Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 31, 2024, 10:38 AMPicky Picky. Well I won't disagree, and being from Finland (even if not born there) does not help.
Simon has a thick Ausssie accent. English is his first language. His inability to speak coherently has nothing to do with living in Finland.
QuoteThere is an old movie, Flight of the Phoenix. In it an aeronautical engineer is putting together pieces of a crashed plane to get something that will fly. The survivors, a WWII bombing crew is helping. Their leader finds out this engineer has only designed model airplanes. That from a factual point of view does not matter. The physics of flight are the same for model airplanes. But the commander wisely keeps the knowledge about the engineer to himself. Facts don't matter. It was important that the flight crew kept their hopes up. Lack of faith would be fatal. They needed to fly to safety or they would die in the middle of the Sahara desert.
A great old movie. I saw it 11 times sailing back from Brasil on a Freighter/Passenger ship that used to do the route. It was the only movie they had on board and showed it every night. Jimmy Stewart played the Pilot, Hardy Kruger played the Kraut model plane designer. Factoid: The plane they were flying on was a charter flight for Saudi ARAMCO.
QuoteI don't much care about the mini-nukes and Simon's hopium about it. I do care that Simon is not crazy as a loon like Guy McFearson is. Simon seems more able to know the difference between bullshit and actual facts better than most. But at the same time spending more than passing time on 'adiabatic oil' is something he should not have not done. 'I am open to the idea'.
Abiotic, not Adiabatic. This was one of the bad science/engineering moments. He also talked about routinely digging 10Km deep wells for geothermal power and abiotic oil. Even if you could drill that deep easily (which we can't), the energy cost of pumping anything up from that depth would be more than you got from it. Negative EROEI.
Another stupid one was the idea of burning iron powder instead of coal. Where is he gonna get iron powder? You don't find iron by itself in minerals, it comes combined with something else, like a sulfate. To get iron by itself, you have to smelt it in a furnace. So what does he burn to get the iron powder? Dumb.
QuoteSimon is a bit of a lightweight from our point of view. But we are not running the Diner just to talk to each other. We actually want discussion, new members, and some growth would be nice.
The thing is, with his bona fides, he should NOT be a lightweight. He should be able to frame the problem correctly and in a 50 minute presentation with a sympathetic interviewer he should be able to cover a whole lot more ground than he did. Talks about micronukes, but did he mention anything about the grid or how to wire them together? He mentioned storage issues with renewables, but he didn't talk at all about what they are. It was all pablum, even for newbies. Energy Collapse for Dummies.
Finally, his future with the Venus Project sounds like greenwashing hopium to me. Perfect energy efficient livable cities for everyone. mmm-hmmmm. ::)
RE