It’s coming, but don’t invest just yet in mining Helium-3 on the moon

August 16, 2014

Helium (4He) is the second most abundant element in the known Universe (after hydrogen) but only makes up 5.2 parts per million (ppm) of the Earth’s atmosphere. Helium-3 (3He) is an isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron. It is not radioactive and very rare on Earth (7 parts per trillion) but exists in recoverable concentrations in the lunar topsoil (in the top 2 -3 m of lunar regolith). It is even more abundant on the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Lunar soil sample #75501 brought back by Apollo 17 in 1972 revealed the presence of He-3 and since then every country planning moon missions has the vision of mining for 3He on the moon and of vast quantities of energy production by means of a aneutronic fusion process on earth. (For old fogies like me, 1972 was the year of Watergate!)

In fusion reactions neutrons are “nasty”. They are very hard to contain and make other materials radioactive on collision. The first generation fuels of Deuterium and Tritium (reactions 1 and 2 below) produce many neutrons. A second generation with Deuterium and 3He only produces a few. A 3He – 3He reaction would produce none.

Kulcinski: Fusion Energy could provide that new energy source in the middle of the 21st Century. ….. However, ……  the DT Tokamak does not appear to be the ultimate answer. The problem lies in both the DT fuel cycle, which emits 80% of its energy in highly damaging and radioisotope producing neutrons, and in the complex design of the Tokamak.

fusion reactions after Kulcinski

fusion reactions after Kulcinski

But the promise of having 3He available to produce power is immense.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Challenge to Bollywood union’s ban on women for make-up

August 15, 2014

It is nothing new that the modus operandi of a trade union is founded on discriminating against non-members. But a Bollywood trade union – the Cine Costume, Make-up Artists and Hair Dressers Association – has for the last 55 years forbidden women from being make-up artists or hair-dressers. But they are now being challenged in court and the Indian Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decision on August 26th.

The union’s defense – that allowing women into the profession would lead to all men losing their jobs – is particularly stupid. I expect the union will lose – as it should.

As an aside, the contemptuous attitude to women demonstrated by newly urbanised Indian youth is – I think – at least partially a consequence of the portrayal of women in Bollywood movies.

The National: Charu Khurana, 32, a make-up artist who trained at the Cinema Makeup School in Los Angeles in 2008 and returned to India with dreams of working in Bollywood. But Khurana found herself being confined to doing bridal make-up, fashion shows and commercials in New Delhi and unable to find work in Mumbai because the Cine Costume, Make-up Artists and Hair Dressers Association turned down her application in 2009.

“They rejected me, saying only men could work as make-up artists. It’s my basic human right to work in any field I wish. They can’t exclude women. I, too, have children and a family to support,” says Khurana.

Indignation prompted her to contact the New Delhi lawyer Jyotika Kalra, who took up the case and also asked the National Commission for Women – the state organisation that protects women’s rights – for support.

Kalra says she did not know whether to laugh or cry at the explanation she received from the Association.

“They wrote saying that the rule was intended to protect a man’s livelihood because, if women were allowed to do make-up, no actor would ever choose a man to do it. What kind of logic is that?” asks Kalra.

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First woman ever among four awarded 2014 Fields medals

August 13, 2014

The Fields medal is the most prestigious award for mathematics and was first awarded in 1936. For 2014, four winners were announced this week and Maryam Mirzahkani, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford,  becomes the first woman ever to be awarded a Fields medal.

Though women are generally underrepresented in mathematics – I suspect partly because of a lack of interest and partly because it is not a “politically correct” occupation – there have been many prominent female mathematicians. But this is the first time in the almost 80 years since it was established that a woman has won the Fields medal.

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years on the occasion of the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.

The Fields Medal Committee is chosen by the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union and is normally chaired by the IMU President. It is asked to choose at least two, with a strong preference for four, Fields Medallists, and to have regard in its choice to representing a diversity of mathematical fields. A candidate’s 40th birthday must not occur before January 1st of the year of the Congress at which the Fields Medals are awarded.

The Guardian:

Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University in California, was named the first female winner of the Fields Medal – often described as the Nobel prize for mathematics – at a ceremony in Seoul on Wednesday morning.

The prize, worth 15,000 Canadian dollars, is awarded to exceptional talents under the age of 40 once every four years by the International Mathematical Union. Between two and four prizes are announced each time.

Three other researchers were named Fields Medal winners at the same ceremony in South Korea. They included Martin Hairer, a 38-year-old Austrian based at Warwick University in the UK; Manjul Bhargava, a 40-year old Canadian-American at Princeton University in the US and Artur Avila, 35, a Brazilian-French researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris.

There have been 55 Fields medallists since the prize was first awarded in 1936, including this year’s winners. The Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman refused the prize in 2006 for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture.

The citations for the four winners:

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MOM and MAVEN approach Mars

August 12, 2014

Both the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM – Mangalyaan, budget $70 million) and NASA’s MAVEN (budget $672 million) are now approaching Mars. Both are doing well according to their latest status updates.

MOM was launched on 5th November last year and MAVEN on 18th November, 2013. Whereas MAVEN on its Atlas 5 rocket could directly enter into a  Hohmann Transfer Orbit with periapsis at Earth’s orbit and apoapsis at the distance of the orbit of Mars, MOM had to take the low-cost, scenic route. Because of the relatively low payload capability of the PSLV launch rocket, MOM had to spend 26 days in ever-increasing earth orbits. MOM had to fire its Liquid Motor six times to work its way up to departing Earth orbit using a standard Hohmann Transfer Orbit on 1st December.

Alternate paths to Mars: NASA’s MAVEN compared to India’s MOM

MAVEN - MOM trajectories

MAVEN – MOM trajectories

 

When they were launched MAVEN was expected to reach Mars on 22nd September 2014 and MOM 2 days later on 24th September 2014. The time lines have shifted slightly subsequent to the mid-course corrections carried out and MOM is now expected to reach Mars orbit about a week ahead of MAVEN. I suspect that the time of Mars Orbit Insertion is still a little fluid, but both are about 1 month away. MOM is currently about 6 minutes away in radio signal distance.

Discovery News:

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is more than 80 percent of the way to Mars and performing well, according to a Facebook update posted July 21 by the Indian Space Research Organization. MOM is expected to enter orbit on Sept. 14.

The second craft, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN), is also performing well. MAVEN is scheduled to embark on its final approach to the Red Planet on Sept. 21, one week after MOM’s arrival, principal investigator Bruce Jakosky said. After months of checkouts and tests, the spacecraft will now be left quiet until close to the big day.

NASA’s MAVEN has now gone into a “pre-Mars Orbit Insertion moratorium.” All systems required for a safe Mars Orbit Insertion remain powered on. But other systems like the instruments are shut down until late September because they are not needed for a successful MOI. We want the spacecraft system to be as “quiet” as possible and in the safest condition during the critical event on September 21st”.

Related: Frugal engineering for India’s Mars mission

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Offending a thesis

August 12, 2014

Another evocative one from xkcd.

If only ……

Thesis Defense

Thesis Offense from xkcd

You can defend against an offensive but offending against a defensive is not so easy.

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Climate models wrong again in ignoring brown carbon from wildfires

August 11, 2014

So much for global warming being settled and the infallibility of incomplete and inadequate climate models.

Climate models generally take the effect of wildfires (brown carbon) on climate to be zero (it is not a parameter that is normally included). Both black and brown carbon particulates are products of incomplete combustion.

A new paper reports on experiments with the combustion of biomass and the brown carbon particulate matter in the smoke:

Saleh et al, Brownness of organics in aerosols from biomass burning linked to their black carbon content. Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2220

The research provides information which can now be included in climate models but since it is a parameter which is not usually included, the obvious conclusion is that for any given level of warming some other effect (most likely that of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide) has been overestimated in the models.

But it is not the obvious conclusion that makes the headlines. Instead it is the ridiculous and alarmist statement that “Forest fires can heat the climate“ that is the headline that Swedish Radio (which is about as orthodox as they come) chooses to lead with. They would clearly like to project the picture of a greater threat and not that of inadequate climate models.

Abstract: …. Here we present smog chamber experiments to characterize the effective absorptivity of organic aerosol from biomass burning under a range of conditions. We show that brown carbon in emissions from biomass burning is associated mostly with organic compounds of extremely low volatility. In addition, we find that the effective absorptivity of organic aerosol in biomass burning emissions can be parameterized as a function of the ratio of black carbon to organic aerosol, indicating that aerosol absorptivity depends largely on burn conditions, not fuel type. We conclude that brown carbon from biomass burning can be an important factor in aerosol radiative forcing.

The paper claims that brown carbon is a significant factor which must be taken into account and the more significant it is the less significant is man-made carbon dioxide.

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IKEA shopping bags provide “efficient” storage for 500 year old skeletons

August 10, 2014

It would be just as easy to consecrate an IKEA shopping bag as a shrine or a piece of turf – so I don’t see anything sacrilegious or anything to be much indignant about. This story from The Local:

The Kläckeberga church is using Ikea bags to store the remains of around 80 people who were once buried under the floorboards. The macabre collection, which is almost overflowing from a set of large blue Ikea bags, was found by local woman Kicki Karlén. 
“There were around 80 skeletons,” she told The Local.
Woman finds Ikea bags stuffed with 80 skeletons

Ikea bags stuffed with 80 skeletons – photo The Local

“I was on the team called in to dig out the bones five years ago,” archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay told The Local.  
“Our mission was to document and rebury the bones, which may be as much as 500 years old. But the reburial was delayed and I have no idea why. The plan was to rebury them as soon as possible, but that’s up to the church. The county board said they couldn’t leave church ground, and it became complicated.”  
He explained that the bones were likely reburied in a secondary deposition many years ago in what he called a “bone house”. The collection is mostly skulls and longer bones, he added.  
While Papmehl-Dufay denied storing the bones in the Ikea bags himself, he admitted that it sounded like an efficient storage technique.   
“It’s not standard practice, definitely not for archaeologists, but the Ikea bags aren’t actually that bad. They’d be great for stopping the moulding process. But it can’t be that good to have them in the basement for so long.”
But what will future archaeologists and anthropologists make of the bags (which may well survive) when they are rediscovered in a few hundred years time. Possibly of the existence of an IKEA cult (which would not be so far from the truth)? With strange burial rituals?  or perhaps that the Swedish church was a department within IKEA?

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Roll on midnight – or why the Doomsday Clock is an abdication to cowardice

August 10, 2014

August 6th is Hiroshima Day and it is now 69 years since the Enola Gay dropped its bomb and the nuclear weapons age began. In 2010, there were about 227,00 hibakusha (被爆者) still alive. In 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki met their Doom. But such is the resilience of man that, today, less than 4 generations later, both are thriving cities. Hiroshima has a population today of 1.2 million compared to the 340,000 before the bomb. For Hiroshima and Nagasaki their Doomsday Clocks reached midnight and moved on – into yet another day.

The Doomsday Clock was “invented” in 1947 and, of course is purely symbolic. It is “set” by a group of alarmists to represent the time left before a human induced catastrophe (nuclear war, global warming, genetic modification, disease …) strikes at the “symbolic” hour of midnight. But this symbolism is flawed, rather stupid and just plain wrong. They use midnight as a symbol of the end of things whereas – certainly for me and, I suspect, for most people – midnight is just the start of another day. And when that day ends there will be yet another one to come. When it was first set in 1947 the alarmists of the time reckoned that humanity was 7 minutes away from their “midnight”.  In 1953 the clock was set to 2 minutes to midnight. The time to catastrophe has gone up and down over the years and reached 17 minutes in 1991 when the Berlin Wall fell and optimism ran high – even among the professional pessimists. Currently pessimism has taken over again and we stand just 5 minutes from catastrophe.

Doomsday Clock - Wikipedia

Doomsday Clock – Wikipedia

The Doomsday Clock is nothing more than a subjective – and less than qualitative –  assessment of the state of the world by a group of alarmist pessimists.

Naom Chomsky has a new article in The Unz Review – “How many minutes to midnight”. I’m afraid I do not have the same high opinion of Chomsky – even on language which is his own field – that others seem to have . But on the concept of the Doomsday Clock and the time left for impending disaster, his article is little more than well written drivel. He looks down on most of humanity – apart from himself of course – with a great deal of contempt when he writes

…. August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts.

Chomsky’s article is not particularly insightful but it serves as an example of the cowardice that alarmists exhibit. Cowardice is the subjugation of actions to fear whereas courage is the subjugation of fears to actions for a purpose. Alarmism and the Doomsday Clock pander to fear. Catastrophe theories never – ever – come to pass. But raising false alarms gets headlines, gets funding and usually provides lucrative opportunities for some. Fending off Doomsday rather than working to some objective becomes the priority of the hour. Political action is diverted to avoidance rather than to achieve goals.

Roll on midnight – and the start of another day!

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Swedish Environmental Party makes a fool of itself (again)

August 9, 2014

The Swedish Environmental Party (Miljöpartiet) has not been slow in trying to cash in on the large forest fire in Västmanland. The Swedish General Elections are in September and “anything goes”. Especially if it is alarmist. I don’t expect much intellectual or scientific honesty from them any longer but I though their behaviour yesterday was particularly opportunistic and crass.

  1. Never mind that forest fires in Sweden reduced from over 250,000 hectares destroyed every year before 1850 to less than 1,000 hectares per year in recent times when forest “cultivation” increased.
  2. Never mind that because of the reduced incidence of forest fires the owners have reduced their fire watches.
  3. Never mind that the number of military helicopters suitable for fire fighting have reduced from 33 to 3 in the last 20 years.
  4. Never mind that Sweden no longer has any planes suitable for water bombing.
  5. Never mind that in the grip of complacency, fire fighting equipment has reduced under 3 successive governments.
  6. Never mind that global temperatures have been stagnant for the last 18 years and have actually reduced slightly in the last decade.
  7. Never mind that carbon dioxide emissions by humans are apparently having no impact on real global temperatures (but are absolutely fundamental to every climate model)
  8. Never mind that temperatures in Västmanland this summer are nothing out of the ordinary.

Never mind the facts, just feel the fear. They came out with this picture yesterday even though the Västmanland fire has yet to be brought under control.

“We cannot afford to ignore Climate Change” it reads.

I get the impression that the Swedish Greens have prostituted themselves on the altar of global warming orthodoxy (sorry – climate change >> sorry – extreme events >> sorry – global cooling?).

mp västmanland

mp västmanland

But the temperature anomalies in Västmanland are nothing out of the ordinary.

Västmanland temperatures - The Stockholm Initiative

Västmanland temperatures – The Stockholm Initiative

 

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Another duck species being exterminated for being successful

August 8, 2014

The inconsistencies in the “conservation” movement and the meaningless defence of “biodiversity” have never been so apparent as in this case where the UK is wiping out all the females of a duck species just because the males are too successful.

Once again an inadequate and failing species is being “protected” by exterminating a successful one for no other reason than that it is successful. The nonsense spouted in the name of “conservationism” is amusing but always expensive and without any real benefit.

The Guardian:

It is American, oversexed and over here, but the days of the ruddy duck in the UK are finally numbered, with the latest culling data revealing that just 10 females remain.

The shooting of the final few – at about £3,000 a bird – will mark the end of half a century of occupation by the species. At their peak, their numbers reached 6,500 but their breeding prowess threatened the native European white-headed duck. 

The invasion began in 1948 when the famed conservationist Sir Peter Scott’s love for ducks led him to import three pairs of the colourful US birds to his Slimbridge reserve in Gloucestershire. But their escape and consequent flourishing in the British countryside led to an anguished debate among ornithologists decades later, as well as a nationwide cull that has cost more than £5m. …… 

Apart from their success in the duck world they don’t seem to pose any particular threat to humans

The problem is that the “sexy” males ruddy ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis) are preferred by female white-headed ducks. The resulting hybrid offspring threatened the survival of the white-headed duck, which was already struggling with habitat loss due to development. “Ruddy duck males are particularly aggressive when it comes to breeding and court females more vigorously,” said Madge. “That makes them more attractive to female white-headed ducks.”

The UK ruddy ducks also spread their wings across Europe, into France, Belgium, the Netherlands and into Spain. The discovery of hybrids in the latter country in the 1990s showed the ducks had grown into a continent-wide threat and that sealed their fate. The following year, an eradication programme began in the UK and a marksmen who has been part of the cull since then told the Guardian the birds fulfil the idea of a sitting duck.

Clearly gender equality is not something for ducks when the females are culled for the “sins” of the males. If ruddy duck males are preferred by the female white-headed ducks (and they have no problem in breeding together) why are these “conservationists” not allowing natural selection to take its course?

If male conservationists were preferred by normal females then perhaps the solution is to eradicate all female conservationists?

Related: Too much biodiversity – time to let some species die out

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