Monthly Archives: May 2013

View 776 Thursday, May 30, 2013

I’ve had a hectic week, some good – Monday was good – and some not so, which I suppose is to be expected, so I’m catching up again. The news has been a bit discouraging. I was going to write a couple of short essays today, but the day was eaten by locusts. Shopping takes longer than it used to. Everything takes longer. Suddenly it was dinner time, and then time for the LASFS meeting, and I was planning on doing something tonight but we stayed and talked about the loss of Jack Vance.

Jack Vance, RIP. I never knew him well, but he was a close friend of Poul Anderson. Jack had a story telling knack that many envied. He also had a live imagination. This resulted in some wonderful tales – the Demon Princes series was wonderful – and some sequences that appealed to some and turned off others. Jack was never a big best seller but he was a journeyman artist story teller who make a good living at this racket, and told some great stories.

But it’s late and I’m due for bed. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow.

View 775 Friday, May 24, 2013

If you wonder why Congress is losing approval with the people, this may be of use: 

http://www.youtube.com/embed/svGDZOW-brA?rel=0  It is worth your time.

A cheer for President Obama

In a major speech at the National Defense University, President Obama announced that it it time for an end to the war on terror. In pursuit of that he has a new policy on drone strikes, with strict procedures to be followed before anyone can be put on a proscription list and killed by a Hellfire missile (along with anyone else unfortunate enough to be near the proscribed person) anywhere in the world. And he says that he intends to close the internment camp – prison? – at Guantanamo.

That’s worth a cheer. I have never been a great fan of a war without identifiable enemies which justifies proscription lists, nor of overseas internment camps to which people may be sent for the duration of a war which has no visible means of being concluded. A detainment camp for prisoners of war, subject to the rules of the Geneva Convention, should be sufficient: and yes, I understand that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo are uncooperative to say the least, and require extraordinary means of confinement including separation from other prisoners. I understand the impossibility of running such an establishment when hundreds of judicial officers can assert authority over them and issue writs of habeas corpus.

The War Powers of the President are great, and should be; but wars ought to have a defined enemy, and some means of coming to an end.

This will not all be settled by fiat. There will be debate, as there should be. This is not the first time that the United States has been challenged by organized clandestine enemies. It is time to find ways of dealing with this.

Perpetual war is not in my judgment the best way to do that. It is time and high time to have a national debate on just what measures the United States should take in defense against an implacable enemy dedicated to acts of terror.

Regarding Cold Fusion:

E-Cat report

I too have been following Andrea Rossi since he first surfaced. I find the vitriol used against LENR and him pathological, from the days of Robert Park and Huizenga, through the Patent Office making it virtually impossible to obtain patents in anything related to cold fusion, to the current ad hominems.

Andrea Rossi sold his EON business for about a million Euros (a matter of public record) and could have retired. It is ludicrous to suggest that he has spent that money and several years working 14 – 16 hour days to build an elaborate fraud.

The recent two 100 hour tests funded by the Swedish R&D Organization ELFORSK (equivalent to our EPRI) run by seven professors from various universities, proves beyond reasonable doubt that LENR is real and Rossi’s E-Cat works.

Doubt remains about how controllable the E-Cat is and the actual COP of a commercial unit. They are already committed to a six month trial starting this Summer.

The critics start with the idea that LENR is impossible and jump at any detail that might confirm their belief. The earlier demonstrations left plenty of room for the skeptics to suggest ways for fraud, but if the E-Cat really does work, this means that Rossi’s claims were actually true.

As of a couple of days ago DOE doesn’t believe LENR is real and refused to take Defkalion up on their offer to test the Hyperion (a kissing cousin to Rossi’s E-Cat) in Greece last year.

That DOE supports the $25 billion ITER hot fusion Tokamak is not entirely coincidental.

LENR is indeed real. I don’t think anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation of how it works. Possibly Rossi knows as he knows what the fuel is and can analyze the ash.

There are hundreds of peer reviewed papers on the subject at http://lenr-canr.org Interesting times ahead

Adrian Ashfield

What I would like to see is a picture of a plant delivering a megawatt of power with some indication of how that was measured and what the power was being used for. Such things need no peer reviews although if reporters are not allowed to look behind the curtains some might be suspicious. I have seen a dozen “cold fusion” plants purporting to show as much as a hundred watts of output, but I was never allowed to examine where all the wires going into the system led to (and I suspect that one eventually ended in a wall socket), but those were all very low power output systems. It would be impossible to fake a megawatt (although finding a load to measure that much power output might be difficult). I’d be glad of an account of “How I charged my Volt on an LENR.”

There is no need for vitriol. A power plant that delivers a megawatt of power is not small, and showing that it can deliver that output, while not simple, isn’t all that difficult either; and since a megawatt is a lot of power, it would be very difficult to conceal some hidden input. If a small device can output a megawatt of electrical power, it should be headline news in any country in the world. I note that Forbes does not claim to have seen such a demonstration. I would be glad to be shown that I am in error on this. Surely it can’t be hard to show a megawatt of power?

As to the peer reviewed papers, the one by DIA appears to be a justification of continued Navy and other US agency investments in continued experimentation of the Fleischmann and Pons research, and an estimate that other governments are making similar small investments. It does not mention any large scale results, but does state that “energy anomalies” have taken place. I don’t doubt the energy anomalies. I have not seen any claim to have witnessed a megawatt.

I MW E-Cat plant real

Further to my recent comment on this form, I then read that you doubted the existence of the 1 MW plant.

Here is a picture of the 1 MW plant being loaded for shipment to the US last month.

http://s20.postimg.org/fc0n0hat5/004.jpg

Here is a picture of the Hot Cat under test http://ecat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Hot-Cat-closeup.jpg

Adrian Ashfield

My apologies but neither of those pictures shows me anything that convinces me that the system would deliver a megawatt or even light a hundred watt lightbulb. Now if the system ready for delivery were to be turned on and light up McCormick Field or Dodger Stadium I would be enormously impressed; and I suspect that such a demonstration could be arranged and would probably sell out. Perhaps the plant in the picture could be used? It can’t be that expensive to set it up just outside the stadium.

The existence of a system of the size in the picture capable of delivering a megawatt of power would start a fourth industrial revolution, as well as end the importance of the Middle East. No place on Earth need be without electrical power, apparently without need for large turbines and big power grids. Obviously a new source of energy would have an enormous impact on the war on terror.

The Kern County sheriff’s department, whose officers beat a partly drunk man until he died, has ruled that the man died of heart failure and high blood pressure. This seems a bit like saying that a man thrown off a building died of the fall. It seems extremely unlikely that the man would have died of failure had he not been bitten by police dogs and beaten by a number of young men with clubs. He was being beaten because he was trying to defend himself from the dog. A casual observer would say that the deputies beat him to death. He was certainly screaming for help as he lay with bound feet while being assaulted. He died soon after.

In England a British soldier was killed by attack with a cleaver. There is no contention that the assault was not intended to result in death. The President of the United States has so far refused this to call an act of terrorism. One presumes that the actual cause of death was exsanguination.

Neither of these is officially to be called an act of terror.

A brilliant idea

Re the London terrorists: We can put them thru the new food replicator and turn them into bacon. Then feed them to the pigs.

My fantasy on hearing of the attack was to picture a wigged judge putting on the black cap and sentencing them to be taken to Woolwich Barracks and there delivered into the custody of the Sergeant Major of Her Majesty’s Fusiliers, who need make no future account of his disposal.  Do they have the equivalent of Mons Meg in an English fortress?  I am pretty sure the Scots would loan her to the Fusiliers…

View 775 Thursday, May 23, 2013

Talk continues on carbon taxes, and there are political claims that Oklahoma deserved destruction since it produces oil and contributes to global warming and global warming causes extreme weather. Some of the rhetoric is frantic: we cannot continue spewing out CO2 into the atmosphere. We summed up what we know for sure a couple of days ago: CO2 levels in 1800 were about 280 ppm. In 1900 they were about 300 parts per million. Current levels are about 400. The error rates are in the order of 10% for the earliest estimates, and about 3% now.

This is a pretty dramatic rise in CO2. Up to now there is little evidence that the higher levels have caused harm, and considerable evidence that they have aided plant growth. If the growth rate slowed to a stop time would erase much of the growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration from the last century. While there may be benefits to the higher CO2 levels, I think few would regret a halt in their growth.

The problem with that is energy: there can’t be any economic growth without increases in the availability of energy, and the cost of energy is a very large part of the cost of economic growth. For the most part, any increase in low cost energy availability means an increase in production of atmospheric CO2.

All of this should be obvious although many of the AGW True Believers seem to be ignoring it.

There is, of course, an economical energy source that produces no CO2 whatever. The Believers will instantly say “Green Energy!” and their usual example is ground based solar energy. It’s true enough that it’s “green” in the sense that it doesn’t produce CO2 while it is producing electricity, although one could quibble over the CO2 produced in the production of solar panels. The problem is that except in special cases ground based solar is not an economical way of producing energy for economic growth. Indeed, most of the reason for its demand is tied to government subsidies. Ground based solar suffers from physical limitations: the Sun doesn’t shine at night, not much energy gets to the ground during bad weather, and the solar constant limits the maximum amount of power you can get per square meter even at noon on a clear day. There are inherent limits on electrical energy storage. Again no surprises.

A much “Greener” energy source is nuclear power. We keep hoping for lost cost high efficiency nuclear fusion power, but for the last forty years the estimate of the time needed to produce economically useful fusion power given major capital investment and a priority override to regulatory red tape has been thirty years. That is, we needed thirty years to get fusion-originated power into our houses back in 1970 (and I wrote stories based on that assumption). Came 1980 and we still needed thirty years to get there. And now in 2013 the last time I checked with the experts, the estimate is that we can do it with current science in about thirty years.

On the other hand we have plenty of experience with fusion based nuclear power. A recent Wall Street Journal article by environmentalists summarizes what’s known.

Going Green? Then Go Nuclear

We’re environmentalists, but pretending that solar power is ready for prime time is delusional.

By TED NORDHAUS And MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Over the last several decades, the cost of electricity from solar panels has declined dramatically, while the cost of building new nuclear plants has risen steadily. This has reaffirmed the long-standing view of many environmentalists that it will be cheaper and easier to reduce global warming emissions through solar electricity than with new nuclear plants. But while continuing price declines might someday make solar cheaper than nuclear, it’s not true today. Yet the mythmaking persists.

. . .

The cost of building and operating the Finnish nuclear plant over the next 20 years will be $15 billion. Over that time period, the plant will generate 225 terawatt-hours (twh) of electricity at a cost of 7 cents per kilowatt hour.

Since 2000, Germany has heavily subsidized electricity production from solar panels—offering long-term contracts to producers to purchase electricity at prices substantially above wholesale rates. The resulting solar installations are expected to generate 400 twh electricity over the 20 years that the panels will receive the subsidy, at a total cost to German ratepayers of $130 billion, or 32 cents per kwh.

In short, solar electricity in Germany will cost almost five times more for every kilowatt hour of electricity it provides than Finland’s new nuclear plant.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323716304578482663491426312.html

This is pretty much in line with what every other honest analyst comes up with. Nuclear is cheap compared to most other forms of energy generation. Its only real competition is from oil and coal.

If we want to continue economic growth while reducing the amounts of CO2 blown into the atmosphere, nuclear power is the way to go – at least until we get serious about space solar power satellites. I know, I know – I said all this in A Step Farther Out more than thirty years ago. It was true then and it remains true today. But so far as I can see, those who promise hope and change do so by subsidizing ground based solar, and hate boths pace and nuclear fission. And here we are.

Regarding the cold fusion report, I’m still waiting for input from some of our more expert readers, and I admit I have not been following this particular story very closely. We do have this:

Regarding Rossi and his E-Cat…

This report, taken in isolation, sounds impressive. But Rossi’s history and behavior are considerably less than impressive. He has a long criminal history in Italy, and has been caught in numerous lies about his current activities. Both the University of Bologna (on two separate occasions) and National Instruments have had to issue statements denying Rossi’s claims of a working relationship with them. His primary "expert" (Domenico Fioravanti) is a supposed retired NATO Colonel who seems not to have existed until Rossi presented him to the public (in 18 months, no one has been able to find any signs that such a person actually exists).

Rossi claims to have sold somewhere between 2 and 14 1-Megawatt devices, but they were all sold to "secret" customers. He has been selling "franchises" and claiming to have a factory in Florida to mass-produce the devices. But, when the Florida Bureau of Radiation Control investigated his public claims, he denied doing any manufacturing or selling in the United States.

I’ve been watching Rossi’s activities for over 2 years now, and it certainly seems to me that he is running an investment scam. I would love for his invention to be true, but if it is, then it will be the most extreme example of an "eccentric" inventor the world has ever seen. However, his behavior fits right in with several established con men (starting with John Worrell Keely, in the 1880s).

J

Which leaves unexplained the enthusiasm that Forbes has for the story; and I do not mean more than I say in that statement. I truly don’t know. I have seen no real explication of the fusion theory involved, and I have certainly seen no demonstration of a system that produces more energy than it consumes, or even a device whose output is a megawatt. A one-megawatt electrical device would not be small, and the cables to carry a megawatt of electric power would be difficult to hide. One would think that if several of them exist, it would not be that hard to get one of them to do a public demonstration.

As Descartes said (and Sagan made famous), extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In the case of a cold fusion plant the claim is more than extraordinary: it’s a civilization changer. The upside of it being true is enormous; but it does need at least one existence identification.

View 776 Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Could this be the beginning of a new era?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-independent-testing-of-rossis-e-cat-cold-fusion-device-maybe-the-world-will-change-after-all/

It purports to be an announcement of independent verification of low temperature fusion, with not merely measureable but commercially useful energy output.  I know little about any of this.

Mike Flynn sends this:

ADHD

You may find this interesting:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/05/20/why-american-kids-have-adhd-and-french-kids-dont/

MikeF

The thesis is that the symptoms of ADHD are real but not due to biological factors: ADHD can be “cured” by non-medical means. Thirty years and more ago a major pediatrician referred cases to me during the brief period in which I toyed with the idea of doing psychological consulting. The cases were bright boys who were not doing well in school. I was able to help them, but it was a lot of work and I had to charge a lot for doing it, and I discovered I’d rather write; I’d never set out to be any kind of practicing psychologist.

What I found in my few cases was that you can teach kids to control themselves.  I was pretty sure of that since I had to learn it myself: in my case the incentive was teachers with the legal power of corporal punishment.  Since my pediatrician partner did not want to use drugs, and I legally couldn’t prescribe anything, it was convince the kids their lives would be better if they developed better habits, or admit defeat.  As I said, hard work, too hard for me: I discovered that I am not going to save the world one boy at a time.  But I did learn, as I had thought, that the techniques I had used to teach myself back when I was in grade school can be taught to bright boys, but it takes time and patience.

That doesn’t mean that there are not cases of ADHD that require drugs; it does mean that neither I nor my pediatrician referral source found any.

The author of the Forbes article tends to blame the parents. I’d prefer to blame the culture. But it is interesting that as the influence of the DSM had grown, so have the number of cases of ADHD.

Thirty years ago a national commission on education concluded that “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.”  We still have the same system of education, only now in Spades with Big Casino. It is not getting better, and the teachers unions are powerful enough to continue their war against the children of these United States of America.  For more http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/videos/?show=425168643

Basically we have surrendered. Those who can find niches of decent education in this vast wasteland. But we don’t take it seriously any more. We have given up.

The schools don’t even pretend to teach all the kids to read now.  They just have good reasons for why they didn’t learn.  And an increasing number can’t read but are pronounced literate because the can read at grade level, which means that they can read controlled vocabulary books. And the costs of this rotten system continue to rise, and the effects of bad grade schools reach up into the increasingly expensive universities, which have to try in four years to remedy twelve years of awful education.

For those who wonder if their children can read, try nonsense words on them. If your child in second grade or above cannot read monopolyastrid and conviducation, that child can’t read.  By read I mean look at the word and figure out how it is pronounced. And if your teacher tells you that isn’t what reading is, then you have a problem you will never solve by any kind of action inside the school system. Get a good reading program. The best one I know is my wife’s rather hokey old DOS program which clunkily works on any version of Windows. About seventy lessons of half an hour a lesson will do the job. After that it’s a matter of finding good and interesting books that kids like. I’ve written a few. There are a lot of them out there. But first they have to be comfortable at reading. Seventy lessons will do it, and it will last the rest of their lives. You don’t have to wait until second grade. English upper and upper middle class pupils were taught to read at age four by nannies, and that worked for a hundred years. English four year old protoplasm is no better than your kids’.

I still haven’t given up on meaningful school reform and here and there it happens, but by and large the battle is lost. The teaching colleges no longer teach their student teachers that kids can and should be expected to learn to read English before the end of first grade; and since they have never been taught to expect that result, they seldom get it. Reading instruction in college is mostly diagnosis of problems, i.e. learning good excuses for why you didn’t teach the child to read.  And the beat goes on.