When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray
It’s an interesting article, but I have to think that they spent WAY more time on the headline than they did on a story about Moray Eels hunting on land.
Category: Science
Yes, Ping Pong Balls are Hazardous Cargo
Don’t try this at home. Seriously!
I don’t know if you’ve ever lit a ping pong ball on fire, but it’s a rather exciting thing. (I have done so)
They are made from celluloid, the highly flammable material that movie film was once made of, and lighting even one ball can sate the little pyromaniac in many of us.
A truck load of ping pong balls is literally hazardous cargo, which is why the Rio games has moved to “Polyballls”, which contain no celluload.
These are not flammable, and they bounce in much the same way, but they are having some durability issues:
The Olympics is apparently dealing with its own version of deflategate.
Matches in Rio de Janeiro have ended with balls that look like they combusted from being smashed — even though players haven’t changed their pressure in any way. It’s a new and frustrating problem in a game marred by hiccups like a green pool and then, a fart-smelling green pool.
That’s because the official balls of 2016 are made of a new non-celluloid material that inhibits durability, says David Brasfield, a customer service representative at Paddle Palace, the official ball supplier of the United States Table Tennis team. What’s worse is that this problem isn’t limited to the DHS ball that’s being used in Rio de Janeiro; all new polyballs are facing similar ball-busting problems.
Despite the growing pains, the switch to non-celluloid balls was practically a necessity because of the severe fire hazard posed by celluloid balls. “We can now have a large quantity of balls come by air quickly, and we couldn’t have done that before,” points out Brasfield; previously, containers of celluloid balls had to be delivered by hazmat trucks with flammable solid warnings plastered all over them.
Mostly though, I am posting this for the the burning vid. I could watch this all day.
Later, I’ll show you a trick with a dry cleaner bag.
Time for a Massive Campaign of Civil Disobedience
The elitists at the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council have decided to ignore the will of the people and name their new research vessel after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, though they did throw a bone to the general public:
The UK’s new £200 million polar research ship will not be called Boaty McBoatface. The decision was announced early on Friday morning by the UK science minister, Jo Johnson. Instead, the new ship will be called the RRS (Royal Research Ship) Sir David Attenborough—a name that also picked up a few votes in the same poll that saw Boaty McBoatface come out way on top.
Showing at least a little bit of political savvy, Jo Johnson didn’t completely discard the people’s choice: RRS Sir David Attenborough will be outfitted with a number of remotely operated underwater vehicles (see gallery above), and one of those will be called Boaty McBoatface. Hopefully they’ll paint a dorky face on the front of its torpedo-like frame.
………
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) had originally planned to name the new ship via an online poll. Shortly after the poll began in March, James Hand, a former BBC radio presenter, proposed the name Boaty McBoatface. The name went viral and quickly picked up tens of thousands more votes than any other. The final tally was 124,109 votes for Boaty McBoatface, 34,371 for Poppy-Mai, and then a handful of others at around 10,000 (Sir David Attenborough picked up 10,284 votes).
………
Yesterday, following the naming debacle surrounding the ship, the UK’s parliamentary science and technology committee began an investigation into “science communication” and NERC’s approach to naming the ship.
You have to hand it to the science minister: if you’re going to take a huge political hit by ignoring the public’s choice, naming the ship after one of the few universally loved Britons is really quite smart. No one’s going to complain about a ship being named after Sir David—and it’s his 90th birthday this weekend. Damn you, Jo Johnson, damn you!
This is an outrage, and clearly it must not be allowed to stand.
Boaty McBoatface Wins!
And the crowd goes wild:
The internet has spoken — and “RRS Boaty McBoatface” is the people’s choice to name a $300 million state-of-the-art polar research ship.
Over 7,000 names were submitted to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) poll which closed April 16, but “Boaty McBoatface” won easily with 124,109 votes.
It all began when the NERC invited the public to christen the 129-meter long icebreaker, the largest and most advanced British research vessel to date.
They asked for names that were inspirational, such as a historical figure or a landmark.
However, after former BBC presenter James Hand cheekily suggested the Boaty moniker it quickly became the crowd favorite over more traditional names like “RRS Henry Worsley” after the British explorer who died in January while attempting a solo, unaided mission across the Antarctic.
………
It spawned countless silly riffs.
A UK train service from Portsmouth to Waterloo was briefly renamed “Trainy McTrainface” much to the amusement of its passengers.
………
There’s no guarantee that they will follow through on the public’s choice but whatever its name, the vessel will be setting sail for Antarctica in 2019.
I think that an MP should bring this up during question time, because it would be epic.
Don’t Tug on Superman’s Cape. Don’t Piss into the Wind
Don’t rely on internet polls to name something:
A state-of-the-art research vessel in search of a name is getting some help from the general public and their top choice is flying in the face of British nautical convention.
Britain’s National Environmental Research Council (NERC) launched an online voting contest, asking for inspirational names of historical figures, landmarks and movements to christen the £200-million ship ($375-million CAD). The internet responded, and the current frontrunner is none-other than RRS Boaty McBoatface.
The 15,000-ton, 128-yard-long Royal Research Ship is currently under construction on the coast of Merseyside and is gearing up to be launched for a research mission to Antarctica in 2019.
The much more appropriate RRS Henry Worsley, RRS David Attenborough and RRS Pillar of Autumn are the current runners-up, though Boaty McBoatface is outpacing its closest competitor 10-1 with over 22,500 votes.
The online poll has proven to be so successful that NERC reported the high traffic caused the website to temporarily crash Sunday.
It appears that, much like many things on the internet, the meme started as a joke:
A man who suggested naming a new £200m ship Boaty McBoatface has apologised.
The suggestion has attracted more than 27,000 votes in an online poll of names for the Royal Research ship, causing the website to crash.
Former BBC presenter James Hand said he found the list of possible names “really funny” so decided to “throw one into the ring”.
He “apologised profusely” to the Natural Environment Research Council.
There is no guarantee the ship will be given the name that tops the poll, with the final decision to be made by the chief executive of the NERC.
Other names in the running are RRS Pingu, RRS Usain Boat and RRS David Attenborough.
A NERC spokesperson said staff were “very much enjoying hearing everyone’s ideas”.
Mr Hand said: “I read the story about naming the ship on the BBC website on Thursday and some of the entries were really funny – my favourite was Clifford The Big Red Boat.
“I thought I would throw one into the ring. By Friday night it was leading by a couple of thousand, and when the site crashed on Sunday it was leading by 8,000. It’s been utterly bizarre.”
Boaty McBoatface is 25,000 votes ahead of the second place suggestion, RRS Henry Worsley.
The boat is being built at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead on Merseyside and when completed in 2019 it will study ice sheets, ocean currents and marine life as part of the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey.
“I’ve apologised profusely to the people behind the website,” the former Good Morning Jersey host said.
BTW, you can go to this link to vote.
I have already voted for Boaty McBoatface, because I am an asshole.
About F%$#ing Time
After years of studies pointing to its carcinogenic properties, California has labeled glyphosate (Roundup®) a cancer causing agent:
California has just dealt a blow to Monsanto as the state’s Environmental Protection Agency has decided to list glyphosate, the highly toxic main ingredient used in Roundup, as a known carcinogenic.
Under Proposition 65, also known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, the state is required to list and publish chemicals that cause birth defects, cancer, or other reproductive harm. If a chemical is found to be carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), they are required to be listed as well.
The IARC released a report, in March, that states glyphosate to be a ‘probably carcinogen.’ The report shows that the herbicide has been found to cause cancer in lab animals as well.
There have been concerns about the cancer causing effects of Roundup® since its commercial release.
There have been studies that have reinforced these concerns for over a decade.
Unfortunately, the standard, in the US at least, is to require proof of harm, rather than, as is the case with medications, a proof of safety.
Tweet of the Day
Months ago, Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic and fired most of writers. This just hit the stands. pic.twitter.com/sr3Savvdli
— Historical Pics (@HistoricalPics) November 24, 2015
This is a damn shame.
A national treasure has been destroyed in a matter of months.
Nestle Launches Mission to Mars
No, Nestle is not actually flying to Mars. That’s just a snarky reference to Nestle’s sucking water out of California in orderto bottle it.
When juxtaposed with some of Nestle’s earlier behavior, the news that NASA’s discovery that there are current water flows on Mars, it is an obvious bit of humor:
Spectroscopic data from NASA
’s 10-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed years of scientific suspicion that periodic dark streaks appearing on Martian slopes are the result of liquid water flowing on the planet’s surface.
The dark features, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), have been observed for years by the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and have appeared on dozens of sites at Mars. This imagery was later correlated with mineral mapping by another instrument, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which determined that the dark streaks are hydrated minerals — i.e., thin patches of damp soil. The salt lowers the freezing point of the water, allowing it to persist longer in Mars’ thin, cold atmosphere.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science and a former space shuttle astronaut, during a Sept. 28 press conference. “Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past. Under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars.”
This is actually rather significant.
Where there is water, on Earth at least, there is life.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the picture.
In Addition to Being a True Patriot, Edward Snowden Is Wicked Cool
Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has some strong opinions on communications — even when those communications are coming from aliens.
The former intelligence-agency contractor turned fugitive was an unexpected guest on famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast on September 18. And, inevitably, the two got to talking about extraterrestrials.
………
But Tyson scored an interview with him in New York City. How? Snowden rigged a robot that he can control from Russia, and rolled right into Tyson’s office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York with his face displayed on the screen.
The conversation turned to encryption and cybersecurity, but here’s where an astrophysicist differs from a journalist: Tyson’s line of questioning quickly turned to how encryption relates to communication with … aliens.
Tyson asked Snowden if a highly intelligent alien civilization might be communicating with encrypted messages. And Snowden had an unsettling answer.
First, Snowden said, let’s assume that most advanced societies eventually realize that they need to encrypt their communication in order to protect it. This could also be the reason why we’ve never heard from other civilizations — their messages may have just been melding into the background static of the universe.
Here’s Snowden’s full answer, from the StarTalk podcast:So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there’s only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communication will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means.
So when we think about everything that we’re hearing through our satellites or everything that they’re hearing from our civilization (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default.
So what we are hearing, that’s actually an alien television show or, you know, a phone call … is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.So it could be possible there are alien messages constantly hitting our satellites, and we just don’t recognize them because they’re so heavily encrypted. (The cosmic microwave background radiation that Snowden mentions is thermal radiation throughout the universe left over from the Big Bang. It basically looks and sounds like static to us puny humans.)
(emphasis original)
This is way cooler than I will ever be.
We Are Sooooooo F%$#ed
I knew that global warming would cause problems in the future, but the fact that sea levels have risen 3 inches over the past 23 years just boggles the mind:
A panel of NASA scientists said Wednesday that new data shows sea levels are, on average, three inches higher than they were in 1992 due to melting ice from both mountain glaciers and the polar ice caps, as well as warmer oceans.
The data was collected from NASA satellites. NASA also released a video that shows a visualization of rising sea levels.
The changes are concerning and “it’s very likely to get worse in the future,” Steve Nerem, a University of Colorado geophysicist and a member of the panel, said in a conference call, Reuters reported. In 2013, a United Nations panel reported sea levels were projected to rise between 1 and 3 feet by 2100; the NASA panel said data indicates the level rise would be on the higher end of that projection.
I may have beachfront property before I die.
My Son’s Worst Nightmare
Charlie has a mild arachnophobia, a fear of spiders, and I just told him about a spider that sounds like his worst nightmare.
It’s a jumping spider, it’s aggressive, it’s favorite food is human blood, and follows our smell.
Sounds scary, even to someone like me who finds spiders to be a fascinating member phylum Arthropoda.
It turns that this little 8 legged beast is actually good for people.
His lust for human blood is limited to human blood inside of the body of an anopheles mosquito:
………
A new study by researchers at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury and the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology looked at what these spiders like to eat. They found, reiterating what previous studies have also, that these “mosquito terminators” shouldn’t be feared at all — they should be viewed as friends.
(I know, friends sounds like quite a stretch. But follow me here.)
Female Anopheles mosquitoes carry and spread malaria. It’s a preventable yet deadly disease that’s responsible for about 500,000 deaths a year. Even though that figure has dropped significantly since 2000, allowing half a million preventable deaths is still, by any measure, unacceptable.
Here’s the good news: The Evarcha culicivora has a specialized craving for those female Anopheles mosquitoes.
Feasting on our blood gives these spiders an odor that attracts mates. So, naturally, they’re gunning for it. But earlier — when I said these spiders love our blood — I didn’t say it had to be in us. Funny story: These spiders’ mouths aren’t even equipped to bite humans.
They can, however, snack on human blood carried by malaria-transmitting mosquitoes.
“This is unique,” Fiona Cross, who co-authored the study, told The Guardian. “There’s no other animal that targets its prey based on what that prey has eaten.”
Not quite as scary now, huh?
Another Climate Change Denial Talking Point Bites the Dust………
It turns out that the evidence that we are in a period of some sort of freakishly high sunspot activity is just an artifact of how counting was modernized in 1947, which means that suggesting that it’s all sunspots is a load of bunk:
A bunch of boffins has completed the first-ever revision of the world’s most important sunspot data repository, along the way challenging the theory that climate change is substantially attributable to the prevalence of sunspots.
It turns out, in fact, that the pro-sunspots argument relies on a statistical artefact introduced in 1947 and not corrected until this year.
While the change officially took place in July, rendering obsolete the data that climate deniers use to “prove” that it’s sunspots driving global warming rather than CO2, it came to prominence at the end of last week in a presentation to the International Astronomical Union’s current general assembly in Hawaii.
The most important correction to come out of the new data, the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) project says, is “a lowering by about 18% of all numbers after 1947, to remove the bias produced by a new counting method started in 1947 in Zürich”.
………
As SILSO explains, the sunspot data set (which, courtesy of Galileo (the man, not the spacecraft), stretches back 400 years) was first collected into an index by Rudolph Wolf in 1849. Startlingly, SILSO says, “this series was left unchanged since its creation … without any backward verification”.
………
The adoption of the new Sunspot Number doesn’t change our understanding of the Maunder Minimum, the low sunspot activity period between 1645 and 1715 that coincided with the “Little Ice Age”.
However, the recalibration does overturn a previous consensus that the data set showed a 300-year upward trend in sunspot activity, culminating in a “grand maximum” in the 20th century.
As Physicsworld says, the dataset “nullifies the claim that there has been a modern grand maximum”.
In response, I expect some right wing nut-job state Attorney General to subpoena scientists private communications.
Science, Bitches
2 Words: Laser Bacon:
A team of Harvard scientists has paved the way for a deadly laser pig weapon by demonstrating that, with a little encouragement, pig fat cells can be made to lase.
According to MIT Technology Review, Seok Hyun Yun and Matjaž Humar stimulated spheres of fat inside porcine cells with an optical fibre, causing them to emit laser light.
Handily, pig cells contain “nearly perfectly spherical” fat balls, which are conducive to lasing by resonance when supplied with a suitable light source. The team has also cheated the effect by injecting oil droplets into other cells.
………
Since the bacon laser technique also involves the use of injecting fluorescent dye into the fat cells, the Harvard team could surely have saved themselves some work by using a glow-in-the-dark pig as a test subject. Better still, they could knock up a transgenic shark with fluorescent pig fat cells in its skin, and turn that into one almighty frikkin’ laser.
This is just so chock full of awesome.
One of Life’s Most Perplexing Questions, Answered
Have you ever wondered why cats wiggle their butts before pouncing?
Me too.
It turns out that it is more straightforward than I imagined. Basically, it’s how they brace themselves for the pounce:
Cats are lovely creatures that never fail to amaze us. They are full of quirks and often have a lot of spontaneous antics that keep everyone in the house amused. Cats have a cute little tush that they are proud to show off. They often like to wiggle and shake their hind quarters when they are about to pounce. It is cute and adorable, but why do they do that?
Let’s look at cats’ wild cousins, the big cats. Wild cats such as tigers, lions, leopards tend to grind the ground with their hind quarters before they pounce. It is a way for them to get into position and brace themselves before they attack. Domestic cats share a similar feature – instead of grinding the ground with their hind legs, they wiggle their behind vigorously to attain balance and leverage.
It’s like runners pushing back against the starting block.
It Appears That Sociological Ethnography Is Not, and Can Never Be, Science………
Alice Goffman released what many consider to be a seminal work of sociological ethnography.
It has now been revealed that many of the details of this study are false.
This is actually not an issue of a violation of professional ethics. In fact ethics in this field requires the obfuscation of data:
Late last month, a Northwestern University law professor published an article calling into question the veracity of a widely lauded book by Alice Goffman, one of sociology’s brightest young stars. The book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, is an ethnographic study of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia where, according to Goffman’s research, residents live in a mini–police state, constantly in fear of being arrested and sent to jail or prison, often for minor offenses. Goffman conducted her fieldwork, first as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and later as a graduate student at Princeton University, by embedding herself with a group of men from the neighborhood—they are all given pseudonyms in the book—and carefully tracking their lives over the course of about six years. The result is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a community—nicknamed “6th Street” by Goffman and never identified by its actual location—in which the criminal justice system dominates people’s lives and systematically cuts them off from opportunity.
On the Run received nearly universal acclaim upon its publication. But according to Steven Lubet, the Northwestern law professor, the book is seriously flawed. Lubet points to two anecdotes that he believes could not have happened as described and a third that seems to implicate Goffman in a felony. The article in which Lubet laid out his concerns touched off a debate both within the academic community and outside of it, one that spilled from sociology message boards onto the pages of the New York Times and caused some observers to wonder whether they were witnessing the opening scenes of an all-too-familiar story of intellectual deception, exposure, and professional disgrace.
Lubet’s article, originally published in the New Rambler Review and adapted by the New Republic, may have touched off the public backlash against Goffman, but he was not the first critic to attack her credibility. A few weeks earlier, many in the world of sociology had become transfixed by a strange unsigned document that had been sent to scores of influential scholars in the field, along with Goffman’s department chairwoman at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In the document, which quickly made its way online, an unnamed critic made the case against On the Run over the course of more than 30,000 words and 45 numbered “problems,” highlighting what appeared to be inconsistencies in the book’s chronology and casting doubt on the integrity of the research behind it. The document appeared to be the work of an obsessive with an agenda—its tone was at times angry and bitter, and its reasoning could be muddled and hard to follow—but some of the author’s observations seemed damning, or at least in need of explanation. Goffman felt compelled to write a line-by-line rebuttal and submit it to her department.
I spoke to Goffman on the phone on June 5, not long after the University of Wisconsin–Madison released a brief statement saying that it had found the accusations of academic misconduct that had been leveled against Goffman in the anonymous letter to be “without merit.” With that statement in mind, I asked Goffman about what I considered the most problematic points in the letter and asked her to respond to them. From there we talked more generally about her book and how it compares to other works of nonfiction aimed at exposing the strife and degradation suffered by underprivileged populations.
Ethnography can look like an uncomfortable hybrid of impressionistic data gathering, soft-focus journalism, and even a dash of creative writing.
I came away from the conversation with a sense that there are indeed factual inaccuracies throughout On the Run. However, they are not the product of the kind of fraud we’re used to seeing in publishing scandals, and it would be unfair to say they place Goffman in the company of fabulists like Stephen Glass or data-cookers like Michael LaCour. That’s because the majority of what I’m calling “inaccuracies” were introduced into On the Run because the conventions of sociological ethnography required them. In keeping with the methodological protocols of her chosen discipline, which typically demands that researchers grant their subjects total anonymity, Goffman changed details and scrambled facts in order to prevent readers from deducing the identities of the people she was writing about. In the process, she made her book all but impossible to fact-check.
The imperative to anonymize subjects is, in most cases, specifically mandated by the institutional review boards that approve social science research in American academia. And while it does seem possible to me that Goffman embellished some aspects of her narrative in order to tell a more compelling story, it was the steps she took to protect her sources—many of whom commit serious crimes in the book—that have made On the Run all but defenseless against skeptics like Lubet and the author of the anonymous letter. In other words, there is a good bit more than just the credibility of On the Run at stake here. At the heart of this controversy are the fundamental limitations of ethnography as a mode of inquiry. As practiced by many scholars, what is supposed to be a scientific undertaking aimed at systematically revealing truths about the world looks more like an uncomfortable hybrid of impressionistic data gathering, soft-focus journalism, and even a dash of creative writing.
Though it may be Goffman in the hot seat right now, any number of her colleagues could find themselves in a similar position, for the simple reason that producing research that is detached from reality to the point of being unverifiable is a central tenet of their discipline. As a result, some of the most vital and nationally relevant findings that come out of their field, including research on topics of urgent importance, like the conditions of inner city life, are vulnerable to questions about how much truth—and what kind of truth—they actually contain.
………
Elijah Anderson, Goffman’s undergraduate adviser
To that question, Goffman doesn’t have a good answer. As Lubet points out, she so disguised the people and locations that appear in On the Run as to make her accounts effectively unverifiable: She changed the name of every person in her book and altered what she refers to in the preface as people’s “identifying characteristics.” According to Goffman, that meant changing the names of the places her characters inhabit and visit, changing people’s ages and jobs, adjusting the number of people who were present at certain events, moving some of those events around in time. What’s more, Goffman revealed in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer that she shredded all of her notebooks and disposed of the hard drive that contained all of her files out of fear that she could be subpoenaed and thereby forced to incriminate her subjects.
………
The third discrepancy was of a different type, however. Goffman said that Chuck was indeed alive at the time of the court hearing. But the field note in which he is described giving his brother a ride was not written down in 2009—Goffman just labeled it that way in the book as part of the anonymization process. When it came to court hearings, she explained, she felt it was especially important to scramble dates because public records can be used with relative ease to identify cases and thus people. In this instance, Goffman said, her failure was in neglecting to make sure that the timeline as presented in the book was internally consistent.
It’s this last example that is most illuminating: unlike the other two, which seem to be innocent, if careless, mistakes, it illustrates the lengths to which Goffman went to change facts in order to protect her subjects. More to the point, that’s exactly what she was supposed to do, according to the rules of ethnography.
………
To find out, I called several sociologists and anthropologists who had either done ethnographic research of their own or had thought about the methodology from an outside perspective. Ethnography, they explained, is a way of doing research on groups of people that typically involves an extended immersion in their world. If you’re an ethnographer, they said, standard operating procedure requires you to take whatever steps you need to in order to conceal the identities of everyone in your sample population. Unless you formally agree to fulfill this obligation, I was told, your research proposal will likely be blocked by the institutional review board at your university.
“Your honor —your word—is the only thing you have to make your stuff believable.”
If all there is to verify your studies is your word, it’s not science. Period, full stop.
If sociological ethnography requires its adherents to produce studies that are by definition irreproducible results, then it is not a science. It is an exercise in historical fiction.
Science requires reproducibility, no saving throw.
Deep Thought
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
― Richard P. Feynman
Run Away from These People
On a web site dedicated to people who do consumer electrical work, someone posits that Tesla’s new home battery packs will force homes to go voltage DC current. This is absolutely and completely wrong, because fails to get even a single fact right, as would be clear to anyone who knew the most basic physics:
CE pros might be sitting in the proverbial catbird seat when it comes to the future of wiring homes.
With the solar revolution seemingly in full swing all across the nation, consumers are enamored with “going off the grid.” And many homeowners are counting on home batteries to be the next phase of their off-the-grid plans. Companies likes Tesla and RoseWater Energy Group are leading the way in the development of these new power storage devices for homes.
But if the battery power trend takes off, it must lead to a new paradigm in which homes will be powered more with low voltage wiring than line voltage electrical, according to a blog by CE veteran Paul Self on Buildz.com.
Indeed, will the pure science limitations of AC/DC conversion eventually force a gigantic sea change from builders, electricians and the National Electric Code itself in the way homes are constructed and wired? The answer is “Yes” that might have to happen, says Self.
Here is Self’s logic: [Or more accurately, here are his completely incoherent thoughts]“An underlying issue with solar power and the Tesla battery is the fact that they run on DC while the power infrastructure in buildings is AC. Stepping power up and down from AC to DC and vice-versa wastes energy, about 20 percent is lost in the conversion. Some converters do a better job than others, but resolving this 20 percent loss is very important when working on a battery stored energy supply.
Ummmm. No. Inverters operate at efficiencies of about 95% at their design points, and if you are connected to the grid, as Tesla envisions, you will only use the inverter .
Many devices in a home could run on DC. Almost all non-incandescent light bulbs can run on DC and require a transformer to step the 110 VAC down to a 12 – 5 VDC signal for the bulb.
No. The a fluorescent light ballast operates as follows: It uses a transformer to jump UP the voltage (not down), then rectifies it to DC, and then uses an inverter (square wave, because unlike motors, that is fine for gas tubes) to hop the frequency from 60hz in the wall, to 1+ Khz to eliminate flicker. (For incandescents, it’s not an issue, because even as the AC current goes through them they hot. CFLs are generating lights from individual sparks).
Other devices like computers, TVs, cable boxes, and cell phone chargers all operate similarly.
No again. They cannot use line current, they need to condition the power, and it is easier to do this with AC current.
Appliances like electric ovens, electric water heaters, and air conditioners will require 110VAC, but most of the house is on DC.
Let me paint you a picture.
They reacquire 110VAC because they are high power, and at low voltage, the amperage, and wire size go through the roof. (Details follow)
- Sun generates 12VDC via the solar panel
Yes, a panel will generate relative low voltage DC, but if arranged in series, you can generate 100s of volts, and have smaller and cheaper wiring with less transmission losses.
- Solar panels push power to a battery
Again, note arranging in series. In their cars, for example, Tesla battery packs operate at DC voltages between 250V and 425V.
- The battery or the solar panel push 12VDC to a DC to AC converter (20% loss of power).
From an info page for an inverter for solar vendor
Again. Inverters are around 95% efficient these days.
- AC is distributed throughout the house
- Many devices then convert the power BACK to DC (20% loss of power)
Again, the efficiencies of rectifiers is about 95%, not 80%, and the devices that have to convert it back to DC would have to do so anyway, because power from the batteries is not as uniform as their electronics requires.
- This all seems pretty silly to lose this much power. I am sure it is less than a cumulative loss of 40 percent power, but when your trying to free yourself of the power company, this really adds up.
Also note that he knows no math. Two devices operating at a 20% loss (80% efficiency) would give us losses of 80% x 80% = 64%; 100% -64% = 36%.
This guy cannot even do basic multiplication.
You know what also “really ads up”?
Copper.
Let’s take a 40 W light bulb.
Power is Voltage x Current = V x I, so for a 120V source, the current is ⅓ amp. For his 12 Volt DC system, the current would be 3⅓ amps, 10 times more current.
You can also express power in terms of current and resistance, P=I2R, so losses in transmission would go through the roof.
Well, they would, except if you look up the charts, it turns out for a typical (I chose 50 feet) length, the DC wiring has much lower resistance, because it is much thicker.
How much thicker? Well the table for wiring for 12VDC gives us 6 Ga wire, and the worksheet for 120VAC gives us 14 Ga wire, and the wire gauge size table gives us conductor diameters of 0.17″ and 0.064″ respectively.
That is a lot of copper you end up paying for, and for many applications.
He also ignores the fact that DC Motors (the kind with brushes) are less efficient, run hotter, and wear out more quickly.
The motor on your furnace, and dryer, and washing machine, are typically induction motors, that operate directly off of your house current, and with a DC house you would need inverters for the motors. (So called “Brushless DC motors” contain their own power circuitry linked to an induction motor).
If you see this guy, do not let him near your electronics. He will kill himself, or kill you, or set your house on fire.
Note that I am NOT an electrical engineer, though I got the basics in school, but this is so ignorant, and so wrong, that I felt compelled to Fisk this bit of bovine scatology.
H/T /.
We are F%$#ed
The massive Larsen C ice shelf is predicted to collapse by 2010 2020:
It has been a really bad week for the ice shelves of the quickly warming Antarctic peninsula, the part of the vast frozen continent that extends northward toward South America.
Earlier this week, we learned that the gigantic marine-based Larsen C ice shelf, which is almost as big as Scotland, has several worrisome vulnerabilities — including a growing rift across it. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and several other research centers say this could pose an “imminent risk” to its stability.
And now, NASA scientists are giving an even worse verdict for the remnants of the nearby Larsen B ice shelf, much of which already disintegrated back in 2002. Back then, the shelf lost a region larger than Rhode Island, but there are still 618 square miles left of it — for now.
However, in a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine say that this remnant now faces its “approaching demise.” In a news release, NASA adds that the ice shelf “is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.”
If these two research teams are right, then the coming years could see major ice calving events off of the Antarctic peninsula — especially for Larsen B.
“What might happen is that for a few years, we will have the detachment of big icebergs from this remaining ice shelf, and then at one point, one very very warm summer, when you have lots of melting of the surface, the whole thing will just give way, and will shatter into thousands of smaller icebergs,” says the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ala Khazendar, lead author of the new study.
Clearly, anthropogenic climate change is a myth.
Note that this is an ice shelf, and as such, is already supported by the ocean so the impact on ocean levels is effectively nil, but this will change the environment and albedo (reflectively) which will likely increase the flow of glaciers into the ocean.
Prediction made by climate experts have consistently been exceeded by what is really going on.
Not good.
Sorry to Harsh Your Warp Drive Buzz ………*
The reports of the EM Drive appear to be greatly exaggerated:
………
Perhaps we should take a long cool drink at this point. Let’s start with the “NASA validates” part. NASA is a huge agency, with more than 18,000 employees. The testing was done by five NASA employees in a lab devoted to exploring unorthodox propulsion ideas. The team leader is a researcher named Harold “Sonny” White, himself a proponent of ideas about faster-than-light warp drives that most of his colleagues have classified as physically impossible. The lead author is one of White’s Eagleworks teammates, David A. Brady. Calling this group “NASA”—as almost every popular news story has done—is a gross oversimplification.
till, science is science: What matters are data, not motivations or semantics. Did White et al actually validate Fetta’s version of the EmDrive? The abstract of their paper, which was presented at a propulsion conference in Cleveland, is freely available online. Reading it raises a number of red flags. The methodology description makes it unclear how much of the testing took place in a vacuum—essential for measuring a subtle thrust effect. The total amount of energy consumed seems to have been far more than the amount of measured thrust, meaning there was plenty of extra energy bouncing around that could have been a source of error.
Worst of all is this statement from the paper: “Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust.” In other words, the Cannae Drive worked when it was set up correctly—but it worked just as well when it was intentionallydisabledset up incorrectly. Somehow the NASA researchers report this as a validation, rather than invalidation, of the device.
Did I say that was worst of all? I may have take that back. In the paper by White et al, they also write that the Cannae Drive “is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.” That last bit stopped me. What’s a quantum vacuum virtual plasma? I’d never heard the term, so I dropped a note to Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist whose work dives deeply into speculative realms of cosmology and quantum theory.
Carroll wrote back immediately, with a pointed message: “There is no such thing as a ‘quantum vacuum virtual plasma,’ so that should be a tip-off right there. There is a quantum vacuum, but it is nothing like a plasma. In particular, it does not have a rest frame, so there is nothing to push against, so you can’t use it for propulsion. The whole thing is just nonsense. They claim to measure an incredibly tiny effect that could very easily be just noise.” There is no theory to support the result, and there is no verified result to begin with.
………
That’s part of why this space-drive story bothers me so much. Abandoning known science when it feels good to do so is a dangerous proposition. As Carroll later tweeted, “The eagerness with which folks embrace sketchy claims about impossible space drives would make astrology fans blush.” I am personally a huge space enthusiast; I would love to see a new type of propulsion that would make it easier to explore the universe. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse to walk away from normal critical thinking. It is not materially different than the approach of people who reject science when they don’t like what it says about climate change, vaccines, or genetically modified organisms.
(Emphasis Mine)
Let’s be clear here: The tests are dubious, the detected “thrust” being, “Between 30-and-50 microNewtons, where the limit of the measuring device is 10-to-15 microNewtons,” which makes the setup vulnerable to subtle errors and confirmation bias.
I am not saying that it’s true, but I am saying that we don’t have even the vaguest model to describe this phenomenon, and the scientific method requires skepticism, and this sounds like the Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fiasco of the late 1980s.
There needs to be a lot more testing, and some theories that could actually reliably predict the results, before we should start buying Star Trek uniforms.†
*Actually, I do want to harsh your buzz. Seriously. This appears to be complete bullsh%$, or at least irresponsibly immature, and I can feel virtuous by shooting it down.
†On my part, I will not be buying a Star Trek uniform. As an engineer, I would be wearing a red shirt. I do not like those odds.
Great. Now Bees are Going to Have Nic Fits
It appears that part of the problem with the neonicotinoid pesticides, and bees is that bees react in the same way to the pesticides as a smoker does to nicotine, and preferentially select contaminated nectar. (Research articles is here and here)
This has the effect of increasing their exposure to these pesticides, which have been tied to colony collapse disorder:
Bees prefer food containing neonicotinoid pesticides, research suggests.
They may “get a buzz” from the nicotine-like chemicals in the same way smokers crave cigarettes, according to scientists at Newcastle University.
The experiments raise the question of whether bees can be exposed to harmful doses of pesticides because they are attracted to the chemicals.
Another study found neonicotinoids had a negative effect on bees in the wild.
The Crop Protection Association, which represents pesticide producers, questioned the findings of the studies, published in the journal, Nature.
Scientific controversy
Bees are in decline in Europe and North America due to a number of factors, including pesticides, habitat loss and diseases.
In 2013, the EU imposed a two-year ban on using three neonicotinoid pesticides on flowering crops amid concern about their effects on bees.
Neonicotinoids contain synthetic chemicals similar to nicotine, which as a plant toxin is damaging to insects.
Neuroscientists at Newcastle University tested whether honeybees and bumblebees preferred food containing neonicotinoids over untreated food in the laboratory.
They were surprised to find that sugar solution containing two of three neonicotinoid pesticides appeared to be attractive to bees and “may act like a drug” targeting the brain.
This sh%$ is getting very real.
We need to stop pandering to the Ag chemical companies of the world, and review these chemicals with a lot more rigor.