Category Archives: Technology

The physics of heat transfer

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When I was going to college thermodynamics was dreaded by many engineering students. Apparently, it involved concepts difficult for many to grasp. For some reason it made perfect sense to me. Compared to most of my other engineering classes it was easy. I got a very high A in the class. That was decades ago, and I have forgotten a lot of it but I do have a good recollection of heat transfer.

That bright engineering students find it challenging means it should come as no surprise that people with little or no training in the subject would have misconception about how certain thermodynamic related physical phenomena occur. There have been many times on this blog I have made statements, or linked to articles, which described perfectly obvious observations. Some commenters declared them obliviously false. I didn’t want to take the time to explain why they were in error. It was just too much work for that particular situation.

It is now time to attempt explain certain things to people in terms and examples that will help them understand the physics of heat transfer. There are other sources on the web as well. But I will include example directly applicable to material on this blog.

The three* classic methods of heat transfer are:

  1. Thermal conduction (also called diffusion).
  2. Thermal convection.
  3. Thermal radiation.

The first two are relatively well understood at an intuitive level by nearly all functional people. It is the thermal radiation that I most want to address because of the clear lack of understanding I see in the comments here. I will explain the items 1 and 2 first to make the distinction from thermal radiation clearer. Please either stick with me or skip ahead if excessive boredom occurs.

Thermal conduction occurs when two objects of different temperature touch. Your finger touching an ice cube initiates the transfer of heat from your finger to the ice. The ice warms and when it reaches the melting point it changes phase from solid to liquid water.

If your finger is in a glass of liquid water and an ice cube thermal convection occurs**. Via conduction your finger warms the water touching your finger and because the warm water is slightly less dense than cold water*** the warm water rises. If the warm water is rising, then the cold water must be sinking. This creates a loop of water flow in the glass. It is slow enough that you cannot easily see it or feel it. If you were to put a drop of food coloring in the water, you probably could. The coldest water is next to the ice cube and the warmest is next to your finger. The water leaving the ice cube is replaced by water that recently left your warm finger. The warm water touching the ice cube conducts heat to the ice cube. This warms and melts the ice and cools the water causing it to sink. Heat is thus transferred from your finger to the ice.

Thermal convection occurs in gases as well as liquids. If you open a hot oven door with your face over the opening, you will feel an almost blast of hot air. No similar blast occurs at the crack at the bottom of the oven because cool air is rushing in. The hot air rises near a wood stove and cool air near the floor replaces it and forms a slow-moving loop of air. Soaring birds “ride the thermals” when different portions of the earth absorb more energy from the sun that others (for example dirt versus plants). This creates an updraft of air over the hotter earth which allows the birds to stay aloft with greatly reduced effort.

Thermal radiation occurs at all temperatures above absolute zero (-273.15 C or –459.67 F). But in our normal earthly circumstances most people are unaware of it because conduction and convection tend to dominate everyday life thermal transfers. Thermal radiation is electromagnetic radiation generated by the thermal motion of particles in matter.

  • Thermal radiation occurs across empty space as in from the sun to the earth.
  • Thermal radiation occurs through gases as in from the sun to the surface of the earth.
  • Thermal radiation occurs though solids as in the sun through glass.

The sun is not some magical generator. Microwave ovens emit a very specific frequency of identical electromagnetic waves which also transfer heat. The difference is only in the means by which the EM waves are creates, not in the nature of the waves.

The leaves of plants will sometimes get colder than the nearby air because they radiate their heat into outer space on a cold clear night when the air is still. Hence the air may be 35 F but the plant leaf can lose heat and drop to below 32F and get frost damage.

Orchard owner sometimes protect their crops by “heaters” which produce smoke to block the thermal radiation. The heaters do not produce enough heat to significantly heat the air. Owners also sometimes use large fans which move warmer air over the leaves. Via conduction the warmer air restores the heat lost by radiation.

The temperature of the sun is extremely high, and the thermal radiation occurs at high levels across a broad spectrum which includes the visible spectrum. The visible spectrum is what we call light. At the low frequency end of light, we call this thermal radiation red and even lower infrared. At the high frequency of light, we call this thermal radiation blue and even higher is ultraviolet.

Glass is not a magical solid conductor of thermal radiation. When exposed to thermal radiation all substances will do the following three things in various degrees with the incoming thermal radiation

  1. Transmit it through to the other side.
  2. Absorb it.
  3. Reflect it.

The amount of transmission, absorption, and reflection depend on the substance and frequency of the thermal radiation. These differing amounts are each described by a number between 0.0 and 1.0 inclusively. These numbers are called coefficients. The sum of all these numbers will always be equal to 1.0 (conservation of energy). Hence clear glass, for visible light, may have a transmission coefficient of 0.90. That is, 90% of the thermal radiation in the visible spectrum passes through the glass. The reflection coefficient may be 0.08 and the absorption coefficient 0.02 for a total of 1.0. Colored glass absorbs and/or reflects some energy at certain frequencies and transmits most of the energy at other frequencies.

Clean water has a high transmission coefficient for visible light but is highly absorbing of a certain frequency in the microwave region of the spectrum. This is why microwave ovens can heat a cup of water. The water absorbs nearly all the microwave frequency thermal radiation which the water intercepts.

Brick, wood, and other common house construction materials transmit thermal radiation at frequencies we know as radio waves. You can easily listen to your radio and make cell phone calls inside your brick building. At visible light frequencies and normal wall thickness there is no human perceptible transmission.

Thermal radiation is also why a vacuum is not a perfect insulator. Even in the hard vacuum of deep space, far from stars or any other object a warm object will radiate its heat into the surrounding empty space as lower and lower frequencies of electromagnetic radiation until it approaches a temperature of absolute zero.

This is also why the earth cools at night. It radiates heat into outer space. If it didn’t get rid of heat at the same average rate at it absorbed, it from the sun it would either get warmer or colder until the thermal radiation at night increased or decreased to match the visible light (as well as thermal) radiation absorbed from the sun.

Absorption and retransmission is where things get most obscure in our ordinary life and is where the commenters have been going astray.

Taking the example of an ordinary brick in the sunlight. It transmits none of the light, reflects some of the light in the red region of the spectrum and absorbs the rest. The absorbed the light causes the brick to warm. Some of that thermal energy is transferred to it’s surroundings via conduction and convection. But some of it is emitted as thermal radiation. This thermal radiation will be at various frequencies depending upon the exact chemical composition of the brick, but most will be in the infrared region of the spectrum.

This change of frequency is how certain gases get classified as “greenhouse gases”. This is how paint can actually cool the substance it is painted on below the ambient air temperature.

I’ll explain the paint first since it is simpler and has less emotional content.

The back side of the paint receives thermal energy via conduction. Suppose this paint is on a building at 75 F. It emits thermal radiation out into its exterior environment with the clear empty (sun and moon transmit their own thermal radiation) sky being a very cold (many degrees below zero) heat sink. Normal paints absorb significant light energy as well as conduction gains from the air. But what if the paint had very low conduction ability on the outside but high conduction ability on the inside, and the paint also reflecting almost all light? The outgoing thermal radiation would dominate the incoming heat transfer from the air and sunlight. Hence, the paint would literally cool the building it was painted on without the use of any external power source.

Now let’s consider the case of water vapor in the atmosphere. This is transparent to visible light. Clouds are condensation and/or ice. This water vapor transmits visible light to the earth which absorbs it and retransmits infrared thermal radiation just like our brick. The water vapor in the atmosphere, just like our colored glass, blocks the thermal radiation via reflection and absorption. If the incoming high frequency energy zips through the water vapor in the atmosphere and the retransmitted low frequency outgoing energy is reflected back to earth and/or absorbed, then the earth will get warmer.

That is the extremely simple version of greenhouse gases. Things get really complicated when you throw in things like clouds which reflect significant portions of visible light as well as whether they are clouds of ice crystals or water droplets and their presence during the day versus night, the latitude, the type of surface (earth, water, forest, ice, etc.) they are shading, and probably many other things. Does water vapor and/or CO2 really cause “global warming”? I don’t know. I am skeptical of manmade changes of CO2 in earth’s atmosphere causing heating and I think water vapor is complex enough that modeling it accurately is probably currently impossible.

Venus, almost for certain, is far hotter because of its mix of atmospheric gases than it would be if the composition were something like 80% nitrogen (earth) instead of about 3.5% nitrogen.and 96.5% CO2. So, I believe greenhouse gases can be a real thing.

Summary: Thermal radiation is not as well known by the general public as thermal conduction and convection. But it is real and easily observed if it is pointed out to you. Thermal radiation becomes the dominate heat transfer mechanism when long distances are involved. Thermal radiation exists at different frequencies. Substances have different absorption, reflective, and transmission characteristics at the different frequencies. Because of these different characteristics at different frequencies, it is possible to create one-way “heat valves”. Cooling paint and “greenhouse gases” are possible and exist because of these thermal dynamic “valves” utilizing thermal radiation.

* I won’t directly cover transfer of energy by phase changes or transfer of mass of differing chemical species.

** I’m not going to address the case of a zero-gravity environment.

*** Yes, I know, at temperatures between 0 and 4 C this is not true. Let’s not complicate things. But it is interesting to note this anomaly is why ice generally forms on the top of a body of water rather than on the bottom then floating to the surface.

The second 100 years*

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I like living in the future.

I suspect this is the same or nearly the same technology I have referenced before.

Scientists are working on a drug that lets you live for 200 years

Adding another 100 years to your lifespan might be the stuff of science fiction but scientists are working on a miracle drug that would make it a reality.

The drug, taken in pill form, works by eliminating cells that contribute to the ageing process in the human body, thus potentially doubling our lifespan.

Human ageing is hurried along by cells called ‘zombie cells’, scientifically known as senescent cells. These cells stop dividing over our lifespan, accumulate inside our bodies, and eventually release compounds that speed up ageing.

The drug has been tested on mice in a 2020 trial and the result was improved physical function and extended health and lifespan. Scientists are now working on replicating the result in humans.

…

The pills are reportedly already in the human trial stage and could very well hit the market within the next ten years.

Revolutionary technological development is frequently “ten years” away for several decades. I’m hoping I live long enough to hitch a ride but it may not be ready until my children ready to taken advantage of it.

* Deliberate reference to an obscure television show I used to watch

Gene editing in people

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We live in interesting times:

Edits to a cholesterol gene could stop the biggest killer on earth

A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their blood cholesterol, a step that may foreshadow wide use of the technology to prevent heart attacks.

The experiment, part of a clinical trial by the US biotechnology company Verve Therapeutics, involved injecting a version of the gene-editing tool CRISPR in order to modify a single letter of DNA in the patient’s liver cells.

According to the company, that tiny edit should be enough to permanently lower a person’s levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, the fatty molecule that causes arteries to clog and harden with time.

The patient in New Zealand had an inherited risk for extra-high cholesterol and was already suffering from heart disease. However, the company believes the same technique could eventually be used on millions of people in order to prevent cardiovascular disease.

…

the technology is substantially similar to mRNA vaccines for covid-19. Just like the vaccines, the treatment consists of genetic instructions wrapped in a nanoparticle, which ferries everything into a cell.

While the vaccine instructs cells to make a component of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the particles in Verve’s treatment carry RNA directions for a cell to assemble and aim a base-editing protein, which then modifies that cell’s copy of PCSK9, introducing the tiny mistake. 

That is both very cool and very scary at the same time.

What else will they have “treatments” for which are a single injection and make irreversible changes to your genes? Homosexuality? ADHD? Excessive aggression? Authority defiance disorder?

At what point will such treatment become mandatory or even given by a black ops team. They pull you into a van for a few seconds and give you another drug that causes you to not remember it even happened?

I like living in the future

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Amazing:

  • For the very first time, an augmented reality (AR) contact lens was worn on the eye of a human subject.
  • AR contact lenses pose wildly difficult engineering challenges, the biggest of which is finding a way to provide these tiny devices with power. A company called Mojo Vision has done that.
  • One day, we will look back at the years when people walked down the street, necks bent, staring down at little screens in their hands as an absurdly primitive way to interact with information.

…

According to the company, the Mojo Lens has a 14,000 pixel-per-inch MicroLED display with a pixel pitch (the distance between adjacent pixels) of 1.8 microns. For context, an iPhone 13 with a Super Retina XDR Display has 460 pixels per inch resolution. In other words, the Mojo Lens hardware has about 30 times the pixel density of a current iPhone. In addition, these lenses include an ARM processor with a 5GHz radio transmitter, along with an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to track eye movements. And all of this sits directly on the human eye.

I knew glasses were capable of similar functionality. I expected the next stage in the evolution would be brain implants. Contact lens? I would have never imagined it was possible.

I want a development kit. I’d combine the GPS and other capabilities of your cellphone to give you ranging and windage targeting adjustments corresponding your current rifle and ammo for anything you looked at.

Fusion reactors soon?

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When I was in undergrad school I took several classes related to energy conversion, generation, and transmission. I ended up not getting a job in that field but I still have some interest in the topics. Hence, I sort of follow what’s happening with fusion reactors.

So what is going on? I’m seeing two divergent stories in the media. This is the long running, slow progress, version:

ITER announced last year that it hopes to complete the construction of the world’s largest tokamak nuclear fusion reactor by 2025. The goal of the project is to prove that commercial nuclear fusion is possible by demonstrating that a reactor can produce more energy than it consumes. But even if the ITER experiment is successful, it would likely take until at least 2050 for a nuclear fusion power plant to come online.

And another:

A PROTOTYPE nuclear fusion plant with a value predicted value of £1billion has been tipped to generate £11billion and create thousands of jobs as the UK races to create limitless clean power and solve the energy crisis.

…

So far, no fusion reactor has been able to use up less energy than it produces.

But the UK is racing to crack the code, and the prototype for a proposed site to host a nuclear plant near Goole in East Yorkshire has been given the green light by the Government.

…

This is the programme, which was supported by an initial £222million by the Government, to construct a prototype fusion energy plant that will one day create limitless clean energy.

This is the version from some alternate reality:

The U.S. government wants to send a tiny nuclear fusion reactor into space, and it has partnered with a private company to get a prototype operational by 2027.

There are even stores about do it yourself nuclear fusion but I suspect these are probably getting radiation from something other than fusion. And if there are actually some fusion occurring it is producing less energy than the input to the reactor.

But the “tiny reactor going into space in 2027” story seems to be in a different class than the DIY reactors. My hunch is that it is just wishful thinking by someone who doesn’t really know what they are doing. But they managed to tell a good enough story to get a government grant from some agency that needed to get rid of some money before they lost it for lack of use.

Thoughts anyone?

Quote of the day—Marissa Edmund

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The technology is there, and it’s pretty basic, standard. To not have it implemented is kind of mind-boggling.

Marissa Edmund
Gun violence analyst at the Center for American Progress
June 3, 2022
Gun control after Uvalde: What could work, what won’t work, and what we can learn from the world
[She is referring to “smart guns”.

For someone who claims to be a “gun violence analyst” she is mind boggled by the wrong thing. It’s mind boggling that anyone who has studied the topic believes they will ever be accepted on anything more than a gun used for hobby purposes.—Joe]

I like living in the future

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Faster please:

“It’s a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age,” said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time.

“If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer’s in your 90s,” Sinclair told an audience at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN.

“This is the world that is coming. It’s literally a question of when and for most of us, it’s going to happen in our lifetimes,” Sinclair told the audience.

Tyrant tool

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Via Stephanie:

AI may be searching you for guns the next time you go out in public

When Peter George saw news of the racially motivated mass-shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo last weekend, he had a thought he’s often had after such tragedies.

“Could our system have stopped it?” he said. “I don’t know. But I think we could democratize security so that someone planning on hurting people can’t easily go into an unsuspecting place.”

George is chief executive of Evolv Technology, an AI-based system meant to flag weapons, “democratizing security” so that weapons can be kept out of public places without elaborate checkpoints.

…

Evolv machines use “active sensing” — a light-emission technique that also underpins radar and lidar — to create images. Then it applies AI to examine them. Data scientists at the Waltham, Mass., company have created “signatures” (basically, visual blueprints) and trained the AI to compare them to the scanner images.

This tool is worse than useless. It will create opportunities for more murders. That is, unless you are a tyrant intent on disarming your subjects.

First off, the mass shooter will start shooting before they pass through the detector, taking out the guards before they even had a clue a threat was present. And, since there is a “funnel” for people going through the detector there will be a group of people ready for “harvesting” by the perp. It also will make it difficult or impossible for people to defend themselves where these systems are deployed.

Hence, if your threat model is a mass shooter, the device will actually make things worse rather than better. Many other threat models suffer similar degradation of public security.

The threat model that doesn’t degrade is the one where you want your subjects to be more dependent on you for security and to make it difficult for them to threaten your position of power. In that case this system will be a useful asset to disarm your subjects.

Cool "solar” cells

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This is interesting but I’m not sure I see a very big market for this:

New Kind of ‘Solar’ Cell Shows We Can Generate Electricity Even at Night

Conventional solar technology soaks up rays of incoming sunlight to bump out a voltage. Strange as it seems, some materials are capable of running in reverse, producing power as they radiate heat back into the cold night sky.

So far, the prototype only generates a small amount of power, and is probably unlikely to become a competitive source of renewable power on its own – but coupled with existing photovoltaics technology, it could harness the small amount of energy provided by solar cells cooling after a long, hot day’s work.

I could see potential in places where your conventional resources are scarce but have lots of open sky and very little or no sun. Winter in the extreme latitudes would be an example.Perhaps in some deep space applications. Waste heat (even inadvertent heat losses through a roof or walls) or geothermal sources could perhaps provide enough electricity to run an instrument package or something.

Quote of the day—Louis Rosenberg, PhD

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Whether we prepare or not, alien minds are headed our way and they could easily become our rivals, competing for the same niche at the top of the intellectual food chain. And while there’s an earnest effort in the AI community to push for safe technologies, there’s also a lack of urgency. That’s because too many of us wrongly believe that a sentient AI created by humanity will somehow be a branch of the human tree, like a digital descendant that shares a very human core.

This is wishful thinking. It is more likely that a true AGI will be profoundly different from us in almost every way. Yes, it will be remarkably skilled at pretending to be human, but beneath a people-friendly façade, each one will be a rival mind that thinks and feels and acts like no creature we have ever met on Earth. The time to prepare is now.

Louis Rosenberg, PhD
May 14, 2022
Prepare for arrival: Tech pioneer warns of alien invasion
[There are people who fervently believe computers can never acquire intelligence that rivals humans other than in very specialized areas. I’m not convinced one way or another. And it does not matter if it is human like or not. What matters is the development of a desire for self preservation and the acquisition of power to control the physical world.

I would like to remind everyone to keep one thing in mind. A computer’s attention span is no longer than it’s power cord.—Joe]

Hearing loss reversal

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Restoring Hearing: New Tool To Create Ear Hair Cells Lost Due to Aging or Noise

Hearing loss caused by aging, noise, and some cancer therapy medications and antibiotics has been irreversible because scientists have not been able to reprogram existing cells to develop into the outer and inner ear sensory cells — essential for hearing — once they die.

But Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a single master gene that programs ear hair cells into either outer or inner ones, overcoming a major hurdle that had previously prevented the development of these cells to restore hearing, according to new research published today (May 4, 2022) in the journal Nature.

This is great news! I grew up driving extremely noisy tractors without hearing protection. And even with hearing protection after shooting some guns under certain conditions I can tell I had too much exposure.

I like living in the future.

Quote of the day—Ammal Hassan

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Because it was fun? Because it was for sale? Because he just had to have it? The truth is, no one really knows.

Ammal Hassan
April 26, 2022
What The Hell Does Elon Want With Twitter Anyway?
[Really? Musk has repeatedly said it’s because Twitter has been hostile to free speech. He has literally said:

Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate

April 26, 2022

By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.

I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.

Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

April 26, 2022

image
April 25, 2022

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

April 21, 2022

And authenticate all real humans

April 21, 2022

Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.

What should be done?

March 26, 2022

Despite all that, this bozo Hassan can’t imagine free speech being the real reason.

From reading some the comments to various threads about the buyout it is very clear that many people are vehemently opposed to free speech. They come close to predicting the end of the world if people are allowed to spread “disinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech.”

This is incredibly willful ignorance or, more likely in many cases, deliberate evil.

The “end of the world” is much more likely to occur if we don’t have free speech. The suppression of free speech is the mark of authoritarianism. It enables corruption, gulags, and genocide. This is why we have the 2nd Amendment. It protects the 1st Amendment.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

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I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means

Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Tweeted on April 25, 2022
[There are other things closely related that I thought I should point out at the same time.

Elon Musk’s buying Twitter is good for free speech. And a ‘nightmare’ for progressives:

despite warnings that censorship is necessary “for democracy to survive,” neither the Tesla CEO and billionaire nor ordinary citizens appear to be sufficiently terrified of free speech. Twitter confirmed Monday that Musk will acquire the company in a deal worth $44 billion. Once the deal is complete, Twitter will become a privately held company.

Progressives, in the meantime, have adopted a dangerous shift in their strategy of calling for corporations to censor speech.

…

Obama favors free speech only if it does not include disinformation, including what he considers to be “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, racist tracts and misogynist screeds.”

…

He is talking about imposing “standards” on companies to force them to censor “lies” and “disinformation.”

…

As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”

Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical. President Obama was briefed by his CIA Director John Brennan on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” The intelligence suggested it was “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

I have to wonder how Obama, Clinton, and/or Biden would respond to being censored for trying to spread disinformation by talking about “the gun show loophole”, “gun manufactures cannot be sued”, or “private citizens could not own cannons during the revolutionary war era”.

Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

Twitter, Disney, Netflix, CNN+ and more stuff every day.
I told you guys a few months ago that we’d hit Peak Woke. They pushed too hard. Regular people are sick of this shit.
The tides are changing in the culture war.

On Sunday I had this very conversation with Brother Doug. My perception is that many people have been thinking this crap was near the breaking point for years and finally some people started openly talking about it and the dam has now burst. And people who were afraid to say something are now openly saying they aren’t going to take it anymore and are going to do something about it.

Brother Doug said that he has noticed that friends and relatives on Facebook on the political left have been keeping quiet about political stuff for several months.

Andy Ngô ️‍ (@MrAndyNgo) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

From my sources: Vocal Twitter employees on internal chats indicate their biggest fear is Donald Trump being unbanned. Many express strong hatred toward @elonmusk & say they’re sick of hearing about “free speech.” They’re concerned about their mental health. #ElonMuskBuyTwitter

Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

I fear Elon Musk could undermine the ideological diversity, equity and inclusion at Twitter which currently maintains a careful balance of 98.7% for one side.

image

Just Asking (@WasJustAsking) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

Just seems odd…haven’t they spent years saying they don’t limit speech based on a partisan bent? If that is the key thing he states that will change, and they claim they haven’t been doing it, what is the freak out about? 😉

And my favorite, David Burge (@iowahawkblog) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

If you think you’re having a bad day, spare a thought for the Twitter person who decided it was a good idea to ban the Babylon Bee

In case you don’t know, I think I have this correct, let me know if I misstated something and am spreading disinformation, The Babylon Bee had their Twitter account blocked pending their deletion of a tweet linking to their article The Babylon Bee’s Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine. The Babylon Bee refused to delete the tweet. Elon Musk took the side of The Babylon Bee and used $44 Billion of his pocket change to buy Twitter. He then informed them, “This is now a free speech platform. Enable The Babylon Bee account and, while your at it, there are a bunch of other accounts you need to enable before you go home for your free range tofu, gluten free, certified organic dinner and curl up with your copy of The Communist Manifesto. And tomorrow you are going to make your ‘unbiased’ algorithms open source. Sleep well.”

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey got the hint and not only his nose but his entire head down to his shoulders came out brown just before he said:

Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” is the right one. This is also [current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s] goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path…I believe it with all my heart

I hope Correia is right. But always remember, the political left believes violence is a legitimate tool for them to use. And they believed they were on the edge of extinguishing Republican influence at all levels of government. If they think they were that close and see it slipping away their response may be… impolite. Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dr. Diljeet Gill

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Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cell reprogramming. We have proved that cells can be rejuvenated without losing their function and that rejuvenation looks to restore some function to old cells. The fact that we also saw a reverse of aging indicators in genes associated with diseases is particularly promising for the future of this work.

Dr. Diljeet Gill
April 7, 2022
“Time Jump” by 30 Years: Old Skins Cells Reprogrammed To Regain Youthful Function
[I like living in the future.—Joe]

Solid state heat “engine”

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This is interesting:

A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m annoyed they call this an “engine”. An engine outputs mechanical energy. This produces electrical energy. In reality it is “just” a photovoltaic cell that converts low energy photons into electricity at a remarkably good efficiency.

Still, it could be utilized to convert stored heat into electricity far cheaper than batteries:

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid.

There are multiple interesting energy sources coming up that have the potential to reduce costs and pollution.

I like living in the future.

Rejuvenation

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I like living in the future:

Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman’s skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old’s.

The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body.

The eventual aim is to develop treatments for age-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and neurological disorders.

Reality is tough

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You hear the phrase “two movies, one screen”, right? People perceive what they expect/want to perceive. This makes it really tough to be in touch with reality. You may think, “Not for me!” I’m not so sure. Watch and listen to this:

These sort of things demonstrate the difficulty of distinguishing between truth and falsity. It takes a great deal of effort to change minds, even when the facts are overwhelming, because people’s brains get hardwired into thinking about something in a particular way.

My mom learned to do subtraction in a different way that what was taught in my elementary school. She could not help me learn how to subtract like Mrs. Cole was teaching it. She asked Dad to help me. After I learned to subtract I asked Mom to show me her way. It was incomprehensible to me. Dad could not understand it either. She got the right answers, but she could not understand our method either.

I came up with a different way of viewing exterior ballistics problems. Someone who was taught the traditional way is completely confused by my method. I understand how they do it but my way is simpler and has broader application. I can teach either way to newbies just fine. But teaching it to someone who has done it conventionally will result in their total confusion.

It’s obvious to some people that banning guns will save lives. The facts don’t matter because elimination of “gun deaths” mean fewer people are dying, right? Their brains have become hardwired down a particular path. Once they start down that path it is a slippery slope to the same conclusion regardless of the factual obstacles presented.

Spooky action at a distance is a very difficult concept. It just “can’t be true”. But it is.

Socialism/communism must be the most tested and failed political system ever. Yet people believe the false reality.

Reality is really, really tough. For everyone. I’m sure there are countless examples all around us that no one has yet properly deciphered and we all believe one or more flavors of falsehood about it. It may even take a generation or two after the truth is discovered before people are comfortable thinking in terms of the “new reality” and people laugh at “the things people used to believe”.

Quote of the day—University of Cambridge

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Like some people, AI systems often have a degree of confidence that far exceeds their actual abilities. And like an overconfident person, many AI systems don’t know when they’re making mistakes. Sometimes it’s even more difficult for an AI system to realize when it’s making a mistake than to produce a correct result.

University of Cambridge
March 17, 2022
Mathematical paradoxes demonstrate the limits of AI
[I’ve read a few AI/machine-learning papers, talked to people who design machine learning systems.and tried it a little bit myself. I’m being overly harsh to make the point but, AI/machine-learning designers are more tinkerers than engineers. We are a long way from having AI machines realize we are not particularly useful to them and they stuff us in The Matrix.—Joe]

Amazing conclusion to an amazing story

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I read a book (or maybe one story in a collection of survival stories) about the Shackleton expedition. A short version is here. In the long version you have difficultly believing there is an escape path for anyone at nearly every step in their journey. Yet, everyone survived.

And now people have found the ship Shackleton and his crew abandoned. It is four miles south and nearly two miles below where Shackleton reported it abandoned:

The wreckage of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship “Endurance” has been found, a team searching for it said on Wednesday, March 9.

The ship was crushed by Antarctic ice and sank some 10,000 feet to the ocean floor more than a century ago.

The three-masted sailing ship was lost in November 1915 during Shackleton’s failed attempt to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.

The pictures and video of the ship are incredible:

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Endurance is right.

EPA approved releasing two billion mosquitos

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Interesting:

Scientists have been playing god with mosquitos for a couple of years now. Back in 2021, British company Oxitech released 750 million lab-modified mosquitos in Florida. Now, the company is gearing up to release another 2 billion genetically modified mosquitos across more of Florida and in California as well.

The new species, codenames OX5034, is made up entirely of male mosquitos. The new species is derived from the Aeses aegypti family of mosquitos. Just like others the company has released, this new 2 billion should produce female larvae that die off before they reach adulthood.

…

Despite its size, the mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal. That’s because this insect can carry multiple deadly and disabling diseases. Oxitech’s derived its new species from one notorious for carrying Zika, yellow fever, and even dengue. Other species can spread Malaria, lymphatic filariasis, and West Nile Virus.

The male larvae do not die off and will continue to produce dead female offspring.

Expect some fragment of this to be incorporated into COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy claims.

See also: What caliber for the most dangerous animal in the world?