Who is Online

We have 41 guests and no members online

Kaş

 

Kaş is a small town near or on the site of the ancient city of  Antiphellos. It has a particularly pretty harbour. It's beloved by yachties, 'grey nomads', who cruise the Mediterranean in floating versions of the vans that traverse inland and coastal Australia.  Apparently it's possible to spend weeks moored in Kaş on a shoestring.  At dinner we met a couple who were doing just that - leading an idyllic life - living on their yacht and eating-out at the same harbour-side restaurant we'd chosen.  It was easy to understand our yachty friends' preference.  Kaş has fewer tourists and is, on the whole, a much nicer and less expensive place to spend an evening by the harbour than at Antalya.

 

See album See album
See album See album
See album See album

Kaş a pretty town with a popular harbour for yachties and the ruins of Antiphellos, a Greco-Roman city up the hill.

 

Like many ancient towns Antiphellos had a Greco-Roman theatre and the ruins remain a short distance from the Kaş town centre.  Indeed until 1923 Kaş was a small island of Greek culture.  Then, as I mentioned above, there was exchange of Muslim and Christian populations between Greece and Turkey.  So the town's Orthodox Christian population was expelled to Greece leaving a majority of the dwellings abandoned. The town has since recovered but it's still struggling economically - except for the yachties. As a result our hotel was good value too.

The coastal road, heading west out of Kaş, is quite spectacular winding along the cliff-side with the sea to the left.  From time to time the two lane road becomes almost impassable due to beachgoers parking in both directions on the roadsides, before making their way down, out-of-sight, to the beaches below.

 

 

No comments

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

Australia's Hydrogen Economy

 

 

  

As anyone who has followed my website knows, I'm not a fan of using 'Green Hydrogen' (created by the electrolysis of water - using electricity) to generate electricity. 

I've nothing against hydrogen. It's the most abundant element in the universe. And I'm very fond of water (hydrogen oxide or more pedantically: dihydrogen monoxide). It's just that there is seldom a sensible justification for wasting most of one's electrical energy by converting it to hydrogen and then back to electricity again. 

I've made the argument against the electrolysis (green) route several times since launching this website fifteen years ago; largely to deaf ears.

The exception made in the main article (linked below) is where a generator has a periodic large unusable surpluses in an environment unsuitable for batteries. In the past various solutions have been attempted like heat storage in molten salt. But where there is a plentiful fresh water supply, producing hydrogen for later electricity generation is another option.  Also see: How does electricity work? - Approaches to Electricity Storage

Two of these conditions apply in South Australia that frequently has excess electricity (see the proportion of non-hydro renewables chart below). The State Government, with unspecified encouragement from the Prime Minister and the Commonwealth, has offered A$593m to a private consortium to build a 200MW, 100t hydrogen storage at Whyalla.  Yet, the State already has some very large batteries, with which this facility is unlikely to be able to compete commercially.  Time will tell.

Read more: Australia's Hydrogen Economy

Opinions and Philosophy

The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

 

 

 

 

As we all now know (unless we've been living under a rock) the only way of defeating a pandemic is to achieve 'herd immunity' for the community at large; while strictly quarantining the most vulnerable.

Herd immunity can be achieved by most people in a community catching a virus and suffering the consequences or by vaccination.

It's over two centuries since Edward Jenner used cowpox to 'vaccinate' (from 'vacca' - Latin for cow) against smallpox. Since then medical science has been developing ways to pre-warn our immune systems of potentially harmful viruses using 'vaccines'.

In the last fifty years herd immunity has successfully been achieved against many viruses using vaccination and the race is on to achieve the same against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).

Developing; manufacturing; and distributing a vaccine is at the leading edge of our scientific capabilities and knowledge and is a highly skilled; technologically advanced; and expensive undertaking. Yet the rewards are potentially great, when the economic and societal consequences of the current pandemic are dire and governments around the world are desperate for a solution. 

So elite researchers on every continent have joined the race with 51 vaccines now in clinical trials on humans and at least 75 in preclinical trials on animals.

Read more: The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

Terms of Use

Terms of Use                                                                    Copyright