My initial guesses for Wordle

I caved in and took a look at Wordle, which is basically the 1970s 'Mastermind' game but the answer is a word instead of a combination of colours.

If you want to get the answer in the shortest time possible with the least mental effort (rather than using up the least guesses, which requires concentration), you can use a brute force strategy by entering up to five initial guesses to work out which letters are in the actual answer, with a bit of luck, some will have been in the right place, but worst case you have an anagram. The strategy could go wrong if the answer is RIVAL and you guessed VIRAL etc, but there's a new puzzle every day.

For brute forcing it, you need five five-letter words for your initial guesses, that between them use as many letters in the alphabet as possible at least once i.e. the best outcome would be using 25, with a less commonly used letter like X, Y or Z left over.

So I took a Scrabble alphabet and got to work shuffling. Here's the closest I've got so far (not sure yet what the best order is):

WRACK
MYTHS
VIXEN
BUDGE
FLOPS

These five words use 23 letters of the alphabet at least once (E and S used twice), with J, Q and Z left over. So not perfect, but as close as I've got so far.

With a bit of luck, you won't need them all. If your first guess is WRACK and RACK is right letter/right place and the T in MYTHS is right letter, wrong place, you know the answer is TRACK.

Trees and CO2 capture - fun with numbers

Here are my workings, if you spot any glaring errors, please leave a comment. It's all round figures, I'm not going to bicker about anything more accurate than the first significan figure.

How many trees would we need to clear the backlog?

CO2 in atmosphere = 3,000 billion tonnes (3 x 10^12)
One-third of that is the increase since 1850 = 1,000 billion tonnes, this is apparently the Bad and Planet Warming portion. 1850 level is accepted as beneficial.
World population = 8 billion
Bad CO2 per person = 125 tonnes.
Trees consist of mainly CO2 by mass, plus a bit of H.
My mistake 1 - see comments - about half of the weight of a live tree is water.
An 80 foot tall hardwood tree = 9 tonnes
Let's say an average medium sized tree = 5 tonnes.
(A four foot long section of tree trunk with diameter 2 foot = 1 tonne, so if the main trunk is 16 feet high (two storeys of a house) plus 25% for boughs and branches, that's 5 tonnes)
So we'd need to grow another 25 trees per person to catch up. Sure, those trees will take decades to grow, but you have to start somewhere.

Ongoing emissions

At present, total CO2 in atmosphere is going up by 1% a year.
My mistake 2 - see comments - probably closer to 0.5%
1% x 3,000 billion tonnes = 30 billion tonnes.
30 billion ÷ 8 billion people = 4 tonnes per person.
Let's say each tree soaks up 0.1 tonnes of CO2 per year while it's growing (from above - 5 tonnes divided by 50 years)
That's 40 trees per person i.e. each person plants that many to offset the element of their lifetime emissions which aren't being soaked up naturally. This sort of overlaps with the 25 from above for older people, but hey.
The maths gets super tricky after that. People are born and they die. Older trees would have to be cut down once they reach maturity and are soaking up little additional CO2, then stored somewhere dry - to be replaced by new trees that are soaking up carbon as they grow. So I won't bother looking that far ahead.

Land area needed

25 to clear the backlog, plus 40 for ongoing = 65 per person. Number of trees in the world = about 400 per person
So broadly speaking, an increase in tree cover of one-sixth Forests (and presumably other wooded areas) = 31% of global land area
So that would have to go up to 36%, which seems do-able.

Applied to the UK

Decent sized trees per acre = 200. (In the dense wood at the top of my road, there are fairly big trees whose trunks were about 5 or 6 yards apart, so each tree has its own circle = 24 sq yards. 4,840 sq yards ÷ 24 sq yards = 200)
So the UK would need to 65 trees per person/200 trees per acre x 70 million people = 23 million acres, or 40% of the UK land area.
There's not that much suitable land (Scottish grouse moors, marginal farmland and such like) in the UK, but maybe we could get half-way there?
Countries like the UK that don't have enough land area per person and especially city-states like Monaco or Hong Kong will have to buy up some land in Canada or Siberia, where the land costs pennies, and let their trees grow there.

Alternative calculations welcome!

UPDATEs:

1. The two mistakes seem to largely cancel out. Trees only soak up half as much CO2 per tree as I thought, but we only need to soak up half as much CO2 = overall 90 not 65.

2. The Welsh government reckons that they need about 30 trees per person to be 'carbon neutral'. I assume (rightly or wrongly) that this is just to deal with ongoing CO2 increases and not clear the backlog, so ballpark, our figures are in agreement.

Why are only satirists asking the obvious question?

From Newsthump:

Met Police Chief Cressida Dick... told reporters, “The Met Police do not like to admit defeat in solving crimes, but in this case, we’ve had too little to go on, so we have had no choice to look for outside help.

“There are so few clues that we just don’t know where to start. Whether it’s with the repeated public admissions of guilt from politicians and civil servants, the questioning of those who resigned over the breaches or to start by talking to the eye witnesses who just happen to be policemen who work for us. How is anyone supposed to solve a crime like this?"

From The Daily Mash:

The investigation into a number of thoroughly documented illegal gatherings that attendees are on record as attending is not expected to be challenging, especially once direct testimony is taken from the police officers who saw it all.

Nathan Muir of Hebden Bridge said: “Call me Columbo, but I’d begin there. Check the records, find out who was on duty, haul them to the interrogation room and get a full list of all parties they saw, heard or inadvertently attended. It doesn’t have to be Line of Duty. They’ll probably just tell you.

“They’ll definitely have noticed wheeled suitcases full of wine, because they’re sharp-eyed police, and there’ll definitely be full records of who was where when because it’s the seat of government."

Not a religion

On the subject of people inventing religions as a way to gain and maintain power, dividing things into Good and Evil is an indicator of what we are dealind with.

Cow attacks hit the headlines

From the BBC:

Ram Raj was drinking tea at his home in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on a chilly November evening last year when a stray cow attacked him.

Over the next few minutes, his young grandchildren screamed and watched in horror as the animal mauled him. The 55-year-old farmer died of severe injuries on the way to hospital. "It was a painful death and my mother-in-law has stopped having proper meals ever since," his daughter-in-law, Anita Kumari, said.

Such attacks have become common in India's most populous state, where a ban on cow slaughter has led to a huge rise in the cattle population. So much so that they have become an issue in the state's upcoming elections, which are set to begin on 10 February.

That's what you call unforeseen consequences on an epic scale. But hey, people use and abuse voters' religious beliefs to gain power, and damn the consequences.

Universal Basic Income News

The Welsh government is going to trial a UBI scheme. It seems a sensible scheme with reasonable payments:

Age range: Child 0–17 - Payment rate per week: £120.48
Age range: Adult aged 18–64 - Payment rate per week: £213.59
Age range: Adult aged 65 and over - Payment rate per week: £195.90

Nor has anyone popped up to provide me with a KCN, what is the world coming to? Perhaps all the Tories are distracted by Partygate.

That's the beauty of LVT - reply to Doonhamer

Doonhamer left this comment on the subject of the Scottish government's auction of offhore wind turbine licences:

Yes, but what is the guaranteed price for all those expensive kWh?
And what do they get paid for NOT producing kWh when the wind is too strong?
And who pays for all the interconnecting copper?*
And who pays for the clean up when the rusting stumps and sea bottom concrete are no longer useful?*
And who pays for the fossil fuel back up when the wind speed is too low or too high?

No, I jest. I already know who will pay.

Let's assume the kWh price is 'too high' (which it almost certainly will be, to "kick start the Green Economy" and suchlike bullshit) and all the other costs are borne by consumers and taxpayers (who are largely the same people).

That means that the future profits will be correspondingly higher - but with a properly run auction (the English/Welsh method; not the Scottish method) that doesn't matter too much. Competing businesses will be willing to submit higher bids for the licences, so the government has more money available to pay all the costs and doesn't need to make consumers/taxpayers pay all over again via taxation.

The same general principle applies to all forms of Land Value Taxation. If the actions of government and society in general benefit particular areas or businesses, the beneficiaries pay the value back into the pot (which hopefully covers the direct costs with some left over to be spent on 'everybody') and those who don't benefit aren't forced to contribute via income tax etc.

* In an ideal world, the National Grid would still be state-owned, so it would have to bear these costs anyway, which it would more than recover by charging generators for transporting electricity. The generators should all be private, competing businesses. Fancy owning a power station? Raise some money, build one and hook it up to the Grid. The most efficient forms generators will win out, the inefficient ones go to the wall and society as a whole benefits.

An auction with a price cap is not an auction

This story is quite baffling, from Yahoo News/Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - BP, Shell and utility Iberdrola were among the winners of seabed rights to develop Scottish offshore wind projects, in an auction which raised nearly £700 million ($958 million) for public spending... Crown Estate Scotland, which manages the Scottish seabed, said on Monday that proceeds from the first such leasing deal in around a decade will go to the devolved Scottish government.

This is land value tax in action - the sea bed and the wind were created by nobody and thus belong to everybody and nobody, so the government is perfectly entitled to claim dibs and auction it off on behalf of 'everybody'. Good stuff so far, but...

Last year, seabed options around the coast of England, Wales and Northern Ireland were awarded at much higher prices at a leasing round held by the Crown Estate. However, Crown Estate Scotland capped the lease payments at £100,000 pounds per km2. As a result the payment for leases per GW were 94% lower than the average in the English auction, said analysts at Bernstein.

The English/Welsh auction last year raised £9 bn, but that article doesn't say how many GW or km2 were involved so I will accept the "94% lower" figure.

So it wasn't really an auction at all, it was a freebie for those who were awarded the rights. I hope that Scottish citizens kick up a stink about this and that heads roll, starting with Wee Krankie.

The Guardian's alternate reality

From The Guardian:

The climate crisis is damaging the health of foetuses, babies and infants across the world, six new studies have found.

Scientists discovered increased heat was linked to fast weight gain in babies, which increases the risk of obesity in later life. Higher temperatures were also linked to premature birth, which can have lifelong health effects, and to increased hospital admissions of young children.

Right. The 'cimate crisis' leads simultaneously to more premature babies, which tend to be underweight, and also faster weight gain/obesity?

The burning of fossil fuels drives the climate crisis but also causes air pollution and a new study in Denmark assessed the impact of dirty air on 10,000 couples trying to conceive naturally. It found that increases in particle pollution of a few units during a menstrual cycle led to a decrease in conception of about 8%.

A recent study in China also found that air pollution significantly increased the risk of infertility, but the average pollution level was more than five times higher than in the Danish study. “Air pollution [in Denmark] was low and almost entirely at levels deemed safe by the European Union,” said Wesselink. “Current standards may be insufficient to protect against adverse reproductive health effects.”

Of course pollution is unhealthy, nobody is disputing that. But it doesn't seem to have that much effect - the birth rate in Denmark is only ever so marginally higher than in China.

Wellenius said an important aspect of the studies was that they showed that vulnerable people often suffered the worst effects, for example people of colour and those on low incomes who did not have air conditioning or lived in areas with higher air pollution. “This is absolutely a health equity and justice issue,” he said.

Right. The number of babies being born seems to be inversely proportional to how urbanised or economically developed a country is (it's a fascinating topic in its own right); the world's overall birthrate has plummetted quite precipitously over the last century. The only continent where they are still getting on with it and popping out lots of babies is also the poorest, and probably the hottest and most polluted one - Africa. But according to the Guardian, the opposite is happening.

"Midget Gems change name after academic's campaign"

From the BBC:

Marks & Spencer has changed the name of its Midget Gems sweets to avoid misleading geology students after a campaign by a Liverpool academic.

Dr Erin Pritchard, a lecturer in geology at Liverpool Hope University, argued the word "gem" was highly misleading as the sweets are clearly not a precious or semi-precious stone, especially when cut and polished or engraved.

M&S has now rebranded the popular treats as Midget Jellies. A spokeswoman said the store was "committed to being a scientifically accurate retailer".