurriedly let positive law come in and check the growth of self-reliance, check the growth of the sense of personal duty, and lead people to feel that, if they obey the law, they have done all their duty.

And here we are...

Ross Lea,
The key claim of that article (at least for me) was:

... the system was running interference to prevent any potential therapy from gaining traction

I think much the same myself, but there wasn't much to substantiate that claim in the rest of the article. It went into technical reasons (beyond me) how the vaccine can cause harm. That's the title of the article, so fair enough, but why was that claim there at all?

Can't say I found the dumped cars all that compelling. Many drone sweeps over the same set of cars. OTOH, the huge piles of bicycles, sorted by colour, that was impressive.

tomo,
I'm ambivalent on what killed him, but you can gauge the sense of decency and decorum about his death from how quickly he's been memorialised in Warnie, which has been advertised on telly a fair bit lately.

It doesn't add up...

United Downs project which seems to have run out of steam

Very droll.

Perhaps there's a movie in this. Field of Dreams 2: "If you subsidise it, they will come".

MikeHig,
If a pipe was going to be troubled by furring, etc., I'd have thought a heat exchanger, with its large surface area, would be even more vulnerable. But that's just a hunch. It *is* impressive what engineers manage to accomplish deep underground. Maybe it'll end up being good practice for when they go back to drilling for oil!

Thought this video was a pretty good use of computer graphics showing how the Earth moves in space relative to various reference frames. Comparisons of annual parallax changes from Earth were very good too.

And one last burst on self-driving cars (apologies — I will give it a rest after this).

Hitherto my "clincher" argument has been that, even if you have correctly solved all the technical problems of identifying all elements in the environment (men in chicken suits, etc.), who's going to put scores on all those things so that, when there no option but a crash, the computer can choose the path of least cost?

That is a pretty tough question: this path leads to half a dozen people being mown down, this other one leads to just one, but he's the US President (or Bill Gates, etc.). Hmmm.

But imagine you can get sign-off on these values for everything on the planet, animate or inanimate (maybe referencing personal "social scores" in the process). Problem soved! You now have a wonderful self-driving machine, that can make optimal decisions. What you also have is a wonderful terrorist weapon. Just set those scores to their negatives and the exact same algorithm will maximise carnage. It could even lurk in the code to be activated at the flick of a switch: Jekyll and Hyde.

On the Eden geothermal project, I find the engineering concept rather intriguing.
My limited understanding of geothermal systems (outside places like Iceland) is that they typically drill two boreholes, frack the rocks around and between them and then circulate water to extract heat.
The Eden job uses a single borehole with a heat exchanger at the bottom connected by concentric flow and return pipes to another exchanger on the surface. So no water is being circulated through the hot rocks; the exchanger extracts heat from the water and rocks at the bottom of the hole. As the bore is only 8" in the lowest section, it must all be pretty small-scale.
It's an intriguing approach. My guess is that they did it this way because of the likely problems with furring, corrosion etc, as mentioned by Idau, if they had circulated water through the rocks. Also, in their location, radionucleides could be a problem.
From Idau's figures, their gas consumption works out at an average of 600 kW. That seems like a lot of energy to extract through such a small system. One to watch.

I should have mentioned the United Downs project which seems to have run out of steam since they completed the wells and provided brine samples with a view to lithium extraction.

https://geothermalengineering.co.uk/united-downs/

Well depth is also around 3 miles. And they did indulge in fracking to increase the volume being tapped. Here's the BGS record of the induced seismicity, which seems not to have produced protest.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/P5OE0/1

Grants ran out. Commercial funding seems problematic.

Cornish geothermal

The Eden Project had a geothermal system before IIRC. It was shallow (hence the emphasis on the present one being deep), and they did try to generate a small amount of electricity as well as providing greenhouse heating. It failed because the pipes corroded and furred up with the mineral rich brine, and because they depleted the heat store so it dropped output substantially.

The present effort has had £23.6m in subsidies with £15.7m from the EU. Annual gas consumption runs about 5GWh according to their annual report. As a large customer before the energy price crisis they would have been paying £20-30/ MWh. So call it an annual bill of £150k. Assuming no other cost (including no financing cost because of grants) this green boondoggle has a payback period of 157 years if it can replace the gas use.

This via Jo Nova, very revealing !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8