I visited Monterrey, Mexico when I was younger. An industrial city that currently has about 5 million people. Home of Topo Chico. And it is running out of water.

Monterrey suffers weeks-long water cutoff amid drought

Have seen all of these FUDs in various forms, in various places. All seems to be misinformation, as best I can tell. I feel bad for people who own gas stations, work for oil and gas companies, repair gas and diesel engine, etc. But things change, and often for the better. Horse and buggies were big business before the automobile, but they went away in a few short years. It can happen again.

The biggest myths about electric vehicles

I always figured solar is the future of energy in places like Texas. Most of our electricity spike (based mostly on my own electricity bills) is summer air conditioning. Using the sun on these hot sunny days seems like a perfect match for A/C. It seems wind and solar are keeping the lights on this summer. A quote about April 10, but I would expect to see better numbers for all of June.

“The proportion of energy generated from wind power in Texas set a new record on April 10, when it contributed to about 69% of the total electricity on the ERCOT grid,” Choi added. “Solar energy generation in the state’s main power grid set a new record on May 19, when it accounted for 14.62% of the electricity in the system.”

Renewables Ride To The Rescue As Texas Bakes Under Withering Heat

Bought a bottle of this Sotol at the Desert Door Texas Sotol distillery. Thought it was 50 proof but it’s 50% alcohol, 100 proof.

I tend to agree with this. A short read on why the Fed is making a mistake. From Robert Reich in Common Dreams.

The Fed Is Making a Big, Big Mistake

We have this large cactus sort of plant by the pool. It was very small when we planted it, but it soon split into three parts, and grew quite large. This is over a 20 year period. Recently it sprouted these enormous stalks, maybe 20 feet tall. The photos don’t really do justice to the scale. After a bit of internet research, we found out this is a Sotol p!ant. We also found out that these are used to make a type of tequila, also called Sotol. We also learned that there is a Sotol distillery, Desert Door Texas Sotol, just down the road. A nice place, tucked in among the new wineries on the way out to Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill country. Bought a bottle I’ll sample tonight.

Something to aspire to. From the Guardian.

Experience: I am the dullest man in Britain

I ran across the Japanese concept of ikigai today. There was a Venn diagram associated with ikigai that I found fascinating. I remember when I was younger and trying to figure out what to do with my life I seemed to run across the advice along the lines of “follow your passion” and “do what you enjoy”. But this didn’t seem to be practical. Most of the things I liked to do didn’t pay very well, if at all. I figured you had to find some balance between doing what you like and what pays the bills. I’m probably lucky that I did find something I really liked to do, that also paid the bills. The Diagram below (taken from the World Economic Forum article “Is this Japanese concept the secret to a long, happy, meaningful life?“) lays it out in more detail. Wish I had seen this when I was a young man.

The US announced that the new Frontier Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) has achieved sustained exascale performance and is now the faster supercomputer in the world. It is similar to the sort of machines I helped build for the financial services sector, but quite a bit larger. This displaces the previous leader, the Japanese Fugaku Supercomputer.

For some reason this morning the mention of ORNL reminded me of the old country and western group the Oak Ridge Boys. Surely there is no connection. But there is!

The core group that would eventually lead to the Oak Ridge Boys was a country group called Wally Fowler and the Georgia Clodhoppers, formed in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. They were requested to perform for staff members and their families restricted during World War II at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in nearby Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They were asked to sing there so often that, eventually, they changed their name to the Oak Ridge Quartet … In 1961, Gatlin changed the group’s name to “the Oak Ridge Boys” because their producer, Bud Praeger, thought “Oak Ridge Quartet” sounded too old-fashioned for their contemporary sound.

Frontier supercomputer debuts as world’s fastest, breaking exascale barrier