View 770 Thursday, April 18, 2013

This is a fraction of a kiloton’s worth of fertilizer explosion smoke – before connecting any dots recall that ammonia and ammonium nitrate plants , being on the wrong side of the enthalpy of formation tracks, blow up with monotonous regularity- like the one in Toulose that went off just after 9-11

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

That was my first thought, particularly after I heard that the fire department had been called in earlier in the day. Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. I bet there were a lot of people smoking marijuana just before the Marathon Bombing, and several accidents involving VW automobiles, and someone scratched his head just at the moment of the blast and someone involved in the Waco Massacre caught the flu, and…

I’ve been fooling around with small computers since before the S-100 buss days, since before CP/M and DOS, and I still don’t understand them. I can generally make them work, but that’s a different story.

A few minutes ago I woke up Swan, a very high end Windows 8 machine, and spent the customary time in confusion trying to find the control panel. I also found that BING Travel seems to have installed itself as a kind of virus – I never asked for it – and does not seem to have any kind of off switch. I tried to close the program – it gives some neat travel pictures, but I’m not going to Petra or Turkey or anywhere else just now but when it is running I can’t find the desktop – so I first tried to search for whatever was driving it and was told there was no such app. I finally used control alt delete to bring up task master and used that to close the application. After which I spent the customary time in confusion trying to find the control panel again – the easiest way is to use the Windows key to bring up that screen and just type control which energizes search and I can now leave the keyboard to mouse over the magically appeared control panel icon, poke that, scroll down and find Windows Update, and invoke that.

I remember way back in the early days there was some controversy over whether people preferred Windows and punching icons, or a command access screen where you typed in commands with or without parameters;. Windows 8 seems to have decided to make you use both for reasons not clear to me.

Having done that I found that I had two uninstalled updates. Attempts to let them install failed because I was not connected to the Internet. Actually it didn’t tell me that – I had to punch an error explanation request to get that information. And sure enough I was not connected to the Internet although the cable was connected. The lights weren’t blinking on the switch. I pulled the cable out from that and plugged it into another port on the switch. Still no lights. So I took one of the other cables to the switch and plugged that into the port I’d taken Swan’s connection out of, and it blinked cheerfully away. So go back and pull the cable out of Swan. Put it back in. Put the other end into the port it usually rests in on the switch. Success.

Now go back and install my updates. Trundle, then request for reset. Let it reset. Now I need to go back and see if closing that Bing Travel “feature” takes me off the internet. I’ll do that and go down to dinner.

The story continues later this evening…

Back after LASFS. All is well. Closing the Travel app does not get me off the Internet. Swan is working as sh should. Exactly what happened with that I will never know.  I am still frustrated by the Bing stuff which seems to be active without showing up as closable applications.  It’s not using much CPU or memory or bandwidth, and I suppose it does no harm, but I am old school: I like to know what use my computer is making of its resources, and I don’t want it doing things I haven’t at some point asked for or at least consented to.  I suppose that’s disosaurish.

Swan and Windows 8 work wonderfully when doing some things, and at the same time make some of the simplest things so complex I don’t like them. Just finding the desktop can be a pain. I am contemplating scrubbing Windows 8 and replacing it with Windows 7, but I get the haunting feeling that there’s something about Windows 8 I ought to know, and it keeps eluding me.  I continue to collect stories.

I do know that back when I was contemplating changing all Chaos Manor operations to Apple from Windows Vista, only to be interrupted by Windows 7 which seemed preferable, had it been 8 I probably would be all Apple all the time now. Peter’[s observation that with Apple everything is either very simple or impossible remains a fair summary of Apple, provided that you add that if you’re willing to become a UNIX guru you can do very difficult things with Apple. It’s a matter of how much time you want to invest in an operating system.  I gather that Windows 8 wants to move in that direction, but has the problem that a lot of old Users like me remember one way of doing things, and Microsoft wants to wean us away from all that complexity and induce us to accept the Windows 8 default way of working.  Sometimes I like that notion. Usually that’s when I’m thinking about it, not trying it. 

The radio news says there’s still unusual police activity around Boston and MIT and Revere. No one has yet come forth to claim credit for the Marathon bombing, and no suspects in custody yet.

The West, Texas explosion looks more and more like it was just what it seemed to be, fire in a fertilizer plant, dangerous and catastrophic but something to learn operations safety from, not a call to arms.

And just as it’s bed time there are bulletins form Watertown, and the Boston Globe is now reporting a suspect in custody.  No details available. Hits of mysterious explosions and “heavy police activity” in Watertown.  I am unlikely to hear anything before the news media do, and I have never been a breaking news reporter. I suppose I mention such things to show I am still sort of in touch with the world.  And every now and then I do get a few words from people closer to it all than me and who still remember.

And it’s time for bed. For some reason I don’t see at my web site what I can download from my web site.  When I post an updated version I don’t see the updates.  I haven’t time to figure all that out.  It just happened again. I post this, but this section doesn’t appear. What I see ends with the previous section and the words not trying it.  This seems to be some glitch in the system, but I haven’t time to figure out what it is.  I seem impelled to keep doing silly things so you don’t have to…

I fixed it and I have kept copies of the oddly defective posts, but I don’t understand. I’ll see if I can figure it out.  The “cure” was to keep adding stuff like the crazy picture and the little atom and keep publishing, then move text around the pictures and publish again, and eventually it all came our right. Ninety percent of computer genius is keep trying, and no that’s a not a definition of insanity when you’re dealing with these little beasts. They respond to cues you don’t understand. That I suspect is the origin of a number of religious rituals.

View 770 Wednesday, April 17, 2013

As usual the breaking news is so contradictory as to be worthless. They have or have not arrested a suspect who may or may not be in custody, perhaps by the US Marshals but it might be someone else. Doubtless the authorities will get it sorted out. At least we can certainly hope so. The last official news is that no arrest has been made, and there seems to be no follow up to the story that a suspect placing a black bag on the scene was identified from a department store video.

Meanwhile here is some information on bomb making.

Dr. Pournelle:

I note that Russell Seitz has changed his estimation from TATP to smokeless powder. I don’t doubt it, it is lots easier to buy a can or keg of Unique than to run a synthesis with strong acid and oxidizer. But I have not seen it discussed elsewhere except for fears that it will be applied to demonize gun owners and hobbyist reloaders.

The advantage of TATP to the terrorist is that it is not a nitrate compound, which is the basis for instrumental explosive detection and bomb dog training. But you don’t have to go through a sniffer to watch the Boston Marathon, as you discussed.

Anyhow, as a handloader of some experience and having worked on a study related to bomb making, I will provide some details.

Modern smokeless powder is predominantly nitrocellulose. Call it guncotton, although a lot is made from cheaper wood pulp. Some are straight nitrocellulose with minor additives, some are "double base" with appreciable nitroglycerine content. I have a chart of 300 brands and grades of smokeless powder. I don’t know just how many of them would make a serviceable bomb, but it would be a lot. The video I saw was of a pipe bomb filled with one called Blue Dot, suitable for heavy shotgun loads as for goose hunting. It pretty thoroughly demolished an automobile.

Cordite is a specific chemical formulation and physical configuration of double base smokeless powder. The formulation, if not the rope-like shape, has been used in everything from pistol and rifle ammunition to solid fuel rockets to demolition charges. Obsolete now.

Smokeless powder is a propellant, not an explosive. Ignite it in the open and it just burns briskly; deflagrates.

The galvanized steel of the pipe bomber and the pressure cooker of the Boston Bomber are not primarily to generate fragmentation, they are to let pressure build up to a destructive level and then rupture, releasing it in a blast which appears an explosion.

I am not qualified to speak on bomb deployment, and all I can say about the social and government developments is that I fear they will not be good for the American lifestyle.

Regards,

Jim Watson

Thank you. I have not paid much heed to handloading equipment and supplies since I was an editor of SURVIVE magazine and did my monthly column on survival activities and essentials. I doubt it has changed much. In those days we could rationally discuss such matters as stockpiling supplies for reloading ammunition: safe storage and handling, amounts, shelf life, and such, but even then one wanted to take care given the caricatures of survival groups that were popular with the media.

No one has taken credit for the Boston Marathon bombing. Note that delays of days and even weeks between an event of this kind and some organization coming forward to take credit for it are not unusual.

Meanwhile, physics remains confused. Not only is our theory not unified — http://www.rockol.it/testo-3784077/Jordin-Kare-Unified-Field-Theory — but some well established theories contradict each other. Stephen Hawking famously relented on his view that black holes destroy information. He even paid off a bet with Cal Tech’s John Preskill with a copy of a baseball encyclopedia – it’s heavy and it takes work to get information out of it. (Note that Kip Thorne, also of Cal Tech, who supported Hawking’s side in the bet has refused to concede.)

Dark energy may comprise 70% of the mattergy in the universe, or it may not, and dark matter may take up 20% more, and antimatter half of what’s left, leaving us “normal matter” beings a distinct minority. The universe may not be the same depending on which direction we look in. And so forth. The trend is toward increased complexity, with elusive tracks of even more elusive new particles leading to theories of even more new particles that may or may not leave tracks in the normal matter – which is, by definition, all that we can observe. A long time ago Larry Niven, Bob Forward, and I heard Stephen Hawking tell an invited Cal Tech audience that Einstein was wrong – not only does God throw dice, but sometimes He throws them where they cannot be seen even though the result is important. Hawking was only half joking.

Dr. Pournelle,

Roger Penrose says the one thing we know about Dark Energy is that it is not energy. By E=mc2 energy should have mass and slow the expansion of the Big Bang. The more Dark Matter there is the more of a discrepancy there is.

I just keep remembering that Fred Hoyle and the Steady-State folks predicted an acceleration pushing Galaxies away from each other. A negative gravity if you will.

The idea was that virtual particles arising out of the quantum froth or vanishing back into it would have a gravitational effect. In places were there is much matter there would be more vanishings than appearances. Particles cannot vanish where they do not exist When a particle vanished there would be an effect we call gravity. . And in places were there are no particles they could only appear with an effect of negative gravity. The empty cells between super-clusters would be an ideal place for such a phenomenon. Negative Gravity would seem a candidate for Dark Energy.

This would seem silly moonshine to me. But:

Fred Hoyle and the Steady-State people were bright and accomplished.

Between Inflation, Dark Energy, and large scale structure the Big Bang is looking creaky.

A prediction with an unexpected suggestion of verification after forty or fifty years arrests my intention.

I know ‘Sir Fred is off his rocker." And I am not too up on defunct physical theories from before my birth. But there is the proposed explanation for both Dark Energy and gravity. And a reinterpretation of the 2.7K background may be easier the the ediface it has created.

DAB

I have not conversed with Sir Fred in a decade, but the last time I did he was unrepentant. So far as I know he died believing in some form of ether, and in rejecting much of what is considered standard physics; and in a fairly extreme form of panspermia, in which an intelligent race sent evolutionarily active probes to plants which might have life. As I have said before, he believed in a form of intelligent design, but the Designer would not have been familiar to religious believers in Design. And he rejected the Big Bang. It is not considered good form to reject the Big Bang, hence Adrian Berry’s remark that Sir Fred is off his head, but apparently there are others questioning the short “inflation” period of warp 10,000 movement required to get from a tiny point to something that could start evolving as the universe.

Dark matter, dark energy and Size of Universe

Doctor Pournelle, you wrote:

This is a very half baked idea, a cocktail party theory on the order of my view of the influence of dogs on the evolution of human intelligence, but the more I keep turning it over and over the more I wonder. Dark matter would be thin between the galaxies. And I think I’d rather believe in dark matter than dark energy.

My understanding, via some shows on the Science Channel, is that dark matter works as a gravity brake on the galaxies and that dark energy works as an accelerator and that currently it is believed that there is more of the accelerator than the brake. Would your idea of the speed of light going through thinner patches of either DM or DE, and thus changing the constant for the speed of light in thinner and thicker patches, also mean that the size of the universe is smaller than currently believed? If the speed with which light crosses local cluster space, inter-cluster space and inter-supercluster space changes would that not mean that we are wrong with the Doppler values as currently assigned for distances to the most distant reaches we can see? Might this not also change the perceived age of the universe? To borrow an old tabloid phrase, "Enquiring minds want to know!"

David Crowley

I am trying to make something consistent out of my cocktail party theory – which is loosely based on Petr Beckmann’s alternative view of the meaning of the Michelson Morley experiment – but that may take a while. I keep trying to focus. For a reasonable presentation of the alternative to Einstein theory see Tom Bethell’s account. http://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Einstein-Relativity-Tom-Bethell/dp/0971484597 There apparently are ways to explain the experimental evidence without giving up ether or imposing an absolute velocity of light without regard to the motion of the observer. Whether doing that will cover some of the problems for which dark matter and dark energy were invented is nothing like clear (and certainly not accepted by the vast majority of physicists), but here and there a few dissenters, appalled by the increasing complexities, stop tearing their hair and go back to fundamentals – the observed evidence from which both general and special relativity were derived. It’s still pretty well at the cocktail party theory stage,

And now it’s time to go clean up the back yard from wind displacements…

* * *

New Scientist for April 6, 2013 has an article called “Ring of Fire” speculating about the collision of grand theories. Is a Black Hole surrounded by a ring of fire? If not, why not?

Everything is based on theories with very little experimental evidence, and there seems to be no rush to do crucial experiments regarding relativity vs., ether and other such fundamentals. Of course as Bob Bussard used to say, the easy stuff has already been done. But as far as I can see we are no closer to an understanding of fundamentals than we were when Richard Feynman used to say that we would not understand gravity in our lifetimes, but he hoped that one day someone would. I gather that he said that fairly often; certainly he did so at a lunch with me. John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky. Marvin and I are still around, but I don’t think we’re much closer to understanding gravity than we were then. It still looks like spooky action at a distance. And reading Feynman’s QED doesn’t really help a bit: as it shows. we know how to make spooky things happen, and we have no idea of why they work.

If you don’t follow the rapid developments in paleontology you might have missed the fact that the raptors in Jurassic Park 1 were all wrong: current evidence says they had feathers. Indeed, even Tyrannosaurus Rex may have had a good coat of feathers. Alas, the director of Jurassic Park 4 has recently signaled NO FEATHERS #JP4.  CGI is capable of putting feathers on the dinosaurs, but apparently the human programmers aren’t ready for such a change.

A large fertilizer plant just north of Waco, Texas has exploded. It had earlier reported a fire and fire fighters were in the plant when it blew up.

View 770 Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Last night late before bed I put up a scrambled notion about dark matter and gravity and got some of it backwards as one does when in a hurry. I’ve fixed it, and thanks to the readers who pointed it out. I have found in recent months that it takes a while to focus on a new subject. I can think about what I’m focused on, but it takes a while to get that focus: if I quickly think about something I may know quite well, and I don’t take time to focus in, so to speak, I am capable of making some pretty silly errors. I suppose it’s a price of being able to function despite age, and it’s a pretty low one compared to some that people are paying.

We have a lot of mail about the Boston Marathon bombing. I’ve selected some.

Marathon Bombs

The ghost white smoke speaks for itself. With nary a tract of carbon black in the air, these were not oxygen deficient explosives, military or otherwise The third IED , which failed to detonate, was reportedly smoking when a water cannon disrupted it .

My bet is triacetone peroxide, freshly made and perhaps still damp- and used in miserly quantities- the stained glass is still in the windows of the Raquet & Tennis Club on Boylston Street.

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

I’ve known Russell for about fifty years now, and if I had to bet without any other input I’d bet with Russell on something like this. This stuff has been around at least since The Anarchist Cookbook, and in one false flag edition it was featured with cookbook instructions on making it from easily available starting materials; interestingly the instructions omitted some needed precautions. The stuff is notoriously unstable if precautions are not taken (so is any really high concentration peroxide, which can but should not be used as a monopropellant rocket fuel.) Triacetone peroxide is known to have been used by a number of terrorist groups including al Queda, which published an article on making bombs using pressure cookers in the English language on-line magazine Inspire. Peroxide based bombs were also used in some Weather Underground bombs in the 1960’s.

I note that some of the simpler cook book recipes for triacetone peroxide have been taken down from the Web this morning.

As I was posting this I thought about an implication of the glass remaining at the Raquet Club. That might be thought of as indicating a desire to limit the damage; but then one remembers the ball bearings, indicating a desire for maximum human casualties. The lesser quantities of explosive must be due to other limitations.

1545 PDT: Russell has just called to tell me it appears that the explosive was smokeless powder. His call came during my afternoon nap, so I didn’t focus in fast enough to think to ask which smokeless powder. The term smokeless powder is an old military history term to designate ammunition that was not black powder. In general it meant something made from nitrocellulose or guncotton. It is a generic term in the US; in Britain they tend to say Cordite. I have no notion of which form of ‘smokeless powder” these bombs were made from, but it’s not likely to have been home made.

Digging about a bit I find that instructions for making guncotton still abound on the net. Stage magicians used to make it all the time for illusion effects since it burns extremely fast and in small quantities unconfined is not explosive. Obtaining nitric and sulfuric acids is not so easy now, and I don’t suppose many performers make their own, but I can recall knowing a couple of guys who made their own for their acts.

1630:

An addenum- I failed to follow the white smoke trail to its most mundane extreme- smokeless powder . One Mass Genreral surgeon who extracted shrapnel from the victims report heavy gauge aluminum fragments , clipped nails, and small metal spheres, and thinks the IED’s may have been oversized grenades based on pressure cookers packed with shrapnel and smokeless powder.

Russell

The Boston Bombing

Dear Jerry:

You said "no one saw it coming" . I have to respectfully disagree. The security people saw it coming. They always see it coming since they are the first line of defense against terrorism. The Boston Marathon is a "soft" target. No matter how many people you have standing guard you can’t have absolute, perfect security. I suspect that a much greater tragedy was prevented because that rental truck didn’t get through the lines and that one individual did not get into a restricted area. A large part of my consulting practice before I gave it up to write fiction and drama full time was doing security surveys and threat assessments. Terrorism was always an issue near the top of the priority list. It was not until after 9/11 that civilians took it seriously. No one outside the Security Industry paid much attention until then. But there is no such thing as absolute perfect security. That’s a fantasy.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

As I said yesterday, most of the security professionals saw something coming, but the authorities didn’t. And eternal vigilance has always been the price of liberty. That includes citizen awareness, not just turning it over to professionals. Machiavelli told us what that generally costs a republic.

Hi Jerry,

Charles Pierce, a sports columnist for Grantland (an ESPN page) wrote a paragraph about the likely impact of yesterday’s attack that I thought you might find interesting as a cultural waypoint on our journey as a free people.

–Mike

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9176985/boston-marathon-explosion

The Marathon was the old, drunk uncle of Boston sports, the last of the true festival events. Every other one of our major sporting rodeos is locked down, and tightened up, and Fail-Safed until the Super Bowl now is little more than NORAD with bad rock music and offensive tackles. You can’t do that to the Marathon. There was no way to do it. There was no way to lock down, or tighten up, or Fail-Safe into Security Theater a race that covers 26.2 miles, a race that travels from town to town, a race that travels past people’s houses. There was no way to garrison the Boston Marathon. Now there will be. Someone will find a way to do it. And I do not know what the race will be now. I literally haven’t the vaguest clue.

Interesting. I am not at all sure how one can make a Marathon race safe. There are risks in life. Not all can be eliminated. And of course some risk factors simply cannot officially be taken into account.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. There was a time when that was taught in the public schools.  I think it no longer is. There may be a reason for that.

Speculation about who placed the Boston Marathon bombs continues. ranging from one or another derivative of al Qaeda to speculations about “militia’s”. The only militia people I know would rather have been persuaded to do some amateur patrolling with the objective of preventing the placement of a bomb than to take any chance of killing citizens particularly women and children, but I don’t travel in those circles any longer. I am reminded that this might have been an anniversary of the Waco Massacre, but that seems unlikely since the siege began in February and ended on April 19. If anyone was “sending a message” it was a fairly obscure one, with no one eager to take credit for it. The use of pressure cookers as containers for the bombs was shown in an al Qaeda video, but al Qaeda hardly has a monopoly on the practice. The bombs were designed for maximum anti-personnel damage rather than property damage, but most such devices are.

The local shock jock talk show is encouraging callers to speculate on who would have done this, and trying to draw inferences from obscure observations which may or may not be true. It is apparently still unsettled whether an unexploded bomb was found and recovered; indeed it isn’t clear what the detonating mechanism was. Cell phone, garage door opener, any number of remote control toy controllers, as well as various timing devices would have done the trick. Every tinkerer’s junk drawer contains stuff that would work.

Speculations tend toward the bizarre, but then shock jock’s choose the bizarre callers. I haven’t yet heard that this was the work of Old Tories trying to get revenge for the Battle of Bunker Hill, but I haven’t been listening very closely.

Niven, Pournelle and Benford on Star Ship Sofa next Sunday morning.

http://www.starshipsofa.com/  When I agreed to do this I didn’t realize it would be at 0900 on a Sunday morning.