You would expect the same thing with tournament chess players who spend hours working hard at trying to calculate and visualize move possibilities. The process has something in common with navigation. It does involve pattern recognition also, but there is a strong element of navigation.

An interesting comparison would be with tournament bridge players who calculate but probably don't visualize in the same way. (Can't say for sure as I have only played bridge a few times, years ago.)

The hypothesis would be that spatial navigation effort safeguards, and the prediction would be that chess players will have lower rates of Alzheimers than bridge players.

I'm a citizen of a democracy, and vote on energy policy and the directors of it both locally and nationally and am in that role fully entitled to opinions on both. With or without a PhD.

And when I look at the data of wind generation in the UK what I see is blackouts coming towards the country. I do not see, and you do not explain, how a couple of GW of wind power generation during a calm is going to supply 10s of GW of demand. I do not see any plans in the UK for any measures that will fill the gap.

I am not alone. From the UK Telegraph today:
_________________________
Measures that came into effect this week give the National Energy System Operator (Neso) the authority to tackle electricity shortages with rolling power cuts around the country.
Each area would have its power switched off for three hours at a time. Neso would have to give just eight hoursâ(TM) notice to use the so-called demand control rotation protocol.
The new measures, first reported by The Guardian, are designed to bridge a gap between Nesoâ(TM)s current emergency powers and rolling-blackout plans that require government approval.
Currently, the UKâ(TM)s electricity supply emergency code, a national plan of energy rationing, can only be triggered by ministers and requires emergency legislation.
It is intended for prolonged national crises lasting more than 24 hours.
Neso, meanwhile, has the ability to disconnect up to 20pc of power at five minutesâ(TM) notice in the face of imminent system collapse, such as the nationwide shutdown seen in Spain in 2025.
Under the updated rules, Neso can activate rolling local blackouts without political approval.
___________________________

This post is not flamebait. Its sincerely held rational opinions based on the facts of the UK experience, backed up by the data readily available from gridwatch or gridwatch.templar, I understand that people would like desperately for wind to be a viable technology for industrial societies, but the verdict is coming in from the gigantic experiment, and it just isn't.

What dooms it is intermittency. Well, and high costs too.

Just look at the results of the latest UK wind auctions, and look at the estimates for building transmission capacity from the north coast of Scotland (where the turbines are) to the Midlands and South where demand is. Look at constraint payments. Look at gridwatch to see what all this is delivering. Read the Royal Society report to see what the best UK minds can come up with regarding storage.

It isn't working and it isn't going to work. Folks, you need to get out of denial and look at the facts of experience!

If they are trying to run the country on wind and solar, then on a winter evening when there is the usual blocking high and wind calm, and no solar generation, your UK friends will be trying to supply 45GW (or north of 60GW if they manage to convert everyone to EVs and heat pumps) while having only about 10GW generation. Assuming they manage to get around 100GW of wind installed, which is a real question also.

Don't believe me? Look at gridwatch. Lows from 30GW face plate wind can go as low as 0.5GW. Can be below 5GW for a week or ten days at a time.

And this is going to continue for a week or ten days, as it does almost every winter.

By day two they will not be discussing the difference between stocks and flows. They'll be discussing

"CCGT capacity in the UK is sufficient to cover the rare times when there is zero wind."

No, it isn't. Just look at gridwatch. zero wind (or close to zero) is not a rare occurrence at all.

As to enough gas, the UK has about 30-35GW of gas depending exactly how you count. Peak UK demand is around 45GW.

The UK has twice this year been on the verge of blackouts. The last one, in June, it escaped by the skin of its teeth by importing on an urgent basis from France.

Need to read the UK news. Its impossible to run a country on intermittent generation technology. Its especially impossible to do so while raising demand by moving transport and heating to electricity, and while making no or inadequate provision to cover intermittency.

The question is, what is the value of wind generated power?

The UK has real time and archived data available to anyone who really wants to answer this question. The data shows, in summary, that wind generated power is not the same as conventional or nuclear generated power. You can see it clearly here in graphical form ( and from other sources, (www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk for instance) there's the raw data available in csv format. Here's the graphical version:

www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind

What happens is that much of the time peak wind generation coincides with low demand. This leads to constraint payments, when operators are paid as if they were generating but have to turn off supply. Then, there are regular calms, several a year, lasting a week or so, when peak demand coincides with low generation. When this happens gas has to be turned up to cover. The effect of these two factors is to lower capacity factor. It doesn't appear in the usual accounts of this, and it is never reckoned with in LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) calculations. LCOE is basically accounting fraud, comparable to stuffing the channel in manufacturing. It assumes that all power generated across the life of an installation is of equal value, but it is not.

How low is low generation? As you can see from gridwatch, 30GW faceplate of wind can fall well below 1GW for quite long periods.

This is not primarily about climate. Whether you think there is a climate crisis or not, the problem is that this is not a technology that is fit for the purpose of supplying a reliable electricity system to a modern industrial economy. The problem is there is no cost effective way of dealing with intermittency. In fact, without having total backup for the wind, there is no way at all.

The way to think about this is that what is being done with wind at the moment is not a transition. What is really happening is that a functioning conventional or nuclear system is required to pretty much fully cover peak demand. The buildout of wind is basically supplementing it. The case, if there is one, for doing this is not that a cheaper method of generation will replace conventional. Its that when the wind works and coincides with demand it can reduce fuel consumption of the primary generation network.

A further problem which the UK is experiencing is that wind power locations are far removed from demand centers. So they are having to build at great expense large transmission facilities from the north coast of Scotland - for which there is no other reason than the fact that wind farms have been built there.

Does it in fact do this? Is it cost effective to build (in the case of the UK) all those turbines off the north coast of Scotland, and all that transmission to get the power down to the Midlands and South, in order to save some fuel on your main conventional network?

I have seen it claimed, but have never seen any fully costed case showing that it is. And the fuel savings themselves? Maybe a lot less than you would expect, because to accommodate the wind power fluctuations you have to have rapid start gas, which is very fuel inefficient.

Some reading this will say 'batteries'. The Royal Society considered this, and dismissed it as absurdly expensive. It was so expensive and impractical that they thought a better solution would be to excavate and seal vast caverns and fill them with stored hydrogen. They did not specify where this was to come from. The fact that they thought this a more practical solution speaks volumes about the scale of the problem. The report goes into the question of intermittency in some depth, and draws attention of the observational fact that whole seasons can be low wind.

https://royalsociety.org/-/med...

What happens if you close your eyes and go ahead anyway with trying to transition to wind? The UK is finding out. Its had two cases this year of approaching large scale blackouts because of insufficient reserve to cover fluctuations. So far its been lucky, and there is some evidence that the narrowness of the escape was covered up. But the smart money is that one of these winters luck will run out, and they will then have to cold star at scalet and, if they have had to retire their gas by then, insufficient spinning reserve. And no, you will not get spinning reserve over the Euro interconnects, they don't do that.

There may be alternative technologies which will generate the levels of reliable power our economies need. But wind is not one of them. So on the whole the Administration is right. Its expensive to cancel it, but its a lot cheaper than going ahead with it. The UK is an early warning system. Its the canary. Or if you like, its like a bystander watching the lemmings and figuring out he does not want to join in this particular rush.

A classic example of current cultural pessimism.

The present administration is said to be doing something dire - "The alleged administration never saw a math problem it could understand and has been busy cutting research funding that doesn't directly contribute to producing widgets for its industry friends."

But no numbers are shown to support this. Then there are the '"beancounters" - obviously a derogatory term, presumably for accountants, and they are supposed to be saying something completely stupid, and the sort of thing that accountants in real life never say, and if they were to, no-one would listen.

We actually need accountants. Without accountancy we would find it impossible to run a money based economy. You may not like what proper accountancy shows about a given project to which you are emotionally attached - that's one usual reason for a generalized resentment of accountants. But with all the imperfections of the profession, we need it and its a positive force.

And finally you arrive at the dire predictions which don't follow from your arguments, the attribution of racist denigration of mathematics. How you dragged racism into it? The US is going to run desperately short of mathematicians due to its approach to AI. OK, but how on earth are you to bring race into this? By arguing that the Chinese are visibly doing AI better, and that the only reason the US does not imitate them is racism about them. Oh, so its not the bean counters and the alleged administration at all - or maybe it is, but they are all motivated by racism. Or maybe its the administration that is racist too?

Its all completely incoherent, but its worth dwelling on for a few moments to see a pattern of doom laded resentment, with dire predictions associated, and no solutions, which occurs in the other great progressive issues of the day. Gender, climate/energy, race, periodically even diet, where we switch from demonizing fat to carbs to protein and back every few years.

No, there is not going to be an apocalyptic shortage of mathematicians due to the US approach to AI by this administration. There are lots of ways in which education for employment, and education in general for life, can be improved, not least by changing the attitude and objectives of the teaching profession. But we are not going to run out of mathematicians.

One can make similar points about the other great progressive issues of the day, but this is long enough and contentious enough already, so I'll leave it with that cryptic observation!

The laptop line seems to have great hardware, and I would buy it in a flash, except that I don't want what I see as an awful OS - not so much the OS itself, but the restrictions and app choices it ties you into. I know Apple enthusiasts see this differently, but I just don't understand their enthusiasm for the company.

Don't much like Windows either as OS, but sometimes for some purposes you need it, and it runs very nicely in a VM for those occasiona, and otherwise keeps out of the way.

When they let you run Linux on an Apple machine in the same way you can load Debian or whatever onto an HP or Dell, I'll buy, but the whole spirit of the company is antithetical to that -- which is why I'll never buy one as things are, and they are not going to change.

Pity about the hardware, but there you go. Some compromises are just not worth it, and they want and always have wanted too much. Whether its as in the past buying inferior hardware to get an OS you wanted, or as now, buying an OS you don't want in order to get desirable hardware, the price is always too high and the compromise too great..

"the difference between a story originating from the Guardian or some Russian bot-farm..." But how much difference is there? The Guardian is just a bot farm staffed by humans following a party line. Or they have been humans, though increasingly it seems like they too may be largely bots.

Yes, this is what the government has in mind. The Guardian, BBC and other certified righteous outfits would have to come at the top of searches. Other misinforming broadcasters like GBNews would come at the bottom with the Russian bot farms or not appear at all.

The faked news clips of Trump that the BBC broadcast would be at the top of the searches, and the stories that GBNews carries pointing out how they were faked would not feature at all.

This would be 'Verified Live', and challenging it would be misinformation. It would be sort of like the gender mafia at the BBC, but on a national scale.

And as a late great anti-psych writer once wrote: if you cannot talk about it, you cannot talk about the fact that you cannot talk about it. VPNs would be next, and pretty soon after that it would not be permitted to mention that there are such things. The Great Wall of Britain, Chinese media control with British characteristics. To protect people, or course.

The license fee is taxation tied to supporting one particular broadcaster. Its a government imposed tax on watching live TV from any broadcaster.

If you want an analogy from the cases you cite, it would be if you had to pay a tax on every newspaper purchase, whose proceeds were handed on to the Guardian. And if it were a criminal offence to read any newspaper without paying this tax. Go into a library, and you cannot read the papers without producing a paid permit. Go into a newsagent, and you cannot buy a paper without producing it.

Or it would be like a tax on shopping at any supermarket, whose proceeds went to Tesco. You would have to have a paid supermarket permit to allow you to shop at, for instance, Sainsburys or any other supermarket, and the proceeds would be given to Tesco, and it would be a criminal offence to shop at any supermarket without buying such a permit.

Or, put it another way, you would have to have a paid permit to drive a car, any car. The proceeds would be paid to Ford.

Still strikes you as reasonable? Still think its good value? For who is it good value? Its good value for all the people who like the BBC and would subscribe to it were subscription voluntary. Its good value because the other half of the country, or maybe more, are subsidizing them.

Its the great liberal tradition. Get something we want, then make everyone else pay for it whether they want it or not, call it 'public service xyz', then claim its great value. Because the fee, paid by everyone including all those who do not want or use it, is lower than the fee for, for instance, Sky. Which is only paid by those who want to watch it. So no wonder its cheaper.

Its like if beer from one brewer, every pint, half the cost was paid out of taxation, and they all go around saying what great cheap beer this is. Yes, because the whole country is paying half on every pint drawn, whether they drink it or not.

And then, immune from commercial pressures, the BBC goes around unaccountable and systematically making up fake news, and there is nothing you can do about it, if you want to watch any kind of live TV at all.

A garbage system. No wonder the French have dropped it.

its a noble effort, but you are posting to an environment where everyone here knows that wind+solar+batteries is cheaper than gas or coal, because the wind and the sun are free, and they have no fuel costs. They also know that the only people who are skeptical about this are climate deniers.

These deniers keep talking about something called Net Present Value and claiming that is the correct way to evaluate and compare costs of generating systems. Net Present Value is a concept you will find in all kinds of Corporate Finance textbooks, well, do I need to say more? Its hetero-normative, racist, patriarchal and neo-colonial, and probably Islamophobic and transphobic with it and denies indigenous wisdom. Its on the wrong side of history, like coal, gas and nukes. Of course it pretends that wind+solar+batteries is actually a very expensive technology.

Well it would, wouldn't it?

What's the problem?

All they have to do is build more wind and solar (and batteries). Everyone except a few climate denialists knows that wind+solar+batteries is far cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear and can generate all the electricity anyone could conceivably need from free fuel, the sun and the air.

There is absolutely no need to restrict the installation of data centers, and there is no reason whatever why their power demands should raise prices. In fact, they should lower prices, because they will be at the spearhead of the energy transition, because it will lead to a larger and larger proportion of generation moving away from legacy technology to cheap clean power.

This is so obvious to us all here on Slashdot that its a mystery why the local politicians don't see it too.

AI claims that you can still buy AZW books and read them on one of these old Kindles. The claim is that if you buy from your PC account for the old Kindle it will be supplied as AZW, which will be readable on the device after transfer to it from the PC by USB.

The claim is that what has changed is that you can no longer buy directly from the Kindle, because purchases are now KFX only. But that you can still buy books for it over the web using your PC and they will be supplied as AZW.

If this is really true, the change is not only not a bad thing, its positively a good thing, because the account details on the old Kindles were stored very insecurely so it was a real security hazard wandering around with this very stealable device with all your Amazon credentials stored in open format.

Is it true? It was true before the latest change, but is it still?

The problem is going to be the following. Sometime roughly 2030 there will be 90GW of wind and 45GW of solar. Demand will be roughly 60GW peak winter and 50GW summer. The lows will be about 25GW summer and about 40GW winter.

Are you starting to see a problem? No, not yet? Lets continue.

Its January 2030. Its a cold, calm, clear early evening. There is no solar because its dark, and wind is delivering 5GW owing to the usual winter blocking high pressure zone. It has been below 10GW for a week, and will be below 20GW for another week. Nuclear is supplying around 10GW - if they haven't closed down the legacy nuclear by then, Gas has fallen to less than 10GW because the plant has hit end of life.

Where are you going to get 30-40GW from to meet peak demand?

But if you think this is a problem, now lets turn to early July. Solar is now putting out its max, around 30GW at midday. Nuclear is still delivering 10GW. Wind, well that is going a bomb because this is a time of pleasant summer breezes. Its midday. Demand is dropping to 25GW at midday.

Now the problem with solar is that most of it is not under the control of the grid operator, so they cannot turn it off. They turn off all the wind and pay constraint payments to the operators. They can't turn of the nuclear. They are looking at supply of roughly 40GW and demand of 25GW.

At this point, summer or winter, for different reasons, the flight data recorder has a pause in the dialogue between the crew, broken by someone saying 'Oh dear'. Or something a bit stronger. And then all the lights go out.

Two weeks later they are still trying to find enough spinning capacity to get the thing restarted. If its winter, people are quietly dying of cold. Their heating needs power to operate the gas boilers and cookers. If its summer they are taking cold showers, eating cold baked beans.

Meanwhile the government of the day considers the situation and comes to the conclusion that the problem is that they do not have enough solar power installed, so they adopt a plan to install a further 45GW of it. That should fix the problem. Now, how to communicate this plan to the country? That is a slight problem, Prime Minister. A lot of our communications facilities seem to be, well, out of action... because of the, well, the...the temporary interruption to grid services...

Do the math how you want. If you move a country to a generating system where peak demand is bound to coincide with low supply, and peak generation with low demand, the result will be blackouts.

We are facing the same problem that Gutenberg created in the 15th century: a proliferation in the ability of everyone to create and communicate whatever they want and whatever people want to read. Due mainly to a dramatic fall in the cost of production of books. But its far more extreme than Gutenberg because the drop in costs is so much greater. In an era in which everyone has Internet access, a smart phone and/or laptop, writing in publishable format has become much easier and publishing itself has basically become free.

And the problem arises in the same areas it arose back in the day: pornography, religious heresy, political subversion. The same thing happened in 17c France, where people took their manuscripts to Holland for printing which their local booksellers in Paris were afraid to touch. Holland was also a center of piracy, where you could get a run of some best seller quickly and smuggle it back to Paris or London to sell at a discount. A sort of early predecessor of the Pirate Bay.

There is really no solution to this. You can see the same sorts of measures being taken up - the creation of a sort of index, the banning of some materials by righteous jurisdictions, For instance, as late as the 20c the works of \Joyce being banned in Ireland, Lady Chatterly in England, lots of books in the US. In the end this, and the Papal Index, were dropped because they were widely ridiculed and were not working. When the main result of your policy is to drive your best regarded novelists abroad and their works to be published in France, something is not working. And its not achieving its goal, if anything its increasing the interest in the banned material.

Governments however do not feel they can simply stop trying - and one understands this. Along with kinds of freedom of speech most here would find important and valuable, there is also the darker side of human nature that flourishes at the edges. What do you do about it? Do you decide to just give up? One understands why they feel they cannot. And one also understands that regulation and censorship of the truly vile is only possible by measures which have a dramatic negative effect on privacy.

Its a bit like speeding. You can pretty much stop speeding dead if you have enough cameras and you have number plate recognition. The side effect is that all trips and all car use then become trackable. You lower accidents. But the temptation to increase the use of the data is enormous. Similarly with facial recognition - you probably could use it in conjunction with other draconian measures to stop phone snatching and shop lifting. And there seems to be no other affordable way to do that. But the cost in privacy of such a total package is not small.

I see the problem and its historical parallels clearly enough, but don't know the answer.