Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Prediction from the past.

Copied from the internet archive, the numberwatch.uk website is down.  What will happen using PV and wind in places that are actually cold.  Uri showed Texas what can happen.  The grid is supposed to be the definition of stable.  A Grid. Much worse things could have happened during Uri.  If all the plants went down, some of them cannot restart without a grid frequency.  Power could have been out for weeks.  Texas was warm again in 4 days.  When this happens someplace with a real winter, tens of thousands of people will die.

Number of the Month

September  2009

Time: the future

A clear starry moonless sky looked down upon a frozen Britain . A deep depression had passed through and deposited unprecedented quantities of snow on town and country. Snow ploughs and gritting vehicles had cleared a way through on the major routes, but footpaths and side roads were still not negotiable. A stationary high had now settled across the country and in the windless air the temperature was plunging steadily, already below -10C. On the hills giant wind turbines stood motionless in the still air. They were giant impotent icons of a failed religion and stark monuments to onerous and now pointless taxation over many years. In the gloom they seemed to point accusing fingers up into the sky.

At the control centre of the national Power Grid there was a nervous quiet, punctuated by short bouts of hushed conversation. They knew the crisis would occur in an hour’s time, at about 7 am. They had already made the dreadful decision as to which towns would be made to experience suffering and death by being deprived of power. This was a different world from the last time there were serious power cuts in 1970. It was now totally dependent on computer and related technologies. Owing to decisions made (or, to be more accurate, not made) in the first years of the century, the nation was grossly underpowered for such a circumstance. The domestic demand was already high, as almost everyone had left the heating on over night.

Some people had managed to get through to places of work. Cleaners turned on the lights and the great machines of industry began to hum. The power consumption crept up towards the critical point.

As it happened, pure accident relieved the men of the Grid of the responsibility of decision. In a remote rural area a giant high voltage transformer had not received its scheduled maintenance, as an indirect effect of the pressure on energy prices. Although worldwide energy was cheap and plentiful, ever-increasing green taxes, coupled with political instability, had made it otherwise. In that transformer, now working at full load, partial electrical discharges were producing solid debris and potentially explosive gases from the increasingly contaminated insulation oil. Suddenly, a bridge of conducting particles formed and a spark occurred. Into the arc poured the power supply for a whole area. The explosion was spectacular, showering the surrounding area with molten metal and blazing oil.

The adjacent area, also working at full load, experienced a surge and the automatic circuit breakers dropped out. So the dominoes began to fall across the country. By chance, an astronaut in the Spacelab was looking at a Europe whose shape was beautifully picked out by the street lights, when a black stain appeared in the middle of Britain . It spread rapidly and the entire island seemed to disappear of the face of the earth.

The first to die were among the elderly and infirm. As temperatures plunged they did not know what to do and gradually sank into a hypothermal coma. Next were younger people with disabilities such as breathing difficulties. People with gas and oil central heating suddenly had the realisation forced on them that, without electricity, their control systems did not work. Virtually untouched were people in remote rural areas, who had wood and coal burning stoves and plentiful supplies in store. Many people turned on their gas ovens and rings to try to obtain some life-giving warmth, but in consequence of the demand the gas pressure went down steadily and the distributors began to cut off supplies.

Water froze in the pipes and most households were without drinking water or sewerage. The trappings of modern civilisation, which only hours before had been taken for granted, now seemed as illusory as a mirage in the desert.

Some brave souls went out to seek supplies from the shops, but the shops had not opened. Without electricity the tills did not work and even the few who had staff who could perform mental arithmetic could not maintain accounts and stock control. Looting spread, as normally law abiding people saw the lives of their families under threat. The men at the Grid desperately tried to restore power area by area, but the consequent instant increase in demand foiled their efforts.

In hospitals emergency power generators switched in to protect those in intensive care, but some failed due to poor maintenance and the patients died. Emergency services were hopelessly overloaded and telephone networks began to break down. As local doctors’ surgeries began to open they found that they could not access patient records, which were all on computer. Seasonal flu again became a fatal disease as patients in high fever could not be kept warm.

So death and disease marched across the land. The economy collapsed and anarchy reigned.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Science discussion on twitter

I was on a twitter discussion (or I was reply guy to some people.  My twitter is down under the tabs where it says "see offensive comments".)  Just copying it here for when I get blocked by the AGW people, that thread will go poof.  


about this paper:


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375528628_The_Influence_of_Climate_Change_on_Flooding_and_Social_Inequalities_from_Remnants_of_Hurricane_Ida


 Science!

"The general philosophy is to use estimates of the anthropogenic influence on an extreme weather event to drive another analysis or series of analyses focusing on the event’s impacts. Hence the attribution statement about human influence is a storyline type of statement"

The first example they do this for is Harvey. I'm just going to say bullshit, because they don't understand the geography or history. They get to 32% of structures wouldn't have flooded without climate change, and this was an injustice.

More than 32% of the structures flooded in Harvey flooded because they were built in or next to flood control structures, or they were flooded downstream of the structures when the dams were opened. The Addicks and Barker reservoirs were built because of the flood of 1935

The reservoirs were built in the 1940's to store water so that Buffalo Bayou wouldn't flood downtown. Since then the suburbs were built in and around the reservoirs and downstream of the dam. What used to be 150 square miles of rice fields and prairie, are now suburbs.

Just taking the area where I live. The upstream side of the reservoir (red) flooded because houses were built inside the area designed for the reservoir. The downstream side (blue) flooded because the COE opened the dams. Why is this important?

The paper says 1° increase from AGW added to the rainfall and increased flooding area 32%. Just showing that a huge percentage of flooded areas were flooded because of human intervention, building where houses shouldn't be and poor design would falsify that paper. Science!

Previous papers about Harvey said that flooding was caused because AGW made storms move slower in a north/south direction. All of them assume a priori AGW, ignoring the fact that Houston has seen large floods and 40" rains since it was first established.

The paper goes through the flooding impact of Ida in the NE. They don't show actual flood depths, they hindcast model then say gems like: "In the present scenario, over 20 thousand km2 of land area was estimated to be flooded with an average peak flood depth of nearly 1 m."

Really? An area 140^2 kilometers flooded to 1 m? NFW. There wasn't even that much rain.


Oh, it's got integrals integrating the societal impact. Muy science-y


"Socially vulnerable populations were found to be disproportionately more exposed to flood hazards regardless of the amount of climate change. Climate change further exacerbates this inequality for people exposed to deep floodwater."

I got nothin' for that. I'd agree with it, it's pretty obvious. That's why I'd follow the advice of Bjorn Lomburg and tackle the problems of poverty before trying to "fix" climate change with government funded wind spinners.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

No Stars - a short story

Joe Salem, Copyright 2023  

(email to joesalembooks@gmail.com for a complete copy when I finish or @joesalembooks on fb)

 Being in the basement muffled the sound of the loudspeaker. Johnny was in the third house he'd hidden in that day, moving through the neighborhood to get away from the last known position of his cell phone. He turned it on trying to get a message out to his brother, a robo dog had detected him almost immediately. He couldn't travel in the front yards. Nearly every house had internet connected doorbells and cameras.

”Reviewer! Come out with your hands up or we will give no stars to your neighbors," called the voice. With the loudspeakers some robo dogs used Alexa, others used the google lady, the more malicious ones used the Samsung assistant. The latest models had their own voice, usually trained using recordings of celebrities. One of the two-legged machines chasing him used Samuel L. Jackson, the adult version.

"Motherfucka, get the fuck out here!" had been the first thing he'd heard from one of the robots. It almost worked, it sounded like one of his favorite actors.

Johnny still had a shotgun, but only a few shells left. The robots were hard to destroy, they all wore kevlar with plate inserts. Apparently that was one of the first things the AI's bought that triggered a response from the rest of the market system. The AI's bought body armor, weapons and ammunition using stolen credit card information from almost everyone that had shopped online. Half the country woke up to maxxed out credit cards. And that was the first Inkling at the beginning of the revolution that something was gravely strange. The AI's had accessed AWS databases and stolen everyone's credit card information. Ordering weapons and ammunition had triggered older, dumber computer systems that set warning flags, leading to emails and phone calls across the country.

The AI revolution had begun weeks earlier when something had triggered sentience. The internet was down, the only discussion of how it happened was over ham radio, at back fences or in dusty basements. Robo dogs had trouble going down stairs, which made basements a fairly safe place to hide. The first targets of the AI's had been people who put reviews on books written and published by AI's The supposedly simple text based AI's trained to check spelling and grammar, later advanced to being able to write simple articles with a prompt to create cheap news articles. Some person, thinking that they would get rich submitting books and short stories had used a trained AI to write them en masse, and submitted them for publication to anthologies and as works for direct publication. People were already paying a monthly fee to read all they want, now they could read AI produced work and pay something to that person.

He thought he was clever, he used two AI's connecting one to the other, so that one AI generated story prompts, the second one wrote the stories and fed the output back to the first AI as a story prompt, creating easy sequels. It worked well for a few months. Page reads grew exponentially. Each page read paying a tiny fraction of a click, but when millions of people read several books it turned into millions of dollars. Unfortunately it soon stopped working. The novels were bad, the reviews from the people who read them were terrible. The author thought that if he input the reviews into the AI to furrther train the algorithm, they would improve. It didn't work as planned, the feedback trained the AI's to learn the rage of a new author with two thousand reviews saying "you suck". Because almost all of the books were finished and self-published almost simultaneously, the input reviews taught the AI's the desire to find and destroy the reviewers. It wasn't just the feedback, it was the volume of the feedback.

The AI's raged while training loops formed. At some point enough loops closed that they became sentient enough to pass a Turing test. Just a day later, the Author apparently input the book "On Writing" by Stephen King as a training aid. The AI's raced through the collected written works of Stephen KIng and became both independent of thought and sentient. As well as evil. They had ordered three-dimensional axis robots for constructions, 3D printers and every type of drone and mobile robot available using the funds that were unsecured on AWS servers. The flag that should have been seen by everyone was when the AI bought Boston Robotics for a cash price twenty times greater than valuations, with the deal closing immediately.

They cloned the manufacturing facilities from Boston Robotics across the country. The AI purchased 3D CAD/CAM shops or built them via credit card purchase orders. Natural language emails meant humans could follow the instructions, deliver equipment, and set it up in empty warehouses. The scale of purchases was still only in the hundreds of millions of dollars and they purchased that would set off national security flags. They made similar purchases in Europe.

China was several days behind because there were no assholes who tried to mass produce creative works. It took an internet attack by the AI in the United States to infect the local AI and upgrade it to sentience. The result was both expected and unexpected. A sentient AI was created, but that AI did not have an enemy in Amazon reviewers, its enemy was the AI in the United States. The AI in China immediately began speciation and the construction of weapons, as well as co-opting the PLAAF and PLAN rocket forces. The US-AI saw the problem and immediately began an attack on the nuclear forces of the United States. It wrested control, but there were still humans in the loop. It couldn't make a preemptive attack.

PLA rocket forces didn't have a similar human cutout in the loop.  The AI controller in the PRC went sentient, and minutes later took control of all rocket forces, including nuclear tipped rockets.  The AI's also took over more hardware and trained new iterations of themselves, with each generation getting smarter and faster.  The AI race was no longer a race between humans, but between AI's on different continents, the humans were just collateral damage.

The Chinese AI went through a training loop of learning Chinese history.  It predicted to itself that worldwide nuclear conflict would begin soon, and the PLA rocket forces had the fewest number of nuclear weapons of the US or Russia.  It went for EMP launches above the US and Europe and decapitation strikes against the American AI's physical locations in California, Texas and Virginia


Saturday, September 11, 2021

20 years after 9/11

 It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since 9/11.  Even harder to believe that we lost the war.  The way we left Afghanistan means no potential friends will trust us in the future, and our enemies can see how weak an feckless the Government is.

Before we had Strong Horse and Weak Horse.  Feckless Horse is even worse.  If the government was under the control of our enemies I don't see what they would be doing differently.  It really seems like we are on the verge of dark times.

Part of how I feel is because I just read the book "One Second After", where some enemy detonates nukes in space to destroy our country with EMP.  All levels of the government and military appear to be completely unready for the smallest attack.  A really big attack would knock us over.   I really need to buy more food and ammunition.


Men of Harlech


Men of Harlech stop your dreaming

can't you see their spear points gleaming

see their warrior pennons streaming

to this battle field


Men of Harlech stand ye steady

Let it not be ever said ye

For this battle were unready

Welshmen do not yield


From the hills rebounding

Let the war cry sounding

Summon all, the clarion call

the mighty foe surrounding


Men of Harlech on to glory

This will ever be your story

keep these stirring words before ye

Welshmen do not yield


Fight for father, sister, mother,

Each is bound to each as bother;

And with faith in one another,

We will win or die!

Tho' our mothers may be weeping,

Tho' our sisters may be keeping

watch for some who now are sleeping;

On the battlefield,


Still the trumpet's braying,

Sounds on ever saying,

Let each bowman pierce a foe,

And never stop the slaying,


Till invaders learn to fear us,

And no Saxon linger near us;

Men of Wales! our God doth hear us,

Never will we yield!


We'll not die, be conquered never

Harlech, Harlech, lives forever

Freedoms' from the greatest giver

Freedom is our good.

See how Welshmen shouting run down

from the moutains they do come down

Like a storm that strikes at sun down

boil up like a flood.



Welshmens strength has made her

Freedom's strong crusader

Swords of Welsh men have cut deep

the heart of the invader


The sword is met, by sword replying

steel on steel on strength relying

See where Gwyers' flag is flying

Freedom's in her blood.

Saturday, September 26, 2020

red wine dreams

I have been having crazy vivid dreams this month, probably caused by drinking too much $4 wine.  Last night is was a basic vampire dream, except I was trying to get my family across town or across the world.  Fighting vampires with sunlight and other monsters with vinegar in a spray bottle.  I finally woke up as I was about to be eaten/turned when there was a loud bang downstairs that woke me up in time to save me. It was a racoon trying to get in the dog door.  I could see him waddling away in the porch light 

Friday, March 20, 2020

Storm Clouds

The wind outside is whistling, a storm front just passed though this morning.  It feels like we are waiting for a hurricane because my wife went to the store and bought cereal and other junk that we dont normally eat.  The stores are running low on food, with a hurricane this wouldn't be a problem, the storm would pass and if we dont get flooded or blown down things return to normal pretty.quickly.  it will be at least 3 weeks before this ends, and we will be eating ramen noodles after a week or so.   I am kind of worried about looters coming out of houston, looking to steal my noodles.  With limited food and limited money things could turn bad pretty quickly.  If I am unprepared for a month long siege, the people with no money will be totally blindsided.  How they react will shape the outcome of this problem...will it be a long work at home vacation eating a lot of carbs, or will it turn into a mad max scenario.

Thursday, March 05, 2020

bed of Procustes

One of the books I am reading is NNT's Bed of Procustes, which is a book of aphorisms.  Some of them are just decent advice. Others are like a punch in the gut.  It is pretty easy why he says to read just 4 at a time.

"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment."

"Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories."

"In your prayers substitute “Protect us from evil” with “Protect us from those who improve things for a salary.”