JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
At 3.33 am on Friday, sleep evades, still trying to find Melbourne’s official max temperature for Boxing Day, when figures of 42 or 40 C were tossed around as forecasts.
Just by feel, I’d be surprised if it passed 38 C.
Was it or was it not hyped?
Geoff S
110
Sleep evades me as well, Geoff.
It wasn’t as nearly hot as the official hype and I didn’t see it go past about 37C according to my weather station and the indicated outside temperature in my car. In addition, there was some cloud cover which blocked a lot of direct sunlight.
100
There was another measure. The cricketers didn’t look too uncomfortable. And they were not casting shadows.
I wondered if the sun was dimmed by cloud or smoke from the bushfires.
10
According to the BoM
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV60901/IDV60901.95936.shtml
The maximum temp on Thursday at the Melbourne Olympic Park station was 36.4C.
Station Details ID: 086338 Name: MELBOURNE (OLYMPIC PARK) Lat: -37.83 Lon: 144.98 Height: 7.53 m
That’s before “homogenisation” to make it hotter.
122
David,
I have used the BOM Climate Data Online for decades.
My problem is that the maximum temperature for Olympic Park on Boxing Day, Thursday, was not shown by 3.33 am Friday.
Indeed, there is still no update on my tablet or PC by 7.52 am as I write this.
Can anything these days be done to a standard of simply best, not with all this modern interference by hordes of paid expert obfuscators? Homogenisation is a scientific absurdity. Geoff S
101
Fiddled is the word you need.
60
David,
The Boxing Day Tmax appeared on the BOM site about 10 am this morning, Friday.
It is as usual, requiring confirmation, but is stated as 36.7 deg C.
Cheers Geoff S
50
So few people were upgrading from Windows 10 to 11 due to Microsoft not allowing certain hardware to upgrade, they have dropped the hardware requirement which was preventing the upgrade, and also probably to prevent a mass migration to Linux.
https://youtu.be/q2rC3Djgjro
50
David,
Because some computer pros showed me how Windows versions were planned to become unsupported, I had Windows 11 installed when I bought a new PC a couple of months ago. I kept the old PC with Windows 10, so comparison is easy.
Windows 11 did indeed make transfer of some diverse non-Windows programs impossible or difficult. Info like Numerical Codes used years ago to install (and typically not retained) was required in some cases. There is an assumption that you the user has downloaded the latest gee-whizz Microsoft stuff like Pivot and Edge and Outlook 365 and stuff that requires a Cloud account to run best. It is dreadfully slow. To open Microsoft Outlook for emails each day takes 25 seconds, a bit less for Word and Excel, which is back to dinosaur speed of the 1980s. Colour me not impressed. Geoff S
100
I’m on 24H2 and only have the intermittent black screen (primary and secondary screens) maybe once a week.
Attempts to locate the cause have been unsuccessful so far but I have implemented a shutdown key sequence just in case.
Maybe the Jan 2025 cumulative patch will fix it, or the Feb one, or the March one…
Having removed or disabled loads of bloat and telemetry, as well as having a SSD, it’s pretty quick.
M$ is allowing legacy non TPM 2 compliant pc’s now, not because of Linux but because they want people to upgrade from W10.
10
Apparently, the PC World article that said the hardware requirements had been dropped is incorrect. See here: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/no-microsoft-isnt-letting-you-install-windows-11-on-unsupported-hardware
10
I have no upgrade path after W10, at least with MS. We have always had at least one Linux machine for the last decade or so, and that path seems more desirable for our simple needs.
Linux is simple to install, fast, stable, modest hardware requirements and windowsy enough for Mrs Y not to be distracted by it.
It probably helps that for at least a decade we use no MS software apart from the OS.
10
Ha ha you would think the Linux world is clear of such things but RedHat also brought in stringent hardware requirements preventing many older machines from being upgraded.
The RedHat minimum for AMD and Intel is now x86-64-v2 and that in itself might be fair enough … but their installer does not give a friendly message, “This hardware is not supported” instead is simply crashes and gives some useless hex dump.
10
Here are some videos about how many single women complain that there are “no good men” and why men have given up.
Perhaps the “good men” were there all along but wonen ignored them because they were not “exciting” enough or “rich” enough. Or feminism made men reluctant to court a woman in the traditional way, lest they be accused of being “creepy” or a victim of the “MeToo” movement.
I’ve seen it all before.
https://youtu.be/ddT6i-73UJo
Also see:
https://youtu.be/49P-XUVMqVM
71
Like the old joke:
“In the old days when a man left the house, he kissed his wife goodbye.
Now, when he leaves his wife he kisses the house goodbye.”
These women are shallow, self-centred, plasticy and useless.
Where are all the good men?
Looking for women worth having, and that ain’t you!
Down-to-Earth, minimal makeup, no tramp-stamps (tatts), not afraid to get their hands dirty, without pursed lips and condescending looks, no gold diggers. Where are you?
Nope, a good dog and a good car will do instead anyday.😎
111
All the good men were taken by good women while the whingers spent a decade playing games. The remainder see no benefit in relationships only risks as well described above. Seriously as a young man today , why would you? She would have to be one in a million.
40
I never felt comfortable with the idea of Dark Matter in the universe, said to be 26.8% of the mass-energy content of the universe in the Lambda-CDM cosmological model. Dark Matter is something that doesn’t interact with normal baryonic matter and is not detectable or observable except through its supposed gravitational effects.
Finally, there might be a reason to drop this hypothesis. Hopefully Dark Energy will go with it.
The end of Dark Matter?
https://youtu.be/hE_xLGgZzFI
30
Dark matter is racist.
60
Yeah, Dark Lives Matter.
40
I slipped on black ice the other day and when I got up my wallet was gone.
Black ice matters!
/that’ll get deleted.😎
21
Video about how most modern websites contain so much code that they render older less capable computers useless, even if they have an older lightweight version of Windows or Linux.
https://youtu.be/TE_ePuGAvPM
10
In the old days we manually coded sites – lean and efficient.
Look at the source code of the simplest site now, and it’s reams of software generated code.
It’s amazing that sites even run given the parsing involved.
31
Reuters latest version of alarmism presented as science:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/what-is-latest-science-climate-change-2024-12-17/
The usual drivel but it is important to know what junk people are being fed.
91
And they use the junk science term “scientific consensus”.
I recently quoted Michael Crichton:
71
“Not only is ocean warming fuelling stronger Atlantic storms”
So a 50% increase in CO2 over 250 years is rapidly heating the world’s oceans and this is causing the weather problems?
The insistence that our tiny annual amount of CO2, 0.02% of the CO2 total is the causes ocean warming is anti science. 99.9% of the surface heat is in the oceans and 98% of the CO2.
And all our water, our weather, our climates come from the ocean which can only cool by evaporation and rapidly controls all CO2 within 1% from pole to pole, as it has always done.
But CO2 is warming the oceans?
The oceans are 350x the mass and so 1400x the heat capacity of the thin radiating, turbulent air above. Hot air rises rapidly and cools. But the very deep oceans never freezes or even changes much. Even at the North Pole the 4km deep ocean never freezes. The very thin ice on the surface is only 4 metres thick. And the fish are fine. Vast amounts of heat hurtle around in the currents, the most famous of which is the Gulf Stream, but an increase in CO2 is the entire driver of our weather?
Why does no one consider that oceans heat the air? And warmer oceans release CO2. Why is the obvious never considered?
Because the $1,800,000,000,000 a year in carbon ripoffs would have to stop.
And we are told coal is very, very dangerous but nuclear is good because nuclear energy has zero emissions. Which is prima facie absurd, Political science, not real science. And run by Climatebaggers.
150
The Washington Swamp in denial and getting desperate:
Congress has the power to block Trump from taking office, but lawmakers must act now
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5055171-constitution-insurrection-trump-disqualification/
70
All based on the lie that TRUMP incited “insurrection”.
100
Just another Democrat wet dream
70
100
They (the people involved in the article) don’t understand the fire they are playing with. What they are suggesting is a clear act of Sedition, under the US Constitution. Sedition in the US Federal laws has the same punishments as Treason. (Up to and including execution.)
30
“Will the Coalition’s nuclear power policy reduce or increase the price of electricity for east coast Australians?”
Nothing will change for the better while the Labor/Green/Libs triumvirate supports solar/wind as main alternative and denigrates coal!
130
Remove all the ridiculous ‘dirty’ CO2 laws, all Carbon Credits and Green Certificates (LGCs, STCs) and electricity prices would halve immediately. And fire all the Clean energy employees. Snowy II alone is costing more than the Panama Canal. For what?
160
Such a simple question but the answer is not so simple.
By 2050, a nuclear policy could lower the retaill cost of electricity. This will be partly due to the costs for nuclear coming out of general revenue rather than being paid for through electricity bills.
The small scale theft has been declining on a per unit basis since 2015. The large scale theft comes to an abrupt end in 2030 and is not being replaced. There is a new Labor model of direct funding guarantees through a tender process organised by AEMO to be paid out of Federal general revenue.
The costs are being shifted from electricity consumers to tax payers. as the new model for both flavours of government.
There is a lot of money flowing into new transmission lines and the current funding model is that consumers will pay for these. Snowy 2 will likely require direct funding support because the arbitrage on electricity price will not be enough to even service the debt if it only cost $8bn and even that is looking unlikely now.
When the current consumer theft ends in 2030, I expect all rooftops will be required to pay to export. Likewise, existing grid scale wind and solar will lose income and some many not be viable. A number of wind farms will be approaching end of life by then.
If Dutton gains government then the first step in the nuclear strategy should be to stop all the current AEMO tenders. That would send a firm message that sensible adults are in charge again.
My suggestion to Dutton is to bring the heads of ABC, CSIRO, BoM and the ACCESS team together and ask them why they are not serving the Australian people. They clearly have an agenda that is not aligned with Australia’s needs.
90
Dutton needs to complete Trumpism 2.0 ASAP This bloke is talking out of both sides of his mouth. Cognitive dissonance personified. He’s no better than the current turkey we have to contend with.
10
Just letting you know that their is a yacht in the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race called
Climate Action Now.
All female crew.
I wonder if they’ve thought about all the fossil fuels that went into the construction of their high tech yacht and all their personal equipment?
https://rolexsydneyhobart.com/the-yachts/2017/climate-action-now/
NOTE: The URL has 2017 in it but the page heading is for 2024.
121
Tragically two competitors were killed when hit by a boom (not on the above-mentioned yacht).
https://rolexsydneyhobart.com/news/2024/day-2/tragic-deaths-in-rolex-sydney-hobart-yacht-race/
30
They should have Covid tested them before they went to sea!
Appears to be an outbreak of Covid testing going on. It is a terrible disease destroying family events over Christmas in all parts of the world.
There are elderly spending what may be their last Christmas on Earth isolated from families due to a positive RAT test when they went for an appointment with the Doctor. They get tested in their car then after much swabbing sent off with a script for a retro-viral that may make them really sick.
All they probably had was a touch of the flu or a cold.
Worse still they actually may develop Pneumonia from the flu and be denied antibiotics ending up like I understand happened to the poor buggers in Victorian nursing homes in 2020.
I would love to see the results of Covid testing before 2020 but alas that sort of mad testing did not exist when you felt unwell and went to see your Doctor. People used to believe they had a cold. It was called the ‘common cold’ and there was never any hope of a cure for such a thing.
And Durr!!!
Who but a gambler would have thought that? If there is more double headed coins, are you more likely to gets heads?
41
The deaths were not on Comanche but it has retired. Its 2017 record time will remain.
10
FWIW – On cooking utensils
“Pans: Stainless Steel, Carbon Steel, Cast Iron, Ceramic, Poly-Fluorine Coated, Enamel”
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2024/12/26/__trashed-6/
20
Knife in a pan? Guy’s a di*%head… His cooking oil is probably a seed oil too.
00
Umm!
We’re supposed to research before we guess I heard
00
FAIL!!!!! What a shocker of a letter from the ABC managing director to commando veteran Heston Russell.
Here’s an early Xmas present from the ABC Managing Director – his response to my letter rejecting their inquiry because it was not ‘independent’ by any qualification. Note the last paragraph… cut & paste gone wrong!
Taxpayer funds hard at work & #ABC accuracy on display #Fail pic.twitter.com/23nqn2Go2O
— Heston Russell (@HestonRussell) December 24, 2024
71
It’s not even an apology to Heston, more like ‘how my dog ate my homework.
Just pathetic.
10
Reality check for Therapeutic Albo who’s never had a real job in his life.
A reminder: Albanese is a life-long freeloader who’s never had a job away from the public teat and wouldn’t know the first thing about running a business.
61
There goes all pollies.
You may have run a business people know, so “vote for me!” but running an economy and a government is totally different and they have no worthwhile experience which is why nothing ever changes…
60
NEW VIC LIB LEADER An hour ago
‘Daggy dad’ with tough-on-crime agenda
Meet Brad Battin – a copper turned Bakers Delight owner turned ambitious politician.
If the Victorian Liberal Party’s future lies in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, then Brad Battin is from central casting to lead the opposition into the 2026 state election.
The former copper and Baker’s Delight outlet owner is a real outer suburban guy who displays a pretty good “daggy dad” routine as a politician representing the people in his southeastern electorate covering areas such as Beaconsfield, Berwick and Clyde North.
The father-of-two has been a coach at the Berwick junior footy club, president of the Clematis Country Fire Authority brigade, been a fundraising chair for the Fred Hollows Foundation and since 2010 has been the MP for Gembrook and then Berwick.
20
The best hope Sictoria has had for decades.
20
MAGA, Make Albo Go Away.
20
Gary Varvel for December 24, 2024 – Presdential Portraits
40
British Gov’t Announce Plans to Make ‘Independent Websites’ Illegal in UK
The UK’s Orwellian new online censorship law – the Online Safety Act – that will be enforced from March of next year is already claiming its first victims.
The new legislative landscape in the country is now not providing any kind of safety for hundreds of small websites, including non-profit forums, that will have to shut down, unable to comply with the act – specifically, faced with what reports refer to as “disproportionate personal liability.”
The fines go up to the equivalent of USD 25 million, while the law also introduces new criminal offenses.
https://reclaimthenet.org/uks-online-safety-act-drives-small-websites-to-shut-down
Save the children. The old cry to cover their real motives.
That hard drive with the names of UK pollies doing naughty things to kids years ago never did make it to a data recovery specialist.
“It’s crashed, data gone.” Yeah, right..
Save the kids from the global network of pollies with twisted needs instead.
30
Decorating floral cupcakes! Impressive!
https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_sp3ajsTg001z23obp.mp4
/well, you don’t like dogs or cats, so onto cupcakes😆
10
“The Estlink-2 power cable, which brings electricity from Finland to Estonia across the Baltic Sea, went down on Wednesday”
Is that grammar getting more common, or am I wrong in that it should read-
“The Estlink-2 power cable, which takes electricity from Finland to Estonia across the Baltic Sea, went down on Wednesday”
Sydney Morning Herald propaganda piece linking Russia to the electricity cable being cut by one of their shadow tankers, the data cables being cut a couple of weeks ago being their fault, and the Noordstream gas pipeline being blown up also their fault.
I suppose that understanding what is written, or if it is true or not, are unimportant these days, it all about how it makes you feel..
30
Written and edited by 20 somethings who failed English.
10
SPARC: Proving commercial fusion energy is possible
MIT Engineers believe their Fusion Reactor design is “Very Likely to Work”
00
‘Likely to work, may be ready soon, possibly history making’. LOL
20
Reading Greame Hankock’s “America Before”, published 2019. Picked it up, not because I’m an ‘Atlantis’ sort of person, but that it might have some up to date research on what is turning up in that part of the world. And it is delivering in spades. Depth on the early Mississippi mound builders; the hundreds of Nascar style ish (more geometrical that pictorial) sites on the Amazon side of the Andes; the extent and duration of the Amazon ‘black earth’ civilisations, and their plant domestications; and the Younger Dryas, which voluminous research is nailing as a fragmented, 1-200 km comet event, that I’m not seeing mentioned in the MSM.
North American sites like Poverty Point, which has had additions over a period of 4000 years, and includes a giant C shaped design, ¾ of a mile long, involving 5 alternating 3m x 10m trenches and causeways, adding up to 7 miles of earth works! Building peaked around 1700 BC.
The younger Dryas is tied to the Tauran meteor shower, and over a span of 21 years, reached a cresendo 12822 years ago, when several 1 -2 km meteors slammed into North America, hitting the ice sheets, or air bursting over the continent, triggering the burning of 9% of the planet’s vegetation, and fresh water from the ice sheet to flood into the North Atlantic, shutting down the gulf stream, and that, with all the smoke, almost pushed the planet back into the ice age, for 1200 years!
An interesting book.
40
Sounds good, I’ve placed a hold at my local library.
00
Even bankrupt Argentina is installing SNRs to compliment existing nuclear electricity generation
20
And Sweden is looking for 10 new plants – presumably so they can supply Germany when their renewables flop, prices shot up (6 times from Dec 9 to Dec 12) raising prices for Swedish Voters as well – or possibly not.
20
Behind Closed Doors: The Spy World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak
WSJ Story by Michael R. Gordon, Warren P. Strobel via MSN
A car and driver had been readied to whisk Jason Bannan from FBI headquarters early one morning in August 2021 to brief the White House on a novel virus that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and had stopped the world in its tracks.
Bannan had been told by his superiors to be on hand in case the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to join a top intelligence community briefing for the president. But the White House summons never came.
Bannan, a Ph.D. in microbiology, had joined the bureau after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington when the agency bulked up its expertise to deal with the threat of germ weapons, toxins and other weapons of mass destruction.
But for more than a year he had spent most of his waking hours on the Covid-19 virus that had seeped out of China in 2019.
Frustrated by China’s stonewalling, President Biden had ordered an urgent assessment by the U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories on whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese lab that had been doing extensive work on coronaviruses.
The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24.
The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.
At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.
“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
10
How did they know President Cabbage was awake when getting the briefing.
10
The year is 2035 and RFK has overhauled the health system
https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_sorqrcttbg1aqchyb.mp4
10
Very good.
00