randform

Tim and me hereby protest against the current plans to build a car gigafactory in Berlin’s vicinity as it poses a too big threat to Berlin’s water supply. There had been massive droughts in the last two years in Brandenburg and the factory is sought to use up as much water as over 75 000 people (for estimation: approx. the amount of people who arrived during the refugee crises in Berlin). Apart from this it is thought to be partially built into a high degree water protection area. We are joined in this protest among others by Nora and Theresa Lantez (website) who live much closer to the envisaged plant and for whom the impact on their living environment would be very direct and rather destructive. Here you can see Theresa dancing:
Theresa Lantez in Bernau.

update Sept.6, 2021: According to the public plans given by Tesla all of the buildings will be built into water protection zones. Moreover the plant site is surrounded by a special european protection zone the Natura 2000 zones. According to my counting the chemicals in the factory exceed by far the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. In the town hall meeting a representative of the Tesla factory answered that the allowed limits are not exceeded, if one counts each processing unit as a kind of “separate factory” (in german: Aufteilung in Anlagen), because in this way the volumes and weights of hazardous substances of each “Anlage” stay below the limits.
There are descriptions of what can be seen as a separate “Anlage” in the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. I am not a law person but it appears to me pretty clear that the argumentation of Tesla is simply wrong.

Since the town hall meeting in 2020 things got worse, because Tesla now wants to set up a battery factory as well, where alone the cathode material exceeds limits by about a factor of 20 and the public town hall meetings for the new plans were cancelled.

Last year (Jan 2017) there was a long essay in the german newspaper “Die Zeit” (“The time”) about how important a natural scientific evaluation could be for historical research. The essay: “Darum hatte Hitler keine Atombombe” (“That’s why Hitler had no nuclear bomb”) was written by physicist Manfred Popp. A very brief summary of his argumentation is that a lot of historical research about german nuclear research during Nazi times was more or less flawed due to missing knowledge or misinterpretations of physical facts.

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The frequent randform reader knows that a lot of randform posts are concerned with questions about how to keep earth as a habitat for humans. One of the biggest problems seems to be: population growth. That is humans are the root cause of “pollution”, they are to a great extend causing climate change, they massively reduced the habitat for other beings including those in their own food chain and if their own strive for efficiency keeps on like that, then they (partially?) need to abolish themselves and eventually (?) start the AI machine population explosion-if they haven’t wiped themselves out beforehand in their wars for ressources.

But what really are the reasons for this human population growth?

This seems to be a very deep systemic question, but for me it is rather suggestive that this strive or “competition for efficiency” is playing a major role here. So today I would like to discuss this quest for efficiency again a bit at the example of agriculture.

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Sende-Pentode RS289 from radio technology museum Königs-Wusterhausen

There was again a discussion with randform reader Oekologisch Interessierter about the development of nuclear energy production. The original post was in Oct. 2010 i.e. briefly before the Fukushima disaster in Mar. 2011 and the outlook cited there looked quite differently from what actually happened.

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“We will taylor what you want ” Hannah Perner-Wilson explaining the shop concept of her and Mika Satomi’s new shop, the: “KOBA Maßschneiderei”
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“End-Hauptbereichsverspannungsmedikamente für Nacknmuskuleere Speerre” collaborative artwork by artists group “Entente Sublimale”

More or less recently I had seen a video in which a famous politician was talking in a way which gave me the impression that this person was on drugs. I may have been wrong, but still. It should be said that in the video the person had to comment on a very tragic event and that was sofar the only time where I saw this politician in this state.
Then there was also Jeroen Dijsselbloems recent controversial remarks about economic failures due to alcohol and women and the following discussions, where it was e.g. remarked that after taking interest payments away, the economics of the Netherlands seems to look actually worse than that of Southern Europe. All this made me look a bit at examples of drugs and in particular opiods in connection with economics and politics.
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There was a bit of discussion going on about the last image in the last post which displays two emergency switches on a wall in the radio museum. On the switches there were the words “Diesel” and “Schaltfeld (switch board).” Above the switches there were two signs, each with the message: “Es darf nur eine Laufkatze betrieben werden” (There musn’t be more than one hoist in operation”). I was guessing that “Diesel” meant eventually the Diesel generator within the museum building which served -if I understood correctly- mainly as an emergency power system. So here now images from the Diesel generator.
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Todays post deals with the transmission and radio technology museum at a former transmission facility in the town of Königs-Wusterhausen close by Berlin (the town is reachable by Berlin subway). The facility is located on a hill and rather big (Flight over the the facility including its museum (building with red tiles)). The museum is definitely a must-see.

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Dead marten in our garden. Cause of death unknown. The head was unexplainably jammed by twigs (see image). The animal was already stiff when I found it. Could have been there at most for a day.

Here a comment about a specific problem in statistics which is often ignored by (mostly) non-mathematicians.

I originally intended to leave the comment in a mathematicians forum where this problem is discussed. As an example I looked at the glyphosate Renewal Assessment Report from 2013 where I think this ignorance leads to very problematic conclusions. Warning: some details about the animal test results are rather explicit.

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Image of the new safe confinement of April 2015 by Tim Porter, Wikimedia Commons

On the occasion of commemorating the Chernobyl disaster which happened then 25 years ago an interview with Dörte Siedentopf (a physician who has since 20 years been working in disaster relief programs for victims of the disaster and an antinuclear activist) had been published on Germanys major public news website. It was reposted today on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the disaster. Amongst others Dörte Siedentopf drew my attention to a 1959 agreement between the IAEA and the WHO.
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