Beam Global's EV ARC charging system could be a game-changer

Well, here's a cool thing: Beam Global has developed a standalone off-grid EV charging station with its own solar-powered canopy. 

The EV ARC System generates and stores its own electricity, and can power up to 6 EV chargers. It requires no construction, electrical work or utility connection (although it can be linked to the grid for backup if needed), and it can be shipped intact in a standard 20-foot shipping container, or on a flatbed truck or railcar, or in its own proprietary transportation system. It uses a 4.4 kW array with a sun-tracking system for added efficiency.

Patents have been issued in USA, Europe, India and China thus far. It is thought that delivery fleets may well be the mainstay of ARC's potential market. It's approach is to ensure continual charging for a full daily range replenishment (DRR) for multiple cars, which particularly suits fleet businesses. Parking lots at theme parks and sports stadiums are also a target market, but supermarkets and restaurants are also showing an interest. It is designed to fit within a standard-sized parking spot (or at least an American one).

Although the units may seem pricey at about $70,000 fully installed, when you consider that the traditional construction (trenching, cable runs, etc) and electrical work for grid-tied chargers can run to as much as $300,000, you can see how it might establish a healthy niche for itself, particularly in sunny locales. Installation is also much quicker. Beam Global is already seeing a 500% year-on-year increase in orders.

Nice to see some good news about renewables for a change, as the world seems intent on retrenching just when we need expansion the most.

Suggestion that black people can't do math ruled out by appeal court

I don't often agree with the current Ontario government - on anything, really - but I do agree with a new Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that sides with the Conservative government's education policy in this one particular case.

A lower divisional court had found earlier that the Ontario government-imposed math proficiency test (MPT) for teachers discriminated against racialized teachers because, for whatever reason, they had more problems passing the test. No-one was ever disqualified as a teacher on these grounds, because they could just re-take the test until they passed it. But some, including the lower court, felt that this still discriminated against them.

The Appeal Court, however, ruled that racialized teachers were actually passing the test at a generally similar rate to white teachers - 93% compared to 95% - as you would probably expect, and there were multiple opportunities to pass the test anyway, so no discrimination was happening.

I'm not totally sold on the need for the test in the first place. But, given that such a test exists, to assume that racialized teachers are somehow more poorly equipped to pass it seems ridiculous to me. If indeed they do pass the test at a lower level than white teachers (which is now debatable), then that's just an indication that they need to buck up their math skills, not that they are somehow being discriminated against. Indeed, the very suggestion seems inherently racist to me.

Who are the Palestinian prisoners to be released in Israeli hostage deal?

Under the Hamas-Israel deal brokered by the USA and Qatar, 150 Palestinian prisoners are to be released in return for 50 Israeli hostages. It's a deal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier rejected but has now seen fit to accept, under political pressure. The hostages (women and children) will be released in batches during a four-day cease-fire, and further batches may be added, extending the cease-fire as needed.

This is an important and promising development, but it raises the question of who exactly are these political prisoners that are to be released from Israel's jails? 

The list of names published (300 of them, on the grounds that more hostages than the initial 50 hostages may ultimately be released) includes 123 minors under the age of 18, including five as young as 14-years old. They are mainly women and children arrested for various crimes including rock-throwing, hurling firebombs, and possession of firearms, as well as lesser crimes like hindering police work and unlawful assembly. None of them are convicted of murder, although a few are convicted of attempted murder. Many have been arrested but never tried.

Israeli jails are bulging with Palestinian "terrorists". This deal may result in a few hundred fewer.

UPDATE

As the prisoners swap continues, and has even been extended a little, it is becoming increasingly clear that Israel is deliberately detaining more and more Palestinians from the occupied West Bank so as to have more bodies to swap for more Israelis. 

Israel holds some 7,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, many of them held under "administrative detention" (i.e. not formally tried). While there may be a "humanitarian pause" in Gaza, no such pause holds in the occupied West Bank. Far more Palestinians have been detained since the war started on October 7th than have been released to great fanfare in the last week, and the rate of detentions seems to have accelerated in recent weeks. Coincidence? I think not.

It turns out the Hamas "terror-tunnels" were mainlt built by Israel

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been providing copious but entirely unconvincing evidence that they have found the secret headquarters of Hamas in tunnels underneath al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Their PR machine is slick and sophisticated, but most observers find their so-called evidence a bit thin. A few guns and some body armour (which may or may not have been found in the tunnels) does not constitute a thriving nest of terrorist cells, feverishly plotting the destruction of the Jewish overlords. BBC analysis of the IDF video of the findings shows that it had been edited, despite IDF assurances that it was filmed in one continuous take.

Now, it turns out that the "terror-tunnels", as the IDF spokespeople insist on calling them, including the ones under al-Shifa Hospital, were mainly build by Israel decades ago. A CNN interview with Ehud Barak, the ex-Israeli Prime Minister blithely admits that, "we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital". This was confirmation of a previous admission by the Times of Israel.

Yes, Hamas may have extended the tunnels since for their own purposes (e.g. evading capture by Israel), but for the IDF to make a big song and dance about "discovering" these "secret" tunnels is disingenuous at best.

There are tunnels all over Gaza, many of them dating back to the 1980s, long before Hamas, particularly near the Egyptian border, and Palestinians have long used them for the smuggling of black market goods, including, it must be said, weapons. But in a blockaded state effectively under martial law, where Palestinians live under constant threat of extra-judicial killing or imprisonment by Israeli forces, you can kind of understand that.

If Israel can't show some more convincing evidence of a Hamas military control centre under al-Shifa Hospital, their justification of all the killings at and around the hospital falls down, and their whole narrative starts to look very shaky to thus-far supportive Western nations. The existence of some Israeli-built tunnels certainly does not cut it.

Jeff Bezos' emissions-spewing superyacht

Centibillionaire (look it up!) Jeff Bezos has a $500 million superyacht that emits an estimate 7,150 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. This is equivalent to the CO2 emissions of 1,521 average people (or 450 Americans!)

Despite being the largest sailboat in the world, it rarely makes use of its wind power, preferring the power of its two MTU engines instead. And, because it doesn't boast a helipad (design fault, no?) it is trailed around everywhere it goes by a shadow vessel which DOES have a helipad ('cos you gotta have a helipad, bro).

So, next time you listen to Bezos' partner Lauren Sanchez tell us that "Jeff and I really are focussing on the long-term commitment to climate", you'll know to take it with a pinch of salt.

Aluminum-free deoderant - should I be worried about aluminum?

I've always been a little confused about the presence or absence of aluminum (see, I spelled it the North American way - I'm practically a local now!) in deoderant and antiperspirant. 

Pretty much all deoderants these days boldly advertise "aluminum-free" or "0% aluminum". So, I naively assumed, probably like most other people, that aluminum on the skin is bad for you. After all, too much aluminum in the brain can cause dementia, can't it? Gruesome animal experiments have proved that.

However, I recently read an article referring to the aluminum-free trend as a "marketing scam", so I looked into it. Well, it seems that aluminum blocks the pores and so prevents sweating from the area of skin it covers (known since the late 1800s), which is why it is an essential ingredient in antiperspirants. Antiperspirants are designed to stop underarm sweating because it is unladylike and antisocial to smell of sweat (and, let's face it, these things are mainly marketed to women).

So, antiperspirants, by definition, contain aluminum. Deoderants, on the other hand, which seek only to mask underarm sweat smells and not to stop sweating completely, by definition, do not contain aluminum. So, advertising "0% aluminum" on a deoderant is technically correct but unnecessary and redundant, similar to advertising fat-free popsicles or gluten-free vegetables. In that respect at least, it is a marketing scam.

But there is still a lot of confusion out there about the aluminum in antiperspirants. Antiperspirants (containing aluminum) are still sold, they're just a bit misunderstood and face a lot of public disapproval. This is largely due to one of those well-meaning but ill-informed viral scare campaigns that do the rounds of the internet from time to time, claiming that antiperspirant is the leading cause of breast cancer, and that it occurs because antiperspirants block sweating, the body's natural means of purging toxins, and that they somehow cause DNA damage leading to cancer. (It doesn't, take the American Cancer Society's word for it.)

The Slate article humorously enjoins us to maybe not inject aluminum directly into our brains, just in case, but that's about the size of it.

"Panda diplomacy" is back

At Joe Biden and Xi Jinping's love-in summit in San Francisco this week many weighty subjects were discussed and some concrete agreements were made, like a resumption of military-to-military communications between the two countries and a vow to curb Chinese fentanyl production (although don't hold your breath on that one, Xi has little or no control over it).

And then, out of the blue, Xi announced he was throwing in a couple of pandas, as  a "goodwill gesture", to "deepen friendly ties" and to "meet the wishes of the Californians". Up until recently, there have been several Chinese giant pandas in American zoos (and elsewhere) on a loan basis, but most of them have now been returned (two were returned from Washington DC just this last week).

I just find it a bit bizarre that China uses its giant pandas as bargaining chips in this way, almost as a kind of currency. Did anyone ask the pandas? Does Xi think that the offer of some cute pandas will distract the West from all the other important things that it is asking China to fix?

Panda diplomacy has been a Chinese tactic since the 1940s, but it really came into its own after Nixon's visit to China in 1972 (the US reciprocated by sending two musk oxen to China, which is even more bizarre). In the 1980s, Chinese policy changed to leasing pandas, often for big bucks, to Western zoos, which rather defeats the philanthropic impact, I would have thought. As US-China relations soured in the 2010s, many of the pandas were returned, and the last few loaned pandas are due to go back to China next year.

So, you can probably judge the state of international relations by the number of pandas in each country. Canada's two pandas were returned to China in 2020, supposedly because of the difficulty of finding good bamboo, but it did also coincide with a precipitous downturn in Canada-China relations, with the whole Meng Wanzhou/Two Michaels saga. Coincidence?

Like I say, bizarre.

Is battery life an issue for electric cars?

When thinking about electric vehicles (EVs), people worry about their range, their cost, charging infrastructure, and battery life. Wait ... battery life? Is that a problem too?

Well, apparently not. A new study shows that only 1.5% of EVs have had to have their batteries replaced (outside of a very few recalls), and most EVs driven up to 100,000 miles still have 90% of their original battery range. Battery replacement is most common (obviously enough) in older cars, and in cheaper vehicles like the Chevy Bolt. But in most cases the batteries will last at least as long as the cars themselves. 

So, yes it's expensive to replace a battery in an EV, but you're unlikely to need to, and it is really not a major stumbling block. Maybe, as I have seen suggested, it would be better for car companies to offer a lifetime warranty, to put people's unfounded fears at rest.

Oh, and by the way, just to mention a few of the other criticisms often levelled against zero-emission vehicles: EV range is not an issue these days, and they will start to save you money after just a couple of years. While reliability is still a problem with public charging ports, the number of charging stations is increasing rapidly, and anyway most EV owners do most of their charging (80%) at home. And no, they don't spontaneously burst into flames with great regularity (much less frequently than gas cars actually). And no, EVs are not actually an environmental disaster covered up by the radical eco-warrior caste. Dead EV batteries are not going to be a major problem on a par with nuclear waste, as some will tell you, lithium-ion batteries are at least 90% recyclable (this according to JD Power). And, finally, yes, EV range goes down in cold weather, but so does the range of regular gas vehicles and they may fail even more than EVs according to Norwegian data.

Bottom line: there's a lot of anti-EV propaganda being disseminated on the interwebs, most of it false or at least misleading.