Covid-19 is long enough away now that we should look at what happened and decide what we want to to next time there is a pandemic. One thing we could do is challenge trials of vaccines. This would have sped up vaccine deployment hugely and saved time and huge amounts of money. Reading books like Vaxxers there were several vaccines ready for early testing in the first weeks of 2020. But it still…
In 2010 the South African World Cup had a terrible football, the Jabulani It was too smooth resulting in serious problems. The football had a lot less seam which the technology at the time was not ready for Jabulani: eight thermally bonded panels, unusually short/shallow seams The 2010 ball had shallow thin seams When you kick a football really fast a layer of air develops around it that…
Green Collective solar farm only figure was a record % At 2:30 today, Ireland’s solar share may have been about 51% of total electricity demand , once imports and domestic rooftop solar are included. Calculation: Solar = grid solar + solar imports + domestic solar = 1.16 + 0.41 + 0.58 = 2.15 GW Demand = grid demand + domestic solar = 3.66 + 0.58 = 4.24 GW Solar share = 2.15 / 4.24 = 50.7% Domestic…
I made a timeline of all the people in We Didn't Start the fire when Bridget Bardot passed away. It got popular and put in newspaper stories. Then three weeks later Nathan Yau makes a timeline of all the people in We Didn't Start the Fire and uses the Bardot passing hook my graph had. But he never mentions my graph His graph has a few ideas I am going to take to improve my next version. And Yau…
AI can cost more than human workers now This is an Axios headline but the tldr is that once an LLM can do your job it will undercut you the next year. This is the article and it focuses on token and infrastructure costs. Not cleaning up messes or other times a person needs to be in the loop. For example "Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token…
From Greencollective I think this 29% figure (1207MW out of ) is actually close to 50% of the electricity in Ireland. In Ireland small scale solar is shown as a fall in demand. the metrics measure solar farms and small scale production is used on site or locally and not shown in the full supply figures only in demand reductions. " Of the cumulative solar capacity , 1,322 MW comes from…
I made a bet early in 2025 that China would reduce its coal usage for electricity in 2025. The bet is here and I blogged about it before here A bet has been accepted between u/TrueCryptographer982 and u/cavedave for $10. That according to Ember Energy statistics China will create less electricity from coal in 2025 than it did in 2024. David taking the prediction that it will be less. And we can…
I was in Luxembourg recently and saw 4 cars when I was there. Their registration plates were 1396, 1871, 2383 and 8852 This made me wonder if I could estimate the total number of cars in Luxembourg. This is the German Tank problem where the British in WW2 found some serial numbers on German tanks in north Africa and wanted to use those to guess how many tanks had been produced. If you are sure the…
What do we do about a huge amount of energy no longer flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz? " Households urged to cut fuel use as Ireland braces for oil crisis" Walking, cycling, putting on a jumper and keeping the heat lower are good ideas but on a global scale they won't effect the price of energy. And even on the Irish scale won't delay problems by a lot. We can conserve joules and we can…
Cities around the world follow Zipf's law. The second city is a certain percentage smaller, third smaller again etc. With Dublin at 592,713 , Zipf (α=1) predicts the second city should be around 296,000 . Belfast is actually 348,005 — about 17% larger than the law would predict Cork at 222,333 (rank 3) fits pretty well — Zipf predicts ~197k.
Soon you will only trust people you know. I have been learning a fun programming language called Gleam . And I wanted to read a book on it. The one book on it I could find was by someone called Julian Lornfield. Who has written over a dozen books in 2025 each on a different topic in computers. Theres no photo of them on the internet other then this amazon author photo. No linkedin. No youtube…
I predicted in 2024 that 10% of us would 6kg of bodyweight this year . Here is how an even bigger effect might happen. GLP-1 drugs start going off patent in India, China , Turkey, Canada, Brazil March 2026 Usually when drugs go off patent the price drops dramatically ( 32% in one year 80% in 8 years ) And as price drops people take more of something. I am not sure how much 'importing from India'…
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal. As something gets more efficient more not less of it is used. This is going to happen to software. If a developer can produce more features and products witht he help of AI that will increase the demand for developers not…
In Cogitosus’s Life of St Brigid the Virgin translation Liam de Paor St Brigid does a fair division into 3 equal parts. The algorithm used is not explained. "[She divides a silver dish exactly into three] Her miracles are great, but this one is especially admired. Three lepers came, asking for alms of any kind, and she gave them a silver dish. So that this would not cause discord and contention…
I remember hearing years ago that real cheeseburgers could only happen after industrialisation, greenhouses and freezing as the ingredients. On the impracticality of a cheeseburger. This is also a tale of Malthusian constraints for example you would have killed cattle after they fattened over the summer. You could kill them anytime but hunger was so common the best time was nearly always picked.…
I made a graph of when people in "We didn't start the fire" were born, did the act referenced in the song and died. Because Bridget Bardot died people found it interesting that only three people. Chubby checker, Bob Dylan and Bernie Goetz remain alive of those mentioned in the song. The reddit post of the graph got popular and it was picked up by a few online newspapers. People Magazine , The Poke…
An Irish woman named Emma invented an the Animaniacs song listing the Countries of the World and jumped whenever a country that hasn't been invaded by Britain is mentioned. Her video is here Below is the lyrics with the countries she jumps for marked in RED . United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama Haiti, Jamaica, Peru, Republic Dominican, Cuba, Carribean Greenland, El Salvador too. Puerto Rico,…
Theres a rule of thumb in AI agents where they should only be able to call 40 apis. After that confusion between different systems becomes a problem. Cursor has a hard limit of 40 in its MCP setup for example. This i think could be a cognitive limit (like Dunbars number ). The documentary The Price of Everything describes how Stefan Edlis an art collector only collects 40 artists (and 200 works of…
I have made two bets on climate recently. I believe coal usage for electricity by China will be lower in 2025 than it was in 2024. Using Ember Energy as a data source. And I will take a $10 bet on that at 50:50 odds. and one on world coal usage. I think this year 2025 will have lower coal usage for electricity in the entire world than 2024. But if any of the years coming up do I will win this bet.…
Pumped storage is cool. We have too much energy at night and not enough at peak times. So saving some electricity up is a good idea. One such scheme is €650m hydroelectric energy storage which will be able to store as much as 296 Megawatts (MW), with a daily storage capacity up to 2,175MWh of electricity. And employee 50 people long term. It is just in the process of getting planning permission…
If you pick early words in wordle that have a lot of the commonly used letters you are likely to get to the correct word guess faster. But say you were lazy and want to use the same 2 or 3 words all the time and then look at what letters hit or nearly hit to find the next word to guess. the best pair of words is 'raise' and 'clout' which leaves an expected remaining 5.1 words that could be the…
I think grid batteries could pay for themselves in 18 months in Ireland. In January I calculated this as taking 3 years. Solar in May and June were enough here that it caused a bigger drop in wholesale price than usual during the day. You can see this as electricity prices drop below night time prices during the afternoons now. This means that if you have a cheap enough battery it is economically…
I w atched passport to Pimlico. A 1949 fantasy about the ability to buy fruit, clothes etc without rationing. The post war labor government that introduced the NHS kept strict reasons and export controls. The film is effectively wish fulfilment about these being removed. The 19 families in the besieged nation, in the bombers out ruins off Post WW2 London, build an outdoor swimming pool. Something…
1. Straight Edge and Compass Euclidean Constructions From the time of ancient Greece, geometers have been fascinated by what can be built using only two tools: a compass and a straightedge. These "Euclidean constructions" formed the foundation of classical geometry. You can copy a line segment, bisect an angle, draw perpendiculars Euclid's Elements are full of constructions and theorems that are…
In the Summer of 2026 there will be shock reported when solar energy supplies the majority of the power to the grid. When utility-scale solar reached a record output of 719MW during the early afternoon on August 31, rooftop solar is also estimated to have reached a record high output of 399MW . Demand at that time was 4300MW. This won't happen this year. but I think it will in 2026 and when it…