Minor Stupidity

Every time I see a “Help support MS” charity, I feel like yelling something like, “Boo, down with MS, and its supporters.” Yeah, I know what they mean and what they’re trying to do. Something about the way they word it makes me chuckle though. There’s an ever so subtle difference between supporting MS and supporting people with MS. For some reason though it just doesn’t turn heads the way having a “support violence” campaign instead of a “support victims of violence” would.
Maybe next time I see one of those guys, I should walk up and casually say, “This is most interesting, I’ve been against multiple sclerosis all my life and have always held the view that we would probably be better off without it. Now people seem to be for multiple sclerosis?” It would definitely be a practice your poker face moment.

Things we’re supposed to remember

I’ve been helping my sister with her calculus a bit lately. It has me wondering about something. We live in a society where almost every high school graduate has a solid understanding of algebra and almost every baby boomer who doesn’t work in a math intensive field has trouble with basic algebra. At the same time, we’re expected to remember every single language we were ever taught and when we don’t, it’s apparently a flaw in ourselves for not maintaining that level of understanding. Fact of life, people forget things. Things that seem most likely to be forgotten tend to be infrequently used and taught in a disciplinarian style where the end individual has little interest in the subject.
Thus far, the average person I’ve met isn’t able to calculate how much their pay cheque changes by if they were to work an hour of overtime. For me, that happens to be $15.7, give or take about a quarter. Math and finances are two things that interest me, so I happen to know this stuff. I know little to nothing about things I happen to have little to no interest in, like pop culture or languages that I don’t speak every day.

Second Law of Thermodynamics As It Relates To Evolution

The laws of thermodynamics are simple. The first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it is only converted from one form to another. The second law of thermodynamics is also fairly simple, but before I say what it means, I’ll say what people have tried to convince me it means.
I’ve been told that the second law of thermodynamics says that everything is heading towards disorder. Some people add that only closed systems are headed towards disorder and that order can come about through the addition of energy. Other people claim that the second law of thermodynamics only came about after the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The conclusion that I keep hearing from this is that the second law of thermodynamics states that evolution is impossible because evolutions talks about things going from a low level of order to a higher one.
As always, one should be careful regarding claims expanding a scientific principal beyond that which it was intended. The fact that it is the second law of thermodynamics suggests that we should think carefully prior to trying to apply this information to things outside the realm of thermodynamics. A simple analogy can illustrate the dangers of making such an extention of scientific laws without though. I was told that one reason a lot of stuents have trouble understanding quantum physics is because it’s like putting a bunch of things in a box, walking away with it and having half the items staying on the table. From this, one can conclude that public transportation is a meaningless affair because boarding the bus doesn’t neccisarily mean that you’ll travel with the bus. You may be left at the bus stop despite being completely contained within the vehicle prior to departure.
In simple, easy to understand terms, the second law of thermodynamics states that in any conversion of energy, some energy is converted into multiple forms. One conclusion of this is that no thermodynamic system can be 100% efficient because some of the energy converted is in a form other than the objective output form. The various other forms that energy is converted into are often more difficult to work with. If you want to use the term entropy in your definition of the second law of thermodynamics, that’s fine as long as you have a firm understanding of what is entropy and what states are considered ordered and disordered.
Which of the three would be considered to have the highest level of order? A flat plane, a flat plane with a giant stone pillar in the middle or a mountain range with continously varying slopes and elevations? Instinctually, one might see the mountain range as being disordered, the flat plane as being ordered and be puzzled as to where to rank the plane with the pillar. If we approach this from the common misconception of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that we get more entropy with each change, which is considered more organized? I can start chipping away at the pillar or the mountains, get energy out as pieces fall down and then I have the flat even plane. As the flat surface is the end result of when so many energy conversions are performed that no more work can be done, it therefore must be the most disorganized and random state. Although by knocking down the mountain, we’ve gone from what is viewed as disorder to what is viewed as order. Another quick analogy, if I were to apply this to a herd of elephants, as they travel, they’ll become less orderly and I’ll have a random distribution of elephants. Herd mentality is therefore contridictory to the second law of thermodynamics and doesn’t exist. Because of the confusion that can arrise, a good scientific understanding of the terminology is needed prior to attempting to draw conclusions.
If the second law of thermodynamics did not exist prior to the eating of the fruit from the tree of life, Adam could have set a ball bouncing and it wouldn’t have stopped because energy is retained within the system and is never converted to other forms. The ball would also be bouncing silently and background audio from any intended sound would exist indefinately causing noise levels to rise indefinately due to the motions not being converted into heat. Friction would also be completely non-existant because it converts energy into heat. This poses serious problems for the paradise of the Garden of Eden, turning it into more of a scifi b movie horror scenario.
So, if I were to try to apply this concept to biology, does it say that I cannot produce more advanced creatures? It does say that creatures need to take in more input energy than the theoretical minimum required output energy that they expend and the second law of thermodynamics makes no further comments.

Why just oil?

I heard a few more of those people pushing the belief that oil is spontaneously generated in the earth and will never run out. None of them really say what needs to go down there in order to get crude oil, but apparently they think it’s a very quick process. From what I’ve heard some of them say, oil really isn’t a cycle where stuff goes down becomes oil and comes back up again. It apparently is just created. Why are there so many people thinking that oil is limitless? If I were to say that uranium is continously being replenished in the earth and we’ll never run out, people would think I’m nuts. The price of uranium has shot up greatly with more reactors coming online. It’s a very important resource. If anyone were to claim that there’s a conspiracy here, nobody would believe them.
We’ve also been pulling copper out of the ground for ages. We keep using it in a lot of things. Nobody is claiming that we’ll never run out of copper. The price for that has shot up quite a bit too. Enough that people risk themselves to steal high voltage power lines to sell as scrap metal. Should we scream conspiracy about this as well?
There’s always biological material going into the earth, but if this process was a quick process, oil would litterally be everywhere. We’d be pulling vats of crude oil out of places like pompeii instead of finding empty pockets where people were burried under volcanic debris. Every swamp would have oil slowly bubbling up to the surface. The empirical evidence doesn’t support this theory. Oil tends to be concentrated in regions, so there needs to be a couple of conditions needed to produce oil. Most of the matter seems to be reabsorbed into circle of life, but some still manages to detour for a while. Specially so when we burry stuff in landfills. We’ve only ever gotten methane and a few toxic substances out of those though, which are all fairly typical of decaying matter. Longer chain hydrocarbons are completely absent though.
Yeah… my mind is pretty scattered right now, organization in this post sucks.

Where’s the Outrage?

I heard an on-star commercial on the radio and thought, gee, here’s a system that tracks the locations of cars as well as their operating status. It can also exert some amount of control over them. The locking and unlocking of doors seems to be the main thing. This all sounds fine and dandy. Where are all the usual privacy people jumping up and down worried about people knowing where cars are? People scream about all sorts of invasion of privacy issues and oppose all sorts of seemingly innocent things all the time. Why is nobody worked up about on-star?
Maybe it’s time that everyone just stepped back for a while and really thought about why certain things scare us. Tracking my car, not scary. Tracking my cell phone, not scary. Being able to get into my car, well, if someone really wanted to get in, I’m sure an ax would take out the window without difficulty. You can do that without an accomplis.

Turning Language into Religion

I had to check this a few times to make sure I heard it right. In a discussion of why there is so much religious tension in the world, Mandarin China somehow joined a list of various Islamic countries, and Hindu countries. Last time I checked we had a bunch of people in China speaking Mandarin and there’s a bunch of Mandarin speaking people around the world. There aren’t really any worshippers though. Unless I’m missing something, it simply isn’t a faith, it’s a language.

Mathematics vs Reality

I’ve started going back to observing the Creation Vs Evolution discussion for a while. Mainly, I’ve been reviewing attempts from religious groups to refute evolution. Every once in a while I come across something that I just simply know is wrong being passed off as truth. This particular instance just happens to be the Coriolis effect and it’s influence on the direction that water drains in different hemispheres of the earth. I was told that it showed organization and provided proof that there had to be a god. This is just a popular misconception. Granted, if we crunch the numbers, consistant results will be produced. This is mathematics.
The Coriolis effect is real, we can measure it, we can see it’s influence. I’m not trying to deny the existance of the Coriolis effect. However, anyone who’s studied fluids or spent a lot of time studying the draining of liquids will know that no matter what hemisphere you’re on any given container can drain in either direction. This is reality.
Of course, mathematics is never wong, it’s just that nobody bothers trying to calculate reality, only a simplified version of reality. A real container of water has all sorts of currents flowing in it. If you look closely at the edges of the containers, there’s water going up and down in small waves. The water is not static, it sloshes around. Some vibration remains that never exactly disappates. The earth is also not a completely stationary surface, it shakes and vibrates and moves around. If we were to attempt to calculate actual reality on something like an sink or an olympic sized swimming pool, we’d find that the real world influences, that are usually left out because they’re simply too complex, have much more influence than the influence of the Coriolis effect.
No matter what mathematics says, what happens in reality is, well, real. When the math disagrees, we simply haven’t answered the right question.

Spam and Visitors

I find it interesting that the blog stats say that I’ve recieved 830 total views and my spam filter says that there have been 482 spam comments that have been filtered out. I could be wrong about this one, but assuming that someone has to actually load a page before leaving a spam comment this means I’ve had 830-482=348 actual visitors and somewhere around 58% of my visitors are spambots.
Of course, if I’m wrong and the spam bots can somewho get to me without page counters going up, which is a bit of a scary thought, I’m still getting more than one piece of spam for every two visitors. I suppose I should take heart in the fact that I’ve gotten a few meaningful comments from strangers who’ve just wandered by.

Minor Mistake in the Newspaper

Something caught my eye as I was flipping through the newspaper this morning. It was an article about the treatment of hippos at a zoo. In the description of the living conditions, it said that there wasn’t enough water for the hippo to float. It gives an idea of how deep the water is, except there’s one big issue. It’s a minor side note, but hippos don’t float in water. All that bulk is muscle so they sink. No zoo tries to give their hippopotamus enough water to float because they know it can’t be done.

Critical knowledge fails to reach nuclear reactor discussion

I wonder why people seem to want to push pebble bed reactors as being better for power generation than today’s technology. Therer’s some strange drive to develop them and I’m not sure people really understand what they’re going to get as a result.
One of the things I hear is that pebble bed reactors will be far cheaper at around $250 million as opposed to $4 billion. The french certainly aren’t running their country off an array of $4 billion reactors, nor are the Japanese. Claiming that these things will save us money makes about as much sense as sending all our nuclear employees to learn Japanese and hoping things will become cheaper. A large portion of the cost of building a nuclear reactor is development costs. When you do things the way France and Japan have, you don’t need to pay development costs for each reactor because it’s the same design as the last one. This is not true for North America.
Another thing I hear being touted about pebble bed reactors is the lack of a descrete fuel handling unit. Ok, so in an existing reactor, one of the pipes ruptures and we’re in big trouble. Of course, we know that already and so we monitor the conditions very closely. We know if one of those will be in danger of breaking and of course, we’re not stupid enough to let that happen. There’s no such thing to break in a pebble bed reactor. Till Chernoble came along, some nuclear reactors just mixed uranium and graphite together with no discrete fuel and well, that didn’t really prove to be a benifit. One of the big advantages to the current design and using it in power generation is the ability to refuel the reactor while it’s running. Sure, we can add fuel to a pebble bed reactor, we can take fuel out, but if there’s 18 different ages of fuel in there, how do we make sure it’s the oldest fuel that we’re removing? When you’re sorting a bunch of pebbles that can shift around, this becomes problematic. I’m not saying that this won’t be possible, but remember those development costs I mentioned earlier? Add a bit to that amount.
Another thing I’d like to promote about the current nuclear system is that we already have all the facilities needed to process the fuel for it. We can build a reactor and get ready to use fuel bundles shipped to it. If we want to build a pebble bed reactor, we’re going to need to build a facility to process the fuel.
Let’s not push things before they’re ready. If we had to build a nuclear reactor hear in the next five year, let’s build on our existing technology and expertise. It will be cheaper and safer for us. If we want to build a pebble bed reactor for fun and learn things, expect it to be much more expensive. Down the road, if people decide that they don’t want to live with our design decisions, we get back into our current situation of having a different reactor at every site and paying development costs all the time. We might even get ourselves into a worse spot and start a trend of developing new fuel pebbles and processing facilities for each reactor.
Developing pebble bed reactors is a good idea. Building a small one for research is a fairly reasonable idea. Getting some use out of the research reactor is also another reasonable idea. Letting research get bogged down with uptime requirements is not such a good idea. Building a big one is not a good idea yet.
All this being said, I’d like to advise people to do a few things
1) Trust industry experts to make a good decision. They at least have the information to make an informed decision. Down the road, someone might find new information that’ll favor an alternative, but a decision based on information is often better than a decision based off severe simplifications and misconceptions.
2) Wait for technology to mature. Every design that dies on paper and gets improved upon is one that we didn’t have to spend money to build in order to learn from. If we want the cost of nuclear power to be cheap, the thing to do is to develop a standard and simply build more than one from the same set of plans. When you have a design you’re happy with, it takes an army of people to decide where every screw, bolt and weld goes as well as all the other fine details that paper reactors don’t need to worry about. The fewer times we have to do this, the cheaper it is and the more people we have to devote to other things like developing the next generation of nuclear reactors.
3) When you hear that something is a potential problem, don’t panic about it. Chances are, someone who’s been studying it already knows about it and the only reason you know about it is because it sucks to spend your life doing something and never talk it about. It’s the people who are actually there studying this who find out about problems first, not the guy you meet at the bar who has a friend who knows someone that works at a reactor. They deal with problems without worrying the general public and it gets dealt with and people don’t go to work every day fearing that their work place will explode all around them. After that, there are a bunch of people being paid to keep an eye on something, they tell their buddies what they do. Then people, who regret asking, start telling stories of problems with various parts of a nuclear reactor without knowing how the thing works as a whole.