Another Fusion Scam

I'm sorry, but the goddamned diagram includes the words "superconducting magnets". FAIL.

 

FAIL FAIL FAIL. Was this published as a joke?

 

They should have saved this for April 1st. Real superconductors have to be supercold, a few kelvin, to work. High temperature superconductors do not exist.

 

Unobtanium, which is what high temperature superconducting magnets are made from, is never supposed to be in real things. Its a comic book element. You can tell from the name that its completely made up. This is a fantasy, exactly like the Princeton toroid. Which keeps being rebuilt to get some distance between the magnets in the torus and the supercooling system which is supposed to prevent the metal donut from melting despite the need for the magnets to contain the star-hot fusion reaction and if the cooling fails, even a little, the entire thing explodes because its a nuclear reaction, complete with plasma and neutrons and radiation. And the magnets require exotic elements to work better, but those absorb the neutrons from the reaction and become different elements with completely different chemical properties. Good thing it never worked or it would be a smoking hole in the ground which glows from the radiation. And the whole place would be listed as a national disaster area, permanently. All those dead liberals.

 

And the Nova Laser Ignition Center at Livermore Labs. It didn't work as predicted to cause molecular fusion so they doubled the power supply which ALSO didn't work. Then everybody working on it lost their jobs because it cost so much to build they had to sell Livermore labs itself. These huge sheds of batteries continue to not be useful, though the laser itself is a weird way to test nuclear weapons without actually blowing them up. Pretty sure there's easier ways. Livermore Labs deserved to lose its funding decades ago. And the sort have after that debacle.

 

Remember Cold Fusion? Back in 1989. Turned out that all the "positive results" were accidents caused by using the same contaminated source of Palladium electrodes. Total accident, and since they didn't check it BEFORE running their experiment, they found something after which suggested success, even though it wasn't. I have run into absolute lunatics who claimed to have Cold Fusion on their desktops. They were ignorant liars. Cold Fusion, if it had worked, would have generated incredibly lethal levels of neutrons and gamma rays because fusion does that, even at the molecular level. I researched it for the news story I wrote for my school paper back when this was new. And followed up in Physics Today when they figured out what went wrong.

 

Again, people are always ready to believe things which aren't true. This is why Snake Oil sold so well. And why people think that Marijuana Smoke cures cancer instead of giving it to you. People like being ignorant. They love embracing and celebrating stupidity. That's just how people are, and a large part of why I love libraries. They are the opposite of ignorance, and everybody who goes inside is seeking knowledge. They are leaving their ignorance behind.

 

I don't understand why the Lockheed Martin Skunkworks is willing to publish such an easily disproven fantasy and wreck their reputation for serious engineering projects. This doesn't fit their decades of steady service to America. Flipping out for Snake Oil is bizarre. Allowing this scam to be associated with their good name is likely to cause their stock value to crash. Why, oh why, would they do that?

Leaf Grinding

You know you live in the mountains when Fall comes around. You find yourself raking bags full of leaves as the oaks drop them, one after another, every few seconds, day after day. You get used to the sharp report a 1-2 ounce acorn hitting your roof or deck or greenhouse after falling 30-40 feet out of one of the towering oaks that provided that crucial shade all summer. You sweep leaves off the decking and driveway because the iron is so rich in the soil that if those leaves get WET, they leach enough iron to actually stain the concrete, and car paint as well. It doesn't take long either. I swear you could build a car from the iron extracted from all the leaves falling in this neighborhood.

The other thing about the leaves is it is fire season. And wind season. The wind comes up, sometimes down from Nevada and causes fires. Sometimes from Hawaii, bringing thunderstorms associated with hurricanes that spin apart a thousand miles away but still bring dry lightning, virga, and perhaps brief intense rain and hail. The lightning is the important bit. That's where most of our fires come from. We also get evil Fskers throwing lit cigarettes out the window, even today people do that on purpose. Very much on purpose. Remember that 5% of the population are psychopaths. That's MEN and WOMEN, and little evil Damian type children as well. They're quite distributed but often land in positions of power where they can hurt more people because they get things done, so if you think your boss is EVIL, you might be right.

The wind is blowing today, noisily rustling trees and dropping leaves all over the place and blowing them across rooftops and into gutters and catching in bushes and in the dead spaces up against fences. Its a mess. And tonight it is going to rain. Perhaps not a lot, but perhaps for 6-12 hours, which would be nice. It would damp down the soil and stop future fires. I can hope.

With all those leaves, I have been raking them daily for the last couple weeks, accumulating bag after bag full of leaves, each 5-8 inches across. These are deciduous oaks, not maples. I stack the bags up in the semi-basement under the house until we run out of bags, around 20 of them. Then haul them out and Dad, who is 73, and I grind them up. Its not hard work, shaking them the grinder and the other person stirring a sacrificial stick down there to keep them moving. After we're done we use a wheelbarrow to spread them around the yard and return the folic and humic acid back to the soil by restoring the Organic layer with this leaf grindage. Once it gets wet, there it goes. All that iron too.

We are fortunate that we do not live in one of the many places in this town with either mercury or arsenic in the soil. The mercury is from mining runoff. The arsenic is natural. It makes the soil a particular shade of bluish red, unlike the red and yellows of iron. For those of us who can see into the UV spectrum (work a night job, you gain the ability after a few weeks), the blues are more obvious. Also, UV light makes certain flowers look really bizarre. And birds too. This a natural thing, btw. Normal daylight tends to make the UV sensing eye cells overwhelmed and they stop noticing the frequencies. Its working nights and sleeping in that reduces daylight exposure and restores the spectrum to our eyes. I used to really freak out about this until it turned up in the New England Journal Of Medicine and the Lancet. Thank goodness I wasn't hallucinating.

In any case, the rains are coming this evening or tonight. The winds flowing out the Pacific are lovely and the sun is warm but the weather is fantastic. I've got new rain tires, at the proper pressures, so I'll be fine driving to the other libraries tomorrow. Good times.

Ender's Game

Decades ago, as a teenager, I read the new bestselling scifi novel, Enders Game by Orson Scott Card. I was familiar with Heinlein and Niven and would someday discover Gibson, but I was exactly the right age and mindset to enjoy Andrew Wiggin's tribulations. The first of the series remains my favorite. There have been rumors of the movie getting made since 1989. Its bounced around with fantasy cast lists, debates about the requirements of depicting the Zero-Gee battle rooms, and the morality of Demosthenes and Locke's debates and eventual takeover of Earth's govt by his brother and sister. They were an important counterpoint to the war itself, and the entire morality of what they were doing, creating and using child soldiers engineered and trained as tactical geniuses attempting to defeat an alien foe that already showed it was capable of genocide. Its a grim story, and not meant to be taken lightly.

 

The movie grabbed as much of this as it could, comfortably include. However, it made a few mistakes which would have improved it a great deal to leave in. For one thing, in the book, Ender, when attacked, kills. He comments he was winning the battles in the future too, but he killed his tormentors. Bonzo DIED. So did the bigger kid from his earthside school. Nose into his brain. Ender was a murderer, even if he wasn't told. I thought the movie did a good job with battle school. The debate between the psychologist and the school director, including the flashes of the alien fleet driving him on probably could have been improved with a moment's explanation that FTL doesn't exist in the Enderverse. Ansibles exist, so you have quantum entanglement communications instantaneously across any distance, thanks to Special Relativity's other party trick. In the book they were operating on Pluto or Ceres.

 

There was no mention in the movie of the notice Ender and company took to the battle room entrance since it implied gravity fields that could be turned on and off, which is also how the Little Doctor worked, in a related way. Or that it was Ender who figured out you could destroy a planet with the Molecular Destabilizer (Little Doctor). In the movie they show it frying the planet surface. In the book, ships hit by the initial blast spread it to the atmosphere and there to the surface and turned the entire planet into gas. It wasn't burnt crispy. It was literally vaporized.

 

Killed the entire fleet too. People who'd built their fleet immediately after the attack and launched decades earlier. Folks who were family to the 100,000,000 dead in the initial Bugger attack. They called them Formics in the movie. At the time, hivemind aliens were cutting edge ideas not explored yet. By now, everybody has seen Alien and Aliens so its not so visually horrifying.

 

In the book, the battle school commander goes to prison for war crimes, despite winning the war. There were no drone ships. They had pilots. They reveal this in both, after the battle is won. They also reveal that the two boys Ender fought died, the first time he learned this secret, and devastating to his fragile feelings after being used as a child soldier. In the real world, Child Soldiers get really messed up and few survive long as adults. I knew a survivor of the civil war in Ethiopia, a child soldier who ended up marrying the woman he was ordered to rape. They have several kids. He tended to drift off in the middle of a sentence sometimes. Haunted by bad memories, I think. In context Ender's response to the attempt to blame him for the xenocide while simultaneously calling him the hero of the war.

 

I liked the Maori tattoos on Mazer Rackham. I don't remember that in the book, but it was a nice detail. In successive novels in the series, Ender is called the Xenocide, tried in interstellar court by the various human colony governments centuries after the fact, so they could feel smug about how superior they were to him, despite only existing because of his terrible choices, unknowing as they were.

 

In the novel, Ender retrieves the queen's egg, he hops into a sleeper colony ship to escape his brother, now supreme ruler of Earth despite being a murdering psychopath who enjoyed torturing animals and nearly killed his brother and sister many times when they were children. His sister joins him 30 years into the future and at the end of his brother's life, begging for forgiveness, which he does NOT receive, they flee into space for a distant colony world on a 150 year trip (relativistic trips involve time compression) and into the next story. I never cared for that one much, called Speaker For The Dead, which was also about aliens, just not warfare and lacked the edge of Ender's Game. In the movie, they merely show him in a sleeper pod with a timer clicking by but no explanation as to what that means. I doubt they'd make the sequel, though the side stories of the others were interesting to read at least.

 

Ender's Game the movie is flawed. I wish they'd included the Demosthenes and Locke debates by his brother and sister, and the collapse of Petra, who is victorious in the movie but actually goes insane in the books from stress. I'm still glad the movie was made. I waited 25 years to see it.

Conservative Atheist Volunteering

Being a Conservative Atheist is a bit challenging. For one thing, most Conservatives are religious, and I'm an polite but hardcore atheist. I don't openly mock people's religions unless they are the more obvious cultists that are aggressive about their recruiting: Jehovah's Witnesses surprisingly do understand "No thank you. I am not interested." Far better than telephone evangelists. In most Western States you better belong to the right church or you will be facing all sorts of social trouble. The one exception is California, where it is okay to be an Atheist and treat Sundays as a day for hikes, cycling, or fancy breakfast. So I sort of have to live here.

I volunteer, as a Conservative Atheist, because I like books. I also have a strong work ethic, which is valuable around here. I also don't smoke dope, which is rare around here. It means my head is together and I notice things and I don't stink. But it is rare. Many library patrons here in the Sierras are either potheads or growers. We don't get many religious folk at the library because books have ideas and straying from God is dangerous. Might invent something new, and new things upset the delicate balance that the preacher has created, wherein he is necessary. Ahem.

Working with the North San Juan library patrons can be disconcerting when they are really stinky potheads. The eye-watering reek of pot smoke is exactly as painful as it sound. They compound this by needing a long bath with soap, a shave, a haircut, and that stuff called shampoo. Dreadlocks are often multiple colors and generally indicate a subhuman interest in simple courtesy. They sometimes ask for help when their question would be easy to answer themselves if they weren't so high they didn't notice the big signs above the library catalog computers. I suspect CATALOG is incomprehensible when really high. But they use the library so I help them or direct them to the librarians for a more in-depth search, as required by law. I'm not allowed to type it in for them. Some weenie lawyer had to justify his position. This, btw, is a very easy job. About as unstressful as you can get. This is one of the reasons I like it. Job stress really hurts me.

It can also be interesting shelving books in the non-fiction section for both religious texts, cults, fantasy medical witchdoctoring con-games, snake oil, and Apologist Biographies for Treasonous Politicians who indifferently demand: "What difference does it make?". I shelve these things and laugh at the nonsense people believe enough to both publish a book, and for someone else to buy it, and someone else to read it. Reflexology? Amulets? Eating Bugs? Hillary Clinton? Hilarious nonsense.

There is an unlimited amount of ignorance. Still, going into a library you will eventually learn some more mainstream truths, and sometimes people unlearn their ignorance. Other times, ignorance is deliberate and fatal. We get lots of Darwin Awards in the Sierras. Usually in the form of drug overdose, exposure, arrest, or single car accidents on the curvy roads. Usually the driver is drunk or high. Sometimes there's other people in the car that die with them. And I'm okay with that. I grew up in the place where wine tasting is a drunk driving game. Its ridiculous that you would ban the entire point of the tourism just because the drunks wreck their cars. They're mostly a threat to themselves. Headon collisions were rare. Driving off of corners and into fields or trees or rocks and the bloody mess they sometimes turned into, or more commonly the ditch the car had to be pulled out of, was just part of life. There's no Jesus involved. No Buddha or Allah or Loki or Coyote either. Just driving too fast.

There's a lot of hypocrisy too. I laugh hard, inside, when I meet stinking hippies who can't find soap but own an iPhone with apps, though they don't believe in technology like that which keeps their AWD Subaru running, and never read the manual for their phone but want help to use it. Hypocrisy from the older generations is so very willful. At least they're consistent. They were useless spoiled children that grew into useless spoiled teenagers that got all the STDs and did a bad job raising children who themselves grew up useless and spoiled until they either grew out of it or died from Darwin award behavior. I'm astonished so many of my generation survived Baby Boomer parents.

It's weird being part of the generation that gave us the internet. I spent a couple decades teaching people how to use it. The Internet is everywhere. Its useful. It cuts down on stupid questions because looking stuff up is so easy. And people still come to libraries to learn more, from printed books. They aren't obsolete yet. Even with Kindle Fire HD being down to $90 right now. That's less than I paid for my Kindle Paperwhite, but my paperwhite has very long battery life and I still enjoy it. My generation loved the Sony Walkman, and we got MP3 players (or iPods) and listen that way. I was one of those people talking on a cellphone in a supermarket before everybody else did it, via headset that looked so weird. And then I stopped. I don't really carry a phone, not one turned on, anymore. When you sell smartphones, and you notice your customers are all DUMB, you start to connect the two and not wanting to be dumb, I don't have a smartphone. QED.

My life is way simpler, and rather than require constant opinion polling from friends like the Millenials, I prefer reflecting and observing life from my own position, or listening to comedy audiobooks that wryly describe the ignorance and hypocrisy around me in funnier ways. Because you can't force people to think. And many of them will die from deliberate ignorance. I refuse to feel guilty about surviving their asinine behavior when life and death are going to happen regardless, and not getting dead is often a matter of looking both ways before crossing the street, and waiting for that one car with backup lights engaged and huge clouds of acrid smoke right before they jam the throttle open and then fumble for the brake. Because its that kind of world, and those kinds of Liberals, still thinking they're superior despite forgetting that even the discount grocery sells soap for a very reasonable price.

Honestly: North San Juan would do itself a favor if it built a serious water supply system and a bathhouse with very cheap hot showers. Do that and it wouldn't stink so bad. Please North San Juan. Teach your people to bathe!

Acorn Season

After the rains and general chills last week, it warmed up over the weekend and is hot enough for A/C most days. This is what we in California call: Indian Summer. It comes after the first rains, usually in October, and goes away again in a few weeks. Nights are cool enough to sleep, mornings are chilly, and leaves fall all day, even if the breeze is hot. We also get Acorns. The house where I live is surrounded by deciduous oak trees, not to be confused with live oaks such as where I grew up near the coast. These trees produce serious acorns a couple inches long and an inch across, weighing an ounce each. The POP when the hit the roof or back deck. We're getting those falling every twenty or thirty minutes now. The squirrels go nuts over this, hiding them everywhere, then forgetting. This hiding behavior includes lifting up the gutter guards, which in theory allows water into the rain gutters but allows acorns and leaves to roll off to the ground, and cram acorns in the gutter. Those float, then completely plug the downspouts. This is a common problem around here, and if you have pines instead, you get pine needles and even bigger pinecones, large enough to brain you. Yes, around here pinecones are over a foot long and weigh up to 5 pounds when full of nuts. Usually they fall when they're empty, thankfully, and the squirrels tear them open to get the pine nuts. Still, this being fall the critters are doing fall things. I'm hearing migrating geese more often, and hopefully there's enough in the high country to keep the bears up there for hibernation, rather than breaking into homes down in Nevada City, which is only 5 miles away.

The big upside of this time of year? Time for stews, soup, breads, baking, slow cooked foods like roasts, red wine, dark beer, cheeses, squash, tomato sauces, and once it rains again, clam chowder. Good foods to eat that suit the season. And its cool enough in the mornings I can exercise hard without getting all sweaty. So that's a plus as well. Might go for a bicycle ride tomorrow. Good for the heart and respiration rate.

Lessons From F1 GP Japan

A typhoon was bearing down on Tokyo, east of Suzuka where the F1 Grand Prix of Japan was taking place. Various delays for the fans to arrive meant that the race was delayed half an hour, and started behind the pace car with very heavy spray off the wheels, meaning only the pole position driver could actually see where he was going. The Ferrari died after 3 laps, with the steering wheel, a computer with many buttons, shorted out and died. This is not the first time a computer on an F1 car has died, and the fact that these cars have trouble in wet weather is not exactly a positive advertisement for Hybrid Cars, which was the primary reason for this season's design. Trying to show that Hybrids can be fast. What they've actually shown is that hybrids are unreliable, and require millions of dollars a drive to keep them running. That's NOT a positive spin on Hybrid technology.

Dad had more suggestions, watching cars die in the wet. Lose the battery entirely. No more ERS. Narrower tires so they really have to pay attention to braking on corners. Without the battery, they'll be 400 pounds lighter, so braking should be easier too. Lose the radio. All the telemetry and pit data was fine on pit wall boards hung over the side for decades. Remove distractions so the driver can just drive. Return the clutch, and reduce the number of gears to 4 or 5. With a gear lever. No more paddle shifters. They're a bit too easy, and making a shift properly is part of the challenge. This also requires the driver to be more skilled, managing 3 pedals with 2 feet.

And dropping the engines to 2.0L 4-cylinder Turbo, like all Rally cars, and a V6 normally aspirated 2.5 to 3.0 L would be far more like real cars and real drivers use. And you'd be able to hear them. In this Grand Prix only the pace car engine made any real noise, with its supercharged V8 musclecar sound. Ironic that Ze Germans make cars that sound like the 1970's in Detroit.

No fancy battery braking. Just brakes. The batteries get hot, the electric motor loses grip because the power isn't going into a battery so the dynamo doesn't work and all the brake energy falls onto the front brakes which is why SO MANY CARS are running off at the end of the straights this season. This is a direct result of battery overheating and electrical brake failure. This is a DANGEROUS FLAW. It should not be part of the formula. Eventually this is going to kill a driver, or worse, fans. They're going 160-200 mph on those straightaways, with only partial braking working. That's like a 2000 pound missile. This is an engineering safety catastrophe.

Adjusting front and rear wing is part of the challenge, balancing speed against cornering. Having much narrower tires also makes corners more tricky because you won't get unreal levels of Gee force without using lots of wing, which slows you on the straightaway and makes passing there impossible, but opens passing in the turns instead. The different strategies while staying on the road makes it a lot more fun again. Reducing distractions from driving the car, and making it about actual manual car skill rather than a video game console? That's better.

Also, less extreme, more manual cars wouldn't be shutting down because they got wet in the rain.

Beautiful Day

I've had a couple weeks now, driving my car with the new transmission and axels. It works great. As good as new. I'm very happy with it.

The sky is blue, crystal clear, and on my walk this morning I could clearly see the Sierra Buttes up at the Sierra Crest (top) and the Sutter Buttes (extinct volcano north of Sacramento) and the Coast Range mountains beyond, which are tall enough to get consistent snow on them in the winter time and generate their own weather, and have a banana belt (warm dry air) on this side of them, which looks like a grassy desert most of the year. John Muir wanted to build a Grand Staircase park there from one side of the mountain to the other, since it shows of some biomes which interests botanists but largely nobody else.

I would like to live up on those mountains. Maybe with a trailer I could move around for the best views. Weather being what it is, the colder the night, the better the view the next day. And it was 50'F last night. I could feel it with my window cracked open a couple inches. Up there? It probably froze last night, and from the mountaintop I should be able to see Mount Lassen, Mount Shasta, Mount Diablo, San Francisco, and the Pacific Ocean, complete with fog banks and the various storms that roll in across Northern California, producing the usual hundred twenty inches of rain that area gets, but generally misses us down here. Despite the earthquakes, that area really deserves development, with retirement homes and proper full service hospitals with cardiac and cancer treatment so old people will move there and spend their money. Eureka has some of that, but the real hospital still ends up sending its patients to Santa Rosa, my home town, rather than the local clinic, which kills patients, apparently, with anything more serious than a broken bone. I don't know that as fact, only that their reputation, even today, is terrible. Perhaps if there were a medical school at Humboldt State this wouldn't happen anymore. The NW part of California is avoided by tourists who spend weeks cruising the Oregon Coast, largely because NW California is nasty and unfriendly, while Oregon Coast loves tourists and welcomes them. What will it take to make the California Coast friendly? Probably better roads, paying jobs, and a future worth having. Tricky when all the money in California gets spent in LA and San Francisco. This is exactly why Jefferson has so much traction. They want to develop the North, long ignored by LA and Sacramento, and make something of the resources through tourism and retirement communities. If you can have fantastic gardens in Portland and Bellevue, which are colder and wetter, why not Eureka? That whole area should be rose gardens and flowers and fantastic houses where the rainfall becomes beautiful. It really should. This is sane and far more useful than building in deserts like Patterson.

Also, I want to say thank you to Grocery Outlet for your low prices. Shopping there means rubbing elbows with the welfare coupon crowd and the pot growers, but at least they can afford soap and toilet paper, despite being off-brand. Also, they have decent prices for things like eggs and crackers and wines. A great wine selection. So many Lodi Zinfandels, and a fair number of Napa ones too. Their lunch meats are a reasonable price, so you can afford to make a proper sandwich. Just don't expect the brand you buy today to be there tomorrow. Stuff comes and goes. Its not dented cans either, btw. Those are illegal to sell. These are just stuff that doesn't sell well at major grocery chains so it gets auctioned off and arrives there. When you're a good cook like me, you can make something of it.

Anyway, back to my novel editing project. If I can really polish it up properly, back into a sparkling gem, it will be ready to Publish for Money, very important detail, the money.