Top Gear - Captain Slow's brilliant idea..

Whenever TV's 'Top Gear' features electric cars, you may be sure of two things:
 1) They will run out of battery power in the most inconvenient place;
 2) Jezza Clarkson will be chortling with glee.

But when they (finally) reached the seaside, Jezza & Captain Slow (James May) went on some dodgem rides - thereby giving Captain Slow a brilliant idea:
   Overhead power transmission for electric cars on motorways.

It's not as silly as it sounds, i reckon.  Better still, magnetic charging via underground cable..

Possible?  Don't know, but tougher technical problems have been successfully tackled, so why not!
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More happenings

More international happenings..

1) The 'Arab Spring' continues:
     (cf: the then Czechoslovakia's 1968 'Prague Spring')
     Egypt's Hosni Mubarak & others on trial;
     Libya's Muammar Gadaffi losing battle against the now-official rebel      government;
     Syria's Bashar al-Assad brutally trying to repress rebelion.

2) Hurricane Irene blasts US east coast from Florida to Maine.
      Amazingly well-executed evacuation of millions (cf: Katrina!).

3) No US Government financial melt-down but lots of argy-bargy.

4) EU financial speed-wobbles - Greece still a basket-case.

5) Japan has yet another Prime Minister, from post-quake fall-out.

.. & local stuff..
0) CHC earthquake after-shocks rumble on, some of them fiscal/economic>
     who was the twat who said CHC residents should 'harden up'? WTF?!!
     Hell's teeth!!


1) Pike River inquiry fall-out - @ least, that's what i expect.

2) Massive open-cast coal operation approval, on West Coast DoC land!
      Forest-&-Bird are spitting, as are the Greens.  Coasters are pleased.

3) National still polling @ 50+% [sigh].  Labour.. ummm..

4) Wallabies (AUS) win the Tri-nations Cup in Brisbane.

5) RWC fast approaching - teams arriving now.

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It's been a lo-o-oong time..

I should've been posting more often.. 

and of course there have been happenings:
1) CHC had yet another major quake;

2) Japan had a much much worse one (Richter 9) & a massive tsunami to boot;

3) the Japanese tsunami was 10 metres (yes that's right!!) high..
    .. & destroyed a nuclear power installation @ Fukushima..
    .. so badly the Japanese are now rethinking the whole nuclear option!

4) the inquiry into the Pike River coal mine disaster (29 dead!) is under way..
    .. & the evidence presented so far is absolutely damning!

5) Rupert Murdoch's print empire is wobbling after the 'Phonegate' scandal..
    .. @ least that's what i'd call the phone-hacking affair which..
    .. just gets worse & worse, with casualty after casualty!

6) A Far-Right Anti-Islamic Nut-Case butchered 78 people in Norway..
    .. with a 6-tonne fertiliser bomb in Oslo & a spray of gunfire on Utoya Island.
    .. i'm NOT even going to name him, let alone give any links!
    .. well, i could give him an acronym - the FRAINC..
    .. but i don't want him to be (in)famous..

7) as of writing, the US government is 3/4 days away from defaulting..
    .. a US$14trillion debt is going to fall unless the Republican wingnuts yield..
    .. to reality!  At least, that's how i see it..

so far, so grim..

Some sciencey stuff..

Feeling a bit better today, dunno about tomorrow..

Here's a quake map at the actual event time, courtesy of  GeoNet,
an engineering report, (The 'second' CHC earthquake) courtesy of Science Media Centre.

Watched Bill Goff on TV yesterday, talking about the sweeping Ministerial powers operative during this event period - he voted for them but stressed that he & others would be watching very carefully!
Yes, i took my cue from others writing on that subject, but that's because i agree with them!  Are these powers really necessary?  What scenarios did their authors have in mind?

Then there was the CTV site decision - & a reassessment .  As i commented earlier, i think it was what that top cop said & how he said it, rather than the actual decision: it made a helluva lot more sense when the Grand Chancellor Hotel situation was explained!  It hasn't gone down yet, but when it does.. look out!

Different this time..

..Worse!! Much worse than 4 September 2010.  This time people are dead..
This time too i wasn't at all 'detached & interested' (as perhaps i may have been last time).
I was upset & depressed.
And when a senior Police officer made 'a hard call' that the CTV site was no longer 'survivable', i got really depressed, wondered if everything that could (have) be(en) done was done, like the Pike River mine disaster (about which i've said nothing but have horrible doubts).. 

Admittedly, this IS different. This began as an ugly surprise that got worse the second time around - no-one, not even the seismologists, expected Christchurch to be subjected to such a major event: a Richter 7.1 earthquake; & when the aftershocks kept coming, & coming, & coming, & eventually lessening, they then thought the time-frame for a major aftershock event had passed.


And the Richter 6.3 quake was much worse - shallower, nearer, & worst of all, at a critical time of day: lunchtime, not sleepy-o'clock-in-the-morning, & weakened (perhaps subtly so) buildings fell & buried their occupants.


I crawled out of bed today @ 5.30pm, wondering why i felt so depressed at an event which did not touch me directly - yesterday, down here in Port Chalmers, just out of Dunedin, at the event time i thought 'hey, we're having an earthquake!  Should i get under a doorway? Ummm.. no..' & turned on the TV instead, which was just starting to post 'Breaking News' messages.  I listened, & watched, but it didn't really hit me until this morning when i found i just didn't want to get out of bed - it really was hitting me now & i felt very very depressed, even unwell, & i flagged my Polytech lecture & a dental appointment for the day (but i did go to my Wednesday evening 12-step meeting).


My post for the previous quake was all about Christchurch - this one's more about me..

Nonetheless, i found a technical site which collects stuff better than i do - it's on a blog i follow.
It's a clearinghouse for #eqnz reports by a guy named David Winter on The Atavism.
One of the more meaningful measures he mentions was something i heard discussed yesterday by the seismic people - peak ground acceleration, in this case 1.88g (when you round a bend hard in your car - sports or otherwise - you feel g-forces, & that's what Peak Ground Acceleration is measured in).  That was the real killer - a combined indicator of Richter scale, depth & proximity, expressed as a real resultant.
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OK OK so I'm no historian, but..

..i do wonder about S H Steinberg's dismissal of the term Thirty Years War as being a misnomer since this period was actually a succession of wars in a European rather than a purely German context, & lasted 50 years not 30, namely 1609-1659.  Well, the historians can argue if they like, but even though the conflict between the two Great Powers of the day, the Hapsburg dynasty's empire & Bourbon France & her allies, didn't cease with a sudden jolt with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, it seems that it was that treaty that sealed the fate of the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (which Voltaire snidely remarked was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) by dismembering the dying 'body' into 230-something more or less sovereign states of varying sizes which were nonetheless German in language & culture

And i've found at least one reference to a Second Thirty Years War here, which seems a fairly broad outline of the period 1914-1945.  I can't help wondering about the origin of the term referring to the European conflicts of 1618-1648, since the 1914-1945 hostilities (both 'official' & 'unofficial') were preceded by the Moroccan Crises (1905,1911) & the First & Second Balkan Wars. 

Maybe it's just the period in which i grew up that sparked my enduring interest in Germany between the two World Wars.  Even when i was a kid at primary school, we knew the dates not only of the 'recent' World War, 1939-1945, but also its predecessor, 1914-1918.  And the battle that we were told about was not the drawn-out grimness of Gallipoli, but the slaughter of the First Battle of Passchendaele where New Zealand soldiers suffered their worst ever defeat.  I wondered why New Zealand had gone to war against Germany twice within 30-odd years, & also if there might be another monstrous war 25-30 years after my father's war, & if so what would happen then.  This almost did not bear thinking about, because we were now in the age of the Nuclear Bomb, which turned the whole strategy of war in the air upside down.  From being vulnerable to repeated levels of unacceptable losses, typically 5% or more, bomber forces had now graduated to being able to sustain a 95% loss rate & still  succeed in annihilating their targets.  The books that considered possible nuclear war & its after-effects were the likes of Neville Shute's "On The Beach", Walter M Miller Jr's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" & Michael Swanwick's "In The Drift".  Scary, too, was the phrase "Thinking the Unthinkable", referring to a cold-eyed view of a possibly 'winnable' nuclear war by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation.  Nonetheless, it's a phrase i approve of!!  Someone has to look the future, however bleak, squarely in the eye, but if you mention certain topics to some people, they spit the dummy & abuse you for even raising the subject.  Science & science-fiction (the real kind) writer Arthur C Clarke accused such people of suffering from failure of nerve and/or failure of imagination..


It's late now, as in stupid-o'clock on Sunday morning, & my brain seems to have stopped fizzing - i might even be able to get some sleep!  Failing that, i'll just keep reading British historian Dame C V Wedgwood's immensely readable "The Thirty Years War", the 'first' one that is..  And as she points out, the unfinished business of a fragmented Germany reverberated down to "the explosive forces of liberal nationalism in the nineteenth century and illiberal nationalism in the twentieth".

I knew I should've gone straight home..

..but i really wanted a nice relaxing sit-down, read something interesting, & then go home.  The trouble is, my brain is now bouncing around inside my skull coz it's full of caffeine & sugar!

'The Governors' Cona coffee is cheap & good, so i sat there drinking & reading until i started get talkative inside my head & had to go home before i started boring some hapless listener with whatever my current interest happened to be - in this case European history, & in particular the Thirty Years' War (ca.1618-1648).

Why have i labeled this 'Life'?  'History' makes sense, but 'Life'?

Well, yes, actually.  What happened in Germany in that period of European history had repercussions right down to the 20th century, to 2 enormously destructive World Wars, the second of which was more or less the result of the unconscionable blunders made by the victors (?) in the first.  I read of one historian who described those two wars as the Thirty-one Years War - as i recall (?) he was German & therefore directly affected by the aftermath of the Great War, as the first of them is often called.  Whether he actually lived through the precarious existence of the ill-fated Weimar Republic i don't actually know (if i could recall his name i could look him up using what 'New Scientist' magazine calls the Famous Web Search Engine, or FWSE - we all know what that is but for some reason they aren't allowed to say the name in print, not sure why!).  Nonetheless, the aftermath of WW1 was a disaster for Germany, & subsequently for the rest of the world.  As W H Auden put it:
"I and the public know
  What every schoolboy learns
  That those to whom evil is done
  Do evil in return"
And, sad to say, in Germany's case, this was true.  She was made to shoulder the sole blame for a war that was the result of an unstable European concoction of alliances, treaties (some kept from the public eye), nationalistic aspirations, colonial land-grabbing, & an arms race that was epitomized by the British political slogan "We want eight, & we won't wait!" - a reference to the advent of the Dreadnought class of heavy fighting ships that rendered their predecessors militarily obsolete because of their major reliance on very large (15-inch, i think) heavy naval guns which could out-shoot any of their smaller adversaries' weaponry.  Not only was the war guilt unfairly assigned, but the war reparations broke Germany financially - never mind the vehement criticism of the opinions of an economist who was involved in the post-war 'negotiations' at a very high level & predicted trouble ahead in his report entitled "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace" - John Maynard Keynes was not popular with certain jingoistic elements of the 'victorious' nations.  A certain Adolf Hitler had no trouble convincing a defeated & demoralized Germany that her army had been 'stabbed in the back' by the Allies, & while this had little currency in 1923 when Herr Hitler & his fellow Nazis were jailed for attempting a coup d'etat that failed, the Great Depression & the misery that followed `the Crash of 1929 had the German public grasping at the straws of restoration of German national pride &, in particular, Hitler's own take on German unity.

The result was, almost inevitably, the Second World War, from which my own father returned with what is now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - even as a small child i recall seeing him with the 'shakes' but the culture of the day did not see him as an injured war veteran - he had trouble seeing himself that way!  Only years later, with the help of his more assertive RSA comrades did he finally obtain the War Pension i feel should have been his from the day he was demobilized.  That's life, huh??


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