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Ladies and gentlemen: the voting public

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, politics, wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  11 Responses »
Nov 082016
 

Most college students think America invented slavery, professor finds

On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Oy.

I maintain that quizzes  such as this should be integrated into the voting booth. Collect a pool of hundreds of question like this, and provide each question with six unambiguous multiple choice answers. The computer tallies up your answers. Four, five or six correct answers, your vote counts.  Two or three correct answers, your vote counts half. One or zero, your vote doesn’t count. When you vote, you are given a receipt that shows that you voted and what your votes were (which I believe most electronic voting machines do now anyway), with an indecipherable code at the bottom. The *following* *day,* you can go online and enter that code, and it’ll tell you how you did. By doing so the following day, people who did poorly won;t go bugnuts and trash the voting establishment.

The vote-quiz could be made available for weeks in advance. This is something you’d have to do on-site, presumably inside a Faraday cage to keep people from Googling the answer. By having a registered quiz answer in advance, people could still vote early or vote by mail.

Some people will claim that a voting test like this would be racist (or sexist, or transphobic, or whatever goofy hobbyhorse they happen to ride). I suspect that many of these same people believe that voter ID laws are racist. Those people should watch this:

 Posted by at 10:16 am

Joe Friday Explains It

 history, Hmm..., politics, wisdom, youtube  4 Responses »
Nov 062016
 

This scene is something like 50 years old. And if you can ignore the craptacular 60’s “fashion” and the stereotypical stilted talkin’-to, this is a remarkably “modern” speech. Every generation thinks they’re special and destined to change the world, just seems to be a part of growing up. And don’t tell me that the Modern Problems that Friday describes – again, about 50 years ago – don’t seem like exactly the sort of Modern problems people yammer on about today…

 Posted by at 10:17 pm

Metallic Hydrogen

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, reshaping the world, rockets, science, spacecraft  12 Responses »
Nov 062016
 

According to theory, if you put hydrogen under enough pressure it will form itself into a solid metal. Metallic hydrogen would have a density a bit greater than water and would be an electrical superconductor. The planet Jupiter should theoretically have an “ocean” of metallic hydrogen surrounding a rocky core. The difficulty is that the amount of pressure required is astonishingly high, higher than can be produced by man except under a few rare laboratory conditions.

On one hand, metallic hydrogen is a scientific curiosity. On the other hand, there is just barely the possibility that metallic hydrogen is metastable. This means that once formed, when the pressure is removed, it will remain a metallic solid. You will have turned hydrogen gas into a chunk of room-temperature metal.

“Metastable” of course means that it is not *entirely* stable. That chunk of metal might be happy to remain a chunk of metal for a billion years. Or someone might whack it with a hammer, zap it with a laser, nuke it with gamma rays, or yell harsh language at it, which would be enough to cause it to unravel itself back into regular hydrogen. Problem is, nobody is quite sure *if* metallic hydrogen is metastable, and, if so, how twitchy it would be. And this is something you’d really want to know. Because unraveling metallic hydrogen would make one *hell* of an explosive, more powerful than anything else out there. Recomobination of hydrogen from the metallic state would release 216 megajoules per kilogram; TNT only releases 4.2 megajoules per kilo. Hydrogen/oxygen combustion in the SSME releases 10 megajoules/kilo.

If things work out just right, metastable hydrogen could revolutionize space launch and space travel. A rocket engine based on pellets of metallic hydrogen detonations could have a specific impulse of 1700 seconds. This compares really well to the 450 or so seconds you could get out of a hydrogen/oxygen rocket engine, and quite well to a solid core nuclear thermal engine like NERVA, which would have an Isp of 800 to 900 seconds. And it would do all that without the need for radiation shielding. This would make SSTO’s almost trivially easy, make trips to the moon and Mars economical.

The problems, of course, are that we don’t know if metallic hydrogen is metastable (and if so, *how* metastable), and of course we don’t have any metastable hydrogen to experiment with to determine these things.

Except… now we do. Sorta.

Observation of the Wigner-Huntington Transition to Solid Metallic Hydrogen

Ranga Dias and Isaac F. Silvera
Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138

A *small*quantity of reflective metallic hydrogen has been created at a pressure of 495 gigaPascals (71,793,680 pounds per square inch, about 4.8 million atmo0spheres) in a diamond anvil. The sample was about 8 microns in diameter by 1.2 microns thick. As of the writing of that paper (published in early October), the sample was being kept under pressure at liquid nitrogen temperature. The next step is to release the pressure and see if the sample remains solid metal.

Several papers and presentations were made a few years ago describing the potential of metallic hydrogen as a rocket propellant. Given the extreme temperature produced by metallic hydrogen going *foom,* it was assumed that the reaction would be diluted with liquid hydrogen or water. This reduced Isp, but increased thrust.

met-h

 Posted by at 10:31 am

Male Birth Control Pill

 Hmm..., news, science  1 Response »
Nov 052016
 

A few days ago, news broke that a medical trial of  a birth control pill for males had been halted. The basic headline was that the pill was basically effective, but it caused a few minor side effects such as acne and moodiness, and Fragile Males Just Can’t Handle That Sort Of Thing. Turns out that it was halted for kinda more pressing reasons. Rather than do a whole lot of typing and complaining, I’ll just post this video from ShoeOnHead, who does a good job of not only laying out the story… but also points out that there are some people who are opposed to the Male Pill. People you might not initially expect, but after a moments thought you’ll realize that you’re unsurprised that they are opposed to letting men make these decisions.

 Posted by at 7:14 pm

Port of Call: Bayonne

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, history, humor, ships, youtube  4 Responses »
Nov 052016
 

In 1978 the US Navy began running this very successful recruitment commercial:

Navy. It’s not just a job,

It’s an adventure.

In 1979, Saturday night Live ran this parody:

Navy. It’s not just a job.

It’s $96.78 a week.

I’ve never known anyone in *any* branch of the military to say that the parody was the less accurate one. As my now rather time-dimmed memory serves, the whole nation was laughing it’s butt off back in the day.

 Posted by at 5:05 pm

That time my home town joined the ranks of Metropolis and Gotham City

 art, blather, Hmm...  3 Responses »
Nov 042016
 

I happened to stumble across this photo of the season 5 cast of “Arrow” earlier today:

Now, I don’t know diddly squadoo about Arrow, having never seen a single episode (it premiered on CW several years before my satellite system carried it, so… meh, too late to get involved). It’s based on the DC comics character “Green Arrow” who generally inhabits the same world as Superman and Batman. I know that “The Flash” spun off of “Arrow,” and that last year there was a crossover episode between “Flash” and “Supergirl,” and now this year Superman has put in an appearance on “Supergirl,” so… there ya go, I guess.

All that said, I glanced at this photo and something caught my eye. See the feller way off to the left, in the hockey mask? He looked familiar. So I dug through a box and found a half dozen comic books I bought in 1987-88. And, yup, that is the little-known minor DC character “Wild Dog.”

“Wild Dog” was sold to DC, in part, on the unusual setting. Instead of a Gigantic Mega City like Metropolis, a fictionalized version of New York, “Wild Dog” was set in small-town heartland America, in the fancifully named “Quad Cities” straddling the Mississippi, with the Rock Island Arsenal on an island in between. Why did I care in 1987? Because I grew up and lived in the Quad Cities, a set of small-to-medium towns straddling the Mississippi, right near the Rock Island Arsenal. As memory serves, the creator was a local, and DC believed that all the places were fictional, even though nearly all the locales were modeled after and mostly *named* after actual local places. One of the later stories even takes place briefly in “The Time Machine,” a local comic book shop… which was where I bought at least a few of the comics.

So a real place, my home town region, is sorta-canonical in the DC universe. I’d bet good money that if they ever delve into the back story of “Wild Dog” they’ll end up changing things, though. Heck, they have already changed the name and ethnicity of the character (because of course they did, from Wheeler to Ramirez), so the back story is almost certain to change.

 Posted by at 5:24 pm

An exciting new era for fire fighters has arrived

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., news, science, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  6 Responses »
Nov 042016
 

Someone goes way too fast and loses control of their car: not new. The car crashes and bursts into flames: not new. The responding firefighters have to dodge explosively propelled flaming battery packs: that’s gotta be a little new.

Here’s the thing: a car full of gasoline bursts into flames has got to be a nightmare scenario for rescuers, but it is at least something that they and their technology are used to. Foam will float on top of gasoline, serve as an oxygen barrier, put out the fire. But a lithium battery fire? You spray anything water based on it, the lithium will yank the oxygen out of the water molecules and combust with *that,* leaving superheated hydrogen to roam free and burn with yet more free oxygen in the air. So don’t spray water on a battery fire. And I *believe* that an adequate lithium fire will yank the oxygen out of carbon dioxide, so don’t bother with *that.* The preferred solution for a metals fire is:

  1. Bury it in sand
  2. Bury it in salt
  3. Stand back and check your emails until the fire burns out.

CSB: Years ago I worked on a small badly run project to develop an ejector ramjet. The dimwit who ordered the components didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to safety issues or even just basic chemical or mechanical issues, and bought us a large titanium tube to serve as the combustion chamber for the ramjet. And titanium is fine, so long as you use the right alloy (6 AL 4V is a good one). But this tube was, IIRC, essentially *pure* titanium. And pure titanium burns like frakin’ magnesium. So the safety guy pitched a fit until management bought a special metals-fire extinguisher that shot out a spray of fine salt. The salt would cover the burning metal, melt, block oxygen, solidify. So as far as management was concerned, in the off chance there was a titanium fire, one of us minions could run out to the test stand and put the fire out. The agreed-upon procedure among us minions was, of course, “screw that noise,”  to sit on our asses and wait for the titanium to burn itself out. There are a lot of things worth risking your life over, and a small shed with some cobbled together rocket equipment just ain’t one of ’em. And I kinda doubt that a Tesla that has been converted into a flaming pile of rubble is one, either. Both occupants of the car died, and I suspect  that one of them was converted to a fine white ash.

Witnesses say the car was going *really* fast. One wonders if it was because the driver was a lead-footed moron, or because the car malfunctioned. Given the severity of the fire, I have doubts that that can be clearly determined.

 Posted by at 4:43 pm
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