tomo,
Last night I was thinking that all Clickspring needed to do to hold me was to make a video much like the Spencer Connor one we're admiring, but based on (e.g.) Solidworks models. That would have helped with the whys and wherefores. Would also have been fun later on seeing where reality didn't quite meet up with the model and the design needs to be adjusted (as happened in the Spencer Connor video).

I agree with the incongruity of such a short video covering thousands of hours of study, design, machining and refining. OTOH, if he'd covered all those steps on video, it would have been a tens of thousands of hours effort.

Thanks for the RFK Jnr link. Was very interesting, always good to see someone willing to give the pot a proper stir. I wasn't completely with him on everything but I have to admit that was more on my ignorance/unwillingness to believe it's quite *that* bad, than on any contrary evidence I had (his talk was short on evidence for many of his claims too of course). Still, I had no idea that children are now routinely vaccinated against thirty-something diseases. That surely has to be past the point of diminishing returns (for the children, not for pharma). I think I scraped by with just a few: smallpox, polio and diphtheria (plus tetanus shots after various mishaps).

Was good to hear a sensible talk on ABC's Big Ideas (90% of which is vegan lesbians campaigning to save whales and the like, but it's worth finding the 10%). This one is on the state of western civilisation and was good listening, and interesting at another level. The contributors all bemoaned the elite. The first contributor wasn't familiar to me, but Paul Kelly is an "elder statesman" amongst journalists, bit of a pompous windbag, and I'd have said very much part of the elite. Likewise, Dave Sharma is a former Liberal Party staffer, MP and was also our ambassador to Israel for a few years. Sounds pretty elite to me. I suppose, on the ladder of elitism, anybody on a higher rung than you is elite.

The whole was pretty good, but the best bit was Sharma's first presentation. Skip in 15 minutes or so. That's a junior MP who comes across as far wiser than any of our recent PMs. Brings to mind that recent interview with the UK defence minister.

tomo,
Sorcerer's Apprentice is a very good analogy. So many things set loose without giving the slightest thought to how they might go wrong, let alone what to do if they do. And yes, the focus on the target and ignoring of side reactions is one way this happens. I've heard we learnt lessons from releasing the cane toad in Australia in the 1930s. It seems those lessons are going to be learnt again, but this time the consequences could be vastly worse.

Thanks for the pointer to the Antikythera video. I watched Clickspring's clock build with great interest (tremendous workmanship), but I found his Antikythera build a bit "in the weeds" and stopped watching after a few videos (fickle impatient fellow that I am). Your link gave a great description and that's probably all the background I needed to put Clickspring's videos in context. Time to give them another go.

It is a marvel to think of the ancients doing all sorts of rational number calculations using gears, sliding pins, pointers and dials. We feel so clever today, but it's shoulders of giants all the way down.

The Energiewende item: you hardly need to be Nostradamus to see what's coming.

There's a chance the German utilities have a bit of a strategy. Rather than hanging on with the nuclear till the last minute, take it offline fairly early. That way, as you gradually pull coal/gas stations offline and ritually dynamite them, salt the earth, etc., when the chronic blackouts start you'll still have a chance of bringing 10 GW of nuclear back up. Even the rabid greens aren't going to dynamite a nuclear power station.

But what a mad thing to be doing when China is in the midst of building 250 GW of coal power stations.

DaveS,
The only way I can make any sense of the numbers is that they're applying the popular theorem:any stick's good enough to beat a dog.

Re comparing averages for different periods. It should also be remembered that the IPCC, having defined a 30-year metric, use a 50-yera baseline 1850-1900. Why not , say, 1850-1880, or 1870-1900? Or stick with 1850-1900 and define "current" as 1973-2023?

tomo,
I should have homed in on a point you mentioned the other day. It might well be that the bigger sin is not so much mRNA "vaccines", but equipping them with the spike protein (or any other mechanism) which lets them get through cell membranes. Very powerful, but more likely to turn to harm than good.

And your comment today is also on the money. These things come down to chemistry (or,as the climatologists are always telling us, "basic physics"). Mutation is just a chemical change. The mRNA is meant to cause a known chemical to be built, but nobody has done a census of every possible cell physiology (N=1 blah blah), so who knows what interesting chemical changes might happen in that 1/1,000,000 person? And how about that 1/100,000,000 cell in an otherwise normal person's body?

So an experimental technology, a bit scary in the labs, ends up being injected into billions of people. While we have N ~ 10^9, unfortunately there's no experimental design, no control group, and no going back. Very 21st century.