The Independent System Operator for the New England power grid (ISO-NE) has produced a summary brief describing the challenges associated with Arctic Outbreak 2017-2018, a period of substantially below normal temperatures that lasted from Dec.25, 2017 until Jan. 8, 2018.

After describing the intensity of the cold wave with a number of graphs, charts, images and words, the brief made the following sobering statements about the fuel mix used to supply power demand.

Overall, there was significantly higher than normal use of oil
– Coal use also increased over normal use
Gas and Oil fuel price inversion led to oil being in economic merit and base loaded
As gas became uneconomic, the entire season’s oil supply rapidly depleted

COVID has revealed a lot over the last year and a half, but no country has been exposed more for its underlying culture of tyranny than Australia. Formerly a beacon of freedom, community, and beautiful landscapes, the land down under has morphed into a dystopian hellscape where the government blesses its residents with an hour of free time a day. The former prison colony has reverted to its roots.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the COVID internment camps now operating in Australia. Travelers, both foreign and domestic are forced into one of the various metal buildings to serve out their 14-day sentence. There, they remain “quarantined,” only to be delivered food by faceless operatives in full protective gear.

This per The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/world/australia/howard-springs-quarantine.html

Linus Torvalds will pull Paragon Software's NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source – but he complained about the use of a GitHub merge in the submission, saying that GitHub "creates absolutely useless garbage merges." //

First, he said the pull request should have been signed. "In a perfect world, it would be a PGP signature that I can trace directly to you through the chain of trust, but I've never actually required that," he said.

Second, he noted that the code in the pull request included merge commits done with the GitHub web user interface. "That's another of those things that I really don't want to see – github creates absolutely useless garbage merges, and you should never ever use the github interfaces to merge anything," he said.

He added: "[G]ithub is a perfectly fine hosting site, and it does a number of other things well too, but merges is not one of those things."

Torvalds has complained about aspects of GitHub before, saying in 2012: "I don't do github pull requests. github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is also deficient and useless."

Note that the git request-pull command is different from the GitHub pull request feature. The ensuing forthright thread has more information on the subject.

Primitive Technology
A SURVIVALIST'S GUIDE TO BUILDING TOOLS, SHELTERS, AND MORE IN THE WILD
By John Plant

From the craftsman behind the popular YouTube channel Primitive Technology comes a practical guide to building huts and tools using only natural materials from the wild.

John Plant, the man behind the channel, Primitive Technology, is a bonafide YouTube star. With almost 10 million subscribers and an average of 5 million views per video, John’s channel is beloved by a wide-ranging fan base, from campers and preppers to hipster woodworkers and craftsmen. Now for the first time, fans will get a detailed, behind-the-scenes look into John’s process. Featuring 50 projects with step-by-step instructions on how to make tools, weapons, shelters, pottery, clothing, and more, Primitive Technology is the ultimate guide to the craft. Each project is accompanied by illustrations as well as mini-sidebars with the history behind each item, plus helpful tips for building, material sourcing, and so forth. Whether you’re a wilderness aficionado or just eager to spend more time outdoors, Primitive Technology has something for everyone’s inner nature lover.

If you use the ls -li command (the -i option shows the inode number), you’ll see that its link count is 2. The link count is after the file permission field. //

You should not create a hard link to a directory

You can create a soft link to a directory but when you try to create a hard link to a directory, you’ll see an error like this:

ln: newdir/test_dir: hard link not allowed for directory

Why are hard links not allowed for directory? It’s because using hard links for directory may break the filesystem. Theoretically, you can create hard link to directories using -d or -F option. But most Linux distributions won’t allow that even if you are root user.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/210741/why-are-hard-links-not-allowed-for-directories
//

Bonus Tip: How to find all hard links to a given file

If you see that a file has more than one link count, you may get curious about the other hard links associated with it.

One way to find that is using the inode number of the file. You can use the ls -i command or the stat command to get the inode number.

Once you have the inode number, you can see all the links associated with it using the find command.

find . -inum inode_number

Mills and his rescue team tried to get her out first through the Kabul airport, but the Taliban turned her back. They then considered the Mazar-i-Sharif route but then the planes weren’t cleared. So Mills and his team got her out through an overland route, through multiple attempts and sleight of hand like a “shell game” he said, just before the Taliban closed the checkpoint they went through.

The State Department’s ultimate role? They helped get them tourist visas after they had already gotten out across the border into another country. Big help. Both Rep. Markwayne Mullin and Rep. Ronny Jackson said the State Department’s claims were false, Mullin calling it a “flat out lie.”

So after creating this mess and putting people in this position, how offensive is this that they try to also steal claim for things they didn’t even do? These people have no shame.

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners. //

2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years. //

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly. //

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.

An Italian pilot has set a world record by becoming the first to fly an aircraft through a tunnel. Dario Costa actually flew through two tunnels on a freeway in Turkey on Saturday to claim five Guinness records. Costa took off in the first tunnel and flew its length in an Extra 300 at about five feet AGL. He had about 15 feet of clearance on the wingtips and flew at about 140 knots.

Things got a little interesting when he broke out into the early morning sunshine to line up with the second tunnel, about 400 yards ahead. “Everything seemed to be happening so fast, but when I got out of the first tunnel, the plane started to move to the right because of the crosswinds and in my head, everything slowed down in that moment,” he said in a Red Bull-produced story. “I reacted and just focused on getting the plane back on the right path to enter the other tunnel.” He covered about 1.5 miles in 44 seconds. //

Brian Lloyd
September 6, 2021 at 12:23 pm
I guess it is a risk/reward thing. Sometimes you just want to shoot-the-moon. If you REALLY want to do it and the people affected agree, why not? It’s your life.

That being said, my father told me of the time he flew an SNJ through Hangar 1 at Moffett field. It was not long after WW-II and there were lots of young pilots with nothing to do and lots of avgas to do it with. Needless to say, many questionable things happened back then. (He looped the Golden Gate in an F8F too.) I liked best the end of his story which went, “As soon as I entered the hangar I realized this was a REALLY BAD idea. Unfortunately I was committed.”

I had a similar kind of decision to make. After flying around the world following Amelia Earhart’s route I had an airplane with which to fly Lindbergh’s route and set the speed record from NY to Paris. I would just have to fly over the N Atlantic in February to take advantage of a positive phase of the N Atlantic oscillation and get the winds that would let me shatter the old record. I had to consider the threats, i.e., engine failure and icing, consider the risk of possibly dying in the cold water of the Atlantic, and then balance that with the reward — a plaque on my wall that said I had the speed record.

I didn’t go.

There are quite a few Internet services today advertising absolute privacy from both hackers and government agencies, such as Signal for messaging. After Lavabit’s controversial shutdown, ProtonMail rose up to become the advertised email service of choice for privacy-minded users, especially those with secrets to keep. Sometimes, however, those secrets may run afoul of certain countries’ laws, which often leads to email service providers handing over data to identify users under investigation. While ProtonMail advertised privacy and security against such actions, it was apparently forced to cave in to such legal demands, leading to the arrest of climate change activists in France. //

Etienne - Tek
@tenacioustek
So @ProtonMail received a legal request from Europol through Swiss authorities to provide information about Youth for Climate action in Paris, they provided the IP address and information on the type of device used to the police //

Of course, ProtonMail was legally forced to hand over that data, but it didn’t get away without incurring the wrath of the Web. It was questioned why it possessed users’ IP addresses in the first place when it advertises that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default. ProtonMail founder and CEO Andy Yen explains that it only started logging the specific users’ IP addresses after it was legally forced to do so by Swiss authorities.

USS Almaack (AKA-10)

(Gareth Wiederkehr)