Environment
drorzel | February 10, 2015I've done yet another piece for The Conversation, this one expanding on something I've been saying in interviews promoting Eureka: that knowing the process of science can help people sort good science from bad. In this particular case, I take the somewhat #slatepitch-y angle that the recent high-profile unraveling of the BICEP2 experiment's claim to detect primordial gravitational waves is a good thing:
Along with general disappointment, the new announcement has prompted discussion of what, if anything, the BICEP2 team did wrong. Many commentators fault them for over-hyping their results to…
drorzel | June 2, 2014I don't have anything all that new to say about last night's Cosmos reboot, and I'm leaving for scenic Madison, WI today to attend DAMOP, so I don't have a great deal of time. Kate did mention something over dinner last night, though, that's a good topic for a quick blog post.
Kate's a big listener of audiobooks and podcasts, including The Naked Scientists podcast, and she mentioned something they said in responding to a question about charging phones and the cost of electricity:
I think my favourite one is a microwave oven. So, the clock on a microwave oven uses more electricity over the…
drorzel | February 3, 2014It's taken me a disgracefully long time to finish the review copy of Lee Billings's Five Billion Years of Solitude I was sent back in the fall, mostly because I didn't read anything not immediately related to the book-in-progress for most of November and all of December. Which is to say, the long delay is not in any way a reflection of the quality of this book, which is excellent.
The title comes from the observation that the span from when life arose on Earth to the distant future when the expanding Sun will swallow the planet entirely is around five billion years. The span when the planet…
drorzel | December 17, 2013We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate's mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out of driving around in a rental car-- The Pip chattered happily about "My new car" for a while-- which we did a lot of, going to a beach and the Mote Aquarium in Sarasota.
Doing all that driving in a rented SUV and a state with a 70mph speed limit got me thinking about optimum driving speed. Particularly on the…
drorzel | February 19, 2013This past weekend, I was at Boskone, where I appeared on a few science-y panels. One of these was on the possibility of beaming power down from space:
Energy From Space
Beam me down some juice, Scotty? Let's talk about the possibilities -- and practicalities -- of really long-distance power transmission.
Tom Easton (M), Jordin T. Kare, Chad Orzel, Jeff Hecht, Joan Slonczewski
This was a little odd, as Jordin does this for a living-- he's been working on a proposal to NASA for a solar power generating satellite that would use lasers to beam power down to photovoltaic panels on the ground--…
drorzel | November 17, 2011The water heater for Chateau Steelypips is significantly older than the usual useful life for such devices, and it's really started to show. I'm getting pretty sick of lukewarm showers, so we probably need to replace it.
As a good squishy liberal type, I of course want to replace it with something more efficient, and there are claims out there that the best way to go for efficiency is with the "tankless" models (a gas one, in our case, so we can still have hot water when/if winter weather takes out our electricity). Of course, there's a lot of contradictory information out there. The usually…
drorzel | September 19, 2011I got a new comment on an old post asking an interesting question about thermodynamics:
I have a question that bears somewhat on this issue of keeping cars parked in the sun, cooler. You all know those accordion folded/aluminized shades you can put up inside the windshield and back window.
Seems to me putting them INSIDE is the wrong approach. They should be on the OUTside of the window acting as real shades and reflecting away the sun before it gets into the inside of the car.
This involves some of the same physics involved in the ever-popular issue of climate change, so it's worth talking…
drorzel | August 30, 2011Back when I reviewed Mann's pop-archaeology classic 1491, I mentioned that I'd held off reading it for a while for fear that it would be excessively polemical in a "Cortez the Killer" kind of way. Happily, it was not, so when I saw he had a sequel coming out, I didn't hesitate to pick it up (in electronic form, this time).
As you can probably guess from the title and subtitle, 1493 is about what happened after Europeans made contact with the Americas. This covers a wide range of material, from straight history, to biology, to economics, but the central theme of the whole thing is basically…
drorzel | August 21, 2011A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it's with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh.
The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that's been around for a long time, with lots of different people working on it. GE's technology is based on an idea from some Australians back in the 1990's, and they appear to think they can scale it up to industrial scale. Predictably enough, there's a stark difference of opinion about the…
drorzel | August 4, 2011Back at the AAAS Meeting, I was really annoyed by a session on fracking, the process by which natural gas is extracted from shale deep underground. As I wrote at the time, regarding the industry shills who spoke:
I left before the whole thing had wrapped up, because it was that or start throwing stuff at Martin and Gorody. Honestly, their presentations made me more convinced than ever that we need strict regulations governing the development of the shale. While the gas will inevitably be extracted (unless somebody comes up with a cheap and readily manufactured solar cell with 60% efficiency…
drorzel | July 21, 2011It's really frickin' hot in much of the US. Fortunately, we have central air at home, A/C in the car, and convenient local businesses with air conditioning and free wi-fi. The inadequate HVAC systems in the Science and Engineering building on campus aren't anywhere near being able to cope with this, so I'm working from home or a cafe until the weather breaks.
I will, however, use this as a shameless plug to re-link a post from last year, where we scientifically tested whether it's better to leave your car windows open or closed on a hot day. The answer: if it's a short stop, closing the…
drorzel | April 22, 2011I intended to do a big book-sales post today, but our DSL modem may be dead, so there was no Internet in Chateau Steelypips this morning, and I forgot to copy the relevant files onto a thumb drive, so it will have to wait. Maybe this afternoon.
In lieu of that, here's some other stuff on shale gas drilling in the Northeast, following on Tuesday's post:
-- It's always nice to have my half-assed writing about economic issues supported, even indirectly, by people who know something about the subject writing similar things. Thus, Felix Salmon on cost-benefit analyses of oil drilling:
Under…
drorzel | April 19, 2011The New York Times had another article on the environmental impacts of shale gas drilling, which reminded me that I had intended to write something else on the subject after February's post on the fracking panel at AAAS, but never got around to it. The hook for the article is yet another study showing that the environmental questions are more complicated than just the question of how much CO2 is released in burning gas vs oil or coal, with loss and leakage during the drilling process potentially producing a lot of greenhouse gases.
This is, of course, a single study, and includes the…
drorzel | March 22, 2011Kevin Drum re-posts a chart on wind power made by Stuart Staniford showing that the number of new wind power plants installed in 2010 was way lower than in 2009 or 2008:
This is meant as a starting point for discussion about the big economic issues that might've caused this. One of the many, many reasons I'll never make it as a political pundit, though, is that when I see a graph like this, I'm inexorably drawn to speculating about aspects of it that really have nothing to do with the intended point. In this particular case, I look at this graphic and ask myself "Why are there so many wind…
drorzel | February 22, 2011I grew up in Broome County, NY, down by the PA border, and my parents still live in scenic Whitney Point. Broome County is one of the areas affected by a huge environmental controversy, because it sits on top of the northern bit of the Marcellus Shale formation, which contains huge amounts of natural gas. For years, this has been deemed too difficult and expensive to extract, but gas prices and drilling technology, specifically hydraulic fracture drilling where they pump large amounts of water down the hole to break up the rock and let the gas escape, have moved to a place where it's…
drorzel | December 29, 2010Most of what would ordinarily be blogging time this morning got used up writing a response to a question at the
Physics Stack Exchange. But having put all that effort in over there, I might as well put it to use here, too...
The question comes from a person who did a poster on terminology at the recently concluded American Geophysical Union meeting, offering the following definition of "data":
Values collected as part of a scientific investigation; may be qualified as 'science data'. This includes uncalibrated values (raw data), derived values (calibrated data), and other transformations of…
drorzel | November 4, 2010I'm spending the day trying to get some work done on the book-in-progress, so I'm avoiding both work- and blog-related stuff. I don't want to leave the site completely quiet, though, so here's a question to ponder, relating to SteelyKid's continuing fascination with Goodnight Moon:
How does a cow jump over the moon?
The father of one of SteelyKid's classmates, who is not originally from the US, asked why there's a cow jumping over the moon in that (or, as SteelyKid puts it: "Cow jumping MOON!!"), and I don't have a good answer. I'm aware of the nursery rhyme and the Tolkien joke, but why…
drorzel | August 19, 2010Everybody's favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what's wrong in science communication. It's a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about "Climategate" between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice little media niche as the go-to guy for climate change denial:
I don't think this is quite as damning as Chris says, but it's pretty bad. What you see here is a competition between a scientist and somebody who knows how the…
drorzel | August 18, 2010We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann's pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn't read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode-- wildly overstating the awesomeness of pre-Columbian cultures, and exaggerating the evil of the European invaders (Neil's recorded some great stuff, but the lyrics to "Cortez the Killer" are pretty dopey). It came up several times recently in discussions elsewhere, though, and seemed like it would make a nice break from the…
drorzel | July 24, 2010Climate change is a major crisis, don't get me wrong, and it's something that needs to be discussed extensively in both scientific and policy circles. We're pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at rather too high a rate, and getting something done about that is a key priority.
It's possible, though, to take the obsession on climate and CO_2 a little too far, though. Such as this news story from Physics World:
A cosmic gamma-ray burst striking the Earth could be harmful to ocean plankton at depths of up to 75 m, according to a team of Cuban researchers. These organisms account for up to…