Power of Siberia Pipeline #2

Power of Siberia Pipeline

Watching European leaders blundering around, sliding farther down the slope everyday, heading toward the abyss, is like watching a movie about crazy people. Nothing they do makes any sense, but given we have big name actors playing these parts, you think there must be some secret plan they are following and one of these days they will explain it and it will all become clear. Or maybe they really are just stupid and crazy. Here's another brick in the wall:

Did you notice the EU just lost its gas lifeline?

The EU’s cheap-gas lifeline just got handed to Beijing instead. With three signatures, Russia, China and Mongolia rerouted half a century of energy history eastward.

On Tuesday, the three countries signed a legally binding memorandum for the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline – a roughly 2,600-km line, at an estimated cost of around $13.6 bn, that will carry 50 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas every year through Mongolia into northern China’s industrial heartland. 

While the pricing structure has yet to be fixed, the signatories have effectively redrawn the European energy map.

For decades, this gas was the bedrock of German and Western European industry, piped from Russia’s Yamal fields in the Arctic through Nord Stream 1 directly into Germany. Now, that same supply is being redirected east.

I have previously posted about several of the places that are shown on the map:

Amur	Amur Bridge Project
Komsomolsk-on-Amur	Komsomolsk-on-Amur
Novosibirsk	Su-57
Urengoy	Failing Conventionally
Vladivostok	Many posts
Yamal	Russian Yamal-LNG project on the Arctic Ocean

Space Rocks

The Object That Will Change Your View of Space Forever
The Space Race

I've always liked the idea of interstellar travel. I'm not quite sure why the idea appeals to me, but I am not the only one. Just look at the success of Star Trek and Star Wars, not to mention the rest of fictional space exploration industry.

It seems like it would be really cool, but nobody seems to have any idea how it might be accomplished. The rocket equation makes it pretty clear that it's going to take you a zillion years to get to another star using any kind of propulsion that we know how to do.

However the trick with the rocket equation is you can reach any velocity you want as long as you can propel your reaction mass to sufficient velocity. Problem here is the velocity you need is insanely high, like in billions of MPH. If you can get your exhaust gas velocity up in the vicinity of the speed of light, and you can devote like 99% of your mass to reaction mass, you could make it to another star in a few years.

Going that far away and being in space for that long, you are going to want to pack accordingly. Say we allocate a million tons for habitat, then we are going to need a hundred million tons of reaction mass. A ball of iron 50 feet in diameter would do.

Putting that much mass into orbit by lifting it from the surface of the earth, be better if we could build it in orbit around the moon. Use electromagnetic launchers to launch what we need into orbit.

Two Graves - Netflix Series

Two Graves | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Very limited series: 3 episodes, 50 minutes each. Basically, it's a long movie. Two teenage girls disappear from a small Spanish town during the night. One girl's body turns up in short order. Nothing is heard of the other girl, then one day, two years later a guy makes an innocuous comment and while it leads to finding out what happened, it also unleashes a veritable shitstorm that falls on everyone.

Cast

	Actor	Surname	Character	Role
5	Zoé	Arnao	Marta	Dead girl, daughter of Rafael, the gangster, friend of Veronica
14	Rubén	Carballés	Salazar's attorney	Gangster's lawyer
10	Nonna	Cardoner	Lupe	Veronica's younger sister
16	Óscar	Dorta	Ginés	Might be Isabel's gardener, but his picture doesn't look anything like the character by about 30 years.
13	Camino	Fernández	Carmen	Rafael's wife, Marta's mother
3	Hovik	Keuchkerian	Antonio	Father of Veronica & Lupe
1	Kiti	Mánver	Isabel	Mother of Antonio & piano teacher
2	Álvaro	Morte	Rafael Salazar	Gangster
15	Antonella	Pinto	Isabel's friend
9	Iván	Prados	Jonás	Friend of the girls & #1 suspect
6	Salva	Reina	Carlos Raén	TV Personality, slime ball
8	Carlos	Scholz	Beltrán	Isabel's student procurer of young women
7	Joan	Solé	Sergeant Zaera	Police Detective
11	Magdalena	Tejado	Jamila	Veronica's very good friend
4	Nadia	Vilaplana	Verónica	Missing girl
12	Ben	Zahra	Farid	Antonio's friend with connections in Morroco

Be Careful What You Are Reading There, Comrade

I like this paragraph:

What an exciting time to be alive. The world is changing, shifting before our eyes. You won’t find signs of the real changes in DC or New York, or London or Brussels. The international event of this year is the Shangai Cooperation Organization (the SCO), meeting now in Tianjin, China. You won’t hear much about the conference from Western news outlets. There are plenty of places where you can learn about it, however. Or why not go to the official government outlets themselves, such as RT, TAAS, or Global Times? I know that is heresy here in Babylon the Great. Propaganda, you say? Okay, but then don’t respond by quoting the NYT, the WSJ, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, the Telegraph, or the Economist; for you are deep into goose-meet-gander territory then. - Introduction from A Tale in Two Pictures

but then I'm a big consumer of heretical media. The rest of A Tale in Two Pictures is about how Asia is overtaking the west, and if you are looking at gross economic clout, that is probably true. But USA is still way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of freedom. Asia has been under the thumb of authoritarian rulers since forever, I'm not sure they could change if they wanted to. We are currently having an argument here about freedom and civilization, because civilization is incompatible with unlimited freedom. I am confident we will sort it out eventually. But then some new mental disease will take hold of the population and noisy ones will start making a fuss, so then we'll have a new argument that we'll have to sort out. And so it goes. At least it keeps a large section of the populace entertained.

American Long Tail Boats

Rich French's traditional 30-foot wooden Thai longtail boat may be the only one like it in New England. Friday he spent time motoring around Echo Lake in Mt. Vernon. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

This guy had this boat built in Thailand and shipped to his home in New England.

GO-DEVIL Longtail

GO-DEVIL is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Their target market seems to hunters and fisherman who like to explore the Louisiana swamps. I can see how a longtail motor could have certain advantages there. They aren't building hot rod motors, mostly small motors. The largest is 40 HP. Did not find any pictures of boats with these motors. Big problem in the USA is that most small boats are trailered, and longtail motors could make that difficult.

The Atypical Family | Official Trailer | Netflix

The Atypical Family | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix K-Content

Very silly, pretty funny, Korean drama. Slow paced, the simplest things take for frigging ever. 

We've got two families. The Bok family has become wealthy thanks to grandma's visions of the future that came to her in her dreams while she was sleeping. Grandpa recognized her talent and did what he could to support her, he basically became her servant. Their daughter could fly like Superman. Their son could travel back in time to visit events in his past. The son's teenage daughter can read people's minds by looking into their eyes. All of their talents have atrophied due to 'lifestyle disease', probably triggered when the son's wife was killed in a car crash roughly five years ago. He has since fallen into depression and has been drinking steadily.

The other family are scam artists. There is a brother and sister. The brother is a tough guy, the sister is the ring leader. She has one natural daughter and one adopted daughter. The adopted daughter's father was a drunk who froze to death one winter. He died deeply in debt and his daughter has been saddled with her father's debt. The mom in this family (the ring leader) has set up a couple of scams where adopted daughter ensnares a man into marriage and then through some shenanigans they make off with all their loot.

Now they have set their sights on the Bok family's son. Things become complicated when the Bok's son and the adopted daughter develop feelings for each other. Things become confused when the Bok matriarch figures out the scammer's plan, but doesn't care because her son has cleaned up his act and returned to life.

At the beginning, the daughter who can fly looks like she weighs 300 pounds. By the end of the show her figure has become svelte. You make a person's body look fat with a fat suit, but how did they make her face so fat? She was really fat. If it was done with makeup, it must have been a real chore to get her ready for the camera.

The Bok's house is fabulous. Besides being big and fancy they have a treasure room and a vault. It's like something a Bond villain would have.

I'm not sure why we watched this show, other than the leading couple are very attractive. I asked my wife why we watched this show and she gave me a couple of reasons. One, it is not our usual fare, and two, it is a romance, and we are kind of suckers for this kind of story.

Asian Wiki has a good list of the cast. There are 66 people listed. The leading man was played by Jang Ki-Yong and the leading lady was played by Chun Woo-Hee.

12 episodes, 1:10 each.

Skyfall

Russian 9M730 Burevestnik Cruise Missile Launch

Life imitates James Bond:

Significant activity on Russia's Novaya Zemlya archipelago indicates an impending test of the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile, known as Skyfall by NATO. - OilPrice

Skyfall was the title of a 2012 James Bond movie. But where is this Novaya Zemlya archipelago? In the arctic ocean, that's where:

Novaya Zemlya Archipelago

Google Maps doesn't show lines of latitude or longitude. I adjusted the view so that the line of longitude that runs through our target is vertical, i.e. the North Pole is directly above Novaya Zemlya at some unknown distance. Looking around, I found a couple other maps of the arctic that do have some better information.

Map of the Arctic showing the July Isotherm line (orange), the Arctic tree line (green) and the Arctic circle (red). Novaya Zemlya is at the top of the Arctic Ocean in this map.

The Isotherm line indicates that the temperature is roughly the same all along the line at that time, in this case July.

Map originally published by Tufts University showing territorial division in the Arctic. Novaya Zemlya is in the lower right quadrant of the Arctic Ocean in this map.

The Russian Ministry of Defense’s newest military base: the Arctic Shamrock, on the large island of Alexandra Land.

Russia isn't messing around when they set up operations in the Arctic. I didn't see any like this on Novaya Zemlya, but there is an airbase on the southern end. There is also small town with a hospital and a church about 75 miles southeast of there. Alexandra Land is roughly 400 miles northwest of Novaya Zemlya.