Obama’s support could be toxic
June 25, 2016
EU bureaucrats, but not the elected politicians, are in denial
June 24, 2016Listening to the European bureaucrats reacting to Brexit today, it was very quickly obvious as to why euroscepticism has never been as high and as widespread in Europe as today. Every bureaucrat, who by definition is part of the EU gravy train, was angry and wanted the UK out as soon as possible. Not one, not Jean-Claude Juncker, not Martin Schulz, not Donald Tusk did not but want to punish the UK for the poll result. Juncker would not even address the question of euroscepticism within member countries. What he does not want to see, it seems, does not exist. He does not see that it is the form and manner of the EU itself which fuels the desire of many to leave.
They are the non-elected, spoiled and pampered bureaucrats of Europe who have gotten used to the idea of issuing European Directives, for all EU members to follow and overruling any objections from national parliaments. The elected politicians from Germany and France were a little more circumspect in their statements. The arrogance and self-righteousness on display today was as clear a symptom of the European malaise as could be imagined. They had no conception of the contempt in which they are held by so many in Europe.
I have no doubt that the UK can manage without being a member of the inner circle of the EU. Of course the UK will need to negotiate a good trade agreement with the EU but there is no reason why this should not be possible – in spite of the EU bureaucrats. Angela Merkel indicated today that some form of EU association with the UK would not be unthinkable. The bureaucrats, of course, dislike this because it may give heretical ideas to the eurosceptics in other countries. It is a myth to think that trade with the US or China or Latin America is enhanced greatly by being a member of the EU. I have no doubt, for example and from my own experience, that the UK can do more business in Africa or in India from outside the EU. There are trading opportunities in a Brexit – but it will need some skill to seize them.
But the one thing that struck me today was that for the survival of the EU in some sustainable form, the EU bureaucrats need to be reigned in by their own politicians from the member countries. Here I mean by the politicians in their own governments and parliaments and not the utterly useless MEPs in the even more pointless European Parliament. The EU bureaucracy has become parasitical. The self-serving and blinkered behaviour of the bureaucrats keeps them completely out of touch with how deep euroscepticism actually runs. Their denial of reality is the single factor which is most likely to lead to the break-up of the EU.
And then came Brexit
June 24, 2016First came Grexit, which threatened, but never came to pass,
Then came Brexit which took a goodly bit of brass,
Next, of course, was Nexit as the Dutch showed their class,
Followed closely by Swexit which showed the EU to be an ass.
Le Pen was shrill in calling for a Fraxit,
Even the Lega Nord saw benefit in an Ixit,
Latin solidarity raised the spectre of a Poxit and a Spaxit,
And the Germans desperately resisted any Gexit.
The Danes couldn’t wait to implement a Dexit,
Which stirred the Greeks enough to go through with their Grexit,
Agitated Finns were not too slow to go ahead with Fixit,
And Brussels couldn’t survive the final straw of a Bexit.
Homo inferieur
June 24, 2016Homo sapiens include Homo denisova, Homo neanderthalensis, another unknown race now extinct and Anatomically Modern Humans (Homo sapiens sapiens).
Future evolution will probably show up as a Homo superieur in about 10,000 generations. Along the way we will also see a degeneration of some to be Homo inferieur.
High on my list of of those making up Homo inferieur will be the participants of some of the “reality TV shows” which make me cringe.
This picture is from the Daily Mail.
Humans rutting in a zoo for the viewing entertainment of others.
All it needs is a hushed David Attenborough commenting on the behaviour of these degenerate samples of Homo inferieur.
BREXIT
June 24, 2016
A leave could take around 3 years.
A new dawn? for the EU?
Clear win for BREXIT (but a win for remain in Scotland).
Cameron thought he knew how to use referenda as a tool of government. But he got virtually no concessions from the EU and his strategy has backfired. Now we will see whether David Cameron is a leader or just another follower. I think his position is untenable — except if he can get real concessions and call yet another referendum.
It is time to dismantle the Brussels machine and the first step shoud be to abolish the European parliament.
Zika fears lead to spike in DIY abortions in Latin America
June 23, 2016Abortion is still illegal in most of Catholic Latin America and the governments have responded to the Zika virus by suggesting that women not get pregnant. They seem to have the support of the Pope for that approach. As The Guardian reports, “Pope Francis has indicated that women exposed to the Zika virus may be permitted to use contraception to avoid pregnancy, in a departure from Catholic teaching. However he reiterated the church’s staunch opposition to abortion, saying it was a crime and “absolute evil”.
But the reality is that DIY abortions are spiking and interestingly the countries advising women not to get pregnant are seeing the largest increases in abortion. Effectively The Pope’s dispensation on contraception is being taken, it would seem, as a dispensation also for abortion.
BBC: Fears over the Zika virus have contributed to a “huge” increase in the number of women in Latin America wanting abortions, researchers say. Estimates suggest there has been at least a doubling in requests in Brazil and an increase of a third in other countries. Many governments have advised women not to get pregnant due to the risk of babies being born with tiny brains.
The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A termination remains illegal in many parts of Latin America, but women simply turn to unofficial providers. Women on Web, which advises women online and then delivers pills to end a pregnancy, is one of the largest. The researchers analysed the thousands of requests received by Women on Web in the five years before the Pan American Health Organization issued its warning on Zika on 17 November 2015. It used this to predict how many abortion requests would have been expected between 17 November 2015 and 1 March 2016.
The analysis of countries that advised against getting pregnant suggested Brazil and Ecuador had had more than twice the expected demand for abortions.
Country Expected Actual Increase Brazil 582 1210 +108% Colombia 102 141 +39% Costa Rica 49 67 +36% El Salvador 18 24 +36% Ecuador 34 71 +108% Honduras 21 36 +76% Venezuela 45 86 +93% Analysis from other countries, which did not advise against pregnancy, suggested smaller increases in abortion demand.
Best Brexit cartoon
June 23, 2016The polls open in the UK in about 10 minutes. By this time tomorrow we shall learn that the UK has probably voted to remain in the EU – by a surprisingly large margin.
(Neither “leave” or “remain” fit my desires, since I would like to see the UK stay in the EU but I would like the EU to suffer a very bloody nose. A third alternative “remain with conditions” would have been my preference).
The Brexit campaign has been a boon for cartoonists and there have been many very good ones. (A simple Google search produces a huge number and the quality is pretty high).
My favourite is one by Alexander Dubovsky in Cartoon Movement because it matches my view of a dysfunctional EU with the UK threatening – with the risk of being overwhelmed – to leave a rudderless raft.
european disintegration by alexander_dubovsky
Physics uses new magic to define the kilogram
June 22, 2016Some fifty years ago my Maths and Physics Professors instilled in me the concept of elegance being the hallmark of “rightness” in science. For my Maths Professor, there was nothing more admirable or elegant than being just “necessary and sufficient”. I cannot shake off the gut-feeling that unnecessary complexity of explanation is an indicator of “wrongness”. Modern Physics is no longer characterised by elegance – only by complexities which are not necessarily, necessary. Fifty-seven fundamental particles (why only 57?), magical dark energy and dark matter, even stealth dark energy are all “fudge factors” to cover the flaws of unsatisfactory theories and which make modern physics grossly inelegant.
A new paper from the National Institute of Standards and Technology:
D. Haddad, F. Seifert, L.S Chao, S. Li, D.B. Newell, J.R. Pratt, C. Williams, and S. Schlamminger. A precise instrument to determine the Planck constant, and the future kilogram. Review of Scientific Instruments, 2016 DOI: 10.1063/1.4953825
There used to be a time when units made common sense. A day was the time from sunrise to sunrise. That one day was a little shorter or longer than the next or that it was a different length in different parts of the world, was of little practical significance. Why the earth rotates around its own axis in its orbit around the sun, even in the most advanced physics theories, remains a mystery and a consequence of fundamental magic. Nowadays, of course, modern physics cannot conceive of using something as elegant and simple as the interval from one sunrise to the next to define time. That interval was too variable, too localised to the earth-sun system to be suitable for the flights of fancy of modern physics and cosmology. The magic involved was just too unsophisticated – too crude, too simple.
So now the unit of time is no longer a day but is a second. The second used to be the 86,400th part of a “standard” day, but now the reference interval is the second, defined as the
duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom, at rest, and approaching the theoretical temperature of absolute zero, including corrections for ambient radiation.
Day-magic is now replaced by a more sophisticated atomic magic. All radiation or vibration requires energy. It follows that the radiation of any atom must eventually cease but physicists are happy enough to invoke the magical acquisition of energy by the reference atom such that its radiation remains magically “constant”.
It is a similar story with the kilogram. Once upon a more common-sensical time, it was the weight (under the force of earth’s gravity) of a mass of one litre of water at 4ºC. Since the litre needed defining and the measurement was of weight rather than mass, physics needed something more sophisticated. So was born the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK). But that mass of platinum/iridium (90/10) alloy was found to be losing mass (about 50 μg over 120 years) and so a more “independent” and “absolute” measure was needed. Two methods were proposed
One would define the kilogram in terms of the mass of a silicon atom by counting the number of atoms in a 1 kg sphere of ultra-pure silicon-28. (See Silicon Kilogram.)
The other ….. proposed assigning a fixed value to the Planck constant as the basis for a new definition. Mohr and Taylor reasoned that if a watt balance could use an exactly defined mass to measure the unknown value of h, then the process could be reversed: By setting an exact fixed value of h, the same system could be used to measure an unknown mass.
The idea, which came to be known as the “electric” or “electronic” kilogram, was widely discussed and finally endorsed in principle in 2011 by the international General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), with a few provisions. One of them was that, prior to re-definition, at least one instrument, and preferably more, would have to measure h to a benchmark uncertainty of 2 parts in a hundred million (108). NIST’s most recent measurement has a stated relative standard uncertainty of 3.4 X 108. In addition, the values obtained by the watt balances should be in reasonable agreement with those from scientists using the atom-counting approach to defining the kilogram.
……. The measured values from different groups will have to be in very good agreement in order to set an official fixed value for h.
To get from Planck’s constant to mass is not that simple:
….. the connection between mass … and a constant deriving from the very earliest days of quantum mechanics may not be immediately obvious. The scientific context for that connection is suggested by a deep underlying relationship between two of the most celebrated formulations in physics.
One is Einstein’s famous E =mc2, where E is energy, m is mass,and c is the speed of light. The other expression, less well known to the general public but fundamental to modern science, is E = hν, the first “quantum” expression in history, stated by Max Planck in 1900. Here E is energy, ν is frequency, and h is what is now known as the Planck constant.
Einstein’s equation reveals that mass can be understood and even quantified in terms of energy. Planck’s equation shows that energy, in turn, can be calculated in terms of the frequency (ν) of some entity such as a photon — or alternatively, with some mathematical substitutions, a significant mass — times an integer multiple of h. The integer aspect is what makes the relationship “quantized.”
Taking the two equations together yields a counterintuitive but hugely valuable insight: Mass – even on the scale of everyday objects – is inherently related to h, which Planck first used to describe the vanishingly small energy content of individual photons emitted by the atoms in hot objects. The value of h is about 0.6 trillionths of a trillionth of a billionth of 1 joule-second. The joule is the SI unit of energy.
As a practical matter, experiments linking mass to h with extraordinary precision became possible in the late 20th century as the result of two separate discoveries which led to two different physical constants related to voltage and resistance respectively.*
*These are the Josephson constant (KJ = 2e/h) and the von Klitzing constant (RK = h/e2). …. Both constants also involve e, the fundamental charge of the electron. Because of the way the watt balance measures electrical power (albeit indirectly), e, cancels out of the equations. That leaves h as the sole quantity of interest.
The new NIST paper describes new measurements of h, with a watt-balance:
A high-tech version of an old-fashioned balance scale at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just brought scientists a critical step closer toward a new and improved definition of the kilogram. The scale, called the NIST-4 watt balance, has conducted its first measurement of a fundamental physical quantity called Planck’s constant to within 34 parts per billion – demonstrating the scale is accurate enough to assist the international community with the redefinition of the kilogram, an event slated for 2018.
But the Planck constant itself is unexplained and relies on magic.
Classical statistical mechanics requires the existence of h (but does not define its value). Eventually, following upon Planck’s discovery, it was recognized that physical action cannot take on an arbitrary value. Instead, it must be some multiple of a very small quantity, the “quantum of action”, now called the Planck constant. Classical physics cannot explain this fact.
Why Planck’s constant is a constant or has to be a constant is unknown. It’s magic. Why the radiation of a caesium atom would remain constant is also counter-intuitive and just magic. Advances in physics only delve down to deeper layers of magic. Ultimately they all rely on evoking the 4 fundamental magical forces of the universe. Giving some magic a name and a label does not explain it.
Fifty-seven fundamental particles is just inelegant and unsatisfactory. It is complication for the sake of complication. (Has CERN ever actually discovered anything? Every question it addresses is answered by two more questions – and without ever answering the first. The God of the God particle turned out to be just a deity rather than a God.)
The universe is not that messy. It is just magical.
Far simpler to take a kilogram as being the mass of a litre of water where a litre is twice the amount of beer I can drink in one gulp (when I am parched).
The election is Hillary’s to lose
June 21, 2016Does Donald Trump really have a chance to win the Presidential election in November? It is – still – improbable but it is not impossible. Both Hillary Clinton and Trump have such high negatives that I suspect this is becoming an election which will be lost by someone rather than be won by anyone.
It is not difficult to imagine blunders by Trump which can increase his negatives. His support is driven by attacks on him perceived to be from the “establishment”. His negatives could multiply quite easily to make him unelectable.
But what could Hillary Clinton do that would increase her negatives? I can think of the following:
- Choosing another woman as her VP pick. An all woman ticket will win some but will probably lose more. More importantly it may lose her more support among traditional Democratic, blue collar, and minority groups. Muslims and some of the other ethnic groups who are now for Clinton, would have second thoughts if it was an all-woman ticket.
- Go too soft on immigration. Legal immigrants are not at all keen on the too-easy rationalisation and ratification of the status of illegal immigrants. It devalues the effort and hardships they have had to endure and overcome. The problem for Clinton would be that even a small defection – or even abstention – of her assumed “captive voters” could have a major impact on her vote.
- No message for the young. Bernie Sanders has enthused some of the young in a way that is alien to Hillary. With no clear message for the young beyond the usual cliches, she could see a large abstention of the millennials. The young voting surge seen in 2008 has peaked and is already on the way down. A lack of any clear and uplifting message would only exacerbate this trend.
- Clinton is indicted for emails or Libya or something. Many of Clinton’s negatives are based on her perceived dishonesty and deviousness. A formal indictment will only cement such perceptions and – if serious enough – could even make her unelectable.
- Revelations that Hillary “allowed” or “covered-up” Bill’s sexual transgressions. Hillary is already on shaky ground when it comes to her “feminist” credentials. If it is perceived that she actually helped Bill in his predatory behaviour with young women, then she could lose all her support from Republican women voters and and a good chunk of her Democratic female support.
- Revelations that the State Department under Hillary actively supported the groups that have now become ISIS. To some extent this is already “out there”. But memos or the like linking, first, US support for these extreme groups in Syria and second, those groups with what is now ISIS, could be debilitating in its own right. It could also provide Trump with some serious ammunition.
It is difficult to see either Clinton or Trump coming with positive messages which command enthusiasm and which can mobilise the electorate in their support. It is quite possible to see them alienate further groups and increase their own negative perceptions such that they mobilise voters only against themselves (#stoptrump or #stopclinton).
It is still a long way to November but it is an election that will, I think, be lost by someone.
The GT26 lives on with Ansaldo (for now)
June 21, 2016I have previously expressed my doubts as to how long sequential combustion technology will continue for gas turbines after the technology has been transferred to Ansaldo Energia (as part of the acquisition of Alstom by GE).
Ansaldo has announced (in March this year) the sale of 2×2 GT26 machines as part of power islands for the Ibri and Sohar#3 combined cycle plants Oman.
Ansaldo Energia Switzerland has been awarded two contracts worth approximately 600 million Euros in total for the supply of major power plant equipment to two large IPP projects. The Ibri 1510 MW CCPP and Sohar III 1710 MW CCPP in the Sultanate of Oman are expected to be commissioned in early 2019. The Ibri and Sohar III CCPP IPP projects are developed by the sponsor consortium of Mitsui & Co. Ltd., ACWA – International Company for Water and Power Projects and DIDIC – Dhofar International Development and Investment Holding Company, following a simultaneous award of the two projects to the development consortium by Oman Power and Water Procurement Company SAOC of Oman earlier this month. The two power stations will operate and supply power under a PPA to the grid in the Sultanate of Oman. Ansaldo Energia will supply the main power train equipment components, including for each power plant, four of Ansaldo Energia’s newly acquired high-efficiency advanced GT26 class gas turbines, four heat recovery steam generators (HRSGs), two steam turbines and six turbo generators to SEPCOIII Electric Power Construction Cooperation of China (SEPCOIII), who will be responsible for engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) on a turnkey basis. Ansaldo Energia will also provide field services to SEPCOIII – under separate contracts – during the construction phase and long term maintenance services to the operator after commissioning. These projects mark Ansaldo Energia’s first success with its recently acquired and formerly Alstom owned GT26 gas turbine technology and will be one of the largest CCPP project awards in the Gulf region. Ansaldo Energia will certainly have a firm place the CCPP and IPP market where highly efficient, operationally flexible and reliable technology is required. With these two projects in execution in the region and Ansaldo Energia’s presence as a service provider in the Middle East area through Ansaldo Thomassen Gulf in Abu Dhabi, Ansaldo Energia’s position in the Gulf will be further strengthened. Juerg Schmidli, Ansaldo Energia Switzerland President, commented: “With its operating flexibility and high efficiency, the GT26 gas turbine will play a critical role in generating maximum project returns for our customer. This is the perfect start for our newly formed Company Ansaldo Energia Switzerland”.
I hope these machines from Baden/Birr will truly mean that Ansaldo has grabbed the sequential combustion ball and is running with it (and not that these are just machines already largely manufactured while under Alstom ownership and completed by Ansaldo).
What I still doubt is whether Ansaldo has the tradition, expertise and financial clout left to manage and implement any innovations. If they cannot, the Alstom version of the GT26 Ansaldo has acquired is already outdated. Especially since Siemens, GE and Mitsubishi have H-class machines in operation and are already moving on to H+ engines. GE’s HA-class machine (9HA) is operational in France for EdeF (62.22% claimed efficiency). The GT26 is still probably only at the G+ level and Ansaldo will need to get beyond the H-class efficiency level to be a realistic fourth player. If not the GT26 will be consigned – at best – to some niche markets. The 60Hz (including US) market and the GT24 are not available to Ansaldo and that does not help in the experience stakes.
How long it may take to get a commercial version of the next generation GT36 to market, or whether it will ever see the light of day, is an open question. I have a soft spot for sequential combustion and would like to see it continue. But I will stay pessimistic and remain doubtful that Ansaldo Energia has the wherewithal to remain a serious player with this technology.
And hope to be proved wrong.
Alstom GT26
The k2p blog 