Bruce

I tend to think most sentences are too much. Pell has been disgraced, which is a big and hard thing for an important man. Except for violent crimes, when the public needs protecting, jail sentences are expensive and I don't like them. South Australia once had a report along the lines of how we were incarcerating the wrong people and at great expense. For example, a defrauding accountant can be adequately punished financially and if he is not violent, the public does not need protection beyond his exposure and debarring. One day I got to put this to the minister of prisons, he was the local member at Gawler. He said that they ( the cabinet ) were well aware of that, but the public wanted big sentences and they wanted to stay in power.

I agree space. We do get some hot overcast days but not enough to make what you say a bad idea. It would take about 4 or 5 panels to work an evaporative air conditioner, and about ten panels to work a reverse cycle. Hey there might be a business opportunity to modify mains appliances to work directly from solar panels.

I reckon all this proves that they don't believe their own stuff. This test of true belief is a difficult one, because the subjects themselves would never have thought about the issue. A standard psychology lab test of belief is when the subject ( with hands behind their backs ) falls forwards , but does not put their hands out because they believe that the other people in the class will stop their fall. Try as I might, I can't think of a similar test for true belief in religion. My nearest guess is if you do something secretly which makes no sense unless you are believing in a reward in heaven. Like selling your house and giving the proceeds secretly to charity. Pell fails this test, but I still say that the sentence is too draconian. Too much puritanism around here, says me.

If it costs too much to take the CO2 out of a coal-burning power station smokestack, there is not much hope for coal. Without this carbon removal,the choice we have is to persist with coal until civilization fails or give it up first. My preferred solution would be to pay farmers lots of money to produce charcoal. Every kilo of charcoal represents a kilo of carbon removed from the air. This is the opposite of coal mining and burning.

I've been told that there is a simple test for computer models, and that is when you reverse time so the model is doing its thing but actually running backwards. If the model is good, it will "predict" the past accurately. I have further been told that the current models fail this test dismally.. does anybody know more about this story?

And you are right Old K about the first attack on Darwin coming from carriers. I'm amazed at how little we kids were told in the 1950's about any of this history... I grew up thinking that there was only one air raid on Australia, now I know it was many.

Wonderful stuff in Orkney, but how much is it subsidized? I reckon a bit of subsidy is ok, but if the amount is too much then Orkney is just an experimental station. For years, I thought that producing hydrogen was great in theory but had such a low efficiency that it was poor in practice. Then you guys on this forum told me differently. Gosh I hope the world has enough time to do this kind of hydrogen economy before the few survivors are back to living like aborigines used to.

Why does a nuclear plant need so much water? I reckon you could recirculate the water through cooling ponds. And in Sweden, I think they use sea-water for cooling. Maybe the cooling water is another furfy designed to stop us having a go at what should be cheap electricity. Alas I agree that profiteers would step in and make the electricity as expensive as they could get away with. Bring on a decent cheap battery so we can all live off the grid.

Luckily for us, the skeptics and deniers included the Germans and the Japanese military. Einstein convinced the American president to pursue the matter against advice from proper people.

Leo Szilard applied for a patent for the atomic bomb in 1934. The science was well known at that time. The time during the Manhatten Project, where the US, with its unlimited money, brought the bomb to fruition, is described by physics researchers as a desert when progress stood still in favor of nuts and bolts stuff. So educated people knew well before Kokoda that the atom bomb would end the war. Skeptics and deniers of course did their regular thing. Consider Rabaul... there were 100,000 Japanese on this island just north of New Guinea, ( the Darwin bombers came from Rabaul) and they were by-passed, as were the garrisons in Singapore and other places. This should also have happened for the Kokoda trail, those poor soldiers were the victims of stupidity and ignorance and face-saving higher-ups. The Australian government had brought troops "home" against the wishes of Churchill, and needed to show that they were of some use.

From my memory of high-school chemistry, uranium must be turned into ionized form . You add hydroflouric acid and then get uranium hexaflouride. this is then ionized and the lighter isotope is separated by shooting the ionized gas into a magnetic field , where the lighter isotope deflects more and so exits at a different pipe. ( the isotopes are 235 and 238, well they were in 1962 when I was in school. Chemically identical, just a tiny density difference. Then you strip off the flouride and get metallic uranium 235 A big enough chunk of this will explode, so you make 2 halves, both below the critical mass, and jam these together when you want the explosion. Apparently the biggest nuclear secret was the details of the jam-together mechanism. There were no secrets as to the physics of the bomb. Just think how good they were at math to calculate numbers like what the critical mass was. Of course, proper people , like generals, didn't believe the thing would work, well at least until it did. How sobering to realize that those who died on the Kokoda trail for example were killed because of atom bomb skeptics. I reckon we should make lots of these bombs so we can stop having to be beholden to the US for "protection".

It is only too easy to make something so expensive that you stop it happening. As I write this, I can see the roof of the old shearing shed and it needs painting. $200 for the paint I guess. but to do it legally would require licensed scaffolders etc. Maybe $20,000 in total. Now there is not enough return from sheep to make this a viable idea, so nothing will happen unless I do it myself, and I'm a bit old to paint a roof. (That's what my wife says, so it must be so) Geo-thermal energy ( hot rocks ) is also nuclear. I lost money on that too. I can't see why the waste is much more radioactive than what was mined. On energy considerations, there must be less there because of the energy extracted. And if it can be concentrated, surely it can be unconcentrated by mixing it with the tailings. Anyway, I think that modern reactors produce quite benign waste. Burt I accept that the political fight has been lost. It would be great if solar voltaic, wind and stored energy were to become viable, but they sure are helping to make high prices at the moment.

I thought that the world would go to uranium for clean energy and this foolish prediction caused me to lose money on ERA shares. South Australia should have by far the cheapest electricity in the world, with our thousand years of uranium. Alas, we have the most expensive electricity in the world, thanks to a lack of education among the population including the pollies, and too many regulations aimed at making nuclear non-viable. As if the waste couldn't be put back where the original radio-active stuff was dug up from. And as if nuclear power had not advanced since the 1950's. The net result is that South Australia has the highest official unemployment figures in Australia . I reckon the true figures are about 3 times the official. What an achievement huh.

I don't entirely discount that theory Litespeed, but I reckon the main thing is that the cost of mitigation occurs right now, while the benefits are years away. And since most people only think a few weeks ahead at most, it is good politics to pay lipservice to global warming while doing nothing of consequence about it. That is the path the whole world seems to be following. I liked Dick Smith's idea about how decisions needed to be made by the under 30's. At least they will reap the rewards or pay the price, while us oldys can refuse to do anything in the knowledge that we will be dead before the worst happens.

Why was Scomo so silly as to front up at Tuvalu with his pro-coal stance? I appreciate that he was under pressure from the US to counter Chinese influence in the area, but golly how stupid was he to go there? Especially with that message, which is, that Australia will continue to mine the coal which is causing them to go under the sea?

PM, I would love to find that global warming was not happening. The implications of global warming are frightful. And I have some good mates who are deniers. Burt Rutan is somebody I respect, as is Mike Borgelt, and they both disagree with global warming. My take from this is that there is no hope for the human race if global warming is true. The deniers and doubters, plus those who sort of believe but not enough to make any sacrifice, are carrying the day.

There are parts of the US where warming has already exceeded 2 degrees, and these are not just urban hot spots. Gosh it must be hard for deniers as the evidence they need to ignore or double-talk around is increasing so fast.

I think Jehova has been described as " one of the most unpleasant characters in all fiction... vindictive, petulant, genocidal, intolerant... you could add more but that's a start. He bears quite a resemblance to how you would imagine a bronze-age tribal leader.

Litespeed, last time I flew over the Hay plains I was shocked to see the enormous flood-irrigation paddocks which have taken over lots of sheep areas. And I always thought Dimboola was there to provide a check-point for glider final glides to Horsham, but my wife thinks its there to help find the Wail nursery. I agree about the cops. There was one at nearby Edenhope who got bored on account of no crime in an average month, so he started pinching people who crossed the road without walking down to the official crossing. I haven't heard of him lately, although he does come to mind when crossing illegally. Bugger though about shearers getting tame these days, I like your memories of livelier times.

I read that lots of Australian place names are the local aboriginal dialect for "get effed whitefeller". This came about when the white mapmaker asked his aboriginal guide " what name this fella place Jacky " and Jacky replies " Wooloomooloo" which the white mapmaker writes down.

Julia was the best prime minister we ever had, and I've lived through plenty. Gosh it was a pity she never had a fair go.

I had a mate who, while driving in the US, went through a town where the speed sign was obscured behind a tree. He was given the choice of waiting in jail till the next day when he could try his luck with the local judge or paying $500 or so. He found out later that speed fines were that town's major source of income.

We are all guilty of not holding our MP's responsible for these outrages. A majority of MP's in parliament can change things, but they need to be pushed. Alas, most of us are too sheeplike.

I didn't know that " in God we trust" was as recent as 57. I do know that Thomas Jefferson said that the book of revelation was clearly written by a lunatic. So the US has gone backwards with respect to superstition. No president could make a Jefferson comment today. So the country briefly rose above its origins, but didn't stay there. The Pilgrim Fathers were a nasty lot , who came, not to escape persecution but to be free to persecute. Look at the trial of the farmhand Spencer to see an example ( Spencer had one eye, and one day a sow at the farm gave birth to a one-eyed piglet. Spencer was tried and executed for " having lain with the sow"). The depth of ignorance and evil is staggering in that story. Yet these were the founders of the US.

I was amazed to see built-up from Tweed Heads to Noosa and inland past Toowoomba. The sparsest is hobby farms, except for bits of the Great Divide. Then there are great areas of dense suburbs. And I was shocked at the 4,500 ft limitation from abeam Warwick to Watt's Bridge. Nobody using the airspace above me, just a prohibition from traversing in safety.