Many years ago I worked in Minneapolis. One day I was at lunch with my friend Kamal from New Delhi and Adel from Cairo. We started talking about the weather, and then which city was further south, New Orleans, Cairo or Delhi. We argued a bit, and I don’t remember exactly what side each of us took. It was intense enough that when we got back from the office we found a world map and checked. All were darn near the same latitude. Just had a look at the on line Latitude and Longitude Finder and sure enough, New Orleans: 29.951065, Cairo: 30.044420 and Delhi, India: 28.613939.

When I look around I mostly see strong trends of renewables replacing oil, gas and coal. Ran across a chart today that shows one place this trend is broken. Data only up to 2021. From Our World in Data.

Electricity generation from fossil fuels

Good read for anyone interested in why some projects do better than others. I think I can give this a slightly different spin. Innovation is all about trial and error, emphasis on error. Your ongoing development needs to tolerate errors to make substantial moves forward. Nukes don’t let you fiddle around with techniques they way other technologies do. So innovation (i.e cost savings) seldom happen. On the flip side, small scale tech like solar allows for all sorts of tweeks at all levels. This leads to large, compounded improvements. Back to the energy grid portion: a nice quote below.

Well, the data on that is in. Wind and solar have plummeted in costs and grids with higher penetration of renewables are actually more reliable than coal, gas or nuclear heavy grids using industry standard metrics for outages per customer per year.

The Nuclear Fallacy: Why Small Modular Reactors Can’t Compete With Renewable Energy

Was thinking about Louis Armstrong’s private tape collection. I read about it a bunch of years back and thought I would see if they had made it on line someplace. It a combination of music and conversations made in his home in Queens, NY. Ran across this pretty amazing site, from the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Will have to spend some time out here looking around.

That’s My Home – Louis Armstrong House Museum Virtual Exhibits

How common is corporate fraud? From an academic paper published by Springer:

We find that two out of three corporate frauds go undetected, implying that, pre Sox, 41% of large public firms were misreporting their financial accounts in a material way and 10% of the firms were committing securities fraud, imposing an annual cost of $254 billion on investors.

How pervasive is corporate fraud?

We noticed these missing from the store a while back. Looks like they are gone. From slate.

The World of Crackers Has Lost a Giant

Things nonagenarians would tell their younger selves. From Sahil Bloom.

Life Lessons from 1,000 Years

A good read from the BBC.

The chilling experiment which created the first vaccine

This showed up in my news feed. The surprising part is there is a guinea pig rescue organization.

Dozens of dumped guinea pigs found along I-35, in Austin parks

There are two outrageous facts here. First, why wasn’t this done decades ago, as part of Civil Defense? Second, why is the private sector handling this? Every public facility, especially fire departments and hospitals, should have had this already. I am also perplexed as to why the military has been so behind on various new power technologies, but that is another subject. From PBS.

Louisiana is building electricity hubs to power communities after a disaster. Here’s how they work