Interesting Links for 03-08-2022

[andrewducker]

1. From next summer all UK visitors to Europe must be fingerprinted and provide a facial biometric

(tags:biometrics UK Europe travel )

2. The Age of Brain-Computer Interfaces Is on the Horizon

(tags:cybernetics )

3. First person charged under Britain's Treason Act for 77 years

(tags:UK crime royalty )

4. Pumped storage under the Alps could be a game-changer for renewable energy in Europe

(tags:electricity storage Europe Switzerland water )

5. I sometimes find the scale of things like YouTube boggling

(tags:YouTube scale )

6. 'Irredeemable' 'Batgirl' movie gets 'shelved' by Warner Bros. despite $70M price tag

(tags:movies batman dc epicfail )

7. If your body replaces its cells every seven years then how do tattoos work?

(tags:tattoos biology )

8. There shouldn't be private schools

(tags:schools inequality )

9. You are allowed to be attracted to people.

(tags:attraction sex )

Comments

[armiphlage]

4: Variable-speed turbines? I didn't know they had those - you'd lose a lot of energy if the speed doesn't match the blade angle. Maybe they can change the blade pitch?

[andrewducker]

Unfortunately the information I can find is limited.
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/hydro-power/large-hydropower-solutions/generators/variable-speed

[armiphlage]

"Elimination of operation modes prone to hydraulic instability or cavitation" suggests they're doing SOMETHING involving the blades, not just tweaking the generator side of things.

[fub]

1: Japan has had this in place for decades now. Upon arrival, prints are taken of your index finger and they take a photo of you. You get a sticker with a QR code on it in your passport that references that info in the immigration systems. Upon leaving, the code is scanned and things are checked.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, lots of places do. EU is late to the party here.

[zz]

hooray for the normalisation of creeping human rights violations...

[fanf]

Looks like Nant de Drance has half the generating capacity of Dinorwig (900MW vs 1800MW) and twice the storage capacity (20GWh vs 9GWh)

It is probably big enough to be helpful for Switzerland but Europe as a whole would need a lot more capacity than that; I wonder if there is enough space for it?

[andrewducker]

See the final link in the article...

Plumbing the debts...

[hairyears]

Yes, I saw that '600,000 potential sites' and discounted it as hype.

Taking it less cynically, I would say that this installation is, at best, a single-digit percentage of what Europe needs to do: but they've got to start somewhere...

And it cost Two Billion Dollars.

That's actually pretty reasonable, for something we'll need to build another fifty- to a hundred of, in the context of The whole of the EU's energy infrastructure.

...Which we're going to end up rebuilding and renewing in the next two decades, as the unfolding disaster of Climate Change makes our current energy strategy untenable.

Lucky for the Swiss, too, that a country dependent on glaciers and permanent snowfields for it's water supply has found a reason for us all to pay for lots of pumps and pipework in the Alps.

Re: Plumbing the debts...

[andrewducker]

The 600k sites isn't hype as far as I can tell.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hydro-across-616818-sites/

But yes, we need to build out a lot more of those. It's just under a GW, and Europe needs (According to the article) another 150GW of storage by 2030. So we need to invest a lot of money in either pumped storage or massive amounts of batteries.

[hairyears]

The Alps are bigger than the whole of Wales, and some of those mountains have a lot more elevation.

The question isn't space, it's suitability and how much the energy utilities are prepared to spend; and that, in turn, is all about the governments that own those utilities.

There's also a question of the strategy.

Dinorwig is all about managing demand surges, and the 'slower' profile of the Nant de Drance puts it into a slightly different use-case: 'smoothing' over a 12- to 24-hour period, and this sounds a lot like a 500MW solar plant's 'storage battery', or the first tranche of a much larger wind-power programme's output-smoothing infrastructure.

1.

[stormclouds]

I don't understand the last paragraph of the EU fingerprinting article. It says it's not because of Brexit but it is. The article is written from a UK perspective and if it weren't for Brexit, we wouldn't be subjected to this. The fact that it's for all non-EU citizens is irrelevant here. Brexit is the reason this is affecting us.

I get that they're viewing the question as asking why this is being brought in rather than why are UK passport holders affected but it's annoying me.

[naath]

8, I agree, but housing segregation means mixing is limited

[channelpenguin]

Yes. I wanted to say this. As already happens in the UK, richer parents move house to get their kids into better-performing schools (house prices in the catchment areas of good schools are driven significantly higher).

They also fake being Catholic (or whatever).

Sigh.

[andrewducker]

Yup.

I moved to a good school catchment. Hugh persuaded a Catholic school to take his kid (I don't think he faked being a Catholic, just pretended to be a decent human being whose child would be a credit to their school).

[naath]

And making kids commute is bad for them

[naath]

my parents paid for 11+ tutoring, cheaper than private fees

[channelpenguin]

... but tutoring only solves the academic achievement issues. It does nothing for the social ones.

[naath]

True

[dewline]

The news about the Batgirl movie is disturbing, given the larger context of other DCEU projects.

[andrewducker]

It feels appalling that they got all the way through development, filming, and editing before going "Hang on, this is just terrible!"

Did nobody look at anything before then?

[hairyears]

Yeah, this ought to be a case of "Call in the Script-Doctor!" and hope that they salvage something of the movie.

So I'll make three guesses:

1. They've hit an intractable legal problem and they're cutting their losses - Is the story plagiarised, or has the rights-holder blocked production? Have Warner Music demanded a Billion-Dollar royalty for using ten seconds of music that's critical to the plot?
   
2. "That's not in the script I was given and I will sue you if you ever show that edit that makes me a sex worker!"... Or maybe, that subtext that a lead actor or actress has only just recognised as being a career-destroying "So now I'm a Gay Icon: great, but I now I won't get any more roles" - which could be seen as cowardly, but they would rather see a film canned than cut their lifetime earnings by ninety percent and get death threats from Christian Fundamentalists.
   
3. Political veto: is someone being a bit rude about Nazis? Has someone told them that there's an pervasive gay subtext that no amount of cutting-room butchery will eradicate, and warned them that the three most powerful ayatollahs in Christian America are going to lobby for a revenue-destroying 'X' rating?

All are more-or-less plausible; none of them peek above the threshold of being more likely than the explanation we've been given: the film's a seventy-million-dollar turkey and they'll take an even bigger hit to their share price if it flops.

[andrewducker]

Turns out the actual answer is: tax write-offs!
https://thedirect.com/article/batgirl-why-cancelled

[snippy]

Rumor I've seen is that it's a perfectly fine movie but they are moving back to theaters instead of streaming and it wouldn't recoup its costs in theater tickets, so it's more valuable as a tax write-off. But man, J.K. Simmons and Brendan Fraser? It had to be pretty good!

[bens_dad]

8 *Can* you ban private schools but still allow home-schooling ? When does a group of parents home-schooling each others children become a private school ?

There seems to be a trend for schools for the Autistic, which suggests that different children need different things from a school. If the state cannot provide your child with what it needs, is it right to stop someone else from providing it ?

In the UK we talk about the harm to society caused by people with Public School educations. Do we mean to include all private schools in this or just the fanciest ones ?

Oh, and our probable next minister is talking about taking away a tax-exemption (VAT) from private schools.
Whilst I don't think they should have this benefit, I worry that as soon as we take it away they will demand the money that the state is not paying to educate those children in a state school.

[snippy]

In the US children have an education entitlement regardless of their mental or physical state. Public schools have a legally-enforceable obligation to educate all children at no cost to the parents, even for autistic children, even for children with physical disabilities or learning disabilities.

[bens_dad]

Ah. We have something similar in the UK.

The trend I am talking about is for separate schools for children who would not have been diagnosed as autistic 20 years ago and who would have (just about) survived mainstream schools.
The question isn't whether they get education, but whether they get suitable education.

[snippy]

Yeah, the entitlement is to mainstreaming as much as possible - educating them with other children and only pulling them out of a regular classroom as necessary, e.g., for a reading tutor or a SPEd session.

[andrewducker]

As part of changes I'd definitely want to ensure that schools were catering to all students.
But that's part of the issue - there's less invective to make state schools work well when better off people can just opt out of them.