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Recollections

The U-2 Incident - Francis Gary Powers

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Francis Gary Powers

In his partial biography, Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident, Powers is indignant at being branded a traitor.

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Interestingly he says he knows of several U-2 crashes and knew 'a number of' pilots who lost their lives.  This must surely have seemed an extraordinary high crash rate given the small number of aircraft in service.  He obviously doesn't know that ten of his colleagues were lost over Russia. 

He goes on to blame his failing marriage on the media assertions against him and the pressure of forthcoming hearing (which would exonerate him).

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He further claims that the 'so called facts' that he confessed to revealing under interrogation had been cleverly fabricated by him to mislead his Russian interrogators. 

As a result the CIA desperately wanted him back.

 

 

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Travel

Southern Africa

 

 

In April 2023 we took a package tour to South Africa with our friends Craig and Sonia. We flew via Singapore to Cape Town.

 


Cape Town is the country's legislative capital and location of the South African Parliament.
It's long been renowned for Table Mountain, that dominates the city.

Read more: Southern Africa

Fiction, Recollections & News

On The Secret

There is an obvious sub-text to my short story: The Secret, that I wrote in 2015 after a trip to Russia. Silly things, we might come to believe in, like 'the law of attraction' are not harmless. 

The story is also a reflection on the difference between American and Australian stereotypes, that were evident from conversations on the cruise.

I lived in New York for some time and my eldest daughter was born there. I have visited the US fairly regularly since. It is, in many ways, the closest country to Australia that you will find, outside New Zealand.  So, I have often been surprised by how different it is in other ways to Australia, given the great similarities in the median standard of living, shared popular culture and immigrant demographics.

I have come to the conclusion that this stems from our different founding origins.

Read more: On The Secret

Opinions and Philosophy

Carbon Capture and Storage

 

 

(Carbon Sequestration)

 

 

The following abbreviated paper is extracted from a longer, wider-ranging, paper with reference to energy policy in New South Wales and Australia, that was written in 2008. 
This extract relates solely to CCS.
The original paper that is critical of some 2008 policy initiatives intended to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions can still be read in full on this website: Read here...

 

 

 


Carbon Sequestration Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

This illustration shows the two principal categories of Carbon Capture and Storage (Carbon Sequestration) - methods of disposing of carbon dioxide (CO2) so that it doesn't enter the atmosphere.  Sequestering it underground is known as Geosequestration while artificially accelerating natural biological absorption is Biosequestration.

There is a third alternative of deep ocean sequestration but this is highly problematic as one of the adverse impacts of rising CO2 is ocean acidification - already impacting fisheries. 

This paper examines both Geosequestration and Biosequestration and concludes that while Biosequestration has longer term potential Geosequestration on sufficient scale to make a difference is impractical.

Read more: Carbon Capture and Storage

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