Saul Griffith is an Aussie engineer living and working in California. He’s written a clear-eyed book about a possible way through the climate emergency, keeping things to +2 degrees C, and it goes like this:

• electrify everything with solar and wind
• start now
• keep a little nuclear for evening things out, although we probably won’t use it
• a bit of R&D into blue-sky solutions like fusion, because the payoff will be big, but don’t rely on it
• remove regulatory impediments, fossil-fuel subsidies, buy the stranded assets for (average profit + a small margin), … non-technical tweaks to law, finance

Unlike most of this literature, he backs it up with numbers. It’s like talking to Paul Mathews; arguments based on data, with charts to make it comprehensible.

The short version is at https://www.otherlab.com/blog-posts/how-do-we-decarbonize. The longer version is in a book I found at the library, “Electrify”: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/electrify-the-book

It’s doable. First thing I’ve seen that makes me think so.

New Zealand delivered a water desalination plant to Tonga to provide fresh water after the volcanic eruption.

The US delivered 70 tons of “lethal aid” to Ukraine around the same time.

Different priorities, I guess.

interop between satellite providers, ground stations and Azure.

At the end, they show it coming together to use a predictive model to identify ships from orbit and build predictive models. They’re really doing lots more than I know about with Azure.

“That Was Then… NAD 3020 | What Hi-Fi?” https://www.whathifi.com/features/that-was-then-nad-3020

Yup, nailed it. Ready for the next step, but a little rueful about moving on.

Went down the rabbit hole this evening, starting from a post on CDM

My friend Martin turned me onto this David Sylvian album when we were young, and listening to some of the raw stuff triggered bits of memory. I didn’t know he came out of the band Japan, and the Bryan Ferry/Eno/”My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”… connections. When I did music, I used to listen to Jon Hassell and Holger Czukay, both in this video (I didn’t remember that they were part of this album!) so off I go to find them. Czukay died, I find, in 2017, and there’s pointers to things like this

which I’d never heard, nor that he was a student of Stockhausen (I think everyone ended up being related to Stockhausen, eventually). Memories of Can, and Sylvian, and Roedelius and all. Nice way to spend a couple of hours.

Just went to Delta airlines to change some details on the tickets I booked for Julie and Terry. I’m told by the automated phone system that the wait time is on the order of “one hour and fifty minutes”, and I should use the website. The website has no mechanism for the changes I wish to make.

update: their “message us” option reports “Sorry, the app is having technical difficulties”. So they can’t handle text messages, either.

update: their messaging came up! and 15m later, I got someone on the other end named An-May who without fuss changed the details. So this bit worked well.

Imagine VR not as passive experience, but as the ability to “play” all those immersive elements – from 3D forms and architectures to spatial sound – live like an instrument. That sums up what has made the Patchathon artist intensives with PatchXR so engaging. Here’s the newest work from late this year, made in just days by invited artists, live in VR.
— Read on cdm.link/2021/12/vr-becomes-a-fluid-medium-a-music-video-you-can-play-a-playground-in-patchxr-patchathon/