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Jonathan Koomey Profile picture
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4 Nov, 4 tweets, 2 min read
I like to summarize Brandolini's law as "it takes ten times longer to debunk nonsense than to create nonsense". It describes a fundamental asymmetry related to misinformation. ordrespontane.blogspot.com/2014/07/brando…
Here's a corollary to that "law": It is a thousand times harder to debunk nonsense than it is to SPREAD nonsense, making the debunking process even tougher and more time dependent.
This is just another way of saying what Jonathan Swift said in 1710: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…" quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/tru…
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More from @jgkoomey

Jonathan Koomey Profile picture
4 Nov
There is some truth to this analysis, in the following sense: Both sides see the election as existential. The asymmetry, though, is that only one side is correct. The Trumpist/GOP believes many false and delusional things, and we need to reckon with that problem.
It's not enough to talk about how both sides feel about things, we need to analyze what motivates both sides' feelings.
Dems correctly see that science is being ignored, the pandemic is running rampant, the economy is in a shambles, and the Trumpist GOP is corrupting the democratic process enormously.
Read 13 tweets
Jonathan Koomey Profile picture
6 Oct
I had some fun digging back into our archives. The existence of a huge offshore wind potential in UK has been known for many years. The recent technology cost improvements are spectacular and impressive, and they've enabled more rapid tapping of that resource than anticipated.
In our technical potential analysis for the EC5 (Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, and the UK) back in 1995 (!) we found that about 40% of total wind potential for those countries combined was in the UK offshore wind/coastal resource.
That was for 50 M hub height, and obviously the turbines have gotten much bigger, with much higher hub heights, bigger swept area, and higher capacity factors than anticipated back then.
Read 6 tweets
Jonathan Koomey Profile picture
5 Oct
We need a balance between corporate and government power, but the scale has been tipped in favor of corporate power in the US for a very long time.
We need an honest debate about the role of government in a modern society. Anyone who says that government needs to be "small enough to be drowned in a bathtub" must be excluded from that conversation. They are not good faith participants.
In a modern capitalist society, well-functioning government is a necessity. Otherwise we get lead in children's toys, poisoned rivers, salmonella in our chicken, workers hurt in unsafe factories, and an unstable climate. We know this from history and from the present.
Read 5 tweets
Jonathan Koomey Profile picture
4 Oct
Yesterday I wrote a thread about why even small carbon dioxide charges can be useful for reducing emissions in certain sectors (but not others).
One of my colleagues rightly asked that I lay out my data and calculations, so this thread does that. If you find any issues with the calcs or data, please let me know.
The main claim (ignoring the peripheral questions about jet fuel) is that a carbon dioxide price of comparable size to those we've actually seen in real emissions trading systems is large enough to substantially affect both dispatch and shutdown decisions for existing coal plants
Read 20 tweets
Jonathan Koomey Profile picture
3 Oct
This is a useful thread. I wanted to add a comment about the notion that "small prices don't work", to help people understand why even a modest carbon price will help drive change.
The key for determining what effect a price change will have on demand is the percentage change represented by that price change. This % is a function of the price of fuel and the carbon content of the fuel, to first order.
For industrial and utility applications (and also perhaps jet fuel) the fuel price per unit of energy content is relatively low and the carbon content relatively high (for coal especially) compared to consumer applications.
Read 7 tweets
Jonathan Koomey Profile picture
29 Sep
This is a nice example of how speed of computation is a function of ALGORITHMS. More efficient algorithms make computation faster. It's not just about hardware (e.g. Moore's law) and in fact we will come to rely more on algorithms to speed things up as we approach physical limits
Leiserson, C E., N C. Thompson, J S. Emer, B C. Kuszmaul, B W. Lampson, D Sanchez, and T B. Schardl. 2020. "There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?" Science. vol. 368, no. 6495. pp. eaam9744. [science.sciencemag.org/content/368/64…]
There's a field called "codesign", in which software and hardware are optimized together to make certain calculations faster.
Read 14 tweets

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