I was wondering how much of worldwide shipping is oil. Just moving crude and products around the world. I was expecting a significant number, but was surprised to learn it is almost one third of all shipping by weight. Not only does it take energy to move all of this oil around, but this also produces pollution. I wonder how this all compounds when you consider nearly all renewable energy is locally produced and requires no transport, at least not in the traditional sense. From Statistia.

In terms of tonnage, oil tankers accounted for around 29 percent of global seaborne trade that year.

Capacity of oil tankers in seaborne trade from 1980 to 2022 (in million dwt)

From the Curiosity Chronicle blog.

33 Life Learnings from 33 Years

Why is one of the richest men in Pennsylvania giving the governor of Texas his largest donation ever? I need to understand these things. I believe it used to be illegal for people in one state to influence politics in another state. I realize everyone does it, but is this really a good idea? From the Texas Tribune.

School voucher supporter gave Gov. Greg Abbott $6 million in December

If solar wasn’t already cheap enough. From Business Insider.

The glut sent prices down nearly 50% in 2023 as manufacturing levels stood three times above those seen in 2021

Solar modules are piling up in warehouses as a massive supply glut has slashed prices by half, IEA says

Fascinating stuff from Wired.

Crispr Pioneer Jennifer Doudna Has the Guts to Take On the Microbiome

Looking for reviews on McAfees books on the Second Machine Age / The Geek Way and ran across this short piece from MIT Sloan from 2018.

How to approach the second machine age

A good discussion on things like base load and how this sort of full transition will happen. From Canary Media.

A huge battery has replaced Hawaii’s last coal plant

As a bit of an experiment I started using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop machine a few years back. While adequate for email and text editing it was a bit underpowered for other uses.

This week I got my new Raspberry Pi 5 in the mail. Thought I would just have to move all the cables over and it should boot.

Not quite. I was running Ubuntu 22 LTS and the Pi 5 needs 23. So I had to upgrade to 22.04 then again to 22.10. It’s ok. I was watching a basketball game. Boot from my USB SSD looked good until the very end. Then it froze to a blank screen and a little white underscore text prompt in the upper left corner.

I did a boot of the Raspberry Pi OS from the microSD card and it worked fine. At least it didn’t seem to be a hardware problem. Then I gave up and went to bed.

Today I decided to put Ubuntu 23 on the microSD flash card and give it a go. Surprisingly, shockingly, it booted. From the USB drive. I suppose the lack of something (anything) in the micro SD slot was a problem. Would not have guessed.

Early benchmarks show a solid 2x performance increase. Seems snappier and maybe even better on the disk side. Looking forward to an Ubuntu 23 LTS.

From Umberto Eco. From the Wiki page Ur-fascism. Worth reading the entire page.

1. The cult of tradition

2. The rejection of modernism

3. The cult of action for action’s sake

4. Disagreement is treason

5. Fear of difference

6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class

7. Obsession with a plot

8. Enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy

10. Contempt for the weak

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero

12. Machismo

13. Selective populism

14. Newspeak