Field Of Lights

Before meeting the others at the Boater, Bill and I went so have a look at the field of lights.

Quite alien.

Why Doesn't The Taxpayers' Alliance Attack ALL Energy Subsidies?

I had a look at the Taxpayers' Alliance report Ending The Green Rip-Off. It seems to advocate removing subsidies for renewable energy. I agree, but at the same time the subsidies for all types of energy should be removed too. The report says:

it seems very reasonable to expect that scrapping the Emissions Trading Scheme and allowing other sources such as nuclear energy to fulfil the Renewables Obligation could cut electricity bills by 10 per cent or more

But says nothing about the subsidy that is given to nuclear power by making the taxpayer responsible for paying the cost of any nuclear incident above £140m. The recent Fukushima incident will cost Japanese taxpayers at least $13bn. Does the Taxpayers' Alliance think the tax payer should continue to subsidise nuclear power in this way?

Another energy subsidy that's ignored in the report is the taxpayer's subsidy of electricity generated from coal. A recent paper shows that:

Accounting for the many external costs over the life-cycle for coal derived electricity conservatively doubles to triples the price of coal per kWh of electricity generated.

These external costs are ultimately borne by the taxpayer. One of the external costs is the damage to human health caused by mercury emissions from coal fired power stations. Quoting from the same paper:

Direct costs of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants causing mental retardation and lost productivity in the form of IQ detriments were estimated by Trasande et al.22,23 to be $361.2 million and $1.625 billion, respectively, or 0.02¢/kWh and 0.1¢/kWh, respectively. Low-end estimates for these values are $43.7 million and $125 million, or 0.003¢/kWh and 0.007¢/kWh; high-end estimates
for these values are $3.3 billion and $8.1 billion, or 0.19¢/kWh and 0.48¢/kWh.

Again, the taxpayer has to bear these costs. Why doesn't the Taxpayers' Alliance speak out against this subsidy of coal?

I'll send this post to the Taxpayers Alliance, and I'll let you know their reply.

Film Licensing For The Internet Age

Have you seen Sintel? Apart from being an excellent short animated film, it's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. That means that it's an Open Source film, nobody holds a monopoly over it. I hope and expect that this type of licensing will become more popular, as it has with software. Hurray, licensing for the internet age!

Birthday Balloon

It was my 40th birthday on Wednesday. I went out for a meal in the evening to Yak Yeti Yak. Julia brought this helium balloon, and made me close my eyes and sprinkled glitter in the shape of '40' all over the table! I got a brilliant card, and excellent presents. Thanks everyone!

Science Cafe: What Happens When We Run Out Of Oil?

On the 12th December, we went along to the Bath Science café, to watch Prof. Chris Rhodes give a talk on What Happens When We Run Out Of Oil? We actually managed to get a seat, these events are always packed out. Perhaps it should be moved to bigger premises? Anyway, this isn't an objective summary of the talk, it's infused with my own strongly held views!

Two things stood out in the talk. Rhodes explained that not all oil is the same. Light oil has low viscosity, and heavy oil has high viscosity (bitumen being the heaviest). On another axis, sweet oil is low in sulphur, and sour oil has high sulphur content. Rhodes reckons we've used about half of the total oil in the earth, but most of the stuff we've used is light and sweet, and most of the oil left is sour and heavy.

The thing is that light and sweet oil is easy to extract and use. Heavy and sour oil is hard to extract and refine. In the worst case (bitumen) it takes 3 barrels to extract 4 barrels.

The other thing that I hadn't properly realized was that wind turbines need rare earth elements (REE) in their manufacture. Rhodes says that China has 97% of the REE in the world, and they need all of that for their own turbines. He opined that scarcity of REE would be the thing stopping the expansion of wind turbines. Is that true?

Cream Tea

The greatest sight in the world, a cream tea waiting to be eaten! This is at Charlotte's, with Lou in the background.

Redemption Ark

If I had regular readers, they'd know that I think that Alastair Reynolds is a genius. I read his series all out of order. Reading Redemption Ark, I gradually realized that I'd read the succeeding book in the series, Absolution Gap. I'm not very good at navigating around the country by car. As a passenger, I'm aware of gradually recognizing the destination. I got this feeling as I got to the end of Redemption Ark, gradually recognizing the beginning of Absolution Gap. Most people are horrified that I read books out of order. It's not out of choice, I'm just not organized enough. Please don't hate me for it!

Glossy Black

At the work pre-Christmas drinks evening, Emily painted the nails of my right hand black! Very glossy.

Bloodmind

I picked up a random book from the library. Bloodmind by Liz Williams. The book appealed to me, and I'm trying to work out why. Whether or not it would appeal to others in the same way, I don't know. I think the atmosphere that Williams creates, a kind of tone of the senses, a feeling, that I find I'm in tune with. I think it was just what I needed at the time. I'll come back to Williams again, I'm sure.

For now though, I'm on to Alistair Reynolds' Redemption Ark. Awesome!

Cooker Cleaning

I used some powerful spray stuff to clean the cooker, and it started to strip the writing from the surface, so I stopped and took a photo.

I've written what I think it should say on the photo below. I'll refer back to this if I get confused when cooking.

Preserves

Andy's starting a new venture involving various preserves. It hasn't officially been launched yet, but here are a couple of preview photos:

Room for rent

I've posted an ad for a room to rent in my house. Here are a couple of the pictures I took for the advert:

Really I need to take some photos of the room itself!

Patent encumbered codecs in the UK

In Ubuntu I installed the H.264 and MPEG-4AAC decoders in the belief that this is legal since the UK doesn't recognize software patents. Despite searching, I couldn't confirm this, so I've decided not to use them. It's difficult to uninstall the codecs so I'm simply going to not install them when I install Ubuntu from scratch next month. If you know the legal position on using patent encumbered codecs in the UK, please let me know.