Category: Science

Stamp Out the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard Once and for All!

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The latest EPA scam to prevent energy production employs a favorite old ploy.  Namely, create a full species out of a small slightly differentiated population of some animal (in this case lizards) and then claim this new species is endangered because there are so few of them.  And the difference between the two populations can be almost non-existent.  A different number of scales on their chins or a slightly smaller overall average length or whatever.  Now the truth of this is that every species with a large enough range develops slight regional variation.  And things like color will vary in order to blend with local conditions.  Even over short time spans moths have been known to genetically select for darker or lighter color based upon the advantage in blending into backgrounds that had more or less coal dust in different parts of London in the 20th century.

So here comes the dunes sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus arenicolus) a small drab creature that is part of a family that includes 114 so-called species that extend from New York State to California and from the Canadian border to Panama.  And even more pathetic, until very recently (1972) the arenicolus was considered just a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus graciosus) which is in no way endangered.  Now government funded biologists live to produce new species in order to have a reason to apply for a government fund to study this new endangered species.  And as you’ll read in this article, the dunes sagebrush lizard is disappearing because oil and gas are being extracted from its home range.

My thought is, “Too damn bad!”

Let’s suppose that what they say is true.  Oil and gas extraction is bad for the very important lizard and if extraction is expanded then the very important lizard will go extinct.  Dead, gone, buried, finished.  Well, guess what.  In twenty years, the sagebrush lizards on the other side of the dune will begin moving into that territory left vacant by the demise of the dunes sagebrush lizards that were just too delicate to make it.  And in a hundred years they will adapt to the exact climate in that dune environment and guess what?  They will look and actually be indistinguishable from the extinct dunes sagebrush lizard cousins they replaced.  Hooray for evolution!

So, my advice to President Trump is to have his EPA not only delete the dunes sagebrush lizard from the endangered species list but also reclassify it as a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard and forget about it forever.  And while they’re at it do a review of all the other endangered species to see how many of them are subspecies with tiny ranges that have been elevated to full species rank just so that their range can be excluded from useful human activities like building houses and fishing in lakes and drilling for oil.

In the same way that Democrats use the USAID as a piggy bank to fund their wish list of stupid causes, the National Science Foundation is a source for endless grant money for things like inventing endangered species and spending whole careers walking around studying these unimportant populations of common species for no meaningful reason.  Being the champion and greatest living authority on the dunes sagebrush lizard should be a badge of shame.  And at the very least should be a pursuit unfunded by the United States federal government (in my opinion).

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24JAN2025 – Nuclear Power

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“Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.”
Interesting choice of words.
If only there were a way of capturing all those extra neutrons and making fuel grade Uranium from more common ore. We could call it a “Breeder reactor”.
Nah. It will probably be decades until we could do that.
Like negative 7 decades.

There is no scientific reason not to use nuclear power. As you pointed out, the French have been doing it for 70 years. (They sell power to Germany.)
And if the French can do it….
The roadblocks are 90% political and 10% engineering.
Nuclear waste can be dealt with if we give American engineers a chance to attack the problem. But with no new activity going on, we can’t solve the problems.

Spending billions on a waste storage project in Nevada and then letting a corrupt politician kill the project was clearly the wrong way to go.
BTW, Nevada, I’d like that money back.

The Next Big Thing

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According to Elon Musk the big project is man going to Mars.  According to Donald Trump it’s Big AI.  So, which do I think is the next Manhattan Project?  Well, neither of those.

Mars will have to wait until there is a compelling reason to send men there.  Sure, send some really advanced drones and bring home some Mars rocks (or Martians if you can find them).  Heck, send a lander to Titan or Ganymede.  I’m all for that.  Even capture an asteroid made of gold and platinum and break off chunks and throw them into the desert or the ocean.  All good clean fun.  But that’s not the Manhattan Project.

And neither is AI.  That’s just more of the same.  That’s management reducing the payroll to a minimum.  Sure, it’s a stunning tool that will enhance the ability of all kinds of projects.  And it will make a lot of us redundant too.  So, I don’t look at it as some big breakthrough for humanity.  At least not as advertised at the moment.  Maybe when we get the AI implants, I’ll change my mind.

No, the Manhattan Project for the 2030s is the changeover of the American power grid to nuclear plants.  We have a window of opportunity while the current fossil fuel reserves are still relatively robust to begin systematically designing and optimizing fission plants to make them as close to foolproof as humanly possible.  We have about fifty years to achieve this before we run out of fuel and based on how the French have been using them for about seventy years without a catastrophe I’m confident that within thirty years more than fifty percent of the American power capacity could be converted to fission plants.  And after that it would be a short time until the only other plants would be hydroelectric and some exotics like solar panels in the desert.

Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.  A lot more work needs to be done on optimizing the life cycle of the radioactive materials in both the fuels and the wastes.  Long term storage and recycling materials for reuse are still underdeveloped areas of study.  Just dumping depleted fuel rods in an underground mine under a mountain in the Nevada desert is a pretty crude plan for the materials produced by the reactor.  Often the byproducts of the reactor can be reclaimed and even transmuted into useful fissionable material.

But we are still in the infancy of nuclear technology.  Combustion is almost as old as hominid life on the planet.  Neanderthal possessed fire.  Now we have to make the leap to domesticating the neutron.  What’s needed is a push in the right direction.  A pilot project sponsored by the federal government to design a plant that can be tested under the most disastrous set of circumstances imaginable and proven safe.  This will provide the American public with the confidence that their bogeymen from the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl events are long dead and buried.

Right now, it wouldn’t have to be some trillion-dollar boondoggle.  Use reasonable resources to build the test case.  Tap into the existing designs and the recent innovations that are going on in China and India and then let the big brains at the big engineering firms show what they can do.  Who knows, maybe Elon Musk could be convinced to put his Mars mission on hold to bring forward the future of human energy production.  Surely, he would consider that a worthy project.  And it would make his dopey electric cars a lot cheaper to charge.

Where’s My Slide Rule?

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Thank you, Donald Trump.  Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.  I feel I’ve been paid back for any trouble I’ve taken on your behalf in the last four years.  Hallelujah and amen.

Okay now it’s up to Trump and his merry band of madmen to fix Washington and fix the country and do that list of a million impossible things that he said he’s going to do.  Have at it, boys.  Give ‘em hell.

So, what’s for me to talk about tonight?  Well, I’ve got to talk about what’s chasing around my head tonight.  First off, I’m grumbling about how damn cold it is today.  The heating system at the Compound is undersized.  Or maybe the insulation should be the focus.  When the outside temperature dips below zero Fahrenheit, it won’t hold a set point above seventy.  And that’s too bad because I hate being cold inside my own home.  Camera Girl holds me directly responsible because I never put the weatherstripping around two of the external doors.  I explained to her that these small insulation problems are only a minor part of the problem and that I’m addressing the problem holistically by spending considerable time thinking deeply about all the ways that a solution can be reached.  I’ve considered the thermodynamic aspects of the problem.  The psychological ramifications of the fear of cold.  The physiological mechanisms by which the human body adapts to hypothermia.  The cultural involvement of cold in the human industries that are called clothing and shelter.  The quantum meaning of absolute zero.  And finally, the latest bill from the heating oil company.  All these things I showed her and admonished her to have patience and faith in my stewardship of the Compound’s Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (U).  None of this registered with her at all.  She made certain primitive Sicilian gestures with her face and hand that I won’t dignify with detail.  Suffice it to say they were not helpful in the least.  I’m going out tomorrow for other reasons.  But I may also pick up some weatherstripping.  Maybe.

I was recently in a discussion about General Relativity with a friend.  The question of the curvature of space came up.  I told him I’ve never been convinced of the idea that mass curves space-time.  I stated that what is the difference if gravity bends the path of light and matter when it comes close to an object like the sun but space is unaffected?  How would we know the difference?  After all, how the hell can you bend something that isn’t even there?  It’s empty space.  Now sure, particles are always popping into existence because of quantum effects.  But by definition those things aren’t empty space they’re matter.  So how the hell can something that’s nothing bend?  Anyway, after the argument got us nowhere, I got hold of a book on general relativity and started reading it.  But my mathematical skills have degraded so I’ve had to break out a book on vector analysis to try and remember what tensor notation means.  Oh, my aching head.  I had an old advanced calculus test from my undergraduate days that would be very helpful on some points but then I remembered I threw it out (stupidly) about thirteen years ago when I moved.  I was going to buy it used and was amazed how expensive text books have gotten.  Yikes!

So anyway, I’m ensconced with the Kronecker delta, the curl and the Laplacian.  And I think I’ve made a big mistake.  I predict by the end I’ll have nothing but a murky idea of the meaning of the proofs of relativity but no explanation as to why we would think of space as being curved.  I think the idea that space is curved is just a figure of speech.  The reality is “space’ goes on endlessly in every direction.  I don’t think it loops back around behind us or anything like that.  It just keeps going.  It’s the same as physicists saying that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang.  Well, what about five seconds before that?

So here I am with my cave man cosmogeny and cosmology trying to relearn Einstein’s equations (at my age!).  Well, why not?  Trump’s fixing the country.  The least I can do is straighten out the theoretical physicists.  Camera Girl! Where’s my slide rule?

Cold Fusion, Again

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07245v2

Cold nuclear fusion is real!  But it’s also extremely lame.  Apparently when deuterium gas is put in contact with solid palladium metal the gas can find its way into the crystalline metal structure and fill voids in the lattice of palladium atoms and the structure of the metal lattice can somehow shield the deuterium nucleii from each other’s positive charges in order to fuse into a helium atom (²H + ²H → ⁴He).

Unfortunately, the rate of fusion is so low that it’s barely detectable.  And if energetic means such as lasers are used to enhance the rate then the energy balance is extremely poor with much more energy put in to speed up the reaction than is produced by the fusion reaction.  As a practical energy source this would be described by the technical term “lousy.”

But all is not yet lost.  The authors of the paper speculate if three separate accelerating processes are employed simultaneously there is the potential to produce the forty orders of magnitude improvement needed to make cold fusion a useful energy source.

Forty orders of magnitude.   Hmm.  That’s a lot of orders of magnitude you know.  That’s 1040.  That’s a really, really big number.  If I had 1040 pennies I’m pretty sure it would form a black hole of pennies.  It’s a lot.

So somehow they think they can increase the fusion rate that much?  Hmm.

So I really like the idea of cold fusion.  The fact that you can take palladium and heavy hydrogen at ambient temperatures and somehow get a nuclear reaction that produces really clean energy is extremely appealing to me.  It sounds like what E. E. “Doc” Smith used as his source of energy for interstellar flight in the “Skylark” series of space operas.  It’s amazingly exciting.  But  1040 anything is a lot.  So I’ve decided not to hold my breath or invest heavily in the technology or rip the oil burner out of my basement just yet.

The good thing about cold fusion research is that you don’t need billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to work on it.  You don’t need magnetic containment to avoid your nuclear plasma from eating through the metal walls of your reactor.  And you don’t need giga-watt lasers to blast a pellet of boron hydride or anything else that would break the budget of any second world nation.  It can all be done in a lab with all the stuff found in MIT or even Brooklyn College for that matter.  So I’m all for research into this avenue of science.  After all twenty years ago cold fusion was declared a hoax and that turned out to be wrong.  Who knows what else they’ll find.  Maybe if you use alloys of several of the platinum group elements the geometry of the spaces in the lattice will make the process run at some phenomenally faster rate.  Maybe not 1040 times faster but something reasonable and that would be enough to throw the whole thing into the range of practical applications.  But to reiterate I won’t be holding my breath.

But it is something cool to think about.  Or even write into an sf story!  But instead of palladium I’m going to make it tantalum.  It’s just cooler.

Now Prove Me Wrong

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So, Camera Girl works double time for a week and I just spend two days eating thousands and thousands of calories of delicacies over the long holidays but I’m the one who’s exhausted and complaining!  I guess we each have our own strengths and weaknesses.

So, mission accomplished.  Two days hanging out with the grandkids and all the rituals were observed.  I even bonded with my sons-in-law.  They were good sports and tolerated all of my quirks.  They uncomplainingly watched my showing today of W.C. Fields classic “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  They even laughed at several of the most absurd scenes of Ambrose Wolfinger with his cellar full of singing burglars, his career as a “memory expert,” his criminal adventure as an unlicensed manufacturer of apple jack, his passion for professional wrestling and his trials and tribulations dealing with his truly awful wife and her mother and brother.

The kids fell right in with the silliness on display.  The only protest came from my six-year-old granddaughter who recognized both Fields and the actress playing his wife from the previous showing of the other Fields movie where they played a husband and wife, namely “It’s a Gift.”  Princess Sack of Potatoes wanted to know where the son and daughter in that previous movie had gotten to in this movie.  I explained that even though Fields and the actress were playing husband and wife again they were different characters.  I think this situation didn’t sit well with her.  Apparently, she felt that her suspension of disbelief was being abused and she wanted those interesting characters returned.  I did my best to smooth over this outrage but it took half the movie to return her to willing participation.

And as everyone was heading home, I was thinking what a strange world we live in.  All the silly rituals and behaviors that we associate with happiness and family.  Three generations of people playing penny ante poker or watching movies from ninety-some-odd years ago or eating peasant foods from a country none of us has ever lived in.  It’s all just a hodge-podge of things that make up a stream of experiences that we all share together travelling down the years.

And for me, those are the realest things in the world.  All the other things I read about “on-line” and the important progress that is being made by artificial intelligence, global convergence or whatever else they call what they are doing with government money are utterly fake.  Watching my two youngest grandchildren trying for the first time to master the silly game of getting a wooden ball on a string to land in a little wooden cup was more meaningful than listening to two physicist talking heads debating about whether dark matter was faker than modified gravity.  These high powered (we hope) intellects should be concentrating their efforts on solving the world’s energy problems.  The physics they need to be studying is defining the criteria for engineering a safe fission reactor.  Humanity needs to snap out of its stupor and produce an ecosystem of abundance and prosperity that fosters human happiness and maximizes human intellectual potential.

It’s amusing to hear people who “believe in science” stating categorically that there is no God and that the universe and life are just meaningless accidents.  And their proof is “The Big Bang.”  They declare confidently that the universe began x number of billions of years ago with all the matter and energy of creation appearing out of nowhere and all of that creation is still expanding at an ever-greater acceleration into empty space with entropy leading to the heat death of this universe in y billions of years from now.  But if you ask them where the big bang came from, they just shrug their shoulders and say that is unknowable.  In essence they are saying they don’t know anything about the beginning and end of the universe.  So basically, they’re saying, “and then there was light.”

I tend to think life is not an accident.  From my point of view, what I experience in my small piece of the universe is the point of the whole thing.  A little kid playing with a ball and cup toy is the reason for the big bang and everything else that has been put in motion.  Now prove me wrong.

I Can’t Wait to Get Started!

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I was reading a chapter in a mathematical survey that I bought a long time ago (Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev).  It was a section in the non-Euclidean Geometry chapter called something like “Real Space.”

The author was trying to make the point that since gravity bends light and light rays were the closest thing to perfect straight lines that you could claim that parallel lines can intersect and triangles can have more or less than 180 degrees in real space.  And to get away from the idea of straight lines in empty space (no matter present) he said that the concept of space only exists in the context of it containing matter.

And I stopped to think whether that seemed to follow.  I never usually question the meaning of empty.  My basic visualization of reality is that the universe is the void of the Bible augmented by really small golf balls bouncing around in it.  Empty space to me is wherever there aren’t any golf balls at that moment.  Now granted, I’ve heard that particles are always appearing into and disappearing out of existence in the “quantum vacuum.”  And I know that many physicists characterize the universe as just a bunch of “fields” of the various elementary particles; the electron field and the Higgs field, etc.  But I don’t understand why we can’t imagine empty space.  I mean I know that at any time a quark or a gluon or some other ephemeral exotic particle can show up anywhere but why is it so hard to say. “Right now, right here is empty space because nothing is there.”

I guess I’ll have to read more deeply.  After all, if the empty space between galaxies (and everything else) is always and ever more rapidly expanding as the universe itself inflates at an accelerating rate, it seems logical to me that there’s more and more “empty space” everywhere.

And so, I propose the following thought experiment:

I posit that using the James Webb Space Telescope, we find a spot in the sky where there aren’t even any really, really old galaxies hanging out.  There’s nothing along that line of sight.  I then take two flashlights (or “lasers” if anyone insists) and using a protractor and some really straight two by fours I line them up parallel to each other in the direction of that cosmic empty spot and turn them on.  Why wouldn’t those two beams continue on to the end of the universe exactly the same distance apart?  Now, sure, a few photons here and there might be deflected by a some randomly situated gas molecules or by the odd quantum vacuum quark that appeared for a femtosecond along the line of sight but for the most part the laser beams should continue on forever and ever, amen.

So, if that is the case.  What’s the problem with imagining empty space (mostly) with my two flashlight (or laser) beams going out and out and out forever?  And forever parallel.  After all there’s nothing close enough to really bend those light beams.  Now to prove this result there will need to be someone on the other end of the universe to do the measurement.  This presents something of a problem.  However, there may be a solution (well, a thought solution anyway).  It’s a well-known part of the Big Bang Theory that there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe.  But here we are with basically none to be found.  I theorize that at the end of the universe is the anti-matter we’ve been looking for (just like those ‘droids).  Granting this, then there should be an anti-matter me at the end of the universe.  Let’s call him anti-photog.  Now assuming he’s extremely long-lived (which anti-matter life forms always are) and that he thinks precisely as I do, he’ll be waiting for those two beams of light and he will measure the angle between the beams and find them to be parallel and thereby prove the Euclidean (or in his case anti-Euclidean nature of empty space.  Then he can send a return beam back in our direction (somehow) and we will have the answer.  Of course, the sun and probably the Milky Way Galaxy will have long ago been absorbed by the local super massive black hole and cosmic lichens will possibly be the only form of life remaining but that’s how science works sometimes.  You have to take the good with the bad.

So, Lobachevsky, Gauss, Riemann and all you other “non-Euclidean” geometricians (I’m looking at you A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov and M. A. Lavrent’ev!) shouldn’t put too much stock in all this curved space hand-waving.  Until the results of this wonderful research of mine are available, they should sit tight.  Estimates for the return trip signal are still being calculated but I’m sure it won’t be too bad.  I’ll be starting my crowdfunding page to buy the lasers and the two by fours very soon.  I’ve still got my third-grade protractor somewhere around here so I don’t need that.  I can’t wait to get started!

Update:

I asked an AI image generator to reproduce my thought experiment rig

It came up with this!

This may take a while.

A Modern Prometheus

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Got home real late but have tomorrow off so I’m cudgeling my brains for a good topic.  And since I’ve been running my series of horror movie reviews for October, I considered finishing off the Universal monster movie triumvirate by reviewing Frankenstein.

But Camera Girl was watching the Yankees World Series game and since they were down 0-3 in the series and would be eliminated if they lost tonight, I didn’t have the heart to refuse her control of the tv.  As it worked out, New York had an orgy of hitting including a grand slam to take the game 11-4.  There was much rejoicing by Camera Girl but I think she understands that no team has ever come back from an 0-3 deficit to win the Series.  But let her enjoy the moment.

As for Frankenstein, at its core Mary Shelley’s book is another meditation on the Renaissance civilization in Europe substituting science for God.  Well, since Renaissance civilization lately seems to be in full retreat, maybe God is sending his reply.

But properly considered, the idea that Man has replaced God with human intelligence is sort of laughably ridiculous.  Every time we are told that biologists have cracked the code that will allow us to cure cancer or reverse aging or turn men into women and vice versa, our efforts are shown to be abysmally inadequate.  We talk about uploading our consciousness into the internet to allow us to live forever but we don’t even know what consciousness is or for instance, how a memory from our childhood persists throughout our lives, or even whether it exists in one brain cell or many.

And when we consider the unimaginable size of even the portion of the known universe that we’ve already observed, the idea that we can become like God should quickly evaporate from our minds.  From my point of view, the fact that we exist separated from even the nearest star by about twenty-four trillion miles of empty space make me feel like we are an experiment locked into a terrarium that we can’t escape from.

Of course, maybe escaping from our ant farm is part of our testing.  Maybe on one of the planets in the Centauri system is a message in English or Proto-Indo-European saying, “Well done.  Now here is a clue to get you to level three.”  Maybe God has a sense of humor and he wants to let us in on the joke.  Maybe some day he’ll give us a book that explains why we can’t avoid childhood cancer, endless war, telemarketers and Joy Reid.  Maybe after we die suddenly everything will make sense and we can stop worrying about the war between men and women, type two diabetes and the national debt.

Well, tomorrow is my last chance to review Frankenstein.  I better get some sleep so I’ll be ready to report truthfully on the incomparable acting skills and technique of Boris Karloff and Colin Clive.  On second thought maybe I should just concentrate on the cool noises and flashing lights in Henry Frankenstein’s electrical glassware display in Germany (I mean Hollywood).

One Shining Moment

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Today I put up a link to that video of SpaceX’s booster rocket returning to the launching pad like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  It was beyond amazing.  It was preposterous.  How could the control system of this rocket have it fall out of the sky like a stone, then brake and maneuver under power and stop in mid-air exactly at the docking station and be caught by a mechanical hand as if it were a ballpoint pen.  It’s beyond technology it’s some kind of black magic.

Well, it did me good to see something positive online for the first time in years.  Sure, it doesn’t really impact my life in any way that can be measured.  I don’t even own any stock in SpaceX.  And I don’t really think that going to Mars has any benefits for humans that could be identified in the next hundred years.  But what I am seeing is men using their intelligence to do things and make things that have never been done or made before.  And every time this happens the side effects from such an endeavor always produce benefits that no one had even considered.  Computers are the side effects that accrued from trying to crack codes during WWII and building missiles and rockets.  We needed machines that could do the ballistic calculations faster than humans could.  If Musk manages to convince the US government to send a mission to Mars, I don’t doubt that the fallout from that project will be more useful than the information we get from going to Mars.

Humanity is a misbegotten collection of mostly psychotic apes.  Every time I look online, I see examples of brutality, depravity and stupidity that should cure anyone of having hope for this world.  But something like this gives me that rush of excitement and reminds me of what seemed possible back in the days when I was young.  Instead of the drab, hopeless world that the Al Gores and Greta Thunbergs try to convince kids to despair about; where we eke out a miserable existence under pathetic wind turbines and solar panels, we could have a world where the world’s energy needs could be completely provided by any number of powerful technologies.  Instead of the phony equity of fake scientists selected by racial and sexual quotas we could go back to a meritocracy where the best would be rewarded by the chance to achieve real breakthroughs in all the STEM applications.

Watching that rocket land on a dime in mid-air was like a shot of adrenaline.  These things can still be done and they should be done.  Hell, I would rather the US government had given SpaceX every penny of the 200+ billion dollars that they threw at the senseless and barbaric Ukraine war that we ginned up.  If we had, we’d probably already be on Mars.

Okay, I know this was all just pure emotion.  I let myself get caught up in that “Right Stuff” rah-rah feeling.  It reminded me of the sense of wonder I felt reading all those science fiction stories that Heinlein wrote back in the stone age.  And it has absolutely nothing to do with present day America.  The land of illegal alien cannibals that we pay billions of dollars to invade our country.  But for one shining moment it felt good.

This is the Validation of Science Fiction in Its Best and Truest Form

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This truly is magic.  Even the booster rocket is precisely controlled by the remarkable technology of Musk’s SpaceX.  This is science fiction come to life.

Science fiction was looking at the world and imagining how humans could use science to push the boundaries of what we could know and do.  This is the fruition of that imagining.  Jules Verne and H G Wells and Robert Heinlein and all the other visionaries led up to this.  And Elon Musk is the one who decided to make it happen.

Well done.