Free solo climber completes Taipei skyscraper climb

There's no way I could have watched it live, even with a 10-second delay, but American daredevil Alex Honnold did indeed complete his "free solo" climb of the 101-storey Taipei 101 skyscraper yesterday.

This ridiculous feat, which you can see video snippets of, took him just an hour and a half, which equates to about a storey a minute. The building is a glass and metal monolith, with all sorts of overhangs and other tricky bits, and looks all but impossible to climb. Success was not necessarily assured. But there he was standing on the pinpoint pinnacle having to the crowds and not even looking tired. Crazy stuff.

Why.doesn't the daytime moon look full?

I had a sudden panic today. The moon was way up in the sky, in the middle of the day, i.e. at the same time as the sun was also way up in the sky. So, I thought, wait. there's nothing in the way of the sun shining on the moon, so why doesn't the moon appear full?

Well, of course, I'm not the only one to wonder that. And, once it is explained, the answer is obvious.

Yes, the sun is high in the sky, but it is off to one side as we look at it from earth. The sun is therefore shining on one side of the moon as we look at it, and so only part of it reflects back to us here on earth. It would only appear full to us if the sun was shining on it straight on (from our perspective).

Phew! Thank god there's a reasonable explanation.

Trump has achived nothing for America and done Putin a big favour

Donald Trump left Davos, Switzerland, with a smile on is face. No-one else did.

That's because Trump thinks he has achieved something great for America, the "framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland", while everybody else is focussed on the damage he has done to the NATO alliance. "It's long-term deal", he says, that "everybody's very happy with". Right. Furthermore, "it'll be forever for Greenland at this point, forever", whatever the hell that means. Trump only spoke with NATO chief Mark Rutte; neither Greenland nor Denmark have had their say yet.

Ironically, Trump achieved next to nothing for America. When he blusters about, "It was an incredible time in Davos", and "We're getting everything we wanted - total security, total access to everything", everybody else knows that he didn't get anything America didn't already have, courtesy of an agreement from the 1950s that Trump seems blissfully unaware of. The US has always been able to place troops, bases and military hardware on the island. Nothing Trump has done has changed that.

The TACO ("Trump Always Chickens Out") monicker has been resurrected, as the US blinked before Europe.

However, as has been said, the damage to NATO is done. As one professor put it, "NATO is based on shared values and trust. What is becoming very clear to European leaders, and to Canada as well, is that these values are not shared any more. And the trust is simply not there." EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas bemoaned the fact that Europe-US relation had "taken a big blow" over the past week.

Vladimir Putin wants more than anything else to destabilize the NATO alliance. Donald Trump has done that for him, without Putin needing to move a finger. As a Democratic congressman phrases it, "Putin is celebrating this misguided effort to extract meaningless concessions that were more about Trump's needs for an abstract win than American national interests".

Trump's claims about Chinese wind power are WAY off

President Trump is still droning on in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as I write this, already well over his allotted time. And, as expected, there's a lot to take exception to.

Just to take one example of his well-documented habit of citing "alternative facts" (aka "lies"), Trump was on his familiar hobby horse, criticising wind turbines, specifically Chinese wind turbines. He suggested that, although "China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven't been able to find any wind farms in China".

Well, I guess he didn't look very hard. China is host to 11 of the largest 12 land-based windfarms in the world, headed up by Xinjiang Hami Wind Farm and Gansu Guazhou Wind Farm, which are an order of magnitude bigger than windfarms elsewhere in the world.

And China produces more wind power than any other country - a huge 992 terawatt hours in 2024. Second? The USA (despite Trump's best efforts to hobble the industry), which produced less than half as much.

Much else that Trump said during his rambling speech was misleading or just plain wrong. But Chinese wind power was definitely the wrong hill to choose to die on.

Carney should avoid Trump's "Board of Peace" like the plague

Hard on the heels of his provocative, inspiring and distinctly critical speech at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is apparently seriously considering joining Donald Trump's "Board of Peace", which is supposed to help bring about a just and lasting peace in Gaza (and maybe elsewhere).

While the end goal may be laudable, Carney should have nothing to do with this latest Trump vanity project. The UN did endorse the idea, but what has ultimately emerged is a far cry from what was promised and voted on, in a classic bait-and-switch move by Trump. Indeed, the Board's charter doesn't even mention Gaza!

Just look at the other members of this invitation-only club thus far: USA, Belarus, Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Argentina, Armenia, and of course Israel (yes, the fox is expected to regulate the hen coop). It's a strange assortment of (mainly authoritarian, as it happens) states. Putin has apparently been asked, and is maybe thinking about it, as are Egypt, Turkey, Thailand, Germany, UK, Paraguay, India, China, Ukraine, Kosovo, Slovenia and Croatia. France's Emmanuel Macron has, sensibly, already summarily refused to be involved in such a group, as have Sweden and Norway.

Mr. Carney should certainly not even consider paying $1 billion to become a "permanent" member of the Board, rather than just a three-year member. (How ridiculous is that? Just how long is Trump planning on stringing this out? What is the money for?). And, thankfully, it seems like he is not thinking about it.

But Carney should follow some of the more sensible countries in not touching the Trump-led Board - what The Guardian calls his "imperial court", and what Trump probably thinks of as an alternative to the United Nations - with a bargepole.

UPDATE

It looked like Carney is off the hook, as Donald Trump publicly withdraws his invitation to Canada to join his ridiculous Board of Peace.

Trump didn't give any specific reason for the disinvitation, but most likely it was a fit of pique over Carney's damning (and less than complimentary to Trump) Davos speech, and not anything more thoughtful and insightful than that. Either way, we should probably all breath a sigh of relief that Mr. Carney doesn't have to involve himself with this whole flawed Trump-dominated enterprise.

Carney outdoes himself at Davos

Well.

Mark Carney just made the speech of his life - "the most important speech in Canadian history", if you believe the National Observer, "Churchillian", say others - and you can watch it on YouTube, or read it here. It earned a rare standing ovation at Davos.

Appearing at the Davos World Economic Forum, his 16-minute speech - which he actually wrote himself, no professional speech-writers here - laid out Canada's way forward as a middle power in a post-Trump world. And, while he never actually mentioned the word "America", "USA" or "Trump" once, it was very clear what he was talking about.

"The old order is not coming back", he intoned. "We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just." There were many more quotables: "The end of a nice story and the beginning of a brutal reality"; "We're in a rupture, not a transition"; "When rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself"; "The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must"; "To hope that compliance will buy safety - it won't"; "If you are not at the table, you are on the menu"; "This is not sovereignty, it is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination".

Referencing Thucydides and Václav Havel, Carney did indeed outdo himself. Yes, there was some bull in there too. For example, the claim that Canada has the "most educated population in the world" - where did that come from? And asserting "sustainable development" as one of Canada's core values is a bit strong coming from a man who has spent the last year walking back much of Canada's sustainability.

But kudos to Carney for a strong showing from a man who sometimes comes over as a bit "blah".

Spoof headlines or real?

Some of the headlines in today's paper looks like spoofs or satires, something The Onion or This Hour Has 22 Minutes might have come up with.

• Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion
• Canada weighs sending soldiers to Greenland in face of U.S. threats
• US President ties Greenland threats to Nobel snub
• Trump invites Netanyahu to join his Board of Peace

Unfortunately, they are all too real. As a Globe and Mail editorial put it: "It is a time of unthinkable things, that move from impossibility to improbability to reality with disorienting and alarming speed".

Maybe cows are not all stupid

If you thought that cows were pretty stupid, well, you're probably right. But maybe not AS stupid as you thought.

It turns out that cows have joined the relatively exclusive club of tool-wielding animals, in the company of humans, chimpanzees, crows, and maybe humpback whales.

And before we get too excited, it's really only Veronika, a 13-year old Swiss Brown cow that lives on a farm in Austria, essentially as a pet. Veronika, over the years, has perfected her technique of using sticks or brushes to scratch herself in various places. It's not much maybe, but it's enough to get some animal behaviourists quite excited.

All those other cows? Yeah, pretty stupid.I