This blog is moving

This blog is moving to substack (until I learn why substack sucks, too).

Go to Brent Noorda's Blog: Part Deux (while supplies last).

WE'RE GRRREAT!

Here's a terrific gift for that patriotic Trump fan in your life. This cap celebrates and validates their choices, while at the same time (because the visor blocks damaging UV rays) allowing them to save face.

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We Made America Great Again.

Yay, Us! Now that America is so

great again, Trump deserves to

retire. Thanks, Donald, anybody

else can take it from here.

The Unmasked Avenger

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References:

• This is the first time I've ever made a comic. It's harder than I expected, mostly because I didn't know how much work went into cutting down the amount of text (probably didn't get the right). The tool I used for putting it together was StoryboardThat, which was delightfully easy to use.
• The 41 daily lives saved comes from seat belt deaths /day is from many sources, such as Seat Belts Save Lives. Some sources give lower numbers, but the exact number isn't important for a comic, is it? 
• The 300 daily lives saved by masks comes from The Case for Universal Cloth Mask Adoption... and my own quick estimates based on current death and mas-wearing rates. So 300 isn't a precise number. Should it be 200? or 400? the point is that it's currently a high number compared to seat belt lives saved.

Text: The Unmasked Avenger

 

Wearing seat belts saves about 41 American lives every day ... and that life my seat belt saves is my own life.

OK. It's a little uncomfortable, but I'll wear a seat belt.

 

Wearing masks saves about 300 American lives every day ... and that life my mask saves is probably not my own life, but the life of someone around me.

I'm wearing a mask to protect someone else?

HELL NO, I won't wear a mask! Freedom from Tyranny!!!!

Fun with Dunce Masks

The CDC recommends wearing face covering “... in the community setting … ” which “... is not intended to protect the wearer, but may prevent the spread of virus from the wearer to others”. In other words, you’re wearing a mask not primarily to protect yourself, but to protect other people from yourself, because you might not feel sick but you may still be contagious with something that this year is killing people in numbers not seen in an infectious disease since the pandemic flu of 1918.

But you’re probably seeing a lot of people “in community settings” who aren’t wearing masks. There could be two reasons for this:

1. they’re a mean D-bag who doesn’t care about infecting and potentially killing you, your elderly parents, your friends and family with underlying medical conditions, or anyone whose immune system rolls the dice incorrectly while responding to this unfamiliar pathogen
   
   OR
      
2. they’re unintelligent or just uninformed, and don’t understand that their behaviors are risking other’s health. In other words, they’re not a mean D-bag, but just a dunce.

I prefer to not think that people are D-bags, and so assume that those without masks are simple dunces. It’s harder to get angry at a dunce than a D-bag, and I’m tired of being angry.

Because dunces are not going to be wearing masks, I have created for them the Dunce Mask, or “D-Mask”. The D-Mask is a mask I put on people, in my imagination, so that I don’t yell at them. So far, it’s working.

For example, here’s an image of the White House COVID task force meeting a couple of days ago:

Nobody in this picture is wearing a mask except for 3 people handling the microphones and a camera. And this is the COVID Task Force! We’re supposed to take advice from these people!! Oh My G!!!

Here’s another image of that meeting, and it is just as upsetting:

And now, the same meeting with D-masks added (“D” for “Dunce” not for “D-bag”). Isn’t that at least a little more reassuring?

D-masks work in a lot of social situations. For example, here is one Walmart shopper not wearing a mask:

A lot better with a mask on, right?

How about this D-bag walking around the Mayo hospital without a mask:

Problem solved:

Last one, I promise: these Michigan protestors are a menace.

The D-mask won’t make them entirely safe (there is the matter of being a crowd in a time of social distancing … oh, and the automatic weapons) but this will help a little bit:

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, you cannot change people’s behavior, but you can change your perception of their behavior. And you can make the best of a bad situation (namely, waiting for your compromised nephew to be infected by some D-bag dunce who won’t wear a mask) by making a game out of it: adding D-masks on D-bags Dunces, even if only in your mind.

>>> these and other maskified pictures are here <<< 

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REFERENCES:

The image at the top of this post is done better in this cartoon created by Peter Kuper for The Week.

D-mask related tools:

• Google: surgical facemasks, transparent background, noncommercial reuse
• Bing: surgical face mask transparent background, free to share and use
• Site for making transparent png: https://onlinepngtools.com/create-transparent-png
• Easy & free image editing, good for putting a transparent png mask over other images:
  1) Drawings on drive.google.com
  or
  2) PowerPoint on onedrive.com
• All images related to this post are in this folder (if you want me to add a D-Mask image you've created, email to brent.noorda “at” gmail.com)
• a link back to this post is at tinyurl.com/duncemask

The Monkey's Paw - 19

For about 10 years, my yearly secret candle-blowing birthday wish has been that the airline industry would collapse; that people would realize the carbon cost for regularly flying long distances was unconscionably high; that families and businesses and salespeople would realize that telephones and the internet and teleconferencing had been invented and could replace carbon-costly in-person meetings and conferences; that runners would realize it was silly to fly 3000 miles and back only to run 26.2 miles and fly 3000 miles back home again; that vacationers would realize there were hundreds of cultures and sites to visit within 100 miles of home. In short, I wished for the end of the regressive carbon insult that air flight represents as an environmental nose-thumbing by those with upon those without.

I guess I got what I wished for, but not in the way I wished it to happen. Flights are down over 90%--the airline industry has been crippled. Teleconferencing is booming. Virtual marathons are a thing!

When I made those birthday wishes every year, I didn’t mean for it to happen this way. Sorry, everyone.

My fear now, and my expectation, is that when the VID bubble pops the skies will fill up again.

But I can still wish

transsignment

Dear Mom. Dear Dad. Dear Pearl.

For the longest time, months even, I’ve been wanting to tell you something, but I could never get up the nerve to do it in person because I know if I did you’d just pretend like you were totally sympathetic and understanding while at the same time you would be giving each other that look you do—that “going through a little phase” look you’d give each other when I was a kid and… Well this is not just a little phase I'm going through!

I hope you’re sitting down now because I’m just going to come out with it: Today I’m in the hospital about to undergo the final steps in the physical transition so that my body matches the identity I’ve had all along, not the identity I was assigned at birth.

So, by the next time we meet it will be a done deal. You will have had time to digest this information, will have come to terms with it, and we’ll all be good. Right? In no time at all, you’ll accept the new me (because it’s really the me I’ve been all along). You’ll accept me because you love me. You’ll accept me because I love you. You’ll accept me because I’ll be accepting myself and will finally be at peace as my outward identity finally matches my inward identity.

So here goes (drumroll ha ha): Mom, Dad, Pearl, I am a Gemini!

Get used to it :)

Oh yeah, I have a new name now, too (of course). I’m not Alex anymore. (Alex was a great name for a Libra, but imagine a Gemini named Alex and the looks I’d get—ha ha too too funny!)  Now I am Allex. Get used to that, too :) :)

Sure, you’ll occasionally make little mistakes as you get used to the new name, clothes, mannerisms, dating and career choices, breakfast cereal choices, etc… but as long as you keep trying I promise not to get angry. Old habits die hard. Heck, even I might screw up my signature now and again (or maybe sometimes I’ll be too judgmental, ha ha, Libras, amiright!?)

Ha ha. You haven’t lost a Libra. You’ve gained a Gemini!

Love ya,
Allex

A Recipe to End Inequality

A ship quickly sank near a small, deserted island. The ten survivors’ names, by extremely odd coincidence, were One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. In all the hubbub they managed to leave the ship with one gold coin each; except for Ten, who held nine gold coins.

No sooner had their clothing dried than they surveyed the island and discussed how to divide the land among them. Being believers in the free market, they agreed it was only fair to divide the land into parcels and to sell each parcel to the highest bidder in an auction to be held the next day.

As they lay down to sleep their first night on the island, most of the castaways had the same thought: since there were 18 gold coins among them, they would create 18 equal parcels and each of them would buy at least 1 parcel as their new homestead.

Had any of them stayed up late with insomnia, they might have noticed, by the light of the moon, Nine and Ten together in quiet conversation.

The auction began at the crack of dawn. The first to speak was Ten: “I bid 10 gold coins for the entire island”. When other castaways murmured ‘how could you have 10 coins this morning when last night you had 9?’, Ten said, “I don’t need to explain myself—I’ve got nothing to hide and have done nothing illegal. But if you must know, Nine has given me 1 gold coin and we have signed a contract. I will allow Nine to inhabit a tenth of my island, and Nine will protect my island from any intruders.”

Being law-abiding folk and having only 8 coins between them (which was not enough to outbid Ten's 10 coins for the entire island), everyone but Nine and Ten left the island to huddle in the shallow waters a few feet off shore.

After a few weeks of standing in the shallow water night and day, surviving on what few clams they could dig from the sand, their feet water-logged and prunish, their bodies shrinking and weak, their minds growing cloudy from lack of sleep and jealous from watching Nine and Ten build their huts and plant their gardens and sleep in hammocks between trees, the offshore-8 had become disgruntled. They decided they deserved more.

A motion was made to implement a 10% tax on everyone, and to use that 10% for the common good. Seven, who was good at math, pointed out that Ten would still have more money than all of the rest put together and so nothing would really change, and so Seven changed this motion to be a progressive tax: “Anyone owning more than 2 gold coins will be taxed at 80% to be shared with all for the common good.” Seven explained that this would leave everyone with about 2 gold coins, and they could all bid equally on equal parcels of land.

When the vote was held, only One, Three, Five, and Seven, voted for the progressive tax measure. Seven could not understand why the rest voted with the wealthy Ten, even though rejecting the tax meant a continued bare-existence standing in shallow water. Six explained it this way: “I know that through hard work and grit I’ll one day be wealthy, like Ten, and when that happens I won’t want all those hard-earned gold coins taken away from me.”

So, the situation returned to status quo. The offshore-8 grew skinnier, prunier, and more sleep deprived. Nine remained strong on a tenth of the islands resources—strong enough to protect Ten. And Ten grew fatter amongst his gardens and livestock. In hungry desperation, a few of the offshore-8 gave Ten their only gold coin in exchange for a meal, making Ten wealthier still.

Then one day something happened that changed everything. One day, Seven ate Nine.  (Seven. Ate. Nine. Who didn't see that coming?)

“How was it? What did it taste like? How do you feel?” they asked. “It was thrilling. Tasted like stringy chicken. I feel full,” Seven answered.

Moving as one the offshore castaways, too poor to own any land and too hungry to remember the importance of abiding by laws, turned toward shore and stepped onto the island for the first time since the auction. They continued walking toward Ten, from whom they tore snack-sized pieces as an appetizer, then cut steak-sized pieces for the barbecue.

And those who remained lived happily ever after.

Treatment/Side-Effect Recursion

Part I: My Bathroom Countertop

Eight weeks ago, there was nothing there except a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, a bar of soap, and a daily multivitamin.

Then this happened:

implement(RadiationTomoTherapy)
implement(CisplatinChemotherapy)
  
implement(trt)
  trt.apply()
  foreach se in trt.getSideEffects()
    foreach t in se.getTreatments()
      implement(t)

Part II: The Early Universe:

This is the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image. It shows the universe as close to its beginning as we can see. What does this look like, if not a cosmic countertop filled with pills, gelcaps, and capsules?

In other words, the universe is a side effect of the original physician's first prescription:

  implement(Light)

From To be nurse, first be patient. Chapter 1.

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Bonus: Every wonder what a person sounds like while they're sleeping 3-1/2 months after throat cancer treatment? Wonder no more. Here's almost 4 hours of it.

Those who cannot remember past historical figures are condemned to condemn them.

“Class, today’s current events topic is the statues being torn down across the country. This has been all over the news.

“Some famous Americans did some very immoral things a long time ago, a century or more in the past, and yet we have statues of them in our public spaces. A few years ago, a movement began to tear down such statues; the people behind this tear-down movement felt that the statues were honoring and condoning, or at least whitewashing, despicable behavior.

“The first statues to be removed were those of the Coal and Oil Barons, like John D. Rockefeller and J. Paul Getty. Almost nobody tried to save these statues from falling, or to prevent renaming the many buildings named after these very immoral people. It is obvious to anyone with at least a 1st grade education that the launching of the fossil fuel age was the single most immoral and unjust act in human history. Honestly, how could anyone have had the gall to support and encourage the global addiction to fossil fuels, and the subsequent environmental and humanitarian devastation these people brought about simply for their own financial benefit!

“The second wave of statue teardowns involved anything having to do with running the old-time aviation industry. This started with statues of Orville and Wilbur Wright, who invented the carbon-binging airplane technology, and went on to include figures like La Guardia, JFK, and Ronald Reagan, who were well known because of their large airports. A few people argued against this wave of takedowns, saying that by the time air flight was invented, burning fossil fuels was already normalized in society, and so they weren’t any worse than average people. But that argument failed against the common-sense facts that at no time did people burn more fuel than when they were flying, and that flying was not done by “normal people” but only by the wealthy few. And so, the flight-industrialist statues came crashing down. Good riddance!

“Next came the removal of statues of anyone who flew in planes a lot, which included a host of wealthy elites of the past two centuries who called themselves ‘frequent flyers’. Some people argued that we should preserve statues of frequent flyers who had exhibited redeeming humanitarian qualities, and that historical figures should not be judged only by the worst thing they ever did. For example, violent counter-protests broke out when a statue of someone named ‘Malala’ was brought down right here in Montgomery. Malala was a Nobel Prize winner who had advocated for the rights of women (difficult as it is to believe nowadays, there was a time when ‘man’ and ‘woman’ were how people were categorized, and women generally got the short end of the stick). These counter-protesting Malala-apologists argued that speaking out for women justified retaining the statue, despite the tens or hundreds of thousands of miles Malala flew around the world to receive prizes for humanitarian work. Ironically, the debate was never settled, because the statue’s foundation had been so weakened over the years, due to the rising tides caused by global warming, that one day Malala’s statue simply collapsed on its own.

“The final wave of statue removals targeted anyone known not just for air flight, but for any use of the internal combustion engine (the ‘internal combustion engine’ was the most common of the many historical machines designed to emit carbon into the atmosphere). Statues of Henry Ford, who was intimately associated with the manufacture of automobiles, were quickly toppled. And just last week another statue was removed in our city: someone named Rosa Parks who, as near as anyone can remember, was known solely for riding a bus—a fossil-fuel driven, carbon-belching bus.

“Your assignment, students, is to write one persuasive paragraph about any living person who you think deserves a statue, and why their statue will never be torn down. Remember to write your name and today’s date—September 30, 2117—at the top of the page, and leave it on my desk.

“When your assignment is finished, you may go out for recess.

“Students, remember that the school yard is deep in water again, today, so how do we stay safe? ... All together now: ‘I’ll put on my waders and watch out for gators.’”

all the world’s a test tube, and all the men and women merely chemoheterotrophs

chemoheterotrophs

In a recent Microbiology lecture, I learned that we can classify organisms into four categories, based on what they use as an energy source (light vs chemicals) and what they use as a source of carbon (organic compounds vs carbon dioxide). This is a slide from that lecture (my own notes are in blue):

As the blue note states, “most pathogenic microbes are chemoheterotrophs”, meaning that chemoheterotrophs get both their carbon and their energy from organic chemical compounds.

This slide sheds more light on these categories:

The blue FYI note “Carbon & Energy are usually the same compound” points out that most chemoheterotrophs use the same carbon source both for both energy and for growth. In other words, they take a carbon compound and break the carbon bonds (releasing energy) and then piece together the newly-freed carbon atoms to create more of themselves (either to grow their own bodies or, if there are enough carbon compounds, to reproduce more organisms like themselves).

the growth (and death) curve of chemoheterotrophs

If you have a small number of chemoheterotrophic organisms in a confined space, such as a test tube, and add a rich supply of new energy-containing carbon compounds, those chemoheterotrophs will do something very predictable. Whether they’re an Escherichia coli, a Staphylococcus aureus, or a Clostridium difficile, all chemoheterotrophs follow this growth curve:

At first, after the new energy-rich carbon compound is added (for example, sugar or some more complex carbohydrate), nothing much seems to change for a little while. This is called the “lag phase”. During the lag phase, the chemoheterotrophs are not able to use the new carbon compound very well because they don’t yet know how. In a process called "retooling" they are adjusting themselves to figure out what new enzymes and other tools are needed to breakdown this new carbon compound so that its  energy and carbon are accessible.

Once the retooling is done, watch out, because things are about to go crazy as the chemoheterotrophic organisms enter the “exponential growth phase” and start to reproduce like mad. For example, the growth curve above represents a bacterium that can reproduce in just minutes (provided there’s a good carbon compound available, and it has retooled for that carbon compound). Within minutes every bacterium becomes two; minutes later they’ve doubled again to be four bacteria; then eight, then sixteen. and so on. Within one hour, during the exponential growth phase, the test tube has gone from holding 10 bacteria to 100. An hour later it holds 250; by the third hour, 630. At 5 hours, the tube contains over 6,000 bacteria, and by 10 hours it holds about 63 million. An hour after that (11 hours after the exponential phase began at 10 bacteria) the tube holds about 1 billion bacteria.

Then, rather suddenly, the population growth ceases as the “stationary phase” is entered. The bacteria (or whatever chemoheterotroph is in that closed system) would keep expanding in numbers if it could, but the test tube environment has reached a point where so much of the carbon compound source has been consumed, and so much waste material has built up, that organisms are dying as fast as they are being created and the population in the tube remains level for a while.

Eventually, the chemoheterotrophs are dying faster than they’re growing and the population enters the “death phase”. The death phase, like the growth phase, is exponential. In the above case, once the death phase begins, it takes only about 11 hours for the population to drop from 1 billion to about 100,000.

Microbiologists see this growth curve happen again and again. Time after time, in experiment after experiment, a little while after a new carbon compound is introduced into the test tube or petri dish, the chemoheterotrophic organisms reproduce as fast as they can, even though, every time, it means the population will soon be dying off at a catastrophically exponential rate. They never, ever pace themselves. They’re just stupid bacteria.

a bigger chemoheterotroph in a bigger test tube

Single-celled microorganisms aren’t the only chemoheterotrophs. Most of the known animal species use carbon compounds as both their energy and their carbon source. Take, for example, humans. Throughout our long history, we humans have used the complex carbon compounds that make up plants and animals as our source of both energy (from breaking down complex carbon chains in our food and even firewood) and carbon atoms (the primary building blocks of all we eat, both flora and fauna, which become the basis of most of our cells, enzymes, hormones, fats, proteins, muscles, skin, nails, etc.…).

So, it turns out, humans are chemoheterotrophs, too. “Hey, Staphylococcus aureus, we have something in common!”


A few hundred years ago, humans began to realize that there was a new carbon compound available to us and, like the chemoheterotrophs we are, it took us a while to retool ourselves to use it. But once we retooled… well, just look at our recent logarithmic growth curve:

Does that post-fossil-fuel human growth curve look like part of any other growth curves you might have seen recently? Perhaps you recognize a resemblance to the “lag” and “exponential growth” phases of bacteria in a test tube into which a new carbon compound has just been added? Could it be that this last graph demonstrates just another chemoheterotrophic organism (aka “humans”) in a test tube (aka “Earth”) discovering a new complex carbon compound (aka “fossil fuels”)?

It may have taken a few hundred years for we humans to figure out how best to retool to use the new carbon compound (directly for energy, and directly and indirectly for food [1,2]), but once that retooling happened our growth took off at an exponential rate. The time scale is longer than in the bacteria graphs, because our reproductive period is decades instead of minutes, but other than that the human “lag” and “exponential growth” phases are so far looking pretty much the same as any other chemoheterotroph in a confined environment with a limited new carbon compound.

do universal rules apply universally?

So, chemoheterotrophic organisms, from single-celled bacteria to trillion-celled humans, all appear to act the same. The same universal rules apply. I would like to see a beauty in that universal truth, except in this case I happen to be one of those organisms in the graph, and in this case I know where that growth curve leads again and again, and it always leads to an exponential death phase.

I want the humans-on-earth growth curve to be different than the bacteria-in-test-tube growth curve. A tiny, one-celled bacterium doesn’t know any better than to use up its new sugar source as fast as it can. But we humans have big brains, and society, and history, and writing, and science, and microbiologists. We should be able to see what’s coming if we continue blindly down our fossil-fueled path, and we should be able to do something about it.

We are smarter than bacteria, aren’t we?

Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 5

The first constitutional crisis of 2017

Hypocrites in a Half Shell

Oh, those DiCaprio brothers:

Donatello

No one was a more passionate supporter of animal rights than Donatello DiCaprio, who fundraised, marched, and spoke out for everything from the SPCA to the Animal Liberation Front to Chengeta Wildlife. When it was discovered that Donatello funded his animal-rights work by running dogfights in his basement and selling carved elephant-tusk bongs on the side, he was humiliated and removed from all animal rights organizations. He’s not even permitted, anymore, to enter the park to feed pigeons.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo DiCaprio was known to risk life & limb battling against the evils of the international child-slavery sex trade. He was humbly honored by human rights groups across the globe for bringing awareness to these horrors, and was rumored to be in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize. When a lineman from the local power utility stumbled across a bunker buried in Michelangelo’s backyard, and it was found to contain six barely-living children used as his sexual playthings, Michelangelo not only had all his humanitarian awards rescinded but was sentenced to multiple lifetimes behind bars.

Raphael

Once known as “Fat Raph”, Raphael DiCaprio inspired legions of admiring fans as the Weight Watchers spokesman. With his simple smile and his well-known slogan (“if I can lose 300 pounds by counting a few points… aw shucks, so can you”), Raphael was an inspiration to all. When it slipped out, during an unrelated court case against his plastic surgeon, that Raphael had secretly had his entire digestive system removed, while he continued to binge on 50,000 calories a day, he lost is endorsement from Weight Watchers, his ex-Victoria Secret Model wife divorced him, and his cat scratched up a corner of his sofa.

Leonardo

Leonardo DiCaprio—oh, Leonardo DiCaprio—he outshone them all. This Hollywood phenomenon used his star profile, his philanthropic cash, and even his Oscar acceptance speech, to raise global awareness of the dangers of climate change. For such work, Leonardo received awards from government and environmental groups all over the world. But then it was discovered that Leonardo owned multiple large estates around the globe (even an island), frequently travelled between them (via first-class & private jets, and superyachts), owned a fleet of cars, and had purchased tickets to fly into space with a companion just for fun (releasing 250 tons of CO2 each for a few minutes of weightless fun); and so it was revealed that every year he personally released about 1400 times as much carbon as the average American (which was already much higher than average world citizen). When this disturbing data was uncovered, Leonardo DiCaprio… um… well… he just went on receiving environmental awards, lots of them, sometimes flying thousands of miles overnight, in private jets, to get from one awards ceremony to the next.

Go figure.

Walmart Douchebags

Here’s an image of a Walmart douchebag:

This douchebag cost me $10.08 at my local Walmart. I’m not sure what it does.

I did my best to follow the instructions, but some steps don’t make a whole lot of sense. The package said it was supposed to leave me feeling fresh, but it only left me feeling awkward and confused (and a wee bit excited).

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Here’s another image of Walmart douchebags:

These are just some of the Walton family, heirs of the $171 billion Walmart fortune. This year these douchebags were handed $3.16 billion in dividends. Meanwhile, the average Walmart worker with children lives below the poverty line.

As far as I can tell, the only work the Walton family does, to earn their $3.16 billion paycheck, is to show up at a meeting once a year to veto shareholder proposals that would pay their workers a living wage.

----------

I don’t understand what any of these Walmart douchebags--the hygiene product or the family heirs--are good for. Both types of Walmart douchebags seem kind of fishy. And both leave a bad taste in my mouth.

----------

I’ve read (here) that Walmart could give each of it’s employees a $5,000 raise, bringing most of their employees above the poverty line, without hurting the Walton family a bit; in fact it might even help the Walmart bottom line. But I say that’s too good for those Walmart douchebags.

You know what you call someone who doesn’t work and just lives off handouts? A freeloader. The Walton family are a bunch of freeloader douchebags and I’d personally like to see all the money go to the hardworking employees. Those freeloading Walton douchebags should have to go out and work for a living.

To be fair, it can be hard to get a job without training or job experience. Their Waltony hands are too soft for manual labor, having never been calloused by the hard work of doing anything except counting money, and buying fine art, yachts, and fancy cars.

But the Waltons do have experience at doing one thing: they’re experienced at being douchebags. There are a lot of people out there whose orifices are not as fresh smelling as a field of daisies after a light rain. So let’s get those Walton’s to work doing what they know: being douchebags, using their so-soft hands to service our American holes. That’s the kind of Walmart family shareholder I want to see.

Our Dublin Vacation

We recently fulfilled our long-time dream of taking a vacation to Dublin. (Boy oh boy, did we need a vacation!) Dublin was everything we had hoped for, and more. Take a look:

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As you can see, Dubliners take a lot of pride in keeping their streets clean, safe, and friendly.

And they feel it’s important to support the local street artists.

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The Dublin food is wonderful. The people are always ready to help. And they’re so friendly!

Here we are enjoying a local brew and a bite to eat at one of their many fine restaurants and pubs. (I admit, we may have enjoyed a little too much of the food and drink--but what are vacations for).

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The plazas in Dublin are their centers of commerce, social interaction, entertainment, dining, and nightlife. Here is Amy in one of the Dublin plazas.

BTW, I believe the local term for such a plaza is “strip mall”.

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Our hotel accomodations were top notch, complete with television (with many English language channels) and breakfast in the lobby with other travellers.

This is our room:

and the view out our window, overlooking the plaza:

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But, alas, no vacation can go on forever. So we had to bid Dublin adiós and adiue.

Here you can see Amy reluctantly headed toward the subway platform, for our trip back home to Oakland, a few Bart stops away from Dublin.

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Farewell, Dublin, and your lovely green rolling hills, your wonderful food and drink, your inspiring arts, and your friendly people. We will always be there in our hearts, even if we can’t always be there physically (at least not until we rustle up another $4.25 in Bart fare).

Peak Lavender? Pppfft!!!

The Doomsayers were wrong 100 years ago, and they’re wrong now.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

Sept 16, 2124

It was 100 years ago, today, that scientists first unlocked the secrets of Heavy Lavender, the almost-limitless power source that has fueled mankind’s last century of unprecedented prosperity and growth. Rather than mark this anniversary as a time for celebration, the doomsday, eco-alarmist Cassandras at WEDF are at it again, predicting “ecological disaster of unprecedented proportions” in today’s sensationalist report titled “Peak Lavender: Return of Limits.”

We’ve heard this song many times before--Thomas Malthus first crooned its dissonant melody over 300 years ago. The song goes on and on, my friends, and though it never seems to end the song of the scaremongers is always and forever wrong.

A little bit of historical knowledge is all we need to thoroughly debunk WEDF’s latest fact-free claims. Very few of us today were alive on April 3, 2019, when some portion of an alien spacecraft crashed into a ski resort in what was then Gstaad, Switzerland. It would be 2 years before the innermost compartment of that spacecraft would be breeched to find that it was full of a substance that looked, more than anything, like seeds of a lavender shrub. Within one year the world’s scientific community had determined that each “seed”, termed “Heavy Lavender” or just “Lavender”, was a form of phenomenally dense sodium and germanium behaving as a single inert element. Our greatest minds soon confirmed that when the GeNa bond was broken each seed was capable of instantly releasing as much energy as the world of 100 years ago then consumed in decades. There were many false starts in harnessing that energy (the world greatly mourned the loss of the Large Hadron Collider along with a third of what was then Switzerland and portions of France), but on September 16, 2024 the first successful Lavender Station went online.

Since that event, 100 years ago, nothing has been the same. Nothing, that is, except the rhetoric of the chattering, so-called environmentalists.

100 years ago, the eco-alarmists warned of “Peak Oil” as if the world would soon run out. How ironic that sounds today, given that Germany’s Lavender Stations produce more hydrocarbons every week (because those liquid fuels are the most effective way to transport energy for the world’s myriad uses) than ever existed in known natural reserves. In light of this Peak Oil history, using the term “Peak Lavender” simply highlights the ignorance of the WEDF.

100 years ago the greatest eco-alarmist threat was something they called “global warming”, the notion being that atmospheric Carbon accumulations would heat the Earth out of control, bringing with it global heating, uncontrolled sea-rises, and general environmental catastrophe. How wrong-headed those notions seem today as Lavender Stations draw the carbon in their hydrocarbons directly from the atmosphere, giving us precise control of these “dangerous greenhouse gases”. As for sea rises, wrong again! By pumping and freezing water across the Antarctic continent we have not only lowered sea levels and greatly increased the Earth’s habitable land, but have also created the third most popular tourist destination in the South Pole’s numerous theme parks and shopping malls.

100 years ago they warned of mass starvation and out-of-control population growth--this in a world of only 7 billion people. 7 billion! Listen… what’s that sound you hear? That’s the sound of today’s 60 billion residents of planet Earth, healthy and well fed, laughing at those old population concerns. Human ingenuity used Lavender energy to quickly bring about a second green revolution: now we’re able to pump water wherever it is needed, extract fertilizer nutrients directly from the air and the oceans, generate artificial sunlight in multi-level skyscraper farms, level mountains into furrows, and turn the newly-exposed ocean floors into boundless farmland. There is plenty of food and water for everybody. (Yes, there remain an estimated 3 billion people suffering chronic undernourishment in areas of political instability--primarily parts of France and the Middle East where relations with Germany remain strained, and as a result of the terrible Verderbnislücke riots within Germany itself--but in historical terms to have just 1 in 20 people starving is nothing short of a humanitarian miracle.)

100 years ago they were predicting massive unemployment and economic unrest as machines took over our jobs; those worries initially worsened as Lavender’s cheap energy made the cost of running those machines virtually free. Those predictions could not have been more wrong, because what they did not consider (they never do) is how many new employment opportunities would be created by the new technology. For example, with ubiquitous and cheap air travel it is not unusual now for workers to commute up to 1000 miles to their jobs--that 1000-mile job-search radius has greatly increased the job market opportunities for every employee. More importantly, entire job titles exist now that never existed before, such as:

• in-flight personal trainer - between commuting, retiring, conferences, and vacations, the middle class now spend about 1/5 of their adult life flying, which would be bad for health if not for our in-flight fitness gyms (offering cross-training, bowling alleys, weight-lifting, etc…).
• ensemblier - a century ago it was common to wear the same outfit all day long. In a time when fashions changed only seasonally, this made some sense (although it was highly unsanitary by modern standards). Now that fashions change daily--sometimes hourly--ensembliers, who choose, purchase and deliver one’s morning, afternoon, and evening attire, make up 8% of the workforce; that’s 4 billion new jobs in a category that didn’t even used to exist. [It was common in olden times to use items more than once--it was called “reuse”. Reusable clothing was just one example of the old mindset that proved both unhygienic and bad for the economy. There were countless examples of product reuse, some of them quite horrifying, including toothbrushes, keyboards, plates, glasses, cutlery, soap, toilet seats, bed sheets, pillows, phones, and currency.]
• quarantine trooper - in a world that is 60-billion strong, diseases could spread very quickly if each city block did not have an ever-vigilant quarantine patrol at the ready
• gravity counselor - space is a favorite weekend getaway, but who would have known that so many space tourists would have so much difficulty getting mentally readjusted to gravity
• energy release artist - most nights we literally have more energy than we know what to do with; without these artists and their brilliant night-time displays whole cities would literally explode
• sommeli-aire - “are we dining this evening on Canard à l'Orange? May I recommend pairing that with bottled air from Lourdes, or perhaps Bilbao if you’re feeling adventurous”

100 years ago they said the ongoing mass extinction was a precursor of humanity’s own doom. If that was our doom, nobody seems to have noticed. Turns out, nobody really misses a few smelly pandas, pelicans, penguins, or porpoises. And bee drones are a lot more efficient than their organic, stinging predecessors.


Today’s WEDF “Peak Lavender” report barely acknowledges the tremendous gains from Lavender energy, never admitting that in every way we’re better off than people of 100 years ago. Instead, the WEDF touts scaremongering estimates that we’ve already used more than half of our Heavy Lavender, even as yearly use increases, and that in less than a century there will be no more Lavender. In language more fitting to a bad movie screenplay than a scientific report, they write “and then, just as quickly as Lavender arrived it will be gone. In just a few generations we will have squandered this one-time resource of incredible energy, leaving nothing for our children. Without the miracle fuel to sustain our way of life, most of the Earth’s 90 billion inhabitants will soon perish in the wars, pestilence and famines sure to follow.”

Whew! Heady stuff. Put that in a QMAX movie sphere and sell me popcorn!

Look. Germany, who has tightly controlled the Lavender supply ever since they annexed Switzerland in 2028, denies the WEDF’s figures. But even if, for sake of argument, we were to accept the WEDF estimate that over 50% of Lavender is gone, it does not logically follow that disaster is impending. Disaster is not at our door. They are just plain wrong.

Why are they so wrong? Why was Malthus so wrong 300 years ago? Why were the zero-population-growthers so wrong 150 years ago, and the climate alarmists so wrong 100 years ago? Because all their claims are based on the belief that Man is restrained by natural, physical limits (and when nature doesn’t prove their point, by golly, they always want government to impose unnatural limits for them).

But what the Malthuses and the Ehrlichs and the Gores and the McKibbens and the WEDFs don’t understand is that Man is not controlled by limits. There are no limits to human ingenuity in an untethered marketplace.

Human ingenuity is an unlimited resource in a free market.

Why are the doomsayers always wrong? Because they never understand the role of the economy and unlimited human ingenuity in overcoming any challenge society encounters.

When petroleum was discovered, brilliant scientist learned to harness its energy. When more food was needed, brilliant scientists brought us the first and second green revolutions. When Heavy Lavender was discovered, it took brilliant scientists only a few years to learn to harness that resource. Do they really believe that in next 100 years our brilliants scientist will make no progress in any of these areas?

• inventing more efficient paths to Lavender energy extraction
• discovering more Lavender deposits through exploratory drilling and planetary exploration (it’s only reasonable to assume there have been other alien crashes in our solar system’s 6 billion years history)
• we have no doubt that someday, as it’s secrets are better understood, Humanity will be able to produce its own Lavender - when that happens, today’s era of prosperity will look like the dark ages by comparison

Looked at historically, today’s WEDF report simply continues a long tradition of pessimistic worrywarts warning the rest of us to amend our wicked ways before it’s too late. The rest of us would be wise to continue our long tradition of blissfully ignoring them.

Bewitched in Salem, MA

Elizabeth Montgomery twitches her little nose and--ding-a-ding-a-ding--magic!

Introduction to Gender Inequality in American Healthcare

“Welcome to the first session of this course: Introduction to Gender Inequality in American Healthcare.

“First off I want to show you a slide which speaks volumes about how much remains to be done to achieve healthcare equality in this county.

“As this graphic makes starkly clear, a woman born in this country in 1980 can expect to die about 6 years sooner than if she’d been born a man. That is to say: women in America enjoy 6 fewer years of life itself. It’s a tragedy and an outrage, and one that our male-centric medical establishment barely even acknowledges

“Could you imagine if the tables were turned and men, instead, were dying six years younger than women? It would make headlines in every paper, and be the top of the news every evening. Congress and the big pharmaceutical industry would be funding men’s longevity research faster than you could say ‘someone give me another blue pill’! There would be fundraising telethons, and marathons, and walks for men’s health.

“It’s unconscionable that in this day and age our society is still so paterna… uh, yes, there in back, you have a question?"

“Yes, professor. Um… I’m not sure you’re reading that chart correctly. I think those lines might be mislabeled. Yeah, um, it looks like someone scratched out the proper labels and switched ‘Males’ with ‘Females’. Rather crudely, too. They didn’t even correctly spell ‘males’.”

“What? You’re saying that it’s the other way around? That females are outliving males?”

“Yes, professor, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Oh my… you may have something there…  OK. You’re right. Never mind. Class dismissed."

Next week: Introduction to Gender Inequality in the American Penal System: Why are women five times as likely to be incarcerated as men, and why is nothing being done to protect these women’s rights?

Thinking about Brownian Motion, Air Molecules, and Airplane Wings

In 1827, botanist Robert Brown peered into a microscope and observed the jittery motion of pollen particles in a fluid. This then-unexplained (therefore magical) jitteriness has since been known as Brownian Motion.

In 2012, pedestrian Brent Noorda peered out a window and observed the non-falling motion of an airplane up in the sky. This then-unexplaned (therefore magical) suspension has since been known as Airplane Aerodynamics.

(In 1738 Daniel Bernoulli published some book about fluid dynamics, including Bernoulli’s principle, but we’re going to ignore him.)

In 2014, this blog post attempted to connect these two phenomena. Can the reason that particles jiggle in Brownian Motion be the same reason that airplanes don’t fall from the sky?

Brownian Motion

Brownian Motion (Wikipedia article) is often observed by dirty daydreamers with nothing better to do than to watch dust motes float around in the sunlight (see dust-mote video), and by smoking chemists watching particles of soot through a microscope (see soot video).

It wasn’t clear what caused the random jostlings of Brownian Motion until Albert Einstein published his “Theory of Brownian Motion” in 1905 (known as Einstein’s “miracle year” because in that one year he released this and 3 other groundbreaking papers in physics, and still found time to record both Electric Ladyland and Sergeant Pepper). Einstein’s paper used the behavior of these microscopically visible particles to provide convincing evidence of the existence of atoms, too small to see in then-existing microscopes, and even to accurately count those invisible atoms.

What’s causing the Brownian Motion of visible soot particles in the air are their frequent and random-like collisions with very numerous, very small (even compared to soot particles), and very fast air molecules. If you could see the air molecules you’d be amazed at how many of those little things there were zipping about and bouncing against the relatively-giant bits of soot.

Interactive web page at MinuteLabs.io

You MUST now play with this interactive web page explaining Brownian Motion at MinuteLabs.io. I mean it. You are not allow to read further on this blog until you use that interactive web site. INTERACT NOW!

At the MinuteLabs.io page, if you are tracing paths of the big balls you’ll see their erratic Brownian Motion looking something like this:

If you adjust the “Drag to see what’s actually going on” slider to make the invisible air molecules visible, you’ll see that there’s a lot more going on there:

Upward-Only Brownian Motion (ignoring collisions from above)

I hope you played with that interactive web page at MinuteLabs.io long enough to really understand it, and to notice that those big colored dots are randomly bouncing all over the screen, and to understand why. Because now we’re going to change the rules a little bit.

I’ve altered that interactive page to create a new page showing Brownian Motion (with upward-only-option). This adds the option “Ignore Falling Air”, changing the rules so that collisions only have an effect if they are from below. In other words, tiny air particles coming from above are ignored (they pass right through), while air particles from below are the same old collisions (they continue to bounce off).

When you play Brownian Motion (with upward-only-option), which I sincerely hope you do, you’ll notice a decidedly different pattern of paths, e.g.:

There’s still a little bit of erratic behavior, but clearly, when collisions from above are ignored, these colored balls just want to rise.

The Upward-Only Brownian-Motion Wing

As we’ve seen, if an object could receive collisions only with air particles moving up, but was invisible to air particles falling down, then that object would rise, as if pushed from below (because it is being pushed from below). Such a magical device would be able to stay aloft in air.

We’ll now attempt to invent such a magical device, and we’ll call it a “Brownian Motion Wing” or just “wing”.

Imagine this “wing” object, having a right- triangular cross-sectional shape, moving from right to left at (oh... let’s just pull a number out of the air) 570 miles per hour. This wing is traveling through a sky full of very many super-tiny air molecules, a few of which are represented in this drawing. Those air molecules are moving very very quickly in random directions, with an average velocity of (oh…) twice the speed of the wing, so that relative to the wing the slowest ones at any instant are running away from the wing at about 500mph and the fastest ones are coming toward the plane at about 1500mph. Here is what I hope you’re imagining:

Notice first the level bottom of the wing compared to the sloped top. There are air molecules bouncing off the wing bottom, but no air molecules bouncing off of the top. This is because the front of the wing is pushing away most of the molecules whose trajectory would have hit the top of the wing. In a sense, the top of the wing is in the random-air-molecule-trajectory shadow of that front edge.

We have our magic wing!

Air molecules are now bouncing against the bottom but not against the top; in other words, there is force on the bottom of the wing pushing up, but no force on the top pushing down. That wing wants to fly!

Notice also that if the wing were not moving, but were stationary relative to the air, the front edge would not be preventing air molecules from hitting the top of the wing, and so there would be just as much downward force of air molecules bouncing against the top of the wing as there is against the bottom. So if this wing is not moving, it won’t fly.

This fast-moving “wing” is what we wanted. It is an object that collides only with air molecules moving up, but not with air molecules moving down. Success!!!!

Wing force-per-square-meter of Upward-Only Brownian Motion

Having invented this “wing” device, which is effected by the upward-pushing air molecules but not the downward-pushing ones, let’s calculate how much force is pushing up on the bottom of our wing.

Force per-square-meter of upward-only air molecules

First lets determine the force of a single air molecule bouncing off the bottom of our wing. To make this calculation easy, we’ll make the following reasonable assumptions:

• the average air molecule weighs about 1e-25 lbs
• the average air molecule is traveling at about 1100 miles/hour (in some random direction)
• the wing weighs much (much much) more than an air molecule

Note about assumptions and estimates: These, and all of the rest of the numbers in this post, are reasonable but inexact estimates, but still reasonable enough to suggest whether further calculations are warranted.

I won’t show all my math, but here are things calculated along the way:

• for air molecules moving in any non-downward direction (i.e. Vy>0) the upward component of velocity averages 635 mph (Vy=sqrt((V^2)/3), or about 284 meters/second
• the change in momentum for each upward collision averages about 284e-25 (lb m/s)
• there are about 2.69e+25 air molecules per cubic meter (at sea level, so we’ll assume plane is flying low)
• in one second about 3.82e+27 collisions will happen between air molecules and the bottom of the wing (that’s half of all the molecules in a 284 meter tall column of air, or 1/2 * 284 x 2.69e+25, if assumptions about elasticity are made)
• in each second, the change in momentum is 108,420 lb m/s (2.69e+25 * 284e-25) or 49179 kg m/s

Therefore, the upward force on a square meter of our magic wing is 49179 N/m^2 (where N is a Newton, which is 1 kg m/s^2).

How big must our magic wing be to support the weight of a 747?

A Boeing 747-400’s mass is 396,890 kg (875,000 lb), and gravity near earth is about 9.81 m/s^2. So the downward force on a 747 is up to 3893491 N (396,890 x 9.81).

To counteract this force of gravity, and keep the 747 in the air, our magic wing’s bottom surface area must be (3893491 / 49129 =) 79 m^2.

Boeing reports the 747 wing area as 525 m^2, which is 6.6 times larger than what is required by our estimate for what is required. That is much closer than I expected to be when I started this theory. Still, why are we off by 6.6X? Bad estimates? Whacky assumptions? Turbulance is a bitch? Boeing over-engineers?

The shape of our right-trangle wing?

In the previous right-triangle cross section drawing of our wing, I just guessed at the dimensions, especially the height relative to the width. So let’s get a better guess for our 747 magic wing.

The 747 cruises at about 913 km/h (567 mph) = 254 m/s. If we want the front edge to block our average downward air molecules (with average downward velocity of 284m/s) at that speed, the height/width ratio should be 284/254, making the cross-section of our triangle wing look like this:

That’s a HORRIBLE looking wing. Horrible, in a lot of ways, but the worst is all those air molecules that are pushing up against the gigantic front of the wing. How are the plane engines expecting to provide enough force to push all those molecules off the front?!

Even if each front-hitting particle would just magically “go away” after it hit the front, how much pressure is that?

Quick Calculation: Taking our wing bottom area to be 79 m^2, the wing front would be about 88 (79x284/254) m^2.  Each second, this would be colliding against 6e+29 (254*88x2.69e+25) air molecules each averaging 538 (284+254) m/s relative to the wing and so each changing momentum by 244e-25 kg m/s. The final force is therefore about 1.46e+7 N.

So to collide against all this air, our engines have to provide about 1.46e+7 N thrust. The combined engines on a 747 generate about 1.1e+6 N, which is about 13 times too little for our wing. The engines to push this thing through the air would have to be massive!

We could start modifying the front of the wing to be more aerodynamic, being angled to push more air down and out of the way. If we deflect the incoming air up we are getting pushed down, and if we deflect the air down there is some benefit, but that is offset by pushing away many of the upward-rising molecules we need to bounce against the underside of the plane.

In the end, this idea of bouncing away all downward molecules is requiring way more energy than current engines supply.

Conclusion: This wing idea doesn’t fly!

This upward-only browning wing is a failure. So the traditional explanation is correct, right?

The traditional explanation for what makes a wing fly is something like this: "The path around a wing is longer above the wing than it is below the wing; therefore the molecules above the wing must travel faster to keep up with the molecules below the wing; therefore, Bernoulli (who we almost got away with not mentioning) says the air pressure above the wing is lower than that below, so the wing is pushed up."

The problem with this traditional example is the idea that for some reason the molecules above the wing go faster than those below the wing. That’s just silly. It’s as if runners around a race track will run faster at the curved ends of the track than they do during the straight sections, just because something about curvature makes a person run faster.

If you want to know what really makes a plane fly, see this superbly excellent article: A Physical Description of Flight; Revisited, then watch some water wrap around a glass under the sink, especially if you can find a wing-shaped glass, and say to yourself “Oh, now I get it!” (But then again, maybe that article and the water-under-glass example are improperly crediting the Coandă effect, and so maybe you still don't get it at all, and neither do I.)

So, does air flight have anything to do with randomly-moving air molecules?

Yes, the flow of air around a wing is completely governed by those random air molecules bouncing around. From a macro level, watching smoke wrap around a wing, or streamline paths in our drawings, it can seem like air is a fluid macro thing. But air is really mostly empty space, if you look at it closely enough, with lots of tiny tiny balls of air molecules bouncing and colliding. It is their collective behavior that gives the characteristics of a fluid.

Take, for instance, the idea “low pressure” that often comes up when describing air flow, streamlines, and “lift”, and especially the extreme of low pressure  of a “vacuum”, which is an area of no pressure.  Lower pressure simply means there are fewer particles bouncing around (or slower particles); while a vacuum means there are no particles.

Nature doesn’t care about a vacuum

You’ll often hear that “nature abhors a vacuum”. But that isn’t at all true. Vacuums are fine, they just don’t tend to last for very long. This isn’t because the surrounding area abhors (or even notices) a vacuum, or is being sucked in by the vacuum, but simply because the vacuum is a place where randomly-moving particles that happen to be headed that way or not going to meet with any other particles to keep them away.

To demonstrate why vacuums don’t last very long, even thought they don’t express any force themselves, I’ve modified the interactive web page one more time, creating Push air molecules around, so it will only show the air molecules, and to allow you to push those molecules around.  If you’re quick about it you can create a vacuum region like this one:

But the vacuum region won’t stick around very long.

Go ahead, play with Push air molecules around. It’s fun, and it’s all I’ve got left.