National Ignition Facility is the laser fusion project. Zap a hydrogen or deuterium droplet with very powerful lasers and maybe it will fuse. Article here. They are only claiming laboratory break even, where laser energy actually delivered to the fuel droplet is counted. Practical breakeven is where fusion energy is enough to power all the equipment, lasers, magnets, whatever. Needless to say, prectical breakeven is a higher bar than laboratory breakeven.
However this is the first time anyone has claimed to reach laboratory breakeven.
It's the first step toward realizing the Mr. Fusion device from Back to the Future. Long way still to go, but we seem to have accomplished that first step.
Much druther have Mr. Fusion than a clean burning wood stove.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
How DO you make a wood stove burn cleaner?
Wood fires, pretty simple tech, you pile some logs up and watch 'em burn. Dry hardwood burns a little cleaner than softwood, but other than that, what's to do? And a wood stove is just a wood fire in a fire proof iron box. Ben Franklin invented them. So they have been around a long time. Not much you can do to change the amount of smoke and soot.
Anyhow, our ever vigilant EPA thinks regulations can make wood burn cleaner. Stove makers have to submit their stoves to EPA labs for testing, at their expense. In January the EPA decided to lower the limits on soot emissions. They claim that wood smoke and soot is a terrible health hazard, nearly as bad as second hand cigarette smoke. By making it impossible to make a compliant wood stove they will save the country untold dollars in medical costs. Right. Compared to Ben Franklin's time, when everyone heated with wood, wood smoke is just not a problem in the 21st century.
If you heat with wood, you have a problem. More people heat with wood than heat with furnace oil. 12% of American homes heat with wood, only 7% heat with oil. Since you won't be able to buy a stove, you will have to make one. An old oil drum makes a nice warm stove.
And then the greenie controlled states are passing laws forbidding the sale of home with "non compliant" woodstoves. You have to take the stove out and scrap it to make the sale. Practically no woodstoves have passed the tighter EPA soot limits.
If you regulate it they will come....
Anyhow, our ever vigilant EPA thinks regulations can make wood burn cleaner. Stove makers have to submit their stoves to EPA labs for testing, at their expense. In January the EPA decided to lower the limits on soot emissions. They claim that wood smoke and soot is a terrible health hazard, nearly as bad as second hand cigarette smoke. By making it impossible to make a compliant wood stove they will save the country untold dollars in medical costs. Right. Compared to Ben Franklin's time, when everyone heated with wood, wood smoke is just not a problem in the 21st century.
If you heat with wood, you have a problem. More people heat with wood than heat with furnace oil. 12% of American homes heat with wood, only 7% heat with oil. Since you won't be able to buy a stove, you will have to make one. An old oil drum makes a nice warm stove.
And then the greenie controlled states are passing laws forbidding the sale of home with "non compliant" woodstoves. You have to take the stove out and scrap it to make the sale. Practically no woodstoves have passed the tighter EPA soot limits.
If you regulate it they will come....
Friday, February 14, 2014
Who knew the Obamacare website wasn't working?
Fox News Five spent some time debating this one last night. "Of course Obama knew." "Sibelius certainly knew." "Somebody knew, why didn't they tell him?"
From the sounds of it, nobody on the Five has the slightest idea how software projects work. Only the techies, programmers and engineers actually on the project have any idea of how things are going. And, in some cases, nobody on the job has the slightest idea what's going on. On a big job, you have to divvy up the coding to a large number of programmers. All of whom settle down at their keyboards and furiously punch in code. Ask one of these guys how he is doing and he will say "Great". You don't really know anything until you put some (or all) of these guy's code together and test the whole system. This doesn't happen until pretty late in the job. And, unless there is a good project engineer who insists on serious testing, it won't happen. Nobody likes testing, it's hard, it's dull, and it shows up flaws in YOUR code, and nobody likes that. If the project engineer doesn't push testing, it doesn't happen. In that case, the customer serves as beta tester, and nobody knows how broke the system is until they release it.
There was no prime contractor in charge of the whole Obamacare project. They divvied up the work inside HHS and let contracts to companies them selves. I seriously doubt that any GS type at HHS knows squat about software projects. If there was a project engineer, he has laid really low since SHTF. It's most likely that nobody at HHS had a clue as to where the project really was.
And the suits anywhere have a problem knowing what's happening. Only the best of project engineers has much of a handle on his project. If a suit tries the "management by wandering around" bit, and talks to the guys on the project, he will find a couple of doom sayers, a couple of polyanna's, a bunch of "duhs" and he won't be able to identify the few techies on the job who actually know what's happening. You have to be a techie yourself to tell one from the other.
It is entirely plausible that nobody at HHS knew what was going down. In that case, Obama wouldn't have known much either.
From the sounds of it, nobody on the Five has the slightest idea how software projects work. Only the techies, programmers and engineers actually on the project have any idea of how things are going. And, in some cases, nobody on the job has the slightest idea what's going on. On a big job, you have to divvy up the coding to a large number of programmers. All of whom settle down at their keyboards and furiously punch in code. Ask one of these guys how he is doing and he will say "Great". You don't really know anything until you put some (or all) of these guy's code together and test the whole system. This doesn't happen until pretty late in the job. And, unless there is a good project engineer who insists on serious testing, it won't happen. Nobody likes testing, it's hard, it's dull, and it shows up flaws in YOUR code, and nobody likes that. If the project engineer doesn't push testing, it doesn't happen. In that case, the customer serves as beta tester, and nobody knows how broke the system is until they release it.
There was no prime contractor in charge of the whole Obamacare project. They divvied up the work inside HHS and let contracts to companies them selves. I seriously doubt that any GS type at HHS knows squat about software projects. If there was a project engineer, he has laid really low since SHTF. It's most likely that nobody at HHS had a clue as to where the project really was.
And the suits anywhere have a problem knowing what's happening. Only the best of project engineers has much of a handle on his project. If a suit tries the "management by wandering around" bit, and talks to the guys on the project, he will find a couple of doom sayers, a couple of polyanna's, a bunch of "duhs" and he won't be able to identify the few techies on the job who actually know what's happening. You have to be a techie yourself to tell one from the other.
It is entirely plausible that nobody at HHS knew what was going down. In that case, Obama wouldn't have known much either.
Cannon Mt Ski Weather
We had about an inch of snow Monday night. It stayed good and cold all week.
It started to snow yesterday around noon. It snowed all night. It's still snowing. I have 9 inches on my deck right now, it's nice medium powder. Skiing should be outstanding this weekend.
It started to snow yesterday around noon. It snowed all night. It's still snowing. I have 9 inches on my deck right now, it's nice medium powder. Skiing should be outstanding this weekend.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Whither the wired phone?
It's clearly on the way out. I just bought a new one. My phone service had been getting noisy and staticy with drop outs. My children all insisted their phones were fine, it must be Dad's phone going bad. Phone in question was an AT&T (made in China) Trimline Princess model, maybe 7 years old. Coil cord was looking a little frayed, but other wise it looked OK. But, I took a trip to Staples in Littleton looking for a new plain old telephone. I used to get phones at Radio Shack, but the Littleton Radio Shack died four years ago. Staples did not have any standard desk phones anymore, you know, the ones with just 12 buttons to dial with, and the handset plunks down on top of, and crosswise to the bottom unit. Like Western Electric used to make back in the good old days. Staples did have several humungous "office" phones, a zillion buttons, four lines, takes up your whole desk. They had some more Princess phones, and just one desk phone. It was an all electronic, speed dial, push button, speaker, caller ID, AT&T model CL2909, made in China, phone, in white, for a mere $32. It was the only real desk phone in the store. All the rest were either humungous, or radio phones, or tiny little phones that won't stay put on your desk. So, if you have some phones around the house getting old and flaky, now would be a good time to replace them, while you still can.
All electronic wonder phone comes with a 43 page instruction manual, needs four AA batteries, has a three line LCD display that includes a clock, a calendar, and a directory. It wanted to be programmed for language, area code[s], clock set, calendar set, and some other stuff. I managed to get thru all this with numerous retries. A day later I find the clever little clock doesn't keep very good time. It looses three minutes a day, which is pretty bad for an electronic clock I have a 100 year old wind up pendulum mantle clock that keeps better time than that. After a couple of tries I managed to program a couple of speed dial buttons. And they worked. I looked at the "directory" feature and decided it just wasn't worth it. You have to enter the phone number, (not too bad) and then enter the name, using the number keys. That was so complicated that I decided not to bother. My desk computer holds my phone numbers anyhow. The speaker button not only turns on the speaker (Living alone, I really need a speaker phone) but lifts the hook switch and leaves it lifted, which is equivalent to leaving the phone off hook. Shortly you will hear that automatic voice from the phone company prompting you to put the phone back on the hook. Useful feature that is.
All electronic wonder phone comes with a 43 page instruction manual, needs four AA batteries, has a three line LCD display that includes a clock, a calendar, and a directory. It wanted to be programmed for language, area code[s], clock set, calendar set, and some other stuff. I managed to get thru all this with numerous retries. A day later I find the clever little clock doesn't keep very good time. It looses three minutes a day, which is pretty bad for an electronic clock I have a 100 year old wind up pendulum mantle clock that keeps better time than that. After a couple of tries I managed to program a couple of speed dial buttons. And they worked. I looked at the "directory" feature and decided it just wasn't worth it. You have to enter the phone number, (not too bad) and then enter the name, using the number keys. That was so complicated that I decided not to bother. My desk computer holds my phone numbers anyhow. The speaker button not only turns on the speaker (Living alone, I really need a speaker phone) but lifts the hook switch and leaves it lifted, which is equivalent to leaving the phone off hook. Shortly you will hear that automatic voice from the phone company prompting you to put the phone back on the hook. Useful feature that is.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Snuff 'em or Snatch 'em?
TV news has been nattering about whether to launch a drone strike against an unnamed American working for the Taliban, or Al Quada, or some terrorist outfit. Drone strike means a hit with a Hellfire anti tank missile, and that's lethal. Target will never talk again.
We ought to fly some troops in by helicopter, snatch him, and bring him home for grilling. If the nogoodnick is worth a drone strike, surely he knows something that we would like to know. Like we did on Bin Laden, only take the bum alive.
Or do we fear US courts setting him free after we get him back to Gitmo? Or does the Obama administration prefer to snuff 'em rather than put them into Gitmo? Or do we lack the stones to waterboard him til he talks? You'd think if we are ready to kill him, that we wouldn't flinch from a little third degree.
We ought to fly some troops in by helicopter, snatch him, and bring him home for grilling. If the nogoodnick is worth a drone strike, surely he knows something that we would like to know. Like we did on Bin Laden, only take the bum alive.
Or do we fear US courts setting him free after we get him back to Gitmo? Or does the Obama administration prefer to snuff 'em rather than put them into Gitmo? Or do we lack the stones to waterboard him til he talks? You'd think if we are ready to kill him, that we wouldn't flinch from a little third degree.
Terminal Vagueness mars Astronomy abstract in Science
I came across this in a post on Istapundit, titled "Archeology of Stars". I followed the link to a longish NYT piece by Curtis Brainard, and then I followed one of Brainard's links back to an abstract in Science. Author was an MIT astronomer, Dr. Anna Frebel. So I read the abstract, several times.
Lead sentence. "Current cosmological models1, 2 indicate that the Milky Way’s stellar halo was assembled from many smaller systems." Hmm. Tell me about those "systems". Systems of what? Stars, dark matter, gas and dust, Legos, black holes, auto parts? Surely Dr. Frebel could have used a more specific phrase in the lead sentence. The use of the verb "assembled" is off putting. We assemble manufactured goods like cars, Ipads, TV sets. Surely she doesn't mean the Milky Way galaxy was assembled in a galaxy factory.
Her next sentence contains the phrase "galactic building blocks". Maybe she was talking about systems of Legos? Then she introduces the phrase "dwarf galaxies" but does not define it. From context I think what she calls "dwarf galaxies" are what used to be called "globular star clusters".
Buried in the middle of the abstract we finally get down to the interesting stuff. She has discovered an extremely iron poor star in the "Sculptor dwarf galaxy". Not being an astronomer, I don't know where the Sculptor dwarf galaxy is, but I guess it is a globular cluster attached to our Milky Way. In short, something close by, or at least close compared to the quasars which are so distant as to be nearly as old as the Big Bang.
Why is iron-poor interesting. Iron poor makes the star old, perhaps as old as the quasars. The Big Bang is thought to have filled the universe with only hydrogen and helium. The first stars lacked any heavy elements, and in fact created all the heavy elements by fusion. Therefore an iron poor star is old because it formed before the heavy elements were made. And, this one is close enough to get a good look at. The quasars are so far away that little can be learned about them.
Dr. Frebel has made a very interesting discovery. But her English language skills are so poor that she would have flunked high school English at my school. Someone should give her a copy of Strunk and White. She would become a more widely known astronomer if she would bother to learn how to write decent English.
Lead sentence. "Current cosmological models1, 2 indicate that the Milky Way’s stellar halo was assembled from many smaller systems." Hmm. Tell me about those "systems". Systems of what? Stars, dark matter, gas and dust, Legos, black holes, auto parts? Surely Dr. Frebel could have used a more specific phrase in the lead sentence. The use of the verb "assembled" is off putting. We assemble manufactured goods like cars, Ipads, TV sets. Surely she doesn't mean the Milky Way galaxy was assembled in a galaxy factory.
Her next sentence contains the phrase "galactic building blocks". Maybe she was talking about systems of Legos? Then she introduces the phrase "dwarf galaxies" but does not define it. From context I think what she calls "dwarf galaxies" are what used to be called "globular star clusters".
Buried in the middle of the abstract we finally get down to the interesting stuff. She has discovered an extremely iron poor star in the "Sculptor dwarf galaxy". Not being an astronomer, I don't know where the Sculptor dwarf galaxy is, but I guess it is a globular cluster attached to our Milky Way. In short, something close by, or at least close compared to the quasars which are so distant as to be nearly as old as the Big Bang.
Why is iron-poor interesting. Iron poor makes the star old, perhaps as old as the quasars. The Big Bang is thought to have filled the universe with only hydrogen and helium. The first stars lacked any heavy elements, and in fact created all the heavy elements by fusion. Therefore an iron poor star is old because it formed before the heavy elements were made. And, this one is close enough to get a good look at. The quasars are so far away that little can be learned about them.
Dr. Frebel has made a very interesting discovery. But her English language skills are so poor that she would have flunked high school English at my school. Someone should give her a copy of Strunk and White. She would become a more widely known astronomer if she would bother to learn how to write decent English.
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