The Peristaltic Testator

For beer pouring, that is. These local boys have invented a beer pouring system that delivers the brew from the bottom of the cup, enabling a single tap to produce 14 beers per minute.

14 beers per minute. Say goodbye to the line at the ball game. More game, less waiting.

Years ago, I stumbled upon (and was inspired by) a device that turned garbage into electricity:

The "tactical biorefinery" processes several kinds of waste at once, which it converts into fuel via two parallel processes. . . .

The tactical biorefinery first separates organic food material from residual trash, such as paper, plastic, Styrofoam and cardboard. The food waste goes to a bioreactor where industrial yeast ferments it into ethanol, a "green" fuel. Residual materials go to a gasifier where they are heated under low-oxygen conditions and eventually become low-grade propane gas and methane. The gas and ethanol are then combusted in a modified diesel engine that powers a generator to produce electricity.

One commenter to that post, atlasimpure, was later re-activated by the Marines and deployed to that theater of war known by combatants as "The Sandbox." A year after I posted about the garbage power thingie, he snapped a picture (in a locked post) of a "molten carbonate fuel cell" access gate.

That tickled memories. King County Metro had installed just such a system at its South Treatment Plant a few years prior:

. . . . [P]luses of fuel cells include few moving parts, modular design, negligible emission of pollutants, and the ability to provide electricity without adding transmission lines and substations. (I emboldened.)

Diesel generators have lots of moving parts and the maintenance difficulties attendant thereto, giving fuel cells operational cost benefit to that original garbage-fueled power device. If, as the King County site mentions, the purchase cost per kilowatt falls, fuel cells will have a distinct advantage over mechanical gen sets. Ah, but here's a question: Why would the military be dumping R&D dollars into energy conservation?

Part of the answer I answered myself in a reply to atlasimpure: "Constantly running gensets are proving fuel hogs in country. That's a problem when one considers the supply line complexity and the need for go-juice for real applications. I've read the military is trying new options for reducing waste and powering the bases."

What I had not considered was how intensely the military was pursuing these "new options." From a Canadian publication The Tyee, we learn:

It all started when insurgents targeted the military's long, cumbersome fuel supply lines with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). When the 400-mile-long highway from the port of Kuwait to Baghdad became a shooting gallery, diesel fuel became a liability in a country floating on oil.

In some months, as many as 40 to 50 Marines died guarding convoys ferrying fuel and water to forward bases. Most perished in blown-up Humvees.

In response, Maj.-Gen Richard Zilmer, the commander of 30,000 marines in western Iraq, issued a startling "priority one" request in 2006. Recognizing that oil had become a tactical liability, he called for a "self sustainable energy solution."

Zilmer argued that green power could reduce "the number of convoys while providing an additional capability to outlying bases ...with photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines."

It got better. This philosophy extended to areas of military culture far beyond the simple supply of electricity:

For starters, the military insulated tents with foam to reduce the demand for diesel generators to run air conditioners. (The military earned back the $95-million investment in fuel savings in just six months.) (I again highlighted boldly).

I read about that original trash digestor in 2007. Research proceeded rapidly, it seems. We now have what I suspect is another variant of the original molten carbonate cell packaged in a smaller box, popularly known as The Bloom Box. The 60 Minutes piece contains the usual poor journalistic hype. For example, the first paragraph of the transcript claims this device has "no emissions;" fuel cells, though cleaner than mechanical combustion, must emit. Still, it seemed promising. And interestingly, according to the piece, Colin Powell joined the company's board of directors, further strengthening the military's ties to this greener shift.

It's sad it took so many lives to convince the military of the conservation's importance, but that's human nature. We do not change without crisis.

And speaking of crisis, Rear Admiral Lawrence Rice ". . . . thinks that peak oil will occur by 2015 and that the U.S. government is not prepared for future oil shocks." Not prepared for oil shocks? I'd agree with that. That totally sounds like us Americans. But 2015? Take a peek at this table displaying World Crude Oil Production from 1960-2009 from the Department of Energy. Head down to 2005's world production numbers (far right column). Then continue down the column. Gee, wasn't the big cost increase in gas at the pump after 2005? Yes, that was 2008, wasn't it? And didn't that spur a huge wave of new crude supply exploration?

So why was 2005's world production volume larger than 2008's?

Welcome to peak oil, Admiral Rice, probably ten years ahead of (your) schedule.

darksumomo found the Tyee article; babystrangeloop added the Department of Energy table.

I have for several weeks now been contemplating subjects, as the phrase goes, way above my pay grade, specifically why today's economic woes might be far more severe than even a press known for glorying in maim and gore is willing to investigate. It's been difficult, to say the least. There is so much I simply don't know. Hey, don't believe me? Go back to an old entry, Understanding the Economic Clusterfuck, and read the new prefixed addendum and disclaimer I recently added:

Disclaimer, June 16, 2010: Much of the information you read below is wrong. I wrote this before I read ellenbrown's Web of Debt. Therefore, I missed details extremely important to the thrust of this post.

For example, below I state that interest is created through loans. This is incorrect. The money issued at the time the loan is finalized is the money actually created. Money is literally loaned into existence by banks, not printed by the Federal Government as everyone seems to assume.

I'm sure I'll post an update soon. For now, though, I intend to leave the post below intact. It will give me a chance to review what I've learned over the years by showing me what I believed in the past to be true. I apologize for the mis-information.

With that kind of track record, I should just quit while I'm far, far, far behind. Ah, but that's the danger of learning new stuff and wanting to share it. Try as I may to make declarations of firm substance and indisputable truth, I find myself constantly learning something else that's new to me and needing to correct the record. Yes, if I just shut up and said nothing I would say nothing wrong. But if I were that kind of person, I wouldn't be much of a blogger, now would I?

For that reason, I have decided to lay as much as I have on the table and see what newly acquired items of factual interest in the future obviates the table's heap into a steaming pile of poo. Let's start with the reason I think markets work -- ( Sir Francis Galton. )

Scientific American shared this video of a new anti-mosquito zapping system. It can flash zap several mosquitoes per second, meaning people might be able in the future to set up this device around a campfire in mosquito-prone areas and roast their wieners in peace. And maybe avoid malaria in the process. Here's the developer's site.

Furthermore, since the system zeros in on its targets by triangulating on their wings sounds, it can be set to discriminate between skeeters that bite (the females) and those don't (those hunting packs of males), thus saving the battery life for zaps that matter.

I have an iPod. Not the fancy, wheel-controlled or touch-screen equipped money pits, but a simple iPod Nano (without the proprietary DRM earbuds). It does what I want of it. It provides audio content while costing less than my $60 limit, the amount of cash I am willing to spend on any gadget I bring to work.

When new, this little gadget did all that was promised and more. Funny thing though: Its functionality ( stopped right at the threshold of 'more.' )

Addendum, the next morning: Oh, and I completely forgot the strangest part, the part that leads me to believe there is a programing error in the pod's OS. There are only two slider switches on the Nano, Power On/Off and Shuffle On/Off. Shuffle off plays items roughly in the order you select on the sync page (see entry for infuriating limitations) -- but plays MP3s, then MP4s, Apple's proprietary format. Switch to Shuffle On -- you're going to love this -- and the unit only plays MP4s, ignoring any MP3s currently loaded.

What's more, this is the second Nano I've owned. I mentioned the shuffle switch weirdness (and some other strangeness) at the Mac store to a floor guy, prompting him to take my old one to the back and declare it FUBAR in ways no one in the back claimed to understand. He gave me a new unit . . . which does exactly the same thing.

Once I can write off as a unit malfunction. Twice and we have a design flaw.

Major Addendum, August 17, 2009: It looks like the latest iTunes upgrade (to 8.2.1(6) ) has corrected the ordering problem! By gum, the darned thing is now playing the order I want!

Now to get them to fix that podcast Autofill and we're on the verge of normalcy!

Found a follow-up to something interesting I heard last year about how people cannot be told the truth if the truth disagrees with their preconceptions.

The same sort of issue — the persistence of misperceptions in the face of evidence — has also been intriguing Brendan Nyhan, of Duke University, North Carolina, and Jason Reifler, of Georgia State University. And they have published two fascinating papers providing the results of experiments that they conducted into whether it is possible to correct such errors of fact.

Their conclusions are not a cause for optimism.

I had heard about their study when I was writing my Deist Miasma series, but they were still working on questions I found too fundamental to include before the answers had been found. This new study found what I had suspected all along:

First, correcting a misperception doesn’t really work when the original misperception fits snugly with the subject’s ideology. Second, and worse still, attempting to correct errors often produces a backlash, with the error becoming more firmly believed. (Emphasis mine.)

Lesson: It really doesn't matter that you are right on the facts; people who don't like the facts simply won't listen.

Not familiar with the James Randi Educational Foundation? James has worked tirelessly over the decades to debunk the bunko artists, the crap salespeople that peddle cheap gimmicks as gold, that prey upon the desperate with empty hopes. He does this by demonstrating what cheats these people are, and by offering a simple challenge: If you think you are psychic in any way, come to us and let us prove it. If you can demonstrate your psychic or paranormal powers in a double-blind test, The Randi Foundation give you a million dollars. It's that simple.

So far, no one has accepted the challenge and collected the money. Go figure.

The problem might be, though, that these flim-flam artists don't really need Randi's cash. They make pretty good money peddling lies and deceit to their generally pretty strong followings. If they tell their legion of minions to complain about Randi, they probably will.


Via Pharyngula.

Addendum, April 12, 2009: It looks like Randi is back on the air! Woo-hoo!

One of the latest podcasts from The Economist had a fascinating interview with Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham. He maintains that the leap from the big chest cavities of H. habilis to the big brain pans of H. erectus may have been facilitated or even made possible by cooking:

Richard Wrangham has tasted chimp food, and he doesn’t like it. “The typical fruit is very unpleasant. . . . Fibrous, quite bitter. Not a tremendous amount of sugar. Some make your stomach heave.” After a few tastings in western Uganda, where he works part of the year on his 20-year-old project studying wild chimpanzees, Wrangham came to the conclusion that no human could survive long on such a diet. Besides the unpalatable taste, our weak jaws, tiny teeth and small guts would never be able to chomp and process enough calories from the fruits to support our large bodies.

Then, one cool fall evening in 1997, while gazing into his fireplace in Cambridge, Mass., and contemplating a completely different question — “What stimulated human evolution?” — he remembered the chimp food. “I realized what a ridiculously large difference cooking would make,” Wrangham says. Cooking could have made the fibrous fruits, along with the tubers and tough, raw meat that chimps also eat, much more easily digestible, he thought—they could be consumed quickly and digested with less energy. This innovation could have enabled our chimp­like ancestors’ gut size to shrink over evolutionary time; the energy that would have gone to support a larger gut might have instead sparked the evolution of our bigger-brained, larger-bodied, humanlike forebears.

The podcast interview continued this thread, noting that the current rise in obesity corresponds with the rise in eating ever more processed foods, essentially softer and hotter meals. Wrangham notes that heat from cooking changes the available energy content of food in three main ways:

Heat gelatinizes starches and collagens, allowing the glucose molecules to dissolve and become available to digestive enzymes;

Heat denatures proteins, opening them and likewise exposing them to digestive enzymes; and

Heat softens food.

Don't discount that last point! The less work the digestive tract has to do to free the nutrients from a meal, the more nutrient doesn't have to be converted into energy to allow the tract to do that work. For an analogy, imagine running into a steady headwind. Cooking food can put the wind to your back, helping you rather than hampering and allowing you more energy to make more speed or distance. Comparing a day's worth of meals identical in caloric value but differing in whether or not they were cooked, Wrangham estimates raw meals require extra energy "probably about the equivalent of running a mile." To support this last claim, he cited a study by Oka in which rats eat meals similar in caloric intake, but different in texture. Even with the same exercise regimen, the rats eating the softer diet gain more weight.

We digest with both physical and chemical processes, but for decades now, he notes, diet has been the domain of those concentrating almost solely on biochemistry. Hopefully more emphasis can be placed on the biophysics.


Note: I'm tagging this one in the Worms! category, because though no worms were mentioned, much of what he said reminded me of The Wife's digestive symptoms.

PBS's Frontline recently tackled global warming and the corporate forces against change in its most recent episode, Heat. (You can watch the full two hour episode at the site.) Among the interviews, they examined GM's new concept plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt. If you happen to follow the link to the Volt's official site, you'll notice a dearth of actual information on the damned thing, let alone any tech-specs that make such sites in any way interesting. There's a reason. The Frontline crew was invited to shoot some road footage of the Volt as a part of "Heat." The prototype slowed to under 10mph on a gentle grade, finally stalling at the top of the hill. It had to be pushed into the truck that brought it to the shoot.

Martin Smith also interviewed a GM PR hack, asking the one question that everyone in the entire world needs to be constantly asking anyone associated with the Evil Behemoth: Why build the Volt when you had a perfectly good electric in the EV1, a car you recalled and crushed. . . ten years ago? The hack tried to correct the record, noting the cars were near the end of their life cycles had been "recycled," and that several had been donated to museums and universities.

The first part about the cars being "too old to drive" was bogus through and through. Most of the lessees protested the end-of-lease recalls. Many of them offered to buy the cars outright for far more than the market would warrent. Really, see Who Killed the Electric Car. The PR hack's last bit about the museum and university donation program proves only partially true; the donated vehicles came disabled and enjoined with strict warnings for the receivers to never, never, never try to restore the cars to working condition and (gasp!) actually drive the cars. Most of the cars were delivered with key components of the drive system removed. In fact, only the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) got a complete car:

Only 40 EV1s were preserved, according to Jill Banaszynski, manager of the EV1 donation program, to be given to museums and institutions or kept for research by GM. Of these, the only fully intact EV1, complete with its (now inert) lead acid battery, is today part of the NMAH collection. “Our requirement is that all the vehicles in the museum have to be complete models,” says Withuhn. “We may remove parts, but we have to know that if we wanted to drive a car, or a steam engine, we could -— not that we would. It’s a question of authenticity.”

This stipulation initially posed a problem for GM, which had decided to take the cars off the road because only a relative handful of technicians knew how to work safely on the powerful batteries. But a series of negotiations proved fruitful, and the museum, in March of 2005, received its own complete example of an exemplary machine. (Emphasis mine.)

That line suggesting that "only a relative handful of technicians" proves reason enough to disable the cars? Bull. Complete and utter bull. Sure, the EV1s do have a pretty high voltage pack, over 400 volts, IIRC, but there are lots of folks out there who work on similar voltages daily. . . and many of them can be found at universities. Duh. No, the EV1 was disabled to prevent anyone from seeing those cars on the road ever again.

You see, it turns out that folks sitting high in GM's corporate office towers, the people who make the core decisions regarding what products it will produce and why, have funny feelings compared to the majority of, say, the majority of scientists in this world. Stephen Colbert reinforced that lesson when he had GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz on his show. Take a peek:

Here Lutz is promoting the car that has at least a chance of pulling GM out of the toxic sea of red ink in which it currently gasps and bobs, and Lutz openly shares the fact that he doesn't believe carbon dioxide build-up causes global warming. "32,000 scientist" believe GW is caused by sunspots? Really, Bob? Really?!? Way to sell the whole Volt concept. I'm sure your target market would agree.

The Bottom Line? General Motors is run by a bunch of old fogies that are not only running their company into the ground, taking all of their employees with them, they furthermore haven't the slightest idea what they are doing wrong, and are therefore highly unlikely to change their corporate course in any positive way anytime soon.

I'm sorry, but when any group runs pell mell through a crowd with a revving chain saw, it's time to act. The sooner GM closes its doors and cedes its market share to companies that don't suck so very, very much, the better everyone both in front of and behind the tailpipes will be.

It's just sad.


*The "Die, Die, Die," of course, refers to a corporate death, not literal death. I may not share, er, any opinions with GM corporate, but that certainly doesn't mean I wish them ill.

Very recently, researchers led by Richard Lenski announced something momentous: For the first time in recorded scientific history, researchers have been able to observe evolutionary change in progress, confirming and refining Darwin's epochal 1859 theory on the genetic level.


Flasks of evolved E. coli

One would think that this coffin nail would have silenced the Creationist crowd forever. It didn't. ( If anything, it momentarily energized them. )

Addendum, July 24, 2008: Just for fun, I headed over to Conservapedia and looked up the latest bashing entry for "evolution." I found this sentence:

The theory of evolution posits a process of self-transformation from simple life forms to more complex life forms, which has never been observed or duplicated in a laboratory.

Weird. With such recent communications with the researcher who just observed and duplicated evolution in the lab, one would assume Schlafly would have rushed to his site to make corrections. . . wouldn't one?


*Addendum, April 5, 2009: Forgive me, readers, for I have omitted. When I first started The Deist Miasma, I fully expected to answer that last question, Why the creationists felt so threatened by the scientific explanations of life. After all, the "Fundamentally" in this post's title refers to the fundamental, underpinning assumptions Behe, Schlafly and Walker all hold that forces their science attacking actions. I wrapped up the third and last installment, though, and forgot to answer that question. Why? I am a lazy, forgetful idiot. Let me rectify that omission now, with a supplement to the original entry that runs from the asterisk to the LJ cut.