Fair

It is only Tuesday but this week I have already heard several people complaining about something not being “fair”. I have terrible news for a lot of people life is by definition not fair. If life were fair would Stephen Hawkins be in a wheelchair unable to communicate? If life were fair Paris Hilton would be rich and on TV all the time? You need to find the person who lead you to believe life was fair and do something mean (as in slightly unpleasant, not beat them to a pulp) to them since that will teach them first hand life isn’t fair! Then move on, since life isn’t fair but that doesn’t mean you have to take it lying down. If someone does something that isn’t fair, then you must evaluate if the power to do that to you is granted by you or if they really do have true power over you. If you give them the power to screw you then don’t bitch cause the light company screwed you over and never do anything, sit down and write them a well worded letter explaining your issue and mail it. Don’t be mean, and if you call them on the phone the most powerful words you can say to the customer service rep is “I know this isn’t your fault but _____” Make them want to help you, and if it is in their power they likely will.
If the person not being fair is your boss or someone more powerful, unless they answer to no one then chances are you have recourse. In theory companies and governments are set up to be fair. So if you’re not being treated fairly, then you have recourse, and you need not even take the recourse, simply asking for special forms or the rumor that you are asking for certain forms is often enough to solicit change.
Now, then if what is unfair to you, is fair or normal to everyone else, you’re up the creek. A bit of advice, the more people involved in a “conspiracy” against you, (unless you can trace the source to a single individual) the more likely it is that it is in your head.
To close, life isn’t fair, but if you don’t simply accept that fact, and you actually strive to make life fairer, then it likely your life will improve. Sure Paris Hilton will still be rich and on TV, and you won’t be, but things won’t be quite as unfair.

Obituaries and immortality

I was flipping through my local paper yesterday when I came across the obituaries section. Normally I don’t look at it since I find it morbid, but this time I looked. I found it decidedly odd, not odd in a bad way, just strange. Each one was like a little biography, noting the key moments in their lives and the people they shared their lives with. I found this to be actually quite a fitting tribute. Most people live and die relatively anonymously, with only the select few achieving the notoriety required (which in theory means they have done something of general interest) to have their lives documented in format that could be bound. So, for those who never achieve their 15 minutes of fame while they are alive, death and a well written obituary will ensure that someone you’ve never met will remember, if not your name, at least your deeds and that is the immortally that fame brings.

Counting your chickens

Remember you shouldn't count your chickens until they hatch, even if you have been told they all hatched, and that you can begin counting.

Iran’s little problem

I have figured out a way to solve Iran’s little problem with the Moly in their UF4. It isn’t all that efficient, but it scales up easily, and technologically it is about as hard as oil refining. So, if cost is no object, any country could have ultra pure U 235/238 for enrichment. I haven’t been able to find anything on the net about purifying uranium tetrafluoride this way, so either it is classified or hasn’t been done (or I didn't look hard enough.) On the off chance I have discovered something new I won’t go into detail, but I checked the tables and there is no chemical or physical reason it wouldn’t work. (It might not be all that safe, but really who’s counting?) The nice thing is I haven't given anything away, since this is wayyyyy out of the box thinking.

I would wish Iran luck in finding a solution, but even if it is the nice thing to say, I don’t mean it. So, instead I say I hope they unbalance their centrifuges, or at least deeply score the bearings and ruin the spindles. If anyone wants to know how it works, well tough, I’m not telling. It is one thing to say it can be done by a method that is novel; it is another to help hostile nations, ruled my mad men, develop nuclear technology. Just ask Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Iran and uranium enrichment

Iran’s threat to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons is an empty threat at best. Based on what I have seen Iran’s stocks of UF4 gas is too contaminated with Moly and other heavy metals to be converted to UF6. Why does a little Moly hurt? Because during the conversion to UF4 to UF6 the Moly (and other metals) will react with the fluorine gas, and become solid. This will clog the pipes and valves and slow the conversion. If they do manage to keep the pipes from clogging then the tiny particles will destroy to centrifuges used to enrich the U235. If the gas centrifuges are destroyed not only would it be a financial and environmental disaster. Sure Iran would lose a lot of uranium but uranium is cheap, they are careful since the centrifuges are difficult to replace.
Now why don’t they purify their uranium, since it is fairly easy to do? The way you get rid of Moly and other metals that are more reactive than U, is thermal decomposition, which basically takes UF4 and decomposes it to U and F2 X 2. Then the U is distilled off leaving the impurities behind and the fluorine gas separated before it can recombine with the U. Well this is easy to do on a small scale, perhaps even a couple of kgs, but Iran needs to refine tons of U. Fluorine is nasty nasty stuff, (F is so electronegative that it can under certain circumstances bond with the noble gases), so working with it on a large-scale requires very special technologies. Only a few countries have these technologies and most aren’t willing to share them.
I am not saying Iran isn’t a nuclear threat. They could refine enough U235 to feed a fission reactor. After several years of reprocessing spent fuel rods Iran might have enough Pu to build nuclear weapons. However, it is hard to reprocess spent fuel, and it is even harder to do it and avoid detection. I personally don’t think Israel would take Iran’s nuclear ambitions lightly and if Iran did begin to reprocess, Israel would make it very hard.
Basically Iran enriching because they want something and they know that someone will eventually buy them off to stop. Then during the down time Iran’s nuclear scientists will analyze what they learned so they will do better next time. They will also acquire more technology so next time they can get further. If they could make a bomb they wouldn’t be talking so much, they would make and test a bomb since a mushroom cloud speaks volumes. Most semi-nuclear nations follow this pattern, the politicians what attention, the nuclear scientists want lab time, so they fire the program back up, the scientists get as far as they can, then shutdown once progress slows and they get a nice chunk of change to show for it. Nuclear research is a profitable investment; nuclear research money not only gets them the advancements in the technology, it also pays dividends in humanitarian aid money to stop, and warns the world country X is to be feared.

Review: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Ok this is an opening day review so I doubt anything earth shattering is going to come out here, but the new HP movie is iffy. The casting especially of Dumbelldoor is shameful. Who ever adapted the book to the screen play couldn’t have give the book more than a cursory glance. I am convinced if the Cliff Notes people had done the adaptation it would have been better or at least more complete. With that said if you are a fan of special effects and haven’t seen the movie, then you need to right now. The rendering of the dragons alone makes the movie worth seeing.

Searching for Eden

The search for Eden (the Garden of Eden is not where Adam and Eve lived, it is where the tree grew) is mostly concentrated in the Holy Land or for the science people around the Fertile Crescent (the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers). However, I think they should be looking South and West, in what is now the Saharan desert. If you think about it, my model fits with both scholarly and biblical accounts. Scientific evidence says that people came out of Africa, so why look for the place the myth talks about, in the place the myth was created, myths are historical accounts so you look at where the people came from, and since creation is always the first myth, it would be the oldest.
The Sahara wasn’t always a dessert it was once much wetter, and if we use the model of human induced desertification that is currently used to explain the conditions in the Middle East and the Southwest part of the US, we can see people were once there and chances are that it was once lush and green. (For those unfamiliar with the theory of human induced desertification, it basically says that a population of people if placed in a fragile area while eventual strip the land of so much vegetation and water that the process of creating a desert will be accelerated. The Middle East was once a huge, cedar forest that was stripped for fuel and building material. However, once the trees were gone, and the water diverted for agriculture, nothing else grew (forests grow on some of the poorest soils, since most of the nutrients are locked up in the trees and biomass, so if you cart away the nutrients as logs what is left?), so what top soil there was blew away and the earth baked in the sun, when the rains stopped coming. When the rains do come without soil and vegetation to slow the current the water doesn’t soak in, it washes to the sea in a torrent.)
Perhaps even the picking of the apple from the tree is not the metaphor we believe it to be; perhaps it is a metaphor for not taking too much from the land lest it fall into ruin, with the Garden of Eden and it fruit being a fragile environment. Remember the story we have isn’t the original version since apples are from Central Asia and weren’t know till much later in history. Perhaps the reason we have no knowledge of the fruit mentioned and have to sub in the apple is, because it is extinct.

Since we are pretty much already into the biblical stuff lets continue on that path. If you take the east exit from Saharan Africa, you end up in the Holy Land and what is more fitting as the fiery sword of GD to keep people from returning to Eden than a fiery desert. Even 8,000 years ago the dead were buried facing West, perhaps back towards a proto-Eden. A serpent with legs is a salamander, and salamanders only live in wet places, but snakes can live in dry places, so GD taking the serpents legs is again a metaphor for desertification. The punishment of Adam and Eve was they had to feed themselves and their growing family with agriculture, since the land would no longer sustain them, again all this points to desertification and Eden being in the Sahara. Eden is between four rivers, I just looked at satellite image of the Sahara and there are plenty of places where rivers flowed 30,000 years ago. So, again what is now the Saharan desert fits as the location of Eden, where man lived on bounty of the land, until GD drove him to a place where he could live, but only as the result of the sweat of his brow.

To end this little story I will state where this idea came from. Quite poetically it came to me in a dream.

Misconception: Feeding the world versus feeding cows

Someone who is otherwise very rational told me recently that she had heard that the US could feed the world, but greedy corporate interests allowed people to starve so they can feed cows. First off this is true, if the US turned its might to feeding the world and neglected all other concerns we could do it, but we would destroy ourselves or go broke trying. Feeding people costs money, period. Sadly, the people most in need can’t pay and since they are really far away it costs a lot just to get the food to them. Also, what does the food do? It keeps them from starving till the next time food comes. The starving people in Africa aren’t starving because they are lazy or can’t find work; they are starving because they don’t have water and fertilizer to grow their own food. Giving them food buys them time; actually helping them would require fixing the real problems. Even more fun they don’t trust us, they take our money but they think for example, that we put stuff in the food to sterilize the women so we can just wait a few years and when they have all died off take over.
Now as for all this excess food we have, that is a myth too. Most of the grain grown in the US isn’t suitable for human consumption; it is at best animal feed. Grain of suitable quality for human consumption requires a lot more work and growing conditions than are much harder to come by, that just getting the grain to grow. Cows really don’t take that much food out of people’s mouths; cows eat what is not safe or palatable for human consumption and give us something that is: meat. Being a vegetarian and getting enough protein is hard, if we ate the diet cows eat we would enjoy a nice lingering death from malnutrition. Even if we ate soy, and beans for protein, it would improve but there isn’t enough human quality soy and beans available, and to make enough would require lots more land fall to the plow and be cultivated with a very chemical intensive style of agriculture. We domesticated animals not because they are cute but because they can turn things we can’t use as food into something we can. That means animals increase the efficiency of agriculture not decrease it.
Now if you want to help save people in the future write a check to help fund your state university system’s agricultural, medical and engineering research programs, or if you want to save people now join the Peace Corps and actually go and help them.

Misconception: Muscle hybrids

So, I read an article about how muscle hybrids are a sham and shouldn’t be made, and on and on. (Oh, for anyone who does know, muscle hybrids are cars that the electric (hybrid) motor is only used to supplement the power of the gas motor, so the fuel efficiency gains aren’t that great.) I think that is BS. People aren’t going to stop driving F350s and Hummers, or Magnums and Vettes, cause the Sierra Club tells them the Prius or a VW Rabbit can get them were they want to go too. If more muscle hybrids are made then massive gas swilling V8s and V6s can be replaced with inline 4s that can get 25 mpg instead of 10 mpg, and that is a huge improvement.
Here is why:
Most the power in your 350 HP engine is there to get the car’s incredible mass off the line, then once you are going 60 mph you only need 10-20 HP to keep it going. So, if you put a high torque electric motor in the car (SUV, truck, etc) to help get it rolling then suddenly a 350 HP V8 is overkill and 170-200 HP 4 banger is plenty. (You still need a lot of HP to climb hills and pull loads, since current gas motors don’t produce a lot of torque, the transmission exchanges RPM for torque in low gears.) Then people are happy with their vehicle cause it still hauls ass, they are happy with the gas savings, and don’t kid yourself a lot of gas is saved. Plus the Prius (which I have driven and it is a cool car) driving environmentalists get to enjoy the cost reductions that come with economy of scale, since the cost of hybrid parts will drop as more hybrids are made, and the technology will improve faster since demand=research $ (and I mean real, sells millions of cars and trucks a year demand, and not the demands of a hundred people who march in front of GMs headquarters’ demanding change.)

Cannibalism, the Donner’s, and modern life

As some of you might have heard they have finished up the archeological examination of the Donner Party camp site, and while others in the group turned cannibal, it seems the Donner’s didn’t. Sadly as with all retractions, this will not get the amount of coverage that the story they were cannibals got.
However, when you stop and think about it, is cannibalism so wrong? Oh sure there are some social taboo’s, but wouldn't people be the optimum food for people?
In order to ward off cannibalism I am trying to be sure that I would be the cannibal equivalent of junk food. To be clear I am too tough and gristly to eat, plus I work with chemicals, so I might not even be safe to eat. Now health food nuts and vegetarians that is some good eating... only the best stuff there. Oh sure they probably won’t be well marbled, but I am sure if you cook’em right they’d be real tender, and very healthy. Perhaps you could bacon wrap them just to up the flavor abit, since anything that low in fat and salt would be very bland.
As a parting thought would the ultimate irony be vegan’s becoming hopelessly lost while communing with nature, and being forced to turn cannibal?

Oh and for anyone who missed the sarcasm, people are very dangerous for people to eat, since disease can be spread easily when you eat your own kind. In fact that is one of the reasons very few human foods are from carnivorous mammals.

Warrants and government snooping

Even though the Law and Order and the CSI families of shows are among the most popular on TV today Americans don’t seem to be paying attention. A poll that came out today shows that most people think a warrant is required if the government is going to eavesdrop on their communication. This is so very false, a warrant is only required if there is an expectation of privacy and even I have seen enough L&O to know this subject has been covered. Thus if the government wants to bug your house and listen to you sing in the shower it needs a warrant, if the government wants to listen to your conversation as you babble on your cell phone it can. Why? You have no expectation of privacy; basically every form of electronic communication has no expectation of privacy. The government can’t read your mail with out a warrant, but as you walk and talk on the street, it can watch and listen to you at its leisure. Why? Again you have no expectation of privacy. See how this works?

Now all this sounds very ominous, but how the average American is watched is actually very benign. They don’t actually listen in while you talk to your mom, and your name isn’t linked to the recording, unless they have reason to care about you. A computer does the listening, and if you use words that are trigger words, then the conversation gets rechecked. Trigger words include Allah, bomb, president, etc or phases that appear to be code, so false positives are very common. ((1: Who sings Lump? 2: The President of the USA. 1: Duh, that song is the bomb!) or The Eagle Flew at Midnight was a great book, but not as good as For Whom the Bell Tolls.) No government funded spy agency acknowledged or not has the resources to monitor every call and person at all times. Now if you are such a stupid terrorist that you didn’t already know the government is listening and you give your whole plan over the phone, and your door gets kicked in and you are whisked away to exotic Camp X-ray, then it is my assertion you had it coming, but the average American should feel free to continue to try and bore the computer to death with the petty details of their petty lives. Don’t believe me that the government really doesn’t care about what you say unless you are a threat to national security. Think of how many people confess to stuff on the phone just by chatting about it with their co-conspirators, think about how efficient law enforcement would be if the government provided even anonymous tips about all the crimes it knew about.

So just sit back, relax and enjoy the fact that your government thinks enough of you to spy on you, because if they didn’t that really does mean you are a nobody and a nothing.