Speaking as an electrical engineer, let me address one part of the Green New Deal, electric power generation. We need to keep the power on for customers, all night, and all day. "Alternate energy" (windmills and solar cells) won't do that. For example, I live up in the north country where it gets very cold (20 below) and stays cold for days. My oil burner won't run without electricity. Should the power go off, my heat goes off, and my pipes will freeze after a couple of hours. Lots of industrial processes, from traditional ones like baking bread to high tech ones like fabbing semiconductors need the power to stay on while the batch, be it loaves or LSI semiconductors is in the oven. If the power quits while a batch is in process, that batch is ruined. Loss of a batch of loaves is a loss of hundreds of dollars, loss of a batch of semiconductors is tens of thousands of dollars. Plenty of other batch processes will be ruined if the power fails while the batch is in process.
Solar cells stop making electricity when the sun goes down. Which happens every evening. Windmills stop making electricity when the wind stops blowing, which happens less predictably, but often enough. My house is high in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I get plenty of dead calm days. In fact it's a dead calm as I write this. A power system based on solar and wind will suffer frequent power outages, like every night. Which is unacceptable, except for those who advocate a return to the Hiawatha life style, teepees heated by wood fires.
The greenies have poisoned the waters concerning nuclear power. We have built dams on all the rivers. Just the middle sized Connecticut river has six power dams on it starting with Moore Dam in Littleton. If we want the power to stay on all night, we need to burn natural gas. Fortunately we have plenty of natural gas. It's becoming a waste product of fracking. Out on the Bakken they are paying people to take the gas away. Natural gas is out competing coal in the power generation business.
So, Alexandra Occasional-Castro's call for elimination of fossil fuel ain't gonna happen, not unless we put up with power failures on a daily basis.
Monday, February 11, 2019
Monday, February 4, 2019
Better double check your yearbook, while you are in the school
A 30 year old yearbook is causing Virginia governor Northam all sorts of grief today. Lesson to all graduates, better double check your year book page while you are still at the school. Remove anything that might cause you grief in the future, should you be successful in your career. I would recommend strongly against gag photos, photos in any kind of costume, nick names, any kind of sexting, any kind of political remarks. Keep it down to a professional portrait of yourself, honors, sports played, club memberships, good simple stuff that will look good 20-30 years in the future.
Sunday, February 3, 2019
MAGA hats show support for our president and the administration
Which is a good thing. Americans ought to support their president. As a symbol, the Make American Great Again slogan was created by the Donald Trump campaign in 2016 as part of his effort to win the election. The acronym and the hat were created a few weeks later. The MAGA hat means support of the sitting president, nothing more.
There has been plenty of opining on the tube about the MAGA hat representing racism, white supremacy, un-Americanism, Satan worship, and other malarky. That's all a crock. We elected Donald Trum p to be our president in 2016. To see high school students wearing MAGA hats is a goodness. The current administration, under attack from the media and the democrats, needs all the support it can get.
There has been plenty of opining on the tube about the MAGA hat representing racism, white supremacy, un-Americanism, Satan worship, and other malarky. That's all a crock. We elected Donald Trum p to be our president in 2016. To see high school students wearing MAGA hats is a goodness. The current administration, under attack from the media and the democrats, needs all the support it can get.
Monday, January 28, 2019
900 year New England temp record meets Shannon's sampling theorem
A post in Phys.org claims to have used a new method to find and plot the temperature recorded in the bottom of a deep Maine lake. They perform some unspecified analysis of a chemical that I have never heard of to determine the temperature of long ago. They don't explain this bit of chemistry at all. They claim to have taken 136 measurements over some 900 years of lake bottom sediments. And they claim to have discovered previously unknown temperature variations of 50-60 year duration.
Good paper, the authors feel they have made a breakthru.
I think they have not taken enough samples. Temperature in Maine can get up to 90F in the summer, I've been there, I know, and Maine winter runs 20F with cold snaps down as far as -40F. And this temperature variation, 70 to 130 degrees, happens quite regularly, summer and winter happen every year. So we only take 136 samples over 900 summers and winters. Suppose our samples hit mostly summer for a few years? Bingo, a heat wave wave, global warming strikes early. Suppose our samples only hit winter for a few more years in a row? Bingo, a mini ice age.
To do this right, you have to take at least two samples for every year. That's Shannon's Sampling Theorem, you have to sample twice in the period of the highest frequency in the signal you are sampling. If you don't take enough samples, you get aliasing. That is what causes the wheels of the stagecoach to start turning backwards as the stage gathers speed on the way out of Deadwood. The movie camera samples the wheels 24 frames per second. When the wheel spokes move too much in between camera frames, the wheel appears to move in reverse.
This paper claims to find 10 different 50-60 year periods of heat or cold. Since they are not taking enough samples, they could well be seeing an alias. Their samples just happen to hit summer for a long stretch of years, or just happen to hit winter for a long stretch of years. That's aliasing, and will show you imaginary hot spells and cold spells. Just as imaginary as the stagecoach wheels running backwards.
About the best you can do with this under sampled data is divvy it up into convenient slices, say 100 years each, and take the average over each 100 year slice. Then you can look for temperature changes from century to century.
Good paper, the authors feel they have made a breakthru.
I think they have not taken enough samples. Temperature in Maine can get up to 90F in the summer, I've been there, I know, and Maine winter runs 20F with cold snaps down as far as -40F. And this temperature variation, 70 to 130 degrees, happens quite regularly, summer and winter happen every year. So we only take 136 samples over 900 summers and winters. Suppose our samples hit mostly summer for a few years? Bingo, a heat wave wave, global warming strikes early. Suppose our samples only hit winter for a few more years in a row? Bingo, a mini ice age.
To do this right, you have to take at least two samples for every year. That's Shannon's Sampling Theorem, you have to sample twice in the period of the highest frequency in the signal you are sampling. If you don't take enough samples, you get aliasing. That is what causes the wheels of the stagecoach to start turning backwards as the stage gathers speed on the way out of Deadwood. The movie camera samples the wheels 24 frames per second. When the wheel spokes move too much in between camera frames, the wheel appears to move in reverse.
This paper claims to find 10 different 50-60 year periods of heat or cold. Since they are not taking enough samples, they could well be seeing an alias. Their samples just happen to hit summer for a long stretch of years, or just happen to hit winter for a long stretch of years. That's aliasing, and will show you imaginary hot spells and cold spells. Just as imaginary as the stagecoach wheels running backwards.
About the best you can do with this under sampled data is divvy it up into convenient slices, say 100 years each, and take the average over each 100 year slice. Then you can look for temperature changes from century to century.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Microbrewers hung up by the Shutdown
According to today's Wall St Journal, micro brewers need approval from some federal bureau or other before they can market new brews or new labels. The brewers have thousands of gallons of suds sitting in tanks, waiting for that bureau to come back to work and do their paperwork.
Sounds like a severe case of micromanagement to me. I don't see why brewers, or any other company, except maybe drug companies, need federal bureaucrats to approve labels, recipes, packaging, or anything else. If the customers don't like the new recipe or label or whatever, they will stop buying the product. That ought be enough to keep the brewers and other companies making good stuff.
Sounds like a severe case of micromanagement to me. I don't see why brewers, or any other company, except maybe drug companies, need federal bureaucrats to approve labels, recipes, packaging, or anything else. If the customers don't like the new recipe or label or whatever, they will stop buying the product. That ought be enough to keep the brewers and other companies making good stuff.
Friday, January 11, 2019
Drug Pushing Robo Callers and the Opioid Crisis
I am getting a phone call every other day now. It's a robocaller who starts out asking if I am feeling any pain, and goes on to point me toward a pain clinic that will prescribe any kind of happy pill I might want. I wonder how many opioid addicts get started by such drug pushing robocallers. For that matter how many opioid addicts get started at those pain clinics, like the one that opened up here in Littleton a year or so ago? Anyone have any numbers on this?
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Near Money and the federal deficit.
Money goes back to King Croesus of Lydia, 595-547 BC. In his time money was precious metals (gold or silver, sometimes copper) stamped into coins of uniform size and purity. Coins made commerce easier, you could do a deal by simply counting the coins, prior to that, you had to find a balance and a set of trusted weights and weigh the gold or silver in order to do the deal.
In those days there was not much that could be done to alter the money supply, short of a silver or gold strike. The Athenian fleet that crushed the Persians at Salamis was built with the proceeds of a rich silver strike on Athenian soil. More commonly kings would debase the coinage by adding lead to the silver or copper to the gold. But they could not debase the coinage so far that the coins looked funny, which was probably in the order of 50%, which is the same as doubling the money supply.
Paper money was invented in the middle ages, after Gutenberg invented printing. The obvious benefit was there was no shortage of paper and the king could print as much money as he needed to meet payroll when times were tight. The drawback to paper money is a lot of people distrust [ed] it. As late as the American Revolution the printing of Continental dollars to finance the war was controversial and there is language in the Constitution forbidding the states to "make Anything but Gold and Silver coin a Tender in Payment of Debts"
Paper money finally won, certainly because huge amounts of money were needed to run the huge new economies that came out of the Industrial Revolution. There just isn't enough gold and silver to make the vast modern economies work. We also learned that printing too much money reduces it's buying power. When I was a child ice cream cones were 5 cents, comic books were 10 cents, and gasoline was 28 cents. Now ice cream cones are $2.50, comic books are $4-$5, and gasoline is $2.80. In short the buying power of the US dollar has gone down by a factor of ten over my lifetime. Any money in bank accounts is only worth a tenth of what it was worth 60 years ago.
Now we come to my college economics course, using Samuelson as a text, Samuelson wrote about "near money" by which he meant government bonds. He wrote that issuing a bond was just about the same as printing new dollar bills. Consider the US T-bill. It is backed by the full faith and credence of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth with an enviable record of never welshing on its debts. There is a bond market, where the bond can be converted into real cash on any working day, Holding a bond is nearly as good as holding cash, plus you earn interest on the bond. So Samuelson called government bonds "near money".
Now we get the point. When the federal government is short on money, ("runs a deficit") it sells bonds to raise the cash to meet its bills. Which is just about the same as printing dollar bills. It's inflationary, Printing money is why the value of the US dollar has dropped to a tenth of what it was when I was a child. Printing "near money: works about the same.
So far, despite humongous deficits run up by Obama, and the humongous bond sales to make payroll, the inflation rate has remained under 2%. Dunno how that happens, but is has.
In those days there was not much that could be done to alter the money supply, short of a silver or gold strike. The Athenian fleet that crushed the Persians at Salamis was built with the proceeds of a rich silver strike on Athenian soil. More commonly kings would debase the coinage by adding lead to the silver or copper to the gold. But they could not debase the coinage so far that the coins looked funny, which was probably in the order of 50%, which is the same as doubling the money supply.
Paper money was invented in the middle ages, after Gutenberg invented printing. The obvious benefit was there was no shortage of paper and the king could print as much money as he needed to meet payroll when times were tight. The drawback to paper money is a lot of people distrust [ed] it. As late as the American Revolution the printing of Continental dollars to finance the war was controversial and there is language in the Constitution forbidding the states to "make Anything but Gold and Silver coin a Tender in Payment of Debts"
Paper money finally won, certainly because huge amounts of money were needed to run the huge new economies that came out of the Industrial Revolution. There just isn't enough gold and silver to make the vast modern economies work. We also learned that printing too much money reduces it's buying power. When I was a child ice cream cones were 5 cents, comic books were 10 cents, and gasoline was 28 cents. Now ice cream cones are $2.50, comic books are $4-$5, and gasoline is $2.80. In short the buying power of the US dollar has gone down by a factor of ten over my lifetime. Any money in bank accounts is only worth a tenth of what it was worth 60 years ago.
Now we come to my college economics course, using Samuelson as a text, Samuelson wrote about "near money" by which he meant government bonds. He wrote that issuing a bond was just about the same as printing new dollar bills. Consider the US T-bill. It is backed by the full faith and credence of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth with an enviable record of never welshing on its debts. There is a bond market, where the bond can be converted into real cash on any working day, Holding a bond is nearly as good as holding cash, plus you earn interest on the bond. So Samuelson called government bonds "near money".
Now we get the point. When the federal government is short on money, ("runs a deficit") it sells bonds to raise the cash to meet its bills. Which is just about the same as printing dollar bills. It's inflationary, Printing money is why the value of the US dollar has dropped to a tenth of what it was when I was a child. Printing "near money: works about the same.
So far, despite humongous deficits run up by Obama, and the humongous bond sales to make payroll, the inflation rate has remained under 2%. Dunno how that happens, but is has.
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