A few months back Nancy Wimmer told us about Bangladesh's solar success. In one of the poorest countries on earth a renewable energy company, Grameen Shakti, is busy installing nearly 1,000 solar home systems each day. It turns out all that small solar has achieved something quite big. In November Grameen Shakti hit 1 Million Solar Home Systems (SHS) installed. The company's milestone reinforces a lesson that is increasingly clear. Whether it's Germany, the US, or even China distributed solar installations are driving the solar revolution.

The Bangladesh story however, is particularly exciting because Grameen has singlehandedly shattered the energy 'axioms' on which the international policy community has relied for decades: Renewable energy is too expensive: Wrong. Even if solar makes sense the poor can't afford it or they won't pay: Wrong. The grid will come regardless so off grid, decentralized energy is a waste of time, money, and effort: Wrong, wrong, wrong. What Bangladesh does prove is that Carl Pope is right: deploying solar makes the most sense for off-grid areas where the economics are compelling and the need is great.

This time, my right ankle, which I broke very badly when I was 30 and in which I have restricted mobility. Ive been suffering bad tendonitis for the last 6 months and have been forced to use a walking stick pretty much anytime I want to walk a km or so.

It turns out, under examination, that the problem stems from the muscles in my quad (lower thigh) which have tightened up to help stabilize my right knee (snapped anterior cruciate ligament) which I'd done 10 years previously.

So I have to do a lot of work on that, which will involve pain and oaths, before we can even begin to look at the ankle.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Brad DeLong links to a blog post from 2011 about saltwater/freshwater and all that making some points I think I've also made, but maybe not that clearly. The key grafs:

The saltwater school, on the other hand, is having to reevaluate a great many of their ideas, not the least about collegiality and scientific epistemology. The recognition of the contempt in which their colleagues held them has to be a shock to many; I think I detect traces of it in Delong's writing, and in Prof. Krugman's. Likewise, the recognition that many freshwater economists were not thinking scientifically at all, but rather bound by prejudice and intellectual rigidity seems to have come as a shock. It is very much to Prof. Delong's credit that he is willing to consider these realities.

There is also a practical problem, if economics as a discipline is to survive. There is a huge amount of junk in the peer-reviewed economics literature-the reviewing process is no protection when the reviewers themselves are prejudiced. A comparison that comes to mind is the collapse of "scientific" eugenics. There were vast amounts of that written, and now it is only read as an object example of the capture of a social science by prejudice and authoritarianism. For economists, meantime, there is a huge task ahead: the garbage must be taken out; removed from the field's teaching, textbooks, and policy advice. It will be a generation at least before this is set right, if indeed it can be set right at all.

...

In fact, the freshwater side wasn't listening at all, as evidenced by the way 80-year-old fallacies cropped up as soon as an actual policy response to crisis was on the table; and as for changing views in response to facts, well, we all know how that has gone.

My review of The Hobbit in twelve words: Freeman's magnificent, but the human story is overwhelmed by video-game aesthetics.

I was pretty close to the fourth of the four Hobbit-anticipating camps I presented the other day, but it turned out that I only got to spend about an hour-and-a-half in Middle-earth, and had to spend the rest in a Tolkien-trademarked version of World of Warcraft.

Your Next Challenge: Avoid Being Crushed by the Stone Giants!

Your Next Challenge: Escape from the Goblin King!

Your Next Challenge: Fight the Pale Orc and His Wargs!

Except it wasn't my challenge at all: all I could to was watch the dwarves bounce around from horror to horror. My hands felt empty and useless without the controller they so obviously needed. Video-game aesthetics are built around the assumption of manual activity: they work far better when you have something to do. I didn't really want to sit passively and watch Peter Jackson play with his Xbox but that's what I felt was happening to me for much of the second half of the movie. All I could do was sigh and wait for Peter to finish so we might return for a while to something like a human story.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

As Reg says - Geffen knew the art of the deal.

You can't be me, I'm taken