Utility Week

Community as 7 per cent of the country's citizens believe the Earth is flat, and this month Brazil hosted its first flat Earth conference, in Sao Paolo, aer YouTube's Flat Earth Professor (aka Siddhartha Chaibub, a graphic designer by trade) was given a prime slot on the country's top talkshow, The Night, to promote the event. The fact is that flat Earthism has flourished under the rule of far-right President Bolsonaro, best known for allowing loggers to set fire to the Amazon. It should be noted that Bol- sonaro has never espoused that the Earth is flat, but he's very much of the science-is-a-matter- of-opinion brigade, and Olavo de Carvalho – a former astrologer who is considered the intellec- tual guru of Bolsonaro and his inner circle – raised eyebrows recently when he tweeted: "I didn't study the subject of the flat Earth. I just watched a few videos of experiments that show that aquatic surfaces are flat – and so far I haven't found anything to refute them." Which leads Disconnector to conclude that he hasn't been looking hard enough. Mirror, mirror on the wall Of course not everything that proclaims itself as science is nec- essarily that scientific. Take the Golden Ratio, for instance, an algebraic formula for describing Disconnector Publishing director, Utilities: Ellen Bennett, t: 01342 332084, e: ellenbennett@fav-house.com; Content director: Jane Gray, janegray@fav-house.com, t: 01342 333004; Editor: Suzanne Heneghan, t: 01342 332106, e: suzanneheneghan@fav-house.com Digital editor: James Wallin, 01342 332015, jameswallin@fav-house.com; Intelligence editor: Denise Chevin, 01342 332087, denisechevin@fav-house.com Energy correspondent: Tom Grimwood, t: 01342 332061, e: tomgrimwood@fav-house.com; Policy correspondent: David Blackman, e: davidblackman@ fav-house.com; Reporter: Adam John, t: 01342 332069, e: adamjohn@fav-house.com; Water correspondent: Ruth Williams, e: ruthwilliams@fav-house.com, t: 01342 332069 Production editor: Paul Newton, t: 01342 332085, e: paulnewton@fav-house.com; Business development manager: Ben Hammond, e: benhammond@fav-house.com. t: 01342 332116; Business development executive: Sarah Wood, e: sarahwood@fav-house.com. t: 01342 332117 Conference sponsorship manager: Sophie Abbott, t: 01342 332062, e: sophieabbott@fav-house.com; General enquiries: 01342 332000; Membership enquiries: Peter Bissell, t: 01342 332057, e: peterbissell@fav-house.com. 2,500 Average circulation Jan–Dec 2018 Membership subscriptions: UK £950+VAT per year. Contact Jo Nikiforov on: 01342 332077 Utility Week is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the regulator of the UK's magazine and newspaper industry. We abide by the Editors' Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism. If you think we have not met those standards and want to make a complaint, please contact the Editor. If we are unable to resolve your complaint, or if you want more information about IPSO or the Editors' Code, contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. political rival, Joe Biden. It's a claim Donald simul- taneously angrily refutes and dismisses as a "so what if I did?" What's not in dispute is that military aid to Ukraine was suspended – the only question is why. The acting US ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, has testi- fied that he and other officials were alarmed that aid had been suspended and tried to secure meetings with the president but couldn't get White House staff to arrange one, chiefly because they were directing all their energies to Trump's main priority at the time – his attempt to buy Greenland, much to the annoyance of Denmark. Yup. In a true "you couldn't make it up" moment, it turns out that one of Trump's strong- est lines of defence against the charge of corruption is that he was distracted by his own idiocy. Down to Earth Talking of stupidity, Disconnector is gratified to learn that flat earth- ers are gaining ground, and not just in the decadent West where not believing stuff has become a badge of sophistication. Distrust of the establishment, which maintain that the Earth is round, is spreading down into South America, even as far as Brazil, where you'd have thought people had more important stuff to worry about, such as finding food. But no, the latest figures estimate that as many Stupid is as stupid does As the late, great Irving Berlin opined: "Anything you can do, I can do better." That's certainly true of the UK and the US. Thus our great populist Boris Johnson is followed around by allegations of directing public funds to his sometime soware tutor Jennifer Arcuri when he was mayor of London. It's suitably snigger-worthy and tawdry, but it's also rather small-scale and thus very, well, British. If you want hubris on a grand scale you'd have to go to the US and sit in awe at the feet of Donald Trump. The US president is mired in an impeachment investiga- tion that seems to be sucking him in deeper the more he flails around. The best advice might be to keep still and keep your mouth shut, but that's not Donald's style. Constant movement has been his life- long modus operandus. Before anyone properly locks on to something outrageous he's done or said, he does it again. This makes it difficult to pin Trump down. Thus the central allegation in the impeachment probe is that he cut off military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to strong arm the regime there to inves- tigate the son of a potential UTILITY WEEK | 15TH - 21ST NOVEMBER 2019 | 31 beauty by finding the perfect proportions between features on a human face. Automobile website Carwow applied the formula to the "face" (ie, the front) of more than 600 cars produced in the past decade to find the most beautiful of them all and came up with… the Smart car. Yup, forget your Ferrari, the Smart car is the prettiest – and that's a scientific fact. It's enough to make you question all this science stuff, as our good friends Trump and Bolsonaro might say. For the birds Readers with a longer attention span than five minutes might remember a photo of a woman on a bicycle flipping her mid- dle finger at Donald Trump's motorcade as it sped past her, whisking the president from his golf club in Sterling. The photo went viral and the woman was identified and promptly fired from her job working for government contracting firm Akima. That was two years ago. Since then, a fired-up Juli Briskman has got involved in local politics and last week won a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, ousting the sitting Republican to boot. And guess which golf club the district of Loudoun includes within its boundaries?

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