Volcano Monitoring

I've written before about the strange position conservatives have put themselves in recently in relation to science. Partially because of the religious fundamentalist struggle with the theory of evolution, and the right wing capitalist position against global warming, we've seen steadily increasing scorn at the least or outright attacks at the worst by Republicans against science.

Now that they are out of power, the Republicans have reverted to their tactic of picking apart the budget and holding up some examples of wasteful spending. Setting aside the fact that they didn't seem to mind wasteful spending when it was being directed in palletfuls of $100s at crony contractors, the examples they pick are almost always scientific studies.

I remember during the presidential campaign, Sarah Palin brought up as one item of scorn and derision, a study on fruit flies. She probably didn't comprehend that we weren't trying to understand fruit flies, but using them to understand genetic traits about humans. In this case, a science commentator connected fruit fly research to autism and downs syndrome research, and tied it all together by asking if Sarah Palin, who has a child with downs syndrome, is not interested in research about the condition.

The latest example of stepping in their own stupidity came from Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and former Representative of their 1st Congressional District. He scoffed about the waste of federal money on Volcano Monitoring. The Scientific American podcast jumped on this immediately, asking him what private entity could possibly be motivated to monitor volcanoes. That it is a necessary endeavor should have been self evident, but it took Jon Stewart of the Daily Show to put it in perspective. He equated it with not monitoring the weather, and then being surprised when Hurricane Katrina struck Jindal's own home state.

The truly ironic thing that happened next was when Mt. Redoubt in Alaska erupted just a few days later. No word if any ash fell on Governor Palin, she probably had a Prayer Shield up to protect her. Governor Jindal was strangely silent on the issue.

300

You may have seen the movie "300" that came out in 2007 and was about the Battle of Thermopylae.

The Battle of Thermopylae was fought between about 300 Spartans and the invading Persians under the Emperor Darius. I learned about this battle in High School, in Mr. Warford's classical history class, and it always stuck in my mind.

I remember the descriptions of the battle tactics, as I was taught back then. The Greeks used a phalanx formation, where they interlocked their shields, and fought like an enormous turtle, with the shields forming a solid shell against the archers. I remember being told that they occupied a valley so narrow, that the enemy could not overwhelm them with numbers, but was forced to narrow their front down to the point that Greeks were never outnumbered during actual battle.

The movie brought to life the mental image of the battle and tactics I had learned about. The vague picture in my mind finally got filled in by images of the first hand action. The strange and stylized look of the film was fine with me, because that's kind of how memories are. When you read a story, the picture in your mind isn't crisp, it's kind of vague around the edges.

I've often played a science fiction game in my mind about epic historical events. What would it be like to actually go back in time and see famous sights? Besides the point of correcting historical inaccuracies, you have to admit that there would be nothing like actually watching this action. Whenever a movie comes along that tries to be as accurate as possible and actually answer this question, I find it very gratifying.

I remember something I heard about how they made the movie The Last of the Mohicans from 1992 with Daniel Day-Lewis. Someone making the movie was tasked with producing the action of fighting with tomahawks as accurately as possible. They adapted a French manual of arms for saber fighting into the moves used by the men wielding the tomahawks. I enjoyed the movie a lot more by being able to notice and compare the scenes where the tomahawk was employed. You begin to understand what it was like.

Another example of a movie striving for historical accuracy of battle scenes was Saving Private Ryan. You can't watch the beach scenes without having a new appreciation of what those men went through.

I have recently been working through a couple of podcasts that cover Roman history. One in particular, The History of Rome has some excellent descriptions of the way they fought. See http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ and go back to the two episodes labeled "A Phalanx with Joints" from November 28, 2008. Mike Duncan has an excellent way of describing the action. I looked into the Maniple Formation as a result of his coverage of the Samnite Wars. I understood that the tight Greek Phalanx was modified by the Romans and adopted to less desirable terrain. They explained how the old Greek Phalanx finally died out under the Romans' superior way of using similar tactics.

So any movie that attempts to show what it would be like to fight in the old days is interesting and exciting to me. I remember watching the battle scenes in Braveheart and thinking that this must what it was like to stand nose to nose and hack away at each other. I read the book Timeline by Michael Creighton, where the characters use a time machine to go back in time and see medieval warfare. I remember a line from the book by a character that had studied and trained to be ready to go back and live the old ways. After about 2 minutes in a sword fight, he was exhausted.

I feel the same way - that you are getting a good glimpse into actual battle history - when I watch 300. So go ahead and scorn the movie, call it homoerotic, it doesn't matter. I still think it's a good window to the past.

Personality Theory

I was recently discussing a person that is always arguing with others, always in conflict. I commented that it was like she signed up for a debate and has never quit. I suddenly realized that this is what a lot of people's lives are all about.

So many people are walking around, and in their heads, they're in a contest with the people around them where they are trying to prove something to them or win out over them. For some, it's "I have more money and worth than you", for others, it's "I think I'm cooler than you." and for others, it's "my politics are superior to yours. I am always right and more brilliant and insightful than you." Some people think they are funnier or more caring, or maybe more talented, but probably everyone has some game they play in their head.

We had a grandmother that everyone loved. I wonder if the story in her head was that she was trying to be a very good person. She went to church and tried to be so nice to everyone, she was always doing nice things for everyone. It sounds derogatory to say that she thought she was better than everyone, but that’s not the point. The question is to figure out what story a person has in their head that describes how they believe they fit in the world.

The point for both of these cases, the good and the bad, is that the person has a self perception, and they play out their lives according to the story they’ve accepted about themselves.

Is this internal story true? The question does not apply, exactly. It’s true enough to the person that tells themselves what they are. Sometimes, this self-story might be completely at odds with the way the person behaves, sometimes it might be right in line. Other times, it’s some weird story that other people may not even be aware of. Often, there could be subtle differences.

When I thought about this way of looking at people, it boils down to “how do they see themselves?” In the particular case of the conflicted person, they story she’s telling herself is at odds with the way other people perceive her. I was wondering why she didn't just be herself and try to enjoy life rather than making everything into a contest. For her, it was a contest. For the people around her, she was just being unnecessarily spiteful, vindictive, and argumentative. From her point of view, if she made enough points, she could win. From the other people’s point of view, she needed to shut up and stop being so derogatory or no one would ever want to be around her.

In this particular case, because her self-story painted her as locked in a battle to convince people, she could not stop fighting with people, which, ironically, made it impossible for her to win over the hearts and minds of people.

So the point here is that if you have an internal story, you may be so blinded by your own point of view that you make mistakes with the people around you. The further point is that if you understand that people may have some kind of internal dialog going on, it is useful to figure out what that is. Discovering that someone is telling themselves they are a saint when they are not is good to know.

Since people see the world through the filters they construct, it is sometimes impossible to get them to see your point of view if it conflicts with their point of view. If it’s not important, if you want to share something with them that you know they will not accept, knowing that they won’t accept it means that you can choose to stop trying. It may be possible to speak to them in a way that they can understand, if you know where they are coming from. It may also be necessary to slip the information in under their defenses. Just because someone is filtering reality doesn’t mean they are immune to it.

Playpumps and Solarwind distilleries

Some solutions to the problems in life turn out to be simple, elegant and fun.

I don't remember when I first heard of the concept of the Playpump, but it stuck in my mind. I'm sure it was a podcast some time in the last two years. I was recently reminded of it when I looked at a video podcast called Wild Chronicles Digital Shorts. This is a National Geographic video site, formerly it was The Best of National Geographic Magazine, but they relaunched it some time back.

The Playpump is a device that they developed to solve the water problems in rural Africa. African people have problems with diseases from their water sources, as well as difficulty in getting retrieving the water, which often times has to be hand carried from local streams. Simply drilling a water well is sometimes not a sufficient solution because the water still has to be pumped out of the ground, and these places do not have electricity, or cannot afford electric pumps.

The play pump is a way to harness the energy of children playing on a merry go round to pump the water out of the ground. As the children push the merry go round around, it serves as the rotary motion to drive the pump, just like windmills used to here in the Midwest. The children's power is more reliable than wind, I suppose.

You can read more about the playpumps at http://www.playpumps.org

I used to think that I would like to buy a farm some day and take it completely off the power/utility grid. I used to fantasize about how to set up an array of windmills, solar panels, ponds, and biofuel plants in order to generate all the energy you would need, in addition to sustaining crops and livestock. The Playpump story made me think about one such device that would be nice to have if you didn't have a grid to connect to.

One of the cool ideas I saw a long time ago, at a K-State Open House, was a solar grill. This was a simple dish antenna, either coated with shiny material or made of a polished metal. Just like a magnifying glass has a focal point that you can concentrate and focus the sun's rays on, dish shaped materials reflect the sun into a focal point. The booth at the open house display had a small one that was cooking hotdogs to serve the visitors. This magnifying effect is also seen in the reflector of a flashlight and in satellite dish antennas. In the case of the flashlight, the light source is at the focal point, and makes a concentrated and directed beam. In the antenna's case, it is radio waves rather than sunlight that is being focused. This same principle is also used in a parabolic microphone, where you can concentrate sounds from far away and magnify them with a dish. You may have seen broadcast crews at football games with the clear plastic dishes with a microphone in the center.

I've always wondered why we couldn't make a water distillery from a solar dish. Instead of positioning a cooking grill at the hotspot, you would put a water coil. The water would boil off, and the pure steam could be cooled (by a heat exchanger using the incoming cool groundwater) and collected to make clean water. If you flowed the water past at a slower speed, you would simply have hot water. You could hook one of these up to a windmill or playpump, and you would have running hot water with no electricity (if it was sunny outside).

Developing such concepts and constructing the devices would not take a lot of money, but it would take some time. It would be great to get a team of college interns to try to develop the concept and come up with a quickly deployable and easily marketable system to try to sell to campgrounds, farmer's outbuildings, or any house on a well system. You could augment the playpump with a windmill driven pump, if that would work.

Like I said, some ideas are fun to work with.

Cosmological Inconstant

It was around 60° the other day and I went running over the lunch hour. This was in late February in Missouri, totally unexpected and delightful weather that I was glad to take advantage of. As happens to me more often now, I remember what I was doing when I heard a particular podcast, much the way I used to remember what I was doing when I listened to a popular song. This day, while running along the narrow road and feeling the feeble winter sun warm my back, I heard a story that sent me into a nice little contemplative daydream for several minutes.

Scientific American has a podcast called 60 Second Science. It's on the web at http://www.sciam.com/podcast/ (not to be confused with Science Talk, another excellent podcast). Also the extended Scientific American Podcast for that day had an extended interview detailing the same point.

The February 18th 2009 podcast featured Chicago's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). On Monday February 16 they had a press conference featuring cosmologists Alan Guth from M.I.T. (developer of the inflationary model of the universe), Arizona State University's Lawrence Krauss, John Carlstrom from the University of Chicago (an expert on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation), and Fermilab's Scott Dodelson (an expert on the structure of the universe).

They were discussing the state of cosmology and the universe's possible "dismal" future. They believe that all of the indicators of the Big Bang will disappear. The evidence for the Hubble expansion will disappear when the galaxies that we use to trace it disappear. Even the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation will eventually go away.

Article said that a cosmologist in the far future would not be able to figure out the big bang, and that the only evidence he had left to go on would indicate that the Universe was static and eternal, just like what recent Cosmologists thought up to around 1900.

So we will look at the universe in the far future (50 billion years from now compared to the current 13.7 billion year age of the universe) like what the ancient philosophers used to think of the universe. They thought that the heavens were fixed, unchanging, and eternal.

I'm not a cosmologist, but I love listening to them. I read Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time, and understood the general concept. We theorize that all matter filled a single point, called a Singularity, at the beginning of the universe, and it exploded into existence, all at once. I remember thinking at the time, what was before that? Where did the Universe come from? The physicists' answer is that we don't know that, we can't know that, because the singularity that was the birth of the universe, by definition, means that you cannot know what was before it, all evidence was destroyed. This made me visualize the universe as a two stroke engine, exploding into existence, collapsing back down into a point, and exploding anew. Because I can't imagine that there was nothing and suddenly there was something, and that's no what they are saying about the Big Bang. They aren't saying there was nothing before it, they're saying we can't know what was before it.

Modern cosmologists calculated the size of the universe, then theorized the big bang from seeing traces of that explosion and older galaxies whose light is just now reaching us. They tell us that the universe has some kind of strange dimensional quality where if you could point a spaceship in some direction and take off incredibly fast, that you would eventually come back to where you started. They compare it to the way you could start somewhere on the earth and take off in one direction (let's say in a plane whose course is unaffected by wind currents) that you will eventually come back to where you started. That makes sense when you think of it as something moving along the surface of a sphere. The observer in the plane thinks he's going along a flat surface and suddenly he's back where he started from. Well, space is supposed to be like this, but not because it's a sphere, but because of some trick of spacetime. I read about it and I can't properly explain the shape or condition that makes this so, but it's a generally accepted idea.

The other thing that blows my mind is the thought that we can see things that are almost as old as the universe, because the light from them is just now reaching us. Does that mean it was flying away from us slightly slower than the speed of light, and the light was barely creeping toward us? Not according to Einstein, who says that light is constant and time is the variable. These are concepts that make the layman give up on figuring out Cosmology and why it seems to be the playground of geniuses and off limits to the average person.

There's only a small percentage of people in the world that can comprehend this field, and an even smaller portion of them that are figuring out the basics of cosmological reality. The worst part is that they know that they don't understand it very well, and they understand some of what it is they don't understand, they've got the right questions, but no answers. You hear a lot of physicists and cosmologists talk about Dark Matter and Dark Energy. They admit that they don't understand what this is. What they rarely explain to the rest of the world that is ignorant of the finer points of their work, but eager for them to work it out, is that these unknowns are just imaginary numbers. It's like Algebra. When you don't know a quantity, you just assign it an arbitrary label, usually x. X just means "the unknown quantity that I am trying to figure out". Which is exactly what Dark Energy and Dark Matter are. They measured the universe and their numbers came in way off. We can't account for over 95% of the matter or energy in the universe. We think it's there based on what we see it doing to the matter in the galaxies, but we can't see it, thus Dark Matter. It's almost like a boogey man or a spirit. Maybe it's the invisible hand of God (did you ever think of that, Mr. Scientist? I didn't think so!).

In any case, we sneer at the "scientists" of the past (up to around 1900) that thought that the universe was fixed and unchanging. How little they understood. Then, with sophisticated new tools, we looked out with some precision and made some measurements and Wow! These stars are all moving, and Hey! some of those points of light aren't distant stars, but whole galaxies.

If scientists in the future aren't going to be able to figure it out (with the tools we have now) how do we know we have enough clues to figure it out? Maybe that's what Dark Matter and Dark Energy are, maybe they are the remnants of something that used to be obvious or visible, and is now just some shadow of an effect that we think we understand. Maybe we are 60 billion years old and it just looks like the way things are now because the light is just now reaching us.

If we can theorize a time when evidence we now have will be gone, what evidence that used to be there is gone now? What do we not know that we don't know? What can we not figure out based on what we see? If this is the case, that we can't know certain things, then can't you say that any theory is possible? Where does it end?

Subterranean Lifestores

I was recently thinking about ground source and geothermal energy. There was an alternative energy article that showed some of the "green" alternatives.

The ground stays at a constant temperature, once you go down a few feet. This means that caves and ground water around here are usually at a constant 56°F. You may have noticed this when letting the water run in your house for a long time, the cold water gets even colder after a while. This is because you are drawing your water from the a piping system that goes underground outside of your house. The pipes are supposed to be buried deep enough to avoid freezing. There are charts that tell you how deep to bury pipes in various parts of the country, and that depth is shallower in the south and deeper in the north. Below a certain depth, the ground stays at a constant temperature. I've noticed that the cold water seems even colder in the winter, after letting it run a while. I'm guessing that the pipes are buried in a zone that does get colder than 56°F as the outside temperature drops below freezing, but these pipes are not in the zone where they reach 32°F.

Some people heat and cool their houses using this trick of constant ground temperature. Heat pumps and air conditioners that are installed in your house normally get their heat or dump the house's heat to the outside air. In the summer, this means you are pushing your house's heat to a 95° or 100°F heat "sink". They say that "heat flows downhill", but what it does is flows from a higher temperature to a lower temperature. They call something a heat sink, the same way you would call a big depression in the ground a sink, which is where water would flow - downhill. It's easier to make heat flow to a 56°F heat sink of the constant ground temperature rather than the 95° or 100°F outside air. The AC only has to chill the air down 15° or 20°, rather than around 60°, which means it takes much less energy and cost to cool your house. In the winter, using a heat pump, you extract heat from the outside air. Even though it doesn't seem possible, a heat pump can find heat in the air on a cold day and push it inside. The limit to this is somewhere around 40°F, when the heat pump can no longer perform this magic trick any more. If you can use the ground temperature, you have a year round 56°F to draw heat from. If you have a heat pump in an area that goes below 40°F, you have to also have electric or gas heat to take care of you when it gets really cold. The heat pump is more efficient than electric or gas heat, and uses less energy.

The man that replaced my condenser on my air conditioner a few years ago told me that he cut his heating and cooling bills down to less than 1/3 of what they had been when he installed a ground source heat exchanger on his house. I've wanted to do this ever since.

I was thinking about how Earth has this constant underground temperature, independent of how hot or cold the climate or temperature for that particular day is. The earth (soil, sand, clay and rock) must be a great insulator, like a blanket on the planet. I know that the center of the earth is molten and very hot, but the layer near the surface is pretty cool and uniform.

I wonder if there is a constant ground temperature on Mars? How deep is it? If that temperature is above freezing (after all, Mars' core is not thought to be molten anymore, so this ground temperature could be very cold, or it might be like ours).
If it is above freezing, I wonder if there is life in that layer?

We should test for life in the thermally stable layer here on earth to see how well it survives being away from sunlight and air. I know they've found bacteria growth in special areas underground, but my question is whether there is still a variety of life in the constant temperature region. If there is, it is likely life is below the surface on Mars, too. That's assuming it was ever established there in the first place, but it's an interesting question that I hope NASA or JPL are working on.

This begs the question "What keeps the underground life alive?" I've heard reports of bacteria that use chemical reactions to get their energy and of ones that live near hot spots like volcanic vents or natural nuclear reactors (they exist - they are slow and steady). There have been methane blooms on Mars lately, which could have come from some kind of bacteria colonies that live under the surface. The question is what balances the subsurface temperature on Mars? Is there still some heat in the center of the planet, sufficient to keep a layer in the liquid water range? We believe there isn't a molten core, as evidenced by the lack of a magnetic field, but that may not mean the ground temperature is much lower. Maybe if we more there, we'll set up camp underground.

Entitlement

In a side skirmish of the culture wars, I was doing some fact checking on www.factcheck.org and stumbled on the following page: http://www.factcheck.org/specialreports/our_disinformed_electorate.html

It's a piece entitled Our Disinformed Electorate and it talks about how much bad information is passed on to the public and what the effects are.

Much of the disinformation comes from political campaigns, which are not required by law to tell the truth. I saw that last gem as a headline and was too disheartened to actually read what law or reasoning allows political campaigns to lie unchecked by anything. Unchecked by anything but Factcheck.org, according to Factcheck.org. And they also lament the fact that not enough people use their services, and belief in bogus disproved information is rampant.

They mention that many people still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and Barack Obama is a Muslim. The article attributes much of the faulty beliefs to political leanings. It says, "We humans all have a basic disposition to embrace our side's arguments and reject or ignore those offered by an opponent."

This reminds me of quote that my wife often uses that was originally from the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own fact." My wife often states this when she see people spewing obviously wrong nonsense that is politically motivated to try to attack across party lines.

This has been pretty important throughout history right up to this day. I believe it was brought to a head under the Bush administration's War on Science. You go back to the people that thought that the Earth was flat, then the ones that thought that the Sun went around the Earth, then the people that thought that the earth was 6,000 years old, up to today, where a significant number of people don't believe in evolution. They are entitled to believe in God, they just don't get to tell high school students that evolution isn't true because they don't believe in it.

We live in a society that is prone to believe bullshit. How you can fix your problems, much less navigate in a world that you don't understand is beyond me. If this was a small fringe problem, I'd prescribe truthtelling and confrontation as an aggressive campaign to rectify the slide away from reality. It's just too widespread.

This week I travelled with a manager that proceeded to tell me (first announcing proudly that he got this from "Fox and Friends") that CO2 levels are going down and scientists are baffled. He was telling me that this means that all the global warming news is not true. He then proceeded to tell me that the Earth is constantly generating new crude oil, that it doesn't come from ancient decaying organic matter, and that it's a myth that we will ever run out of oil. Although I knew both of these stories were bullshit, I didn't argue with him. This guy is a business associate, in a position to negatively impact my income, so butting heads with him politically would not be a wise move. The sad thing is that he says he has an engineering degree (I don't know what kind).

When I got to a computer I searched for the Fox News reference for these stories and found them pretty quickly. A single search and about 20 seconds was all I needed to disprove either story. I found a NOAA chart of CO2 levels and saw that the levels do indeed follow a sine curve each year, oscillating up and down over a steadily rising average. Saying it went down and therefore the whole global warming theory is bogus is like saying the globe is warming or cooling based on the temperature of a single day in the year (something you hear all the time, I'm sure). This is like being on a boat in the ocean in heavy seas with 30' waves and believing that every time you ride up a wave, the entire ocean level is rising. The oil generation story was easy to find. Some Russian scientist put out a book where he claimed that Oxidation and Reduction reactions work in reverse deep in the Earth. This supposedly makes it possible for rocks to turn into oil, there's no further explanation of why this is a good thing for oil generation. Another scientist is quoted as saying that there's no way to prove or disprove what is going on deep in the Earth's crust, which sounds pretty generous to me. As far as the question as to whether or not crude oil is made from decomposed organic matter, the studies put that to rest decades ago. Oil reservoirs are found above mineral deposits called oil shale. Oil shale has fossils in it. Chemical analysis of the oil shale and the crude finds them to be identical. Crude oil is a fossil fuel. There is no evidence or proof of oil deposits that are not generated by organic matter.

The problem here is that there is a systematic program to cherry pick and disprove the parts of science that some people believe threaten their way of life. You can run, but you can't hide from the truth.