Urtica Ferox

Peak Technology   Some time ago I had car trouble. My Mazda suddenly wouldn’t go beyond second gear, and because I live an hour’s drive from the city it was a big problem. So I visited my local garage, who passed me on to an automatic transmission specialist. He diagnosed that there was nothing actually wrong with the gearbox. Instead the sensor was malfunctioning, giving a faulty signal, and the car had gone into “limp-home mode”. Then he laughed and said, “Yeah these days we make most of our money fixing sensors. We hardly working on actual transmission systems.” Limp-home mode. Great. I started brooding on how in my younger years there was no limp-home mode in my old Austin A35. You could crank start it if the battery died, and it could be worked on and parts replaced with a socket set and a jack in the backyard. You didn’t have to have expensive, fragile, electronic systems replaced, and it didn’t talk to you. Sure, someone might be able to use a bent coat-han...

When Iran Runs Out of Water, You’ll Know Why There is an interesting article in Quillette called “How long before the regime falls in Iran?”,   by Art Keller, which I highly recommend. It includes a lot of interesting discussion about the regime in Iran, how fragile it is and how it manufactures support, but the part I found most interesting relates to water. “ Iran is running out, fast,” Keller says. “Nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with the sort of epic state mismanagement reminiscent of China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.” Note the phrase “nothing to do with climate change”. It is worth archiving this story for the time when Iranian society implodes and the Guardia n and New York Times mindlessly and automatically point the finger at fossil fuel use. Nikahang Kowsar is a critic of the regime and a geologist before he became a political cartoonist. According to Keller, Kowsar was forced to leave Iran 20 years ago for his cartoons mocking the regime...