Silicon Valley Redneck

Oh noes! We're about to run out of...

...breakfast?

Tim Worstall explains the concept of "reserves", and why the alarmingly small numbers for certain metals aren't alarming at all.

Not mentioned: how proven reserves and prices can rise and fall together, in apparent defiance of the principle of supply and demand (hint: it's that pesky definition of "reserves" again), and the vast supply of germanium lurking in those menacing fly-ash storage ponds near coal-fired power plants.

And, since the topic of the day is hafnium, have some relaxing (if unrelated) music.

Don't be too proud of this technological error you've constructed

Went with my parents on Sunday to visit relatives in the unfamiliar territory of Sonoma.

Setting off from Palo Alto in my father's Prius - an earlyish (2004 or so) NHW20, with fancy built-in nav system - I was in the navigator's seat, on account of being the one most likely to be able to operate the car's nav system.  And, of course, I had my Magic Elf Box to fall back on.

After some poking, I managed to get the address punched in.  It promptly told us to head for 101; my father, meanwhile, was making for 280.  I got tired of being told to turn around, and found the "suspend navigation" button.

A few blocks later, as we headed west down Oregon Expressway, I noticed that the nav display had us several miles south, in Mountain View, near Rengstorff Avenue.

By the time we reached 280, the nav system was firmly convinced that we were in Boulder Creek, going cross-country through the redwoods in the general vicinity of 9.

I couldn't find any button for "please reassess our location and report back when you have a clue."

Somewhere around Hillsborough it came to its senses.  When I noticed that the map display now matched the surroundings, I re-enabled navigation, and it worked OK the rest of the trip.

Glad I wasn't relying on it.

Panic! Doom! Fear! Fire! Foes! Deadly EMP attack!

Yes, the EMP fearmongers are at it again, boldly asserting that a small nuke set off above the middle of the U.S. could destroy everything electrical... with new added claim that the ensuing collapse would kill 90% of the population.

Er.

Yeah, knocking out civilization is serious stuff; couple decades back, I took a look at the implications of evacuating the cities ahead of a nuclear war, and quickly concluded that fallout would be a much smaller threat than lack of sanitation for a large displaced population.

But:

Let's take a look at this "one little nuke" thing, shall we?  Starfish Prime was 1.4 megatons, not exactly little.  It was significantly disruptive 900 miles away.  The one bomb in the middle needs to do a lot of damage at the coasts; call it a 1500 mile radius.  So, assuming we're dealing with an inverse square law here (and not an inverse cube or something), we need to multiply by (1500/900)², so about 4 megatons.  But!  That's to inflict the level of damage at the coasts that Starfish Prime inflicted on Hawaii, not to wipe out the electrical grid, backup systems, car electrical systems, and all that other stuff.  So, we probably need another order of magnitude, to get enough energy for a proper kill.

Which says out hypothetical enemy needs Царь-бомба, or something darn near.  Plus a delivery system to deliver 20 tons or so of bomb to a point a couple of hundred miles above Omaha.  Which is a damn big ICBM.  Smaller than a Saturn V, but... well... somehow I don't think the NorKs* will have one anytime soon.  And we'd sure notice them testing it.  Not to mention the seismic activity from the giant H-bomb tests.

And, yeah, the bomb and its delivery system would need testing.  Because it's not just rocket science; it's rocket plumbing.  And when you strike at a king....

None of which is to say that we shouldn't be hardening the electrical grid, having decentralized emergency supplies, and otherwise preparing for disruptive events whether hostile or natural.  But I call BS on this particular bit of fearmongering.

* The Russians may have both the bomb and the delivery system (it's just at the upper limit of Протон-М's capacity).  But Tsar Vladimir is ambitious, not insane.  Launch an ICBM from Kazakhstan to deliver a huge nuke over Nebraska, and, regardless of who's in the Oval Office at the moment, you just don't bet against several Russian cities becoming fields of rubble within the hour.

Sensationalism

Three years since that incident in Japan, there's this:

To be precise, three reactors had outright meltdowns or, more correctly, melt-throughs. One, Reactor No. 4, broke beyond repair and posed further catastrophe. Two others simply stopped dead. Within hours, one of the melt-throughs exploded, spewing lethal radioactive waste into the air, soil, underground water veins and, steadily, into the Pacific. Some eighteen thousand and five hundred souls died that cold March day. Many of the dead remain missing even now.

Nice juxtaposition there.  Nuke plants broken, 18500 people dead.  'Course, the body count where actual nuclear power plants were involved was, if memory, serves, one: a worker hit by falling debris.

Onward!

Why were the spent rods—so many of them—stored on top of the reactors? Who at General Electric was responsible for that design innovation? Was it conceived for expediency, to save money, or from an attitude of utter hubris against the force of nature?

Or maybe... just maybe... the short-term storage pools were placed right next to the top of the reactor (where the used fuel comes out) to minimize handling and exposure of fresh, high-level waste...?  Nah.  Too implausible.  Must be some nefarious reason.

During all that time, invisible odorless particles with unspeakable consequences have been descending over the region every time rain or snow falls.

ZOMG!  Radioactive COOTIES!  Wait, is this the H. P. Lovecraft memorial writing competition?

Man!  This whole thing needs a righteous fisking by someone who really speaks nuke power and isn't trying to eat his lunch.  Maybe I'll refer it to the W.O.R.M.

Update: W.O.R.M. sighting!

Afterthought: Hoover doesn't usally publish stuff that sucks like this.  I think that's normally left to the Electrolux Foundation.

Gigabytten by a bug?

Well, well, well.

El Reg links to something at La Dog Trainer claiming that some coupon company did some kind of survey which ended up showing that many Americans think that a gigabyte is an insect, HTML is a sexually-transmitted disease, USB is a European country (c'mon, everyone knows it's a European bank), and so on.

Curiously, no one seems to be linking to the original source.  I guess using hyperlinks can infect your computer with HTML or something.  Heck, even Google (a Russian novelist, usually good at citing his sources) doesn't seem to have a link to it.

Even I don't provide a link.

Anyway.

Before you start crowing over the appalling ignorance of the online-coupon-using American masses, consider this: how many people, given such a survey, would actually try to give the right answers?  As opposed, say, to picking the silliest answers on offer?

Oh, noes! Wetherz!

Over at Slate: the impending SoCal weather apocalypse!

In which this:

There could be some waterspouts or weak tornadoes over coastal areas on Friday into Saturday.

is amplified into:

Yep, full-out tornadoes in Los Angeles (minus the sharks, of course). They aren’t unprecedented: On March 1, 1983, one hit the convention center, injuring about 30 people.

Yeah, "weak tornadoes" = "full-out tornadoes."  Little whirlywinds that break a few trees are just the same as the monsters that tear up entire towns.  Because name.

And SoCal doesn't deal with them well.  That outbreak in '83?  The timing is about right... while I was at UCSD, there was a tornado alert.  The school was closed, and evacuated... so, instead of sitting around in a big sturdy concrete building, I had to go stand around in the open and wait for a bus.  In a torrential downpour.  With a tornado warning.  Brilliant!

You want a conspiracy theory?

It seems 9/11 trutherism is alive and well, and newly respectable or something.

Tales are cropping up, again, of how even a bloody huge fire couldn't have brought down a modern skyscraper, what with its huge safety margins, so the towers must have been intentionally weakened in the months leading up to the attacks.

And the work of weakening the structures, placing demolition charges, and so on, effectively concealed from the thousands of people who worked there every freaking day.

Try this on for size. Look at the remains of the #1-#4 reactor buildings at Fukushima Daiichi, e.g., here.  Note that two of these things are not like the others.  And, were you to dig around, you'd find that the #1 building (and, apparently, #2) was built according to the standard design.  #3 and #4 were built very differently, and without the ability to vent overpressure from a hydrogen explosion.

So, big safety issue with the basic construction of the later buildings.  And no one squawked at the time.  At a freaking nuclear power plant.  Presumably concrete castings all the way up was cheaper and easier than having the special panels-over-framework structure for the top story, but it's not the way it's supposed to be built, and there's a reason for that.

Back to the World Trade Center.  Which is more plausible: that the buildings were intentionally weakened in great secrecy from all the people working there in 2001... or that they were built weak in the first place?

Suppose you're a skyscraper builder.  Which is more profitable: to build exactly according to spec, with the very finest materials and an absurd safety margin, or to build more cheaply, with a good-enough safety margin, and bribe every building inspector in the city?

Think carefully.

And, were it true that the Twin Towers were of substandard construction... ya think the whole thing would be hushed up?  Because it would involve epic corruption, and maybe a lot of other skyscrapers weren't built to spec?

No, I don't have any insight as to the plausibility of the Standard Model (i.e., the impacts and fires weakened the built-as-designed structures until they collapsed as seen) vs. the notion that there had to be something else involved.

But, if you're going to insist that the buildings must have been tampered with, I think this is a more plausible explanation.

Foolish headline

At The Atlantic:

Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts in High School

 What, that late?  I rather suspect it starts much earlier.

The tale seems to be based on numbers for the computer science AP test (y'know, when I were in school we didn't have no sich thang), and calls for action:

"What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that."

Again, when I were in school... the computer science curriculum consisted of a couple of summer electives introducing rudimentary BASIC programming, plus rather limited access to the district's timeshare system so the kids could teach each other.

And the antics we got up to, on that timeshare system?  Back in the day, the sysadmin would often banish one or another of us for a while.  Now, we'd probably all have ended up in the federal pen, along with the budding chemists.

People with an aptitude for tech are few, and the main thing they need is opportunities to learn, starting at home when they're very young.

Trying to create techies out of non-techies through industrial education methods is an exercise in futility.

Here's a clue, though: those ubiquitous computing devices the kids play with?  PCs (Windows, Mac, whatever), phones, tablets, and such?  Maybe the manufacturers could go back to shipping them with a basic (though not necessarily BASIC) programming environment, carefully thought out to limit the damage a beginner could do with it.  Let the kids play.  The ones with aptitude will find their own way.

Sensationalist headline spotted! Film at 11!

This turned up on Slashdot and Instapundit:

'Military-Style' Raid on California Power Station Spooks U.S.

And, from the article:

[A Congresscritter] called the shooting at the the San Jose facility "an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation with military-style weapons.

Reality check!

Yeah, going down the manholes and cutting cables was a little bit sophisticated.  Maybe.

But, taking pot shots at big transformers with a rifle is military-style?  Really?

Wouldn't a military attack on such an installation involve, let's see now... artillery?  At least RPGs, and more likely mortars or even real long-range guns?  Do we think a few well-aimed 155mm HE shells might be a tad more effective than smallarms fire?

Or, in a slightly modern military attack... wouldn't they send a Warthog or something?

And, if you want a sophisticated amateur attack, without access to actual military weapons: no details here, but many of us have, over the decades, spotted a glaringly obvious way of disrupting the power grid, and those who've worked in high-voltage power transmission know some variations on it, and that it's easier than you'd think.  That it hasn't (to my knowledge) been done is a tribute to the ineptitude of terrorists.

Afterthought: I suggest looking for a disgruntled former utility-company employee... on the basis of the manhole thing.  Other than that, it sounds like something a random drunken Bubba might do.  I rather suspect that a gang of international terrorists would have used wire cutters and improvised explosives.

Oh, noes! It's the ECONOPOCALYPSE!

The Ben-Bernank (or perhaps the Dzhanit) announced that it will be REDUCING THE STIMULUS!  Investing LESS money in the vital, economy-stimulating, jobs-creating purchase of GOVERNMENT BONDS!

And the stock market TUMBLED!  The Dow ended the day DOWN by NEGATIVE 292 POINTS!

Oh, wait.  Down by a negative number is, er.  Up.

Never mind.

To the question, "What if we had a government shutdown and society didn't collapse?" we can now add, "What if the government stopped stimulating the economy and the economy started recovering?"

On a suddenly-up afternoon, it's instructive to look at the price of some stock that's been stumbling along for a while, and play "spot the programmed trades."  Oh, look! It hit $25.00, and bounced!  Then it crept back up, hit $25.10, dropped a bit and wibbled along for a while, then the same at $25.15!

Insomnia

I awoke just after midnight, and haven't been able to get back to sleep.

Because, since just after midnight, we've been living in ANARCHY!  The government is shut down!  How can anyone POSSIBLY rest at night without the omnibenificent government beaming the soothing rays of SLEEP from the orbital mind control lasers????

No, wait.  That's not it.

I'm coming down with a cold is what.  Nasty sinus headache.  If I'm lying down, I need to roll over frequently to keep all the gunk from accumulating on one side and building up pressure.

And, once the rest of the world wakes up, I need to run down to the appliance-parts store (not a federal agency), see if replacing that relay turns the icebox back into a refrigerator, pick my parents up at the airport (air traffic control is supposed to be working) and return them home, and settle in with some chicken soup.  'Course, if the refrigerator fix doesn't work, I also need to go refrigerator shopping, 'cause having a working refrigerator is one of those modern niceties whereto I've really become accustomed.

Update: Stocks up on government shutdown!  As a one-time colleague observed: the stock market is always down ahead of an election, due to uncertainty; after the election, it bounces back, regardless of who won.  (Hasn't worked that way lately, but back in the day it was generally true.)

Update 2: When I went to the grocery store for ice, my dollar bills still worked.  Also, my parents' flight fell out of the sky in a controlled fashion, wheels to pavement and all that, just as if the world hadn't come to an end.

Egregious medical ignorance

So, it seems inhaling alcohol fumes is the Trendy New Thing.  Again.

Now it's called a "Vaportini".

The linked article has a couple of scary quotes from a doctor, plus this:

Unlike drinking alcohol, where the liquid is metabolized through one’s liver, inhaling alcoholic vapors sends ethanol straight to the lungs, the blood stream and ultimately, the brain.

And the reporter got this where?  Like so many alarming medical claims, this rests on profound ignorance of basic anatomy, and is well into "not even wrong" territory.  Through the liver?  Really?

From the doctor in question, there's this:

“The danger mainly is that it leads to rapid intoxication in that you don't know you're getting drunk that fast,” Glatter said.

Which does make sense; it's at least plausible that taking a deep breath of air with a sufficient concentration of alcohol vapor would lead to rapid absorption through the vast surface area of the lungs.  Whether it's actually right or not is another question (to which I don't have the answer offhand, but if I weren't so lazy I'd start looking at things like the vapor pressure of ethanol at 37°C, the average volume of a deep breath, and the volume of blood that you're trying to raise to ~ 0.1% ABV).

So, naturally, we need another round...

...of restrictions on guns, reloading materials, and any sort of identifiable chemicals.  (Because chemicals!)

The Al-Quaedish instructions for making crude bombs?  Call for using match heads and sugar.  Not commercial gunpowder, whether black or smokeless.  'Cause, you know, in most places where these guys operate you can't just walk into the neighborhood sporting-goods store and buy a can of powder for your smokepole.

I'm reminded that the last round of restrictions on the sale of blackpowder, back in the 60s or some such, was driven by a Dick Tracy story line.  ZOMG a bad guy in t3h funny papers is using blackpowder in a highly-contrived arson scheme!  We gots to ban itz!

And, should matches not be available?  Why, the good folks at the Frankford Arsenal addressed that one long ago (and in more practical fashion than the Rocket City Rednecks).  Look up TM 31-210.  Got salt, water, electricity, sugar, and time on your hands?

Update: and if we're looking at deflagrating compositions, I stumbled across a doozy back in high school*.  Two ingredients**; one easily found, while the other took a bit of looking for.  Part 'A' remains as easy as ever.  Part 'B'... well... I haven't looked for it in stores in a great long time now, but it's probably there if you look in the right places, and I just discovered that it's unexpectedly easily bought on line***.  Maybe even without getting on any (more) watch lists.

* I was trying to make pretty colored fire. What I got was quite an impressive bang, from a small amount of the mixture with very light confinement.  Thanks to the very light confinement, the fragments thrown around by the blast were bits of paper, and didn't go too far.

** Two ingredients, considered at the retail level.  At least one of them has several different chemicals in it.

*** Oh, and it can also be made at home, without too much effort, from materials which are and will surely remain ubiquitous.

Alarming new discovery!

It's possible to make U-233 from thorium!

Uh, guys?  I found that bit of enlightenment in the open literature quite some time ago.

Like, when I was a senior in high school.

And we walked fifty stadia to school every morning, keeping watch for saber-toothed tigers.  That's how long ago it was!

Oh, noes! Another privacy threat!

Latest fearsome news making the rounds: Android malware by name of PlaceRaider, which runs quietly in the background taking pictures at random and transmitting the picture along with location and orientation data!

So, were it to infest my camera, it would get basically three kinds of pictures:

• The inside of my shirt pocket
• My left forefinger
• The shelf where I keep it at night while it charges

If I had a newer model with a front-facing camera, it could transmit even more damaging images:

• An index card
• My left ear
• My face
• The underside of a shelf

And I'll have you know I don't share images of my left ear with just anyone!

Means, end, what's the difference?

So there's this thing making the rounds about lines of scientific endeavor which have the potential for both great benefit and great harm.

One of the lines selected for its dire potential is geoengineering.  Well, the potential upside is obvious.  The risk?  There's some muttering about unintended consequences, unpredictable changes to weather patterns, and the like - you know, the sort of thing you can get from biofuel plantations, wind farms, and large solar installations - but the really big danger is this: geoengineering might solve the climate-change problem and render the entire current climate-change political agenda irrelevant.

Yup.  The activists are fully invested in a specific agenda for addressing climate change (one which even their advocates admit won't solve the problem), and can't accept the idea that the goal of preventing catastrophic anthropogenic global warming might be achieved in some other way.

Isn't there some proverb to the effect that the means should be justified by the end?

Terrorist EMP menace!

Well... that's the buzz, anyway.

Suppose Iran, or some non-state actor, got hold of a nuke and a way of lofting it?  All it takes is one little nuke in the upper atmosphere to knock out everything electrical in the U.S., right?

Um.  Let's take a look at an actual EMP event, shall we?  Starfish Prime caused significant disruption (not total destruction) of electrical and electronic systems 900 miles away.

And that was a 1.4 MT bomb.  Not a 14 KT fission bomb; a bloody great fusion bomb.

So... to create widespread destruction... our hypothetical enemy needs to use his hypothetical fission bomb that any serious industrial power ought to be able to build (but many seem to struggle with)... and use it to light off a megaton-range H-bomb, which is not widely regarded as being an easily-built item even given the fission trigger.

And then they need a missile capable of delivering that H-bomb (close to a ton, for a well-evolved design in 1958; likely much more for a first try) around 250 miles above the middle of the U.S.  And, if it doesn't have the range to do that from their own territory, they'll need a place to launch it from - maybe a cargo ship; I don't think Cuba would want to play that game this year.

And, looking at the effects described for Starfish Prime, just one of those bombs would create a Big Annoying Inconvenience.  What did the feller say about striking at a king?  We'd have plenty of resources left to track down the perpetrator and retaliate memorably.  A successful, properly crippling attack would need several H-bombs, and several missiles, and... well, basically, we're looking at Russia, or China, or just maybe France or England being able to pull it off.

And, somehow, I don't think anyone's been testing H-bombs without us and the Russians noticing - nor the big missiles, for that matter.  So, the sneak attack by a new Power would involve a bunch of untested hardware.  How good do we think their mathematicians and rocket plumbers are?

Gee, ya think?

(Starting over after the Monkeysphere mishap.)

According to this article, "markets" dominated by high-speed automated trading can - surprise! - exhibit wild behavior.

Quotable:

These kinds of trades appear to generate emergent behaviour that has nothing to do with the actual value of a company. Instead, these events are unavoidable properties of the system itself.

Like I said: school of anchovies.

As Joy likes to point out: "The trend is your friend, until it ends."  The objective of these super-fast trading algorithms is to be the fastest lemming in the swarm, and to turn aside just before the cliff.

Thing is, even if you are the lead lemming, it's a little tricky to spot the cliff in time to turn aside.

And, if you're not the lead lemming, there's no way you can see what the swarm is responding to.  You may be offered an explanation at 11, on The News for Lemmings, but the commentator really knows little more about it than you; he saw which way the swarm moved, and may have heard some rumors as to the reason, but the reality is probably that someone tripped, or was startled by a grasshopper, creating a minor perturbation that the swarm amplified.

Ah, so that's where he's spending his summer vacation.

Apparently, there's a HUGE CYLINDRICAL ALIEN SPACESHIP right near Mercury, revealed by a recent coronal mass ejection.

Except that the spaceship itself need not be huge, nor cylindrical; that could just as well be the shadow of the protective field of a much smaller craft.  Say, something the size of a police box.

Yeah, it's just the TARDIS, right where the Doctor parked it on April 22.  Another fortnight or so, and he'll get bored and go find another adventure, just wait and see.

Or, wait: does Mercury have a magnetic field?  That hole in the CME doesn't look quite right for a planetary magnetic field (though I'm not sure of the perspective), but a big black magnetic anomaly (like the one We Weren't Told About a decade ago) lying on the surface might just do the trick.