What with the weather turning nippy, and the planet turning hot, and marvel of marvels, at the same time, the pond has had trouble getting up of late in the morning to contemplate the herpetarium, and even more trouble finding reference to that story featured in The Conversation, Global warming to bring record hot year by 2028 – probably our first above 1.5°C limit ...
The pond anxiously scanned the top of the reptile digital edition, but alas drew a terra nullius ...
The notion of "perverting the English language" is deeply weird and perverted, it being a matter of pride for those devoted to the language that it is flexible, inventive, and capable of responding in new ways as matters arise ...
Indeed, the OED spends a considerable amount of time tracking new offerings, such as deepfake, antigram and groomzilla... and the pond noted some new insults, such as lamester, crazy-pants, and freako, though the most likely seemed to be dish dog ...
Rather than waste time on cackling Claire offering a dish best served cold and using the notion of filthy preverts to hide her fear and loathing of trans folk, the pond thought it might just do a Humpty Dumpty ... with this coming after the wise old egg celebrated the notion of 364 unbirthdays ...
Why the pond doesn't spend each day running a little gobbet from Alice in Wonderland must remain a mystery, because frequently the pond feels like it's in a reptile wonderland, and that the likes of cackling Claire live on a diet of bacon fat and bullshit ...
But before all this wordplay started, alert readers will have noted a reference to terra nullius, and that was of course a chance to do a segue to the treat of the day, the terminal uninhabited desert known as the hole in the bucket man's mind ...
Nonetheless the pond can make a start ...
And then the pond can return to our Henry ...
Early on a Friday and yet again the lizard Oz editorialist is doing the hard yards, and the pond began to wonder just how much money the reptiles had to hand these days to cultivate reptile columnists. Such stale offerings, and to mangle a quote, such meagre portions ...
Still, as we've been talking of preverts, there was always fifty shades of grey and a chance to nuke the planet yet again ...
If the fifty shades of grey man had done nothing else, that excuse to run the Pope was worth its weight in gassing and nuking the planet ...
As for the rest, sadly the pond has heard it all before ... the only interest is in which banal snaps the reptiles will introduce ...
After that snap of Malware's monstrosity, look at the terrifying snap of hideous windmills they've inserted into the next gobbet ...
Well it wouldn't be a piece about nuking the planet without the usual bullshit figures, but the pond has already been there and done that, and already linked to the CSIRO's The question of nuclear in Australia's energy sector, and is so tired by having to do it again, and is perfectly happy for other countries to spend oodles of cash developing the technology, or improving maple syrup for that matter, and should it all work out for the best, appreciates the offer by the fifty shades of grey man to have one of the units in his backyard ...
And so for those who were unfamiliar with the fifty shades of grey man, to a short final gobbet and the big reveal that he has lobbying skin in the game ...
The World Nuclear Association?
It even has a carefully neutered wiki, but perhaps you might be better off at the wiki about the debate ...
There is controversy over whether nuclear power is sustainable, in part due to concerns around nuclear waste, nuclear weapon proliferation, and accidents. Radioactive nuclear waste must be managed for thousands of years and nuclear power plants create fissile material that can be used for weapons.
Meanwhile, before publishing, the pond went back to check ... and nope, no sign of the yarn where it mattered ... and yet in a rival rag, the story ran last night ...
Once again the cartoon's of a size and the pond can celebrate the detail ...
"the OED spends a considerable amount of time tracking new offerings," Now the OED Updates post claims a mere 600,000 words for English (of which most people only speak/read/write about 40,000 and mainly stay within 20,000 for regular usage. So, like most of us I guess, I have a set of words I know and regularly use, and an additional set of which I just know the meaning).
ReplyDeleteHowever:
"According to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks language usage trends, the English language currently tops a whopping 1 million distinct words."
https://www.dictionary.com/e/how-many-words-in-english/
But:
"It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly 1 million words (although most linguists would take that estimate with a chunk of salt, and some have said they wouldn't be surprised if it is off the mark by a quarter-million); that tally includes the myriad names of chemicals and other scientific entities. Many of these are so peripheral to common English use that they do not or are not likely to appear even in an unabridged dictionary."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-words
Well my vocabulary contains some names of chemicals, eg 'sodium chloride' and 'carbon monoxide', 'carbon dioxide' and 'xenon tetrafluoride ' and so on - is that really so "peripheral" ?
PS: "XeF4 was the first discovered binary compound of a noble gas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_tetrafluoride
Oh my, possibly the all-time greatest English poem:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
Re Ulla Secher, is that what those people waste lifetimes masturbating over ?
ReplyDeleteAs to Holely Henry, either he has both a huge range and quantity of reading, or an incredible memory for every little thing he has ever read, or that took a very big total of 100watt globe's worth of electricity to do all the searching and reading and copying and whatever. And who really cares about even one single thing he's said ?
Like: "Weaponised soon thereafter, 'terra nullius' was transformed into a shorthand for the nation's original sin." "the nation's"? What nation ? This all started right from the early days when there was just a bunch of separate small colonies, each committing its own version of "original sin".
But really, who cares ? None of the 'settlers' gave much of a damn for any fancy laws anyway - they just took what they wanted and did whatever was required to dispose of the "abos". And we kept on doing that until very recently in our nation's history.
Indeed - Henry continues last week’s assumption that a few broad statements from colonial authorities were sufficient to absolve said authorities from any blame for their total lack of enforcement of said platitudes.
DeleteBtw, does Henry have anything in the way of legal qualifications? Not that a complete lack of them would prevent him demonstrating his natural authority. All you need to do is toss around a couple of quotes from Swiss and German jurists and watch the arguments of those perky blacks and their whitey lickspittles just crumble away.
I don't believe our Henry has any formal legal qualifications, Anony, his whole career has been in economics. Just his own unquestioning belief in his capacity to do a bit of reading and hence be an 'expert' in anything he puts his magnificent mind to.
DeleteSo, now onto the 100watt globes scene: Cameron England: "Paradoxically, Chalmers has made the task of bringing gas to the rescue more difficult by subjecting it to price controls, a burden likely to retard investment in new exploration and development." Now is he really that incredibly thick, or is he just "weaponising" his stupidity ? After all this time he can't seem to get that yes, gas will do the job: hydrogen gas and ammonia gas, not expensive and wasteful and planet heating fossil gas.
ReplyDeleteThen: "No mention is made of where the electricity will come from to power all the electric vehicles the government wants Australians to own." Why, it'll come from the sun, a lot of it via solar panels on building roofs, and a lot from wind power generators when the sun don't shine, instead of trying to over-supply the daily grid.
So anyway: "And the case for nuclear power in Australia is strengthening all the time, particularly for the use of the latest technology in nuclear generation, the small modular reactors." Oh but of course - there's scores of them out and about already and hundreds more to come, and they are just so cheap and so quick to build, and they don't require a skilled workforce to operate and manage and maintain them, and there's absolutely no problem in disposing of spent fuel (who mentined synroc ?).
Now who, I wonder, stands to gain from all this ? It can't be Roopie, so who is it ?
Hmmm - Fifty shades Man seems to be comparing ‘costs’ of SMRs and renewables by plucking numbers from some otherwise unidentified piece of accounting. If that is what he is doing, he should be more precise with his terminology. Assuming the accounting is run with some or other version of Internal Rate of Return, it is a bit precious to talk about spreading capital costs - amortizing - over the claimed life of the equipment.
ReplyDeletePerhaps as a mining person, he never moved away from the pitch put to various silly governments of multiplying initial yield from a mine, without discounting, for the expected life of reserves at that rate of yield, and claiming that was the ‘value’ of the project - so howabout a lease to deliver these piles of dollars, Minister?
He blithely tosses in his claim that one technology needs kilometres of transmission lines, while the other doesn’t; but doesn’t mention that SMRs are not conveniently scaleable, whereas solar and wind are.
So, rather than a comparison of investment proposals, it is - no surprise - a simple piece of advocacy for his favoured technology, presented in a way that will convince the Nationals - including those who claim to be trained economists, like the Canavan.
The bit about not needing "kilometres of transmission lines" is of course based on the presumption that 'SMR' nuclears can simply be built where the current fossil fuel generators are sited. Which may be true, as in the case of Victoria's LaTrobe Valley, and it may not; perhaps NIMBY rules will apply - after all, who wants an SMR near their house.
Delete