bye

stuff to do and family for the next 10 days or so, bye.

Media may not be writing their own stories any more.

A few days ago my newspaper did a piece on college professors pay.  Headlines screamed that at least 12 in my state were getting over $100,000.  Text used terms like "raking in" describing the pay.  They listed deans and administrators too, a couple were over 200k.    That list only showed the income of female coaches, not men coaches, if they had shown men they would have a half dozen making several million a year, but that was left out of the story.

In my family I have 4 university professors, 5 plus a 6th retired if I get into the distant cousins.  None of them make much.  They do it because they like it, life on a campus can be fun and entertaining, sports, music, youth.  It's a good living, they do fine, but I know engineers, small business owners, even top notch carpenters and mechanics, computer programmers, who make around what they do.  It certainly seems fair, actually I think they should be making far more, these are the people who are suppose to push our best and brightest up onto the top shelves.

So I was looking on line at that story and suddenly I found the same story in a half dozen states, all published within the last 2 months.  Now I smell a rat.  Some anti tax or anti education group, or the Kochs, some rat has written this story and given it to papers in various states, shit the stories were very similar, all the locals had to do was download the state universities pay scale, which they published with names attached.  

Dreamlifter's nightmare.

A modified 747, one of only 4, flies from Seattle to Japan, or Italy, or Kansas every few days to pick up sections of the 787 fuselage or wing and haul them to assembly in Seattle. This morning Boeing may be down to only 3. Last night one landed in Wichita at the wrong airport. 6 miles north of McConnell AFB shared runway with the aircraft builder Spirit (the former Boeing factory sold to the Canadians). Anywho, they landed at Jabara Airport, named for a Syrian emigrant who became a Korean War Ace fighter pilot. Jabara Airport is a couple miles from the Koch Brothers homes and their headquarters.  It caters to small jets owned by the 1%ers of Kansas.   The picture shows the plane laying under our current grey sky.  
The problem it's certified for 9,119 ft. take off, Jabara has 6,100.  Well, they can wait a couple days for temps to fall to freezing, that helps, they can use that time to take out some of the gear that moves and secures freight, that might lower the weight a few ton, they can take off with minimum fuel for the short flight, they can take down the chain link fence.  To the south are high end medical clinics and hundreds of expensive homes, to the north is a mix of open land and 5 acre McRanchs, a stiff north cold wind will be the best.  I assume they will have to get an FAA waiver and an insurance policy.  Otherwise they could take it apart in the open and haul it 6 miles to the Boeing hangers and glue it back together, a 1 year project for sure.  But with only 3 Dreamlifters available, another event and the 787 DreamLiner build schedule becomes a nightmare.  

How did it happen.  On a clear night with no other traffic the McConnell air traffic control would give an experienced pilot of a large slow aircraft clearance to land a few miles out, then set and watch, the crew in this case, coming from the north, saw the lights of the first airport, they are in alignment, and ended their employment with Boeing 6 miles out.   This looks like pilot error, their are a number mistakes here, navigational aids should have been reporting distance and vector.  Kudos for getting it stopped though, that was great.

UPDATE: As the temp fell near freezing, wind kicked up to 15 to 20 out of the north, they pumped most the fuel out of it and at mid day they took off easy as you please, circled around and landed at the other airport.  Seemed no effort at all.

10,000 hits

 
click to enlarge

Republicans make protesting a privilege for the rich.

 Federal Lands Jobs and Energy Security Act.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), makes applications to drill approved  automatically in 60 days if the Department of Interior fails to act on with in that time.  I sell machinery to corporations, oil companies in the past (but not now), I can tell you they cannot act in 60 days, yet this will demand the government to, or the approval is by default.  Lets see what would be a good strategy, how about bundle up all your requests and send them in at once, ask other drillers to do the same, making it impossible to review them all.  

What if you find out they will frac next to your property, under this new law filing a complaint, or motion, asking for a meeting or to speak, under this law that is called a protest, and protesting comes with a $5,000 filing fee.  Protest tax!  And you better move fast.

Only the guy with the big house or the fancy horse farm is going to plunk down 5k to  protest.  In almost every oil rich country corruption and stepping on the public is common place.  As the US grows into a major oil and gas producer....well just look at the middle east as the model, petro-states run by religion and corporations based on graft and suppression of the people.

I hope the Senate won't take this up but I am not too sure, and Obama, he worries me on shit like this, he wants to keep trying to do favors to the oil industry hoping they will call off the dogs, sometimes I think he doesn't learn very fast.

To break the oil habit, it takes a village.

Burning oil to generate electricity is common on small  islands and remote villages from Alaska to central you-name-it.  In the lower 48 very little electricity is made from oil, but world wide the pollution is significant, some global warming experts identify it as one of the fixes that could quickly make a difference in global warming.
Not only are villagers living near a smoke belching screaming generator barn, the cost is crippling.  The oil shipped or trucked adds additional pollutants to the environment.

The solution is emerging, it's solar panels for most locations.  One Pacific Island recently installed more than enough to run the area during daylight.  The generators are backup and don't run often.  LED lights and batteries get people through the evenings.  The cost is much less than diesel, in about 5 years they break even.  Villagers don't miss the roar or smoke of the old system.

In other areas a few lucky villages are buying wind turbines, especially near the poles.  A few years ago I gave few dollars to an Eskimo village crowd funding for mid size wind mills.  They raised enough to buy two I think.

Solar panels here are usually met with the "hey they only work in daylight" gotcha.  So, I say build big solar farms, and set a two tiered rate schedule, much lower in the daytime.  People will make a bigger effort at running washers, dryers and other appliances during the day.  The night load will be reduced somewhat leaving wind (which runs more at night than day) to pick up much of the evening demand.

Dopamine, it's all in your head.

The pleasure of a friends company, a good joke, book, beauty, sensual art or encounters, good food, all these cause a chemical release in the brain that intensifies the pleasure, in fact is most of the pleasure, that's dopamine we make it and we consume it in our head.  Street drugs are the most severe dopamine enablers.  Brain scans record this, and demonstrate that in between use of these drugs, dopamine background levels fall.  In other words, the normal hum-drum level of happy is reduced, to feel good the drugs need to be applied more often and in greater doses.  Addiction!

Accidentally it was discovered in a brain scan, then studied and confirmed, obese people have the identical dopamine reaction with sugar.  Addiction.  Dopamine levels can only be elevated to "happy" with sugar.  Of course they don't go to the same level of high, and sugar doesn't push them to carjack or turn tricks for sugar money.  But, I can now understand a little better the glutton's dilemma.  Got a monkey on your back cold turkey man, and seriously, there is no reason to give babies or children sugar, my son didn't taste a soft drink until he was almost 4, and then by a god damn fat ass brother in law who bought him a 24 ounce coke in a bakery and an 8inch chocolate cookie (the house speciality).  Asshole.  Biblethumping asshole.  Well the kid is 30 now, and does not have a sugar habit.   

In the movie "Heaven Can Wait" Warren Beatty, in his new life found out that among his vast wealth was a sugar business, he tells his advisors to sell it because, "sugar, it's bad for the body".

heat moves, thats it, heat moves - friday junk science

Bet you didn't know that heat moves and cold does not move.  There is only heat, the opposite is less heat.  Cold can only be explained as absence of heat.   Cold has no force. Cold cannot travel, only heat has force, can travel.  Heat is atoms in motion, the more or faster the atoms move, the higher the heat.  Absolute zero is as the absence of all heat (all motion) and is impossible to achieve.  Nowhere in space does absolute zero exist. In a laboratory they can get down to few thousandths of a degree over it, but not to it.
If we apply heat to flame to a fork we can feel the heat move along it's length.  Put an ice cube on it and    the heat is spent moving into the ice melting some of it, therefore the cool feeling that we might mistaken for cold moving, instead it is heat moving into cold.  All examples of cooling and warming are one direction.  Heat moves, cold does not.
This is the action in the fridge or airconditioner, heat is being moved out and replaced by less heat through gasses that in vacuum vessels boil at lower temperatures than surrounding temperatures.  This boiling off of the heat is expended through fins or fans or baths.
The Alaska pipeline sets on permafrost that is kept frozen by pipes into the ground under each foundation.  The pipe is a sealed vacuum tube with a little water in it.  The degree of  vacuum (negative atmosphere) determines when the water boils.  Water boils in a vacuum at temps other than 212°f.  These are set to boil at temps of the typical permafrost, when winter cold falls below these values the heat syphon moves heat in the permafrost to the cooler air thus freezing the permafrost to a far lower temperature enabling it to get through the summer without thawing and sinking the pipeline.

check out cooling fins on top

Speaker Bohner wants to find a way.......

a way to ignore two girls, Mexicans, 13 and 15 and their story. Find a way my ass, the votes are in the house, already enough Republicans support it to pass if he will let it come to a vote, if he will do what he wants muslims to do, speak out against the extremest among them. As you watch him fiddle with his breakfast you know he knows he is on the wrong side of history. Here we see one more catholic not following Christ's teachings. By the way, the comments about this video where I snatched it, rude and crude. There is so much hate coming from white people, it's embarrassing to be white.

Kansas hoops, 5 beats 4

 KU 94, Duke 83.  I didn't expect the Jayhawks to win.  KU is mostly a team of freshmen.  The two exhibition games and a game against Louisiana Monroe were sloppy boring wins stuffed full of fouls, turnovers and busted set plays.  Finally it clicked last night, they figured out how to be a team in the nick of time.

I like the Jayhawk mascot and logo, we consider it a mythical bird, the name's meaning is a mystery, but the Missouri slavers first named the free-state settlers Jayhawks, whatever kind of insult it was at the time is lost.   As for the Duke logo, what the hell is that?  It looks like parenthesis with nothing in it.  Why did they drop the blue devil  logo?  Religiosity?

drying poodles in the microwave

Yea, not so funny, the old joke may have some truth to it I don't know.  But aren't we all that quivering wet poodle riding the glass turntable?  It's all flying right through us; radio, microwave, TV, WiFi, satellite data, to say nothing of background frequencies from exploding stars, white dwarfs, and your neighbors remote controlled drone looking in your bedroom window, e-gads, were all in a microwave on "thaw" cycle.

Duke University, may their basketball team forever have sore feet and blurry vision, just came up with a panel, a bit like a solar panel, to harvest all these errant transmissions and convert it to energy.  In a few years we may have a funny looking little white card standing on the shelf and cabled to the cell phone or computer charging the dickens out of it.  The tin foil hat guys were right all along, but rather than shooting up the mall over it, maybe we buy a little card that will snatch free power out of thin air 24 7.

Correction on methane's ability to kill earth

 Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH₄ on climate change is over 20 times greater than CO₂over a 100-year period.

Turns out in my previous post I may have made a mistake.  Methane, CH₄ , shares with other green house gases the ability to let light waves pass through to the earth, and the ability to reflect back on the earth infrared (radiant heat) waves, warming our world.  I have seen it stated various ways but have opted for the one above which uses a lower number tied to a time frame which deals with the different live spans of both gases at high altitude.  

So it may appear that methane will stress the earth at a slower pace, but a kill is a kill.

trucks, natural gas, sieves

correction in blue
Last week I posted (look at the second one down) "Another one of your stupid ideas shot down,......".  Concerning the idea that Natural Gas gives off 1/2 the CO2 of coal, therefore it's a good idea, but that just ain't so, if, and we must, count the destructive power of the methane leaks.  Methane, or CH4, being NG before it's burned in your water heater or local power plant.  Methane molecules are a full 102 20-25 times more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.  Leaks at the well, the pipe, the compressor, and the utility plant conspire to make claimed advantages worthless.

My old pal, Sarge, One Angry Zebra ask if it still wouldn't be a net good if trucks were converted from diesel to NG?  I said I suppose so but not much.  But, it's as likely I was wrong, it may never be a net good.  I have found scientific studies which suggest NG as a bridge to even cleaner energies is instead a gangplank.  

If we only measure CO2, then NG is the winner, it puts out less than gasoline or diesel, as it also put out less than coal.  It's a winner in that race.  But the infrastructure moving it and storing it is the problem, starting at the well head.  NOAA scientist in February measured CH4 leaks at dozens of wellheads in Texas found leaks of 6-12% at or near the well.  We haven't moved it yet and we already lost enough to overwhelm the CO2 advantage of burning it instead of diesel.  Remember it's 102 20-25 times the destructive power of CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

To complicate things, CH4 lives 12 years in the high atmosphere, CO2 100 years.  In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science they did the calculations on converting trucks from diesel to NG.  Figuring the impact of burning each fuel, the life of the burned fuels in the atmosphere, the life of CH4 escaping throughout the infrastructure.  Converting vehicles today to NG will not have a positive impact on radiative forcing of the climate (warming) for 80 years or more.  Unless, the well-to-wheels CH4 leaks are reduced by 45-70%.  Stopping all leaks is impossible, but for this fuel to live up to what the industry propaganda claims, leaks must be 2% or less throughout the infrastructure.  Again, as before I remind you, the industry will do nothing to reduce leaks unless forced.  They have so much gas available, what do they care?  And these numbers are from only a few wells, most areas deny access for testing.  My guess is there are some examples out there of far worse leaks

Wind solar wave and geothermal looks better all the time doesn't it?  Science is interesting isn't it?  Whether you believe it or not, it's still true.

melt all the land and sea ice

google national geographic ice melt to see other parts of the world if all the ice melts.  Boy it sure does a job on Cuba, Florida and Alaska.

Another of your stupid ideas shot down, for free, your welcome.

correction in blue

Burning natural gas puts off 50% the CO2 as coal in generation plants, and in transportation it pollutes far less than diesel or gasoline.  We know this, and the industry runs adds on TV to drive it home, so the public believes it could help reverse the slide to global warming.  In truth it won’t, or if it does, not much and not for a very long time.

The largest use of natural gas is for electricity generation.  For a number of years now it's been replacing coal as a fuel, the replacement rate is 2.5% a year.  Sounds good so far. 

When we burn methane (natural gas) it makes CO2, a greenhouse gas, who’s molecules live for up to 100 years aloft if not absorbed into the biosphere.  If there is a methane leak at the well, pipeline or generation plant, the unburned methane rises, also a greenhouse gas and 102 20-25 times more powerful than CO2.  102 20-25 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat.  Methane molecules life in the upper atmosphere is about 12 years.

Estimates and early studies vary, but leaks (from well to the turbine's flame) range from 1.5% to 8% of natural gas is lost.  So it’s complicated, but like compounding of interest the numbers are rather startling when figuring; the conversion rate, the CO2 savings in burning NG over coal, the leak rates, the life and power of each destructive green house molecule. 

The worse case scenario is the 8% leak rate.  If this is true the switch to NG makes things worse for 60 years before it achieves an actual improvement.  If the rate of conversion to NG doubled to 5% a year it would take 50 years to cross into the plus column.  If however, the leak rate is 1.5%, the pay off is immediate, but it’s not much of a gain, we would be only a little better off, and I would take that small advantage.  My gut says that 1.5% is not going to stand up, the leak rate, like every ship wreck or oil platform explosion will turn out to be multiples of what the industry wants to claim.

This only looked at one item, power generation fuel substitution.  It did not look at fracking and it’s multiple layers of community damage. It did not look at transportation use of NG and the leaks in those tanks, engines, and during refueling.  Nor the hissing leaking pipes running below our streets, into our homes.  It did not look at oil wells which often (as you may smell if you drive past one) has methane escaping at the wellhead.  Refiners often flare off NG rather than capture it during refining of oil.  The overall oil and gas industry methane leak rate is unknown but might be over 15% of what we use.  The industry however says oh it’s tiny, why would we let an asset escape?  Well, maybe because your making so damn much money on it that putting improved seals in the pipeline compressor or capturing rather than flaring just isn’t worth it.  We have to remember, they are in the business of ripping resources from the earth, nothing else.

Ever wonder if the higher price energy and water stingy washer is worth it?

One of these days your gonna need a new washing machine.  I just got one, about as energy and water stingy as I could find to buy, had it 4 months, our water consumption is way down, big drop, power use is down too a few dollars a month.
Consumer report illustrates how much you can save by spending more, maybe lots more, for the energy efficiency model.

Energy use for 300 cycles a year for 10 years.  $780 for the best units, but a whopping $2,180 for the worst.  Water use, 43,200 gallons, or up to 153,600 gallons for the worst wasters.  If you have an old machine you've sent the power company a minimum of $2k the last 10 years.  Water in some markets is mucho $, so that adds up too, and me, I don't like sending it to the utility.

pick'n peppers ahead of the freeze

Went out a few minutes ago, picked the last of my bell peppers and jalapenos, all of them, even the tiny little guys the size of a big pill.  A nice last harvest. Washed and in the fridge already.
Came in chopped onions garlic celery and two tomatilla and a jalapeno, sautéed for a few minutes added oregano, cumin and smoky paprika and salt a squirt of catsup.  Wow, a good tomatilla salsa.

we shall never be younger

Pussy Riot to the Gulag Archapipelago, the warden will see you now.

With only a few months left on her prison term the 23 year old musician Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is being sent to central Siberia, 4500 Km from her family, in the dead of winter, to a frozen isolated work camp.  The gulag system lives, and Putin and the Russian Church are eager to provide their enemies the opportunity to die there.  One of the only times she was able to converse with outsiders she claimed abuse by prison officials, now the trans-Siberian railway will carry her where the cry of rape will freeze in the empty forest.  

Imagine, Snowden, the self made savior of freedom and human rights, has chosen Russia to hide in and cry how dangerous the US is.  Hell is empty, all the devils are up here.

poor doctor

Preventative Care Kills return business and profits.

90% of heart disease can be prevented, and most of it can be reversed, with a plant based diet.
Almost all high blood pressure, diabetes, gout, can be reduced to the point of calling it cured.
Most cancers can be avoided, and a few can be shrunk, by a plant based diet.
Of the top 10 killers, only gun shots cannot be impacted by diet.

None of this makes the doctors, hospitals or drug companies any money, neither does it make fast food or the meat industry money.  So, it's (their) wealth over (your) health.