Jim

Off the beaten track.

[Alan @A1an_M]

So...

We're not allowed to buy air conditioners for our houses to cool them in hot summer weather, because we don't have enough electricity to power them, because the solar panels and wind turbines we installed to stop the planet getting hot in summer, don't work when it's hot and windless in summer, so we'd need to burn gas, oil and coal instead to power the AC to cool our houses, but we blew up the oil, gas and coal power stations to stop the planet getting hot in summer, but it's still hot in summer.

But it's still ok to install heat pumps in winter, heat pumps which are also air conditioners and use the same amount of electricity or more, but we still won't have enough electricity to power them on cold, dark, windless winter evenings, because solar panels and wind turbines don't work then either, and we blew up the gas, oil and coal fired power stations because they were making the planet too hot in winter as well as summer.

Have I missed anything?

🙄🤡🌍

[Yesterday's Britain, A Better Britain. @YesterdaysBrit1]

On this day fifty years ago, the great British heatwave of 1976 began.
That summer would be an exceptional one for many reasons, lasting months and bringing joy to Britain.
There have been hotter summers since, but none have been better.

[BlackPanthaa @BlackPanthaaYT]

Yes that was the problem, the marketing team 💀

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

What's happening here is that the systems -- say, criminal justice and policing, or education, or healthcare, or homebuilding, or immigration, or infrastructure, or transport -- that make up the system of systems that is the British state are *all* failing all at the same time. This might have been possible to hide in a Britain that had high enough economic growth that most people felt as though they were getting richer most years. But we have had stagnant growth, and stagnant wages, really, since 2008, and huge swathes of the country above the Wash and west of Oxford have near-emerging market standards of living. So the failures cannot be hidden, and the people (rightly) see fixing them as of paramount importance if we are to find our way back onto the path toward prosperity.

The problem is that not a single one of the Prime Ministers pictured below, or Andy Burnham, actually has a plan to solve it. They are too embedded with the British elites and narrative formers who, mostly, think that everything is going quite well, notwithstanding a few regrettable bumps on the road like Brexit. They are so wedded to the way the system of systems has worked in recent decades that they simply cannot conceive of an alternative. Until Britain gets a PM who can, and has the managerial ability to put a carefully considered plan into effect, and the political savvy to avoid the pitfalls, blast through the blockages and ameliorate the right people, then we shall continue cycling through Prime Ministers. Seven in a decade. The seven before lasted a combined 40 years.

[Geoff Norcott @GeoffNorcott]

Say what you like about the Tories, at least their coups were entertaining.

This is like a slow-motion car crash between two milk floats.

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

It's not an under-16 social media ban, it's digital IDs with better marketing

[🎸 Rock History 🎸 @historyrock_]

The story behind The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes.”

Pete Townshend wrote the song in 1971 for his Lifehouse project, a science-fiction rock opera. It was originally the theme song for the main villain (Jumbo), a powerful man who feels lonely and forced to be “the bad guy,” even though he believes he is good.

The personal inspiration came on June 9, 1970, after a concert in Denver. Townshend, who was married and following the spiritual teachings of Meher Baba, resisted the temptation of a groupie and wrote a prayer in his hotel room asking for the strength to control his impulses. From there emerged the lyrics about vulnerability and pent-up rage.

When Lifehouse was scrapped, the song made its way onto the album Who’s Next (1971). It begins as a soft acoustic ballad and explodes into powerful rock, reflecting the character’s inner conflict. Roger Daltrey sang it the day his dog died and considers it one of his favorites.

[John Duffield @jfwduffield]

This will be popular....... The most blatant Trojan horse imaginable. The British establishment are terrified of social media because it exposes just how incompetent & malign they really are.

[Inevitable West @Inevitablewest]

@leicesterliz People are angry because you're not listening to them, and your response is to attempt to silence them? Tyrants

[Fact @Fact]

A person needs just three things to be truly happy in the world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.

[Le Contemplateur @LeContempIateur]

Des milliardaires du monde entier se réunissent actuellement à Monaco pour le Grand Prix de Formule 1, et toi, on te dit de pas trop polluer avec ta voiture... 🤡

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers from Earth.

It communicates with us using a 23-watt transmitter.
Less than a refrigerator light bulb.

The signal takes 22 hours to reach us, traveling at the speed of light.

By the time it arrives, it's 20 billion times weaker than the power of a digital watch battery.

NASA's Deep Space Network picks it up using 70-meter dish antennas cooled to near absolute zero to reduce electronic noise.

The engineering required to hear a 23-watt signal from 24 billion km away is arguably more impressive than the spacecraft itself.

Launched 1977.
Still transmitting.
Still being heard.

We built something that works perfectly, 47 years later, in conditions no one has ever tested in.

That's what engineering for the long term looks like.

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

Energy use by AI data centres in the UK could cause emissions of 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide – as much generated by 2.7 million people over 10 years.

So while cow burps are blamed and farmers get punished with a carbon tax on fertiliser, the tech giants are rewarded with AI data centre contracts.

[Jim @pintopop]

My favourite historic computing comparison 👇 Back when software had to have *zero* bloat.

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

The Apollo Guidance Computer had:

• 4 KB of RAM
• 72 KB of storage
• A clock speed of 1.024 MHz

Your iPhone 16:

• 8 GB RAM
• 512 GB storage
• up to 4.04 GHz.

The iPhone is roughly 100,000,000x more powerful.

And yet, the AGC landed humans on the Moon six times with zero crashes.

Here's why: the software was written with constraints so tight that bugs had nowhere to hide. Margaret Hamilton's team coded in machine language, directly. No abstraction layers. No frameworks. No dependencies.

Every byte was deliberate.

We didn't go to the Moon despite having weak computers.
We went because weak computers forced engineers to be extraordinary.

[F. A. Hayek Quotes @FAHayekSays]

Hayek on why freedom is essential for progress:

“Whenever you have a community completely commanded by an authoritarian system, there is no evolution in a sense because better systems cannot prevail so long as the old system is maintained by force.”

“Evolution is made possible by freedom. What you get in unfree systems is due to the fact that the emergence of the better has been prevented.”

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[Alan @A1an_M]

I spent a large part of yesterday trying to explain to people who supposedly are proponents of science what a "confounding variable" is.

Rather than say the same thing again today to about 100 people in about 100 different replies, I'm going to write it all in one place, here.

When scientists do science, in the form of an experiment or study, they will ultimately write it up in a standard report format containing the same sections:

Abstract
Introduction
Method
Results
Discussion
References

One of the most important aspects of the Discussion is a critical analysis of what was done. What went well, what could have been done better, what should be done next time. In particular, the authors attempt to identify if there are any "confounders" which may have influenced the results and rendered them invalid.

Let's take the example of a medicine in a clinical trial. We might, if we are ethical scientists, want to study whether a particular medicine causes adverse effects to those taking it before letting it loose in the wild. So we might recruit some people for a trial, and divide them into two groups. The first receives the actual medicine, the second receives a placebo. We might then monitor the recruits for a few months (or, preferably, a much longer period) on a daily basis and note any illnesses suffered in both groups.

We would then do a statistical analysis on the results from the two groups. If the results of that analysis showed that there was no statistical difference in the levels and types of illness suffered in the two groups, we might then conclude that no adverse effects were caused by the medicine. If, on the other hand, there was a significant difference between the two groups, that would point towards the need for further study and might lead us to conclude that the medicine was the cause of the difference.

The key thing here with our experimental design is that we want to make sure that the two groups in the study - the experimental group who receive the medicine and the control group who do not - are, in every other way, identical. Because if they're not, those differences might have caused the effect we observed, rather than the differences we created in our experiment.

What factors might make these two groups different?

1. Age differences. If one group was older, we might expect they might suffer more illness than the younger group.
2. Gender. Dependent on the medicine, males or females might be more affected. If the groups weren't balanced for gender, this might distort the reported illness results.
3. Health differences. If one group had poorer general health than the other at the beginning of the trial, we might expect them to report more illness during the trial.

These are all examples of "confounding variables". Factors which we did not control but which might influence the outcome and render our results invalid.

So in our experimental design we would want to make sure the experimental group and the control group are closely matched for age, gender and health status.

Which brings me onto climate change.

Climate scientists contend that Carbon Dioxide created by human activity in the industrial age is causing global atmospheric temperatures to increase.

As evidence, they point to an increase in global atmospheric temperatures over the last 200 years or so.

So far so good. Temperatures have, broadly, risen during that time. There are plenty of other things to criticise about this hypothesis and about climate "science" in general but that is for another time.

Yesterday we saw, all over the media, headlines about new record May temperatures of 35 degrees at Kew and Heathrow, and below the headlines was text saying that experts were saying this was another example of evidence of how the climate is warming.

Now I don't deny that it's been hot the last couple of days - where I am it has been around 32 degrees - so I don't doubt that the May record may have been broken somewhere in the country.

But the specific problem I have is with the temperatures at Heathrow and Kew, or indeed anywhere close to London or a big urban area being used as the evidence that the May record has been broken,or that they are evidence of atmospheric warming.

Why? Because of a confounding variable.

When we say a temperature record has been broken, we need to make sure we are comparing apples with apples. So not only do we need to compare temperatures that were measured in the same site using the same type of equipment in both instances - we need to make sure that the sites themselves have not changed.

We know that modern urban areas create a "heat island" effect. The expanses of heat-retaining materials like concrete, asphalt and cement retain heat during the day and release it slowly overnight, leading to higher daytime and nighttime temperatures. Added to which are the many buildings and vehicles in urban areas generating their own heat. All of this means that temperatures in, or close to, an urban area are typically several degrees warmer than in countryside some distance away.

Given the expansion and urbanisation of London over the last century, this effect will only have grown over time.

Arup measured this effect in London and concluded that temperatures there are often 4.5 degrees hotter than in the surrounding countryside (see first comment for link).

This effect obviously varies between different parts of London, as shown on the heat map, and reduces as you move away from central London, but even at Kew, the effect is estimated to cause temperatures to be 0.9 degrees higher than would be the case if Kew was sited in the countryside.

And Heathrow clearly creates its own heat island effect given the scale of the airport and the big expanses of heat absorbing materials there.

So if we are going to use temperatures measured in, or close to, London as evidence of atmospheric warming, we have a problem. We have a significant confounding variable. The warming caused by the heat island effect is going to add to any warming in the atmosphere, and give us an exaggerated result.

You can perhaps forgive tabloid newspapers for running headlines about this, just quoting the raw temperatures measured. They want to make money and it being very hot outside is a great news story. And urban areas becoming increasingly hot in summer is an issue in its own right.

But what is unforgiveable is people who claim to be scientists using these measurements as evidence of atmospheric warming, when there's such a glaring confounding variable influencing the data.

How would a proper scientist deal with this confounder?

Well, they might say "from now on, we will only use temperatures from rural weather stations which are not subject to urban heat island effects, and we will only declare records on the basis of those measurements"

And they might say "we will not use temperature measurements from areas subject to urban heat island effects as evidence of atmospheric warming".

But the Met Office and the climate science people aren't saying that. They're going with the artificially inflated temperatures. Because they have an agenda to push, a vast Net Zero industry to sustain, research grants to chase, and any evidence, however shonky, which backs up the global warming narrative is welcome.

This isn't science!

[#Marcher @MarcherReborn]

32c on your Spanish holiday: “Excellent, let’s go for a beer”

32c at home: “Imminent death, roads turn into molten lava, schools closed, railways disrupted, Govt alerts issued”

[#Marcher @MarcherReborn]

And just like that one of the greatest brands on earth killed itself

[Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki @MatthewWielicki]

The UK just “smashed” its May temperature record… but here’s the part the Met Office conveniently leaves out:
The PREVIOUS record was set in 1922.

That’s 104 years ago.

Long before SUVs, private jets, or modern CO₂ emissions. Heathrow Airport didn’t even exist yet. The area was literally farmland and small villages.

So if a 1922 heatwave could produce nearly identical temperatures in a world with ~130 ppm less CO₂, maybe, just maybe, natural variability plays a much bigger role than the panic merchants admit.