Some good charts from Our World In Data.

17 key charts to understand the COVID-19 pandemic

While I’m fond of the line from the old song, “things in this life change very slowly if they ever change at all” it isn’t really true. Many things, maybe most things, don’t change much at all. But some things change very quickly and in ways hard to even understand. I worked in tech and rode the big wave of semiconductor change for pretty much my entire career. But I even have a hard time with the numbers, because the scale isn’t something humans usually have to deal with. I’ve seen it explained lots of ways, but Azeem Azhar in his post Why AI, solar & batteries will keep getting cheaper spells it out in plan numbers. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s still happening, but only in a few places. Here is what happened to computing power in my lifetime.

From $190 billion for one gigaflop of compute power in 1961 to just 1.25 cents in 2023

TL;DR: burning stuff wastes lots of energy, electricity mostly doesn’t.

My garage used to get hot. Like really hot. This being Texas, I figured maybe my garage doors needed better insulation. I thought about putting in a vent fan. And my office was over the garage and it was even noticably warmer. Recently I noticed the garage never gets hot any more. Then it hit me. The Tesla! I used to have two, sometimes three cars in that garage. Just the heat leftover after they were turned off were enough to really heat up the place. Glad I didn’t invest in new insulation!

I have also started using a little induction cooktop. It is so much better than gas (or old fashioned resistive electric). Things heat up fast and nothing else gets hot but the pot. No sweating over a meal, getting blasted by heat, and probably toxic fumes.

This article point out the massive amount of wasted energy in “thermal” power generation. You can tell this by all the excess heat given off. All that heat is energy being (literally) thrown away. So estimates of how much electricity we need to transition from thermal technologies are probably vastly over estimated, perhaps by as much as a factor of 2x to 4x.

Addendum:  I have told people many times it cost me $3 – $5 to “fill up” the Tesla.  This compares to maybe $30 to $50 for a similar gas car.  People don’t believe it.  Even techies when I show them the (relatively simple) math.  Maybe this is the real explanation.  Gas engines are inefficient.  All that heat coming off the radiator is a complete waste.  With a gas car you are basically burning a lot of fuel that does nothing to help move the vehicle.  All it is doing is making the nearby area hotter.

The Primary Energy Fallacy

From The Big Picture. Seems the number of Federal Government employees has been remarkably stable over the years. Not so much for state and especially local governments. Maybe people looking to make cuts in government spending are looking in the wrong place when they look at the Federal Government.

A good read from CACM on the history of Artificial Intelligence. This is the second in a three part series. I’ll have to go look up the other two.

Between the Booms: AI in Winter

No need to eat, just get some sun.

Researchers Give Animal Cells the Ability to Photosynthesize for the First Time

I keep hearing about how the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables has “stalled”. I did a quick search looking for the data and found a few articles, but it seems Wiki has it. Not a surprise that with factories cranking out solar panels, and more factories being built, that solar continues on a “technology curve” with exponential growth. From Wiki:

From 2016-2022 it has seen an annual capacity and production growth rate of around 26%- doubling approximately every three years.

Growth of photovoltaics

Perhaps a better graph is one showing how far off predictions on solar have been.  From The Economist magazine / Bloomberg.

From Smithsonian Magazine.

The Hidden History of Bermuda Is Reshaping the Way We Think About Colonial America

Had to go to the BBC to learn some important info about the new Energy Secretary nominee.

In a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year, he said: “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

Trump names fracking executive Chris Wright energy secretary

Had my pool water tested and found out I needed to boost my Alkalinity. Needed 20 lbs of this special powder, which went for about $4 a pound. When I balked a bit the young fellow whispered to me that “it’s just baking soda”. So I took the hint and went to find 20 lbs of Baking Soda at the nearby big box home improvement store.

In fact, baking soda was a fraction of the price of the special pool chemical, at about $1 a pound. It was sold as air freshener but the bag even mentioned it was useful for swimming pools. While I was there I bought some toilet bowl cleaner. Not that expensive but I realized it was the same liquid chlorine that I put in my pool diluted 3:1. And a gallon of the pool chlorine costs about as much as the two smaller bottles of toilet bowl cleaner. To be fair the toilet bowl cleaner is in a fancy squirt bottle. I know what I’m doing when these bottles are empty.

i also saw, inexplicably, that my home improvement store is selling bacon fat, for about $10 a pound. Seems expensive since I have a bunch in my fridge I usually throw out.