Meanwhile in Sweden

Wooden wind turbines

tomo,
Chin up: the days are getting longer.

Nuclear powered container ships make lots of sense. It may make all the difference if the Chinese start using them. Ports that would be closed to other-flagged nuke ships could well open up to them (being as they're a developing nation and all).

On the notion of "modular heat source" power stations, it makes plenty of sense at that scale and at the smaller scale of a container ship. I don't know where the line is that it stops making sense. Heavy earth-moving equipment? Trains? Road freight? Cars? It will be ironic if the swappable "battery" of the future is some sort of nuclear cell. No range anxiety; it lasts longer than the car.

But as you say, with the people running our energy policies, it'll be for China to show the way.

Christmas done and dusted. Fairly pleasant weather here (recent pattern of warmish days, afternoon thunderstorms), a lot nicer than the flooding rains and hail that have been hitting other parts of the country.

Looked in at Judith Curry's again. The wrangling has continued in the comments to Ross McKitrick's article. From among them I clicked on this page by Morgan Wright dating back about a decade. Quite a good roundup of alarmist arguments and their weaknesses. He's pretty blunt in the comments and the alarmists do passable impersonations of punch-dummies.

Ten years on and little has changed.

Mailman,
A certain appeal, I suppose, something like that of an ugly dog Oh the poor thing, having to go through life looking like that.

tomo,
Thanks for linking that documentary. I remember those times well, but wasn't aware of the junking of thousands of Lisas, nor of the strange competition between the Mac and Lisa groups in Apple. It's no wonder they went bust.

Your "eventually" might be a while. Some Apple users have a religious zeal about them. Mere technical problems won't do it; it would take a cataclysm (say the appointment of new evil Elon Musk as CEO) to shift them.

The problem with the Hyperloop was the name. It should have been Hyperhype; it started and ended in hype. Looking at the comments for the article is what put Musk in mind for my previous paragraph. Plenty talking about Musk and hardly a peep about Branson. I always found Musk a bit dislikeable (Branson too), but his internet swing from feted to foetid has been impressive.

Robbo,

I dunno mate...I think that Russian EV has a certain appeal to its design.

Having said that, given Russian fighter jet design over the last for ever years has produced some of the most beautiful aircraft to have ever hit the skies Im surprised they didnt draft in some of the designers from Mig or Sukhoi to sort it out?

Quick bonus. The Russians have developed an EV blessed with more than a glancing blow with the ugly stick

tomo,

Sometimes even bad books can have their enjoyable aspects. Most of that recent book was pretty shallow, but this bit had merit in the field of "sophistry":

...over the last three decades, the lifespan of a computer has dropped from eleven to just four years.

Such a wasteful world we live in! That is until you consider that an 11 year old computer three decades ago was new in 1982, before personal computers were in any way popular. Most computers back then were seriously expensive so companies kept them for as long as they could. There would also be many ways of measuring computer turnover these days with phones, fridges, light bulbs all containing "computers" of power at least on a par with a 1982 personal computer. It can hardly be an apples with apples comparison (so to speak).

Rather than "selective reporting", I think the BBC would like you to think of their role as curating the news. A lovely back-formed verb, but is it from the museum's curator, or from the proverbial curate and the egg?

Popped over to Judith Curry's for the first time in a while. Ross McKitrick's article on Total Least Squares regression caught my eye. Followed his maths ok, but I'm not an enthusiast for applying methods like these in the real world. I like the pure maths theory behind it well enough, but am with Rutherford that, if you need stats to see the relationship, you need a better experiment.

For people less keen on the mathematical side it's still worth reading his conclusion. Like making "cherry pie", the climatologists can see bias in a technique to be a feature, not a bug.

Skipping just past that into the comments, I note the absence of David Appell — long may that continue — but a couple of new irritants have taken over. Have to give points to one of them for truth in advertising: George J Kamburoff. Off camber indeed, he clearly sees his mission is to take things off on a tangent asap.

Finally, John Cadogan caps his coverage of the Melbourne EV cement truck fire. Gives the company a fair old bollocking and takes a few swings at the Victorian government while he's at it.