tomo,
Blown out by £208m? Over the 736 subpostmasters who got dudded, that would cover £282,000 each. They might have saved quite a bit by just offering a flat £200,000 each. Less fun for the bureaucrats and lawyers though.

Maybe get them to make up the shortfall from their own pockets for a little empathy boost.

Josh Szeps talk with Jonathan Rauch was mildly amusing. The guest was introduced as having recently written a book about how the church might be the nemesis of "Trumpism". That set expectations one way, but it turned out that Rauch is an activist leftie, and his demands that Christians hold properly to their values of tolerance and putting aside fear came across (at least to me) as a mighty big do as I say, not as I do.

He was articulate though, and easy to listen to, just not at all convincing.

tomo,
Good coverage, and the comments were interesting. For all the appearance of "relentless improvement" in air safety, you're left wondering how many other places are getting by on alright so far. It's not like Washington DC's some sort of backwater.

Phil Clarke is most welcome to stay away.

John Anderson had a good guest, Aidan Morrison, for his podcast. Clear speaking on the madness of Australia's efforts towards Net Zero. Unfortunately, Anderson lets enthusiasm get the better of him rather a lot — interrupting to agree, etc. — which gets a bit irritating. The fellow knows what he's saying; let him say it.

Jo Nova covers the wing-clipping going on at USAID. I've long doubted Australia's equivalent, though not in such criminal terms. A lot of our overseas aid is tied to the recipient nation using Australian advisors/consultants. A lot of the money ends up in Australian hands anyway. Wouldn't be astonished to learn that there was outright theft going on too.

DaveS,
I meant to comment on the trolls at Climate Etc. I think it's particularly bad there because the articles are often sceptical, but have an academic air about them that might lend credibity to the case. The flame-wars in the comments allow the whole site to be dismissed as a hangout of extremists.

The Bushaw fellow turned up around a year ago (under the name ganon1950). Another turned up around that same time: George J Kamburoff; I always assumed that surname was synonymous with off-camber — he's here to divert.

Wrote an author-tallying Perl script a few years ago. Here's the tail of its report on Planning Engineer's posting:

1: sherro01
2: Pat Cassen
2: cerescokid
4: Wagathon
4: jacksmith4tx
6: burlhenry
9: jim2
10: Chris Morris
20: Joe K
31: B A Bushaw
ce.html total: 107

DaveS,
Yes, I went too far describing his view on intermittency as being a "red herring". Still, his wording:

Overcoming intermittency ... at best gets us around a molehill which will leave a huge mountain ahead.

I'm not sure the stability problem is as big as he says either. If the entire generating fleet had no inertia (i.e. all DC + inverter), the problem could be addressed (I believe) by careful time synchronisation (sub-millisecond, e.g. from GPS time signal), and setting a fixed phase for each generator based on where they are on the grid. You might even declare Greenwich to be "in phase", with 0V at the start of each second. Everything else gets its phase according to the propagation delay from there.

A big problem with this is that spinning generators would have great difficulty staying synchronised with a perfect 50Hz waveform. Just like a car engine, they slow as the load increases and speed up as it lightens. For decades, the deal has been 50Hz average over the whole day. Tall order to make it 50Hz fixed, every second of the day.

Separate grids? It's only money after all.

tomo,
Agree on NVG. In an urban setting, I suppose they show a bit more of what's between the point light sources, but colour and peripheral vision are a lot to trade away for that. NVG == not very good.

Robert

Thanks for link to the piece at Climate Etc. For what it's worth, my take on his attitude to intermittency is that he's not saying it isn't a problem, rather that the inability of renewables to provide reliability services is a bigger problem.

Reading the comments under the piece, they do seem to have a commenter straight out of troll central over there.

tomo,
Diversity over competence is stupid anywhere, and especially so in safety-critical jobs. It's likely to be one of the holes (in the Swiss cheese sense) leading to this disaster. To me, though, the craziest thing was the 100' vertical separation. One good wind-shear gust will drop a plane in its direction and lift a plane coming the other way. 100' gets eaten up pretty quickly. Whatever the investigation comes up with, I bet these flight corridors will be changed.

Reasonably hopeful that mad ideas of We need a new ATC computer system, or (perish the thought) turn it all over to AI, won't emerge.

ATC is a tough problem where general training takes you just a fraction of the way to competence. Each station is going to have its traffic and weather patterns which any controller is going to have to learn. It's a bad idea to think of controllers as interchangeable. Someone who knows the ropes in Chicago is back to a trainee if he relocates to San Francisco.

I've long thought the plans for a new ATC system in the USA were a bad idea. I'm in favour of some sort of overall review mechanism, where different stations are compared for how safely and efficiently they deal with their traffic, but attempts to centralise the daily running procedures are bound to fail. These systems should evolve. Giving them a huge toolkit and saying "There, use that" is, at best, wasteful.

Andrew Montford article was good, though hardly surprising.

French Doctor showed his "humility" in a rather forthright way:

... no skills to treat men, even if they have shaved their beards and come to tell my secretary that they have become women.

He's a specialist gynaecologist; at least here, you'd usually have a referral from a GP to see a specialist. If that's the case, I guess he won't be friends with the GP anymore. But I guess (if you're willing to pay full price), you *can* see a specialist with no referral. If that's the case, the "patient" is probably an activist who was out to take him down.

New article by Planning Engineer at Judith Curry's. I liked his lifting the covers on the renewable statistics and, when you took away hydro and geothermal, all the supposed renewable success stories turned out to have hardly any wind or solar.

OTOH, I'm not sure I understood why he thought (or seemed to) that intermittency was a red herring. Might become clear on a rereading.