Netflix Recommendations

Here are some shows that I have watched on Netflix that I enjoyed and am happy to recommend to other people. I have attempted to make my comments as spoiler free as possible but still make them informative. I have included trailers for the shows, which will give you a sense of the look and feel of the show but might contain some spoilers. The trailers are all for season 1 of the show. They are in no particular order. There are many shows on Netflix that I want to explore but the ones below are those that I have watched. Other recommendations welcome in the comments.

Travellers

An excellent time travel show. Only three seasons but with a satisfying conclusion.



The Umbrella Academy

An interesting and quirky look at time travel and dystopia. I am looking forward to the next season



Sense8

Eight people across the world have a connection. Unusual Sci-Fi with a satisfying resolution. It has strong and positive LGBTIQ themes. Series complete.



The Last Kingdom

Set at the same time as the show Vikings with English Kingdoms battling Viking invasions. I found it more interesting and satisfying than the Vikings TV show. So far with four seasons with I think more to come



Van Helsing

The Vampire apocalypse. Avoid if you don’t like horror shows, but this one has a very interesting story line and a satisfying resolution. Series complete



Shadow and Bone

Fantasy – chosen one / good vs evil, but done well. Covers the first book in the series very well. The introduction of very interesting characters from the follow-up series “Six of Crows” was a masterstroke. I am looking forward to the next season.



Outlander

Time travel / historical drama, based on the best selling series by Diana Gabaldon. So far 5 seasons. I am looking forward to season 6.



Anne with an E

An interesting adaption of Anne of Green Gables. I have one friend who hated it because she loved the book so much, but I enjoyed the show. Show completed with a satisfying conclusion



Gotham

Set in the Batman universe this tells the story of Commissioner Gordon from when he was a rookie detective. Back stories include Batman, The Penguin, Catwoman, The Riddler, The Joker, Bane, Poison Ivy and Scarecrow. Show completed satisfactorily with 100 episodes



Bridgerton

The loves, loves and rivalries of upper class families in Regency England (1813). Looking forward to the second season.



The Cook of Castamar

Set in Spain in 1720 a story of family rivalries and politics but with the central theme of the relationship between the Duke and his cook. A Spanish production. We watched it dubbed in English which was very well done, but there is the option to watch it in the original Spanish with English subtitles. Series completed with a satisfying conclusion.



Longmire

A modern day police procedural set in contempory Wyoming, USA. Six satisfactorily completed seasons.



The Witcher

A fantasy series based on the stories by Andrzej Sapkowski. I really enjoyed the first season and am looking forward to season 2. Note there are multiple timelines in the story.



The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf

An excellent one off animated prequel to the Witcher.



Godless

Set in the American west. This is an excellent limited series with 7 episodes



Blindspot

A FBI crime show with an interesting twist. There are currently 5 seasons and we have watched the first two. We will continue on with series 3 soon.



Love, Death & Robots

A collection of animated short stories spans several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror and comedy. I have watched the first four of the shows and will come back to it later. The animation is excellent.



Lucifer

Based on characters created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, this is a redemption story for the original villain - the Devil. Six seasons with a satisfying conclusion.



Line of Duty

A great contemporary police drama with 5 seasons.



The Crown

A series following the life of Queen Elizabeth II. Excellent show currently with four seasons with season 5 coming next year.



Knightfall An excellent series on the Knights Templar. Currently two seasons with no plans for a season 3.



Rake

This great Australian show is on Netflix if you haven’t already seen it on the ABC.



Peaky Blinders

A notorious crime gang in 1919 Birmingham UK. An excellent show but I find it hard to find anyone in this show to barrack for as there are so many villains.



Marcella

A contemporary British Police procedural, made interesting by the personal, psychological struggles of its main character. Complete after three series.



Jack Irish

A great contemporary Australian crime series. Netflix has two seasons of the TV show and three movies.



Babylon Berlin

A German series set in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A great story and highly atmospheric, made doubly so because we know what is coming in 1933. The dubbing was excellent so we watched it that way. Currently three seasons. The German Production company is filming the fourth season, so hopefully that season will appear on Netflix next year.



The Alienist

A psychological thriller set in New York in the late 19th Century. Two seasons. A third season has not been confirmed but no announcement for cancellation.



Happy

“Nick Sax is a corrupt, intoxicated, ex-cop turned hit man who is adrift in a twilight world of casual murder, soulless sex, and betrayal.” It is dark, violent and with plenty of graphic language but there are wonderfully comic and uplifting elements as well. Nick ends up with the most interesting sidekick! Only two seasons unfortunately.



Altered Carbon

A great Cyberpunk detective show unfortunately cancelled after two seasons. The first series follows fairly closely the first book, but the second series is completely different. I am a sucker for Cyberpunk and if you are too then you will really enjoy this show. Warning it is quite violent.



Russian Doll

“Russian Doll” is spiky, funny, devastating, and downright bizarre. It follows simmering New York City misanthrope Nadia through the most horrific, life-changing, revelatory night of her life.



Sweet Tooth

“Sweet Tooth is part fantasy, part sci-fi, part whimsy, part cold-eyed realism and most points in between. It is either warmly eccentric or hysterically crazy, perfect entertainment or a horrifying attempt to parlay the pandemic into a commercially palatable mashup.” The Guardian. But I liked it.



Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

“As a freewheeling comedy-thriller, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is agreeably daft entertainment even if it doesn't crib heavily from Douglas Adams' novels, serving as an incredibly loose adaptation. Quirky sci-fi comedy is fun but can be violent.”
I loved it. Unfortunately cancelled after two seasons.

Cloud Atlas - the Book

Introduction

The author of Cloud Atlas is David Mitchell.

I first became aware of Mitchell in a YouTube interiew/conversation at this link.

Book Structure

During the interview Mitchell described whis writing style in the video excerpt below.



In the video Mitchell states that his natural style is as a novella writer. He assembles a group of novellas connected together by "footbridges and worm holes" so it looks like that he has "handed in a Sir Christopher Wren sized thing but it is actually just leggo blocks".

Cloud Atlas is written in this style. It consists of six nested stories (of novella length); each is read or observed by a main character of the next story, thus they progress in time through the central sixth story. The first five stories are each interrupted at a pivotal moment. After the sixth story, the others are resolved in reverse chronological order.

The diagram below graphically displays the structure of the novel. Source: https://albrooke.com/2016/01/19/cloud-atlas/

In the second story Robert Frobisher the musician is writing a musical composition - Cloud Atlas Sextet. His description of the structure of the piece is reminiscent of the structure of the book. His comment "Revolutionary of gimmicky" is maybe the author asking the same question about the book. “Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.”

Here is the music from the film adaption. It is not like the description in the book but is still very pleasant to listen tol



Major Themes

Reincarnation of souls is an important theme in the book. Zachry, the protagonist in the sixth story, makes it an explicit claim and even uses the name of the book in his argument.

“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.”

Mitchell does guard the secular hypothesis when he has Meronym reply that she does not believe in souls.

Each of the main characters has a comet birth mark and Mitchell does think that this signifies reincarnation. Unfortunately two of the characters with this birth mark Luise Rey and Timothy Cavenish have overlapping lives. When asked about this Mitchell admits that it was a mistake but goes on to give a "rationalisation" which includes that "...things are more interesting when they are fuzzy and don't quite fit ..." which can work in a novel and goes on to describe such probolems using the wonderful phrase "portable textual temples of inexactitude" and "its kind of OK for novels to not make complete sense, this is ofcause a ratioisation but its kind of a true rationalisation as well."

See his full response to the issue in the video below:



Dystopia

Each of the main characters in the stories were trying to improve their world.
Adam Ewing decides to join the anti-slavery movement.
Robert Frobisher composes a musical masteriece.
Luisa Rey stops the construction of a dangeroug nuclear power station.
Timothy Cavendish writes a film script of his comic adventures. The film is produced as it is watched by Somni-451 in the next story.
Sonmi-451 publishes her declarations which are revered in by later generations.
Zachry assists Meronym and resists the temptation to attack her.

But the attempts by individuals to improve the workd are ineffective as the two stories in the future are very dystopic.

In An Orison of Sonmi~451 set in the year 2144, in a country called Nea So Copros: " ... a savage consumer-driven society gone amok. Each citizen has a spending quota; all-seeing eyes watch from the street corners; and each citizen has a "soul" or a computer chip implanted in his finger, without which travel and other basic freedoms are impossible. Several stratas of society exist, ranging from Xecutives (who appear to run Nea So Copros as part of the "Juche") to Fabricants, mass-produced slave clones treated as nothing more than property." Source of quote at this link

Somni described Nea So Copros as follows: "Nea So Copros is poisoning itself to death. Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless,its air tosloaded, its food supplies riddled with rogue genes. the downstrata can't buy the drugs necessary to couonter these privations. Melanoma and maleria belts advance northwards at forty kilometers per year." People escape the surrounding coutryside around NeoSeoul because of: ".. malaria, flooding, drought, rogue crop-genomes, parasites, encroaching deadlands...".

“I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.” "Human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too." —Meronym

Denier nonsense

Links

Global Cooling in Telegraph

The Temperature of the Earth

The following calculation assumes that the energy into the Earth system and the energy out are not affected by the atmospheric gasses. When the system is in equilibrium, that is neither warming nor cooling, Energy In must equal Energy Out.

Energy In

Energy enters the Earth system from the sun mainly in the form of visible light. This solar flux is represented by the letter L. The value is 1361 Watts per square metre (W/m²). About 30% of the light from the sun is reflected out of the Earth system, mainly by clouds and ice. The reflectivity of the planet is called the albedo and is represented by the letter α.

Each square metre then absorbs energy from the sun according to the following formula:
L(1 – α)

We are interested in the total energy absorbed. The solar flux varies over the surface of the Earth, strongest at the equator where the surface is perpendicular to the incoming light and weakest at the poles where the surface is at a large angle to the sun’s rays. Adding up all of these variable amounts is tricky but there is a simple method to calculate it. The light waves from the sun are parallel to each other and the Earth intercepts them and casts a shadow. This shadow is a circle which has a simple formula - πr². So the formula for the total energy from the Sun absorbed by the earth is:
L(1 – α) πr²

Energy out

The formula for the energy that is radiated away from the surface is:
ϵσT⁴ 4 πr²
ϵ is emissivity, how close the source is to a black body (0 not a back body to 1 a black body), σ the Stefan-Boltzman constant, 5.67 X 10^-8 (Watts/square metre), T⁴ is temperature in Kelvin raised to the fourth power, 4πr² is area of a sphere.
If the system is in equilibrium Energy In equals Energy Out
So
L(1 – α) πr² = ϵσT⁴ 4 πr²

Calculate Temperature, ie solve for T

πr² appears on both sides so it can be cancelled

So
L(1 – α) = 4 ϵσT⁴



With L = 1361 W/m² α = 0.3 σ = 5.67 X 10^-8 and ϵ = 1 (given that Earth is relatively close to being a black body)
T = 254.5 K,
(K is degrees Kelvin. The Kelvin Scale starts at absolute zero ie -273⁰ Celsius. Note Kelvin temperatures are indicated by K, and do not by convention use a degree (⁰) sign.)

Consequently 254.5 K equals -18.5⁰ C

Given that the global temperature is about 15⁰ C, according to this calculation the planet should be about 33⁰ C below current temperatures.

This calculation gives a very incorrect answer because it ignores the effect of Greenhouse Gasses.

The Discovery of Infrared by William Hershel

The Discovery of Infrared by William Hershel

Before I started researching this topic I was only aware of Herschel as the discoverer of the planet Uranus in 1781.

It turns out that he made at least one other important discovery, that if infrared light, in 1800.

Herschel's discovery is described at this website in the following way:

He was interested in learning how much heat passed through the different colored filters he used to observe the Sun and noticed that filters of different colors seemed to pass different levels of heat. Herschel thought that the colors themselves might contain different levels of heat, so he devised a clever experiment to investigate his hypothesis.

Herschel directed sunlight through a glass prism to create a spectrum - the "rainbow" created when light is divided into its colors - and measured the temperature of each color. He used three thermometers with blackened bulbs (to better absorb the heat) and, for each color of the spectrum, placed one bulb in a visible color while the other two were placed beyond the spectrum as control samples. As he measured the temperatures of the violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red light, he noticed that all of the colors had temperatures higher than the controls and that the temperature of the colors increased from the violet to the red part of the spectrum. After noticing this pattern, Herschel decided to measure the temperature just beyond the red portion of the spectrum in a region apparently devoid of sunlight. To his surprise, he found that this region had the highest temperature of all.

Herschel performed further experiments on what he called "calorific rays" (derived from the Latin word for 'heat') beyond the red portion of the spectrum. He found that they were reflected, refracted, absorbed and transmitted just like visible light. What Sir William had discovered was a form of light (or radiation) beyond red light. These "calorific rays" were later renamed infrared rays or infrared radiation (the prefix infra means `below'). Herschel's experiment was important not only because it led to the discovery of infrared light, but also because it was the first time that someone showed that there were forms of light that we cannot see with our eyes.

The video below was produced by FLIR Systems, makers of infrared thermal imaging systems. It begins by describing Herschel's experiment and infrared light in general, before describing the use of thermal imaging systems in the modern world.

Over the next century or so the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum was discovered.

The diagram below shows where light and infra red fit into the the electromagnetic spectrum. Infra red has a wavelength between 0.7 and 300 micrometres. A micrometre (micrometer for Americans. The symbol for a micrometre is µm.

Did Julia Gillard Lie?

I first posted this on a different blog in 2011. I am reposting it as the issue of carbon pricing is becoming important again.

It is often claimed that Julia Gillard is a liar on the basis that she said before the last election that she would not introduce a Carbon Tax. The argument continues that as she is now introducing a Carbon Tax she lied. Some people have taken to calling her JuLIAR.

There are two issues to consider here:

1. What did Gillard actually say before the last election?

2. What is the nature of the legislation that is currently before the parliament?

The day before the election the Australian published an article on Gillard that can be found at this link.

Here is the direct quote from Gillard from that article:

"I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism," she said of the next parliament. "I rule out a carbon tax."

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme mentioned in the quote is the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that was negotiated between the Rudd Government and the then Opposition led by Malcolm Turnbull. (The Opposition kicked out Turnbull, but only by one vote, the then reneged on the agreed ETS.)

So she ruled out a Carbon Tax but not an Emissions Trading Scheme.

See this post and this post for analyses of the differences between a Carbon Tax and an Emissions Trading Scheme.

So what is the Government introducing a Carbon Tax or an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)?

The clear answer is that it is an ETS.

There is an interesting wrinkle though. For the first few years of the scheme it will operate somewhat like a Carbon Tax as the price per tonne of carbon released will be charged at a fixed price ($23 per tonne). There are differences though as the permits can be traded.

The reason why there will be an initial price placed on carbon emissions is to facilitate the transition to a full ETS and avoid the problems of excess permits that occurred in the early years of the European ETS.

So the simple answer to the question: did Gillard Lie, is clearly no.

She did not rule out an ETS before the election and she is now introducing an ETS to the parliament.

It is significant that the quote from Gillard came from the Australian newspaper. This is not some left of centre paper. The Australian has made its life work to destroy the Gillard Government.

Here is a link with comments by Gillard on how the price mechanism would work.

The best speech in the Federal Parliament given on the topic of Carbon Pricing was by Malcolm Turnbull. The speech can be found here.

This post emphasises the importance of checking original sources. For an interesting take on this issue see this post.

The climate policy worked out by the Multi-party committee - Government, Independents and Greens - is based on the Garnaut review, the summary of which can be found here.

Greenhouse Effect

This is very cold, as Kelvin is the absolute temperature scale. Zero K is -273 degrees Celsius (^oC), so zero Celsius is 273 Kelvin. Consequently 254 K is -19^oC. As global temperature is about 15^oC , the calculation above concludes that global temperatures should be about 34^oC lower than that actually measured.

The derivation of the formulae above is explained in the following video.

http://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/climate-science-data/climate-science/greenhouse-effect#targetText=Greenhouse%20effect,re%2Dradiated%20by%20greenhouse%20gases.&targetText=The%20absorbed%20energy%20warms%20the%20atmosphere%20and%20the%20surface%20of%20the%20Earth.

An interesting link with accurate diagram and dubunking a dienier