Mix and Swirl

     As with the last slurry of tidbits, I'll give you the option to skip over this or save it to sort out for exploring later, a method by Hakai which simply adds a section they title, "What We're Reading Now" at the end of their newsletters.  Of course, they're utilizing an entire office of readers and editors (and marine scientists) so their variety is rather extensive; but every now and then I'll find myself clicking on one of their links and be pulled outward on yet another tangential journey.  All of which is very similar to an essay from way back by author and professor Ellen Ullman on her story of coding, artificial intelligence, and cooking...sounds very piecemeal but her piece showed the difficulty AI has in trying to conceive of every possible avenue of thought and yet (so far) miserably failing, all of her insights coming with her many thanks to Julia Child (whaaat?).

   Anyway I first begin with a visually beautiful piece on mining in Chile, a piece that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.   Early Hawaiians believed that the earth was sacred and to "scar" or dig out the earth was to go against nature.  But the Atacama Desert of Chile is so rich in minerals that an old mining proverb there says that "you cam get copper just by kicking the mountain."  A century later, the mining companies are finding the once-easy minerals such as gold and lithium ever more difficult to uncover, but they have little option to quit.  Chile is dirt poor in one sense so the extraction of minerals pretty much remains a major part of the country's lifeblood; and it is taking ever more electricity to run those mining operations; at its peak, electricity costs ran over $150 per kilowatt hour (yes, that figure is correct -- the current rate in my state is closer to 10 cents per kwh).  The mines alone use up what is estimated to be over 10% of Chile's entire energy usage so they and the country itself are turning to renewables, and in a big way.  Renewable energy such as wind and solar already represent 14% of energy production. a figure Chile hopes to expand to 70% in 30 years.  In some ways, there are similarities to Saudi Arabia and other desert countries dependent on what the earth holds beneath her.  And when those deposits run out, well, political boundaries can shift.  Still, the other side of the sword is the need for countries to find other sources of power quickly and the deserts of our world have plenty of both sun and wind...perhaps the necessary research Chile is exploring in delivering that power to distant cities will prove beneficial to all, maybe even to the rest of our planet. 

   I guess I am leading off with that subject because I remain fascinated with the sun.  From our view, it's easy to forget that the sun is a round orb and the small portion which we see is indeed just a small portion of it overall (imagine lining up two marbles at a distance from each other, one red hot [the sun] and the other rotating); so even with our vast arrays of solar panels, the struggle to valiantly capture what we can is minimal overall; that portion of the sun's energy reaching us is just one, one-billionth of its output (or put another way, 1/10.000.000).  It's mind-boggling to imagine such energy radiating into space in a hundred billion directions, and still space is cold (and our sun is again, just considered a medium star and just one of several hundred or more billion such stars so ignited and generating heat).  And consider again Earth's Goldilocks distance from the sun and its heat (and damaging solar rays*)...one degree further, either closer or further away, and we would not have life as we know it.  So ahem, appreciate where you are in the grand scheme of things.

   And speaking of space, there's Peggy Whitson who just retired from NASA.  Never heard of her?  She's the holder of having spent the most time in space of any U.S. astronaut, the first female to command the Space Shuttle twice, and on record as having spent over 60 hours outside the Shuttle.  Wow, a new Amelia for the current generation.  Oh, and speaking of solar (I did say that these tangents would occur), there's the mineral perovskite (a basis of calcium titanium oxide for your chemists out there); easy to lab-grow and virtually translucent the mineral has been lab-replicated in one-sixth the time of silicon and may prove so versatile that solar panel costs could be halved (hello Chile, are you listening?).  The downsides: the mineral dissolves easily if exposed to moisture, works best with lead (toxic issues), and so far scientists aren't sure of the durability in its ability to convert energy.  Did I mention the mineral was first discovered in Russia's Ural Mountains (more mining or here we go again).

   On what I would call my "surprised" side, I discovered that sending out your washing (yes, your everyday piles of laundry) has now become a booming business.  Said the piece in INC.: You're already outsourcing housecleaning and lawn care.  Why not outsource laundry?  Perhaps that's just another "only in (lazy or overworked) America" thing.  And then there were the emergency calls (911 in the U.S., and no, not that 9-11); haven't you wondered as police and fire and medical emergency vehicles  zoom by you at record speeds why there aren't more accidents?  Turns out that there are quite a few accidents (not good news if you're being rushed to the hospital and your ambulance crashes); in a study done some five years ago, there were over 4500 ambulance crashes (many of the injuries and deaths happen to the patients and emergency personnel inside who are not wearing seat belts).  Said Cecil Adams in his now-missed column: Police-related crashes dwarfed fire and ambulance accidents in this study, both on emergency and non-emergency runs...This brings to mind a 2004 analysis in the journal Injury Prevention in which researchers sought to figure out how many motor vehicle crash deaths in the U.S. were specifically related to police pursuits.  In a nine-year period the authors identified 2,654 crashes, involving 3,965 vehicles and resulting in 3,146 fatalities. That already seems a bit stiff, but get this: 1,088 of those fatalities --more than a quarter-- were “not in the fleeing vehicle.”  Forty were police officers, 102 were nonmotorists --pedestrians, bicyclists, et al-- and 946 were “occupants of vehicles uninvolved in the police pursuit,” which is to say unlucky by-drivers.  And haven't you wondered about all those new planes and trucks and washing machines that are constantly appearing?  Where do all the old ones go?  Okay, some recycling occurs and there are airplane "graveyards;" but what about old ships?  Nigerian environmentalist Prince David Omaghomi told Vanguard: Nigeria currently has over 3,000 shipwrecks littering its coastline, a development that will continue to endanger smooth navigation in and out of the nation’s ports...“When a ship has served its life time, you are supposed to take it to a dockyard and dismember it, recycle the metals, but they avoid such expenses, make money from insurance and they dump them in the Nigerian coastline where nobody cares,” said Omaghomi.  He said Nigeria is being ridiculed as the shipwreck graveyard of the world.  “Nigeria has no legislation or enforcement of existing legislations that help people to remove ship wrecks.  So people find Nigeria a favourable ground to dump their ships that are no longer in use.  With each ship sunk so goes the fuel and the oil, the paint and the rest of the gunk; and with bottom trawling still legal in some states scientists now predict our oceans might be "fished out" within 30 years.  One has to wonder what the heck we are doing to our home planet?

  But is all of this real or "fake" news?  Here is some real fake news.  That Border Wall that Congress so proudly announced was funded in their last spending bill?  Said Bloomberg Businessweek: Reality: Some of the money in the bill may be used for planning the development of a wall.  But the law limits any construction of a physical barrier to fencing and levees.  And those massive regulation cuts claimed earlier this year ("almost a 1000" claimed the White House spokesperson); said the same magazine: ...only a handful of regulations have actually been taken off the books.  Hundreds of the pending regulations had been effectively shelved before Trump took office.  Others listed as withdrawn are actually still being developed by federal agencies.  Still more were moot because the actions sought in a pending rule were already in effect.  The review’s findings undercut one of the signature assertions of an administration that has struggled to show progress on its major campaign promises.   But it's not just politics.  Here are some of the requirements for legally labeling pet food, says Lifehacker: "Beef" or "poultry" will include organs, cartilage, and bone...Terms like "natural" or "human grade" are almost meaningless.  As to our own food, O Magazine wrote that the term "natural" isn't defined by the FDA and "doesn't necessarily mean anything about the purity of a product."  Hmm, but you did know that an easy way to convert those "total sugars" under that carbohydrates label on your can or jar is to simply divide the number by four; every 4 grams of sugars on the label represent the equivalent of one actual teaspoon of sugar.  So take skim milk, with 11 grams of sugars per cup...this means that each 8-ounce serving has close to 4 teaspoons of sugar (same with plain yogurt...sorry you healthies).  Of course, sugars come in many forms, from lactose to dextrose to the horrible corn syrup, but once in your body they're all just "sugar."  So yikes...now you know so you can take a gulp and just read those labels (and also discover how much salt something as innocent as cottage cheese contains).

   But it's not all horrible news.  There is a world of innovation out there.  Take the story I had saved from way back in 2015 on a drinkable book which appeared in The Washington Post: Imagine a book that has pages you can tear out and use to turn raw sewage into drinking water.  Each page is implanted with silver or copper nanoparticles that kill bacteria when water passes through them.  And each page is printed with a message in your local language: “The water in your village may contain deadly diseases.  But each page of this book is a paper water filter that will make it safe to drink.”  Cool.  Well what about all those sharp needles used for injections worldwide (so they go into a SHARPS container but then what?).  Enter the Needle Grinder as featured in Bloomberg Businessweek: This photocopier-size device can sterilize and grind up medical waste, including syringes and sharps containers, to produce nontoxic garbage that doesn’t require incineration or other special treatment.  Cool again.  But what about something more dangerous like some nerve gas (yikes)?  How about designing a portable device to do the job; call it the Field Deployable Hydrolysis System and get them out there.  Done.  And while you're at it, why not make jet engines even bigger, as in becoming the size of a current 737 fuselage; and make it more fuel efficient and cleaner and quieter in the process.  Already done and being tested by GE.  Wow.  And while we're here, we may as well get into chemistry...or not.

   It's a lot, isn't it?  Why you probably wouldn't be surprised if I began delving into the subject of UFOs (okay, there was a pretty intriguing piece in the London Review of Books on that subject).  But here's the bad news...while I'm done for this post, I'm not really done overall; a bit of my slurry pile is gone but there's more, unfortunately.  Fair warning...more to come in the next post.  But I'll leave you with this piece of a TIME interview with Bill Gates on his late statistician friend's new book, Factfulness: Asked TIME: If the world really is improving at a faster rate than people think, why does it matter whether people have incorrect notions about it?  Gates replied: It’s easier to accelerate progress if you know how far we’ve already come.  If you don’t believe the world has improved, you’re more likely to look at a tragedy and think nothing can be done.  But someone who knows how much progress is possible can look at a bad situation and say, “How can we make this better?”  Hans liked to call himself a “possibilist,” which is a perfect way to describe this worldview.  He believed that things could get better, not that they will get better.  A possibilist like Hans doesn’t wait for improvement -- he looks for the areas where progress is happening and finds way to duplicate it in other places.  Cool, cooler, coolest...


*In a related story in Barron's, agriculture analysts are forecasting a bad year for wheat production: ... supply is low, and more adverse weather conditions could tighten the market further if extreme weather batters the crop.  Worse, there is reason to believe more bad weather will come, affecting wheat output in many countries.  Extreme weather such as we have seen these past 12 months is more common when the activity on the surface of the sun declines.  The count of dark spots on the solar surface tends to fluctuate in a fairly predictable 11-year cycle.  At the moment the cycle is nearing its low point, with very few sunspots -- and low sunspot counts also mean harsher weather...For instance, the highest temperature ever recorded in the U.S. occurred in 1913 --a blistering 134 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley, Calif., says LiveScience-- and that was also a year when the sun had 311 days of zero spots, according to NASA.  Some analysts also point to the so-called Maunder minimum, when sunspots disappeared for the decades between 1745 and 1815 and coincided with a mini ice age.