| Monday
August 30, 2010 Massive solar storm to hit earth in 2012! Lions and
tigers and bears! Oh, my!
Dr Pournelle
Thank you for your contribution to the silly season.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q3/view637.html#Friday
"Massive solar storm to hit Earth in 2012 with 'force
of 100m bombs'"
From the article: '"The general consensus among
general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming
Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent
in 100 years," News.com.au quoted astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave
Reneke as saying.'
Who is Dave Reneke? Dave Reneke is 'one of Australia’s
most well known and respected amateur astronomers and lecturers'. In the
article, he quotes Dr Richard Fisher, NASA, and, yes, Dr Fisher has
published alarms about the ill effects of solar storms, but Dr Fisher is
forecasting the big one will occur in 2013.
So why does Dave Reneke say 2012? Just coincidence
that 2012 is the year the Mayan calendar cycles to 0.0.0.0.0? Could be.
Could be that a 99-to-1 horse will win the Kentucky Derby next spring, but
my money won't be on that horse.
(I note that the story was published without a byline.
Who would want his name connected to this piece?)
And what is this uncorroborated talk show nonsense
about the California Department of Consumer Affairs? I recall the trumped-up
report about Texas law requiring software mechanics to get PI licenses. The
talk show stuff sounds like it comes from the same zany mindedness. 'Hey,
look! According to the law, the Department of Consumer Affairs can do this!'
Call me when it happens and a store files a Fourth Amendment suit against
the State of California in Federal District Court.
"If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it
would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
My wife keeps asking me what is in the news, and I
keep telling her there is nothing worth talking about; it is August and
everyone is on vacation, so the sogenannte journalists are making up
stories.
Who was it who said, "When there's no news, we give it
to you with the same urgency as when there is"?
Live long and prosper
h lynn keith
When I post something with the tag "Something
else to worry about" I am not always dead serious. I am aware of the 2012
date.
As to the California Department of Consumer
Affairs, yes it was a talk show; and the proprietor of the store was on
the air, gave the name of the Consumer Affairs agent to the show hosts (it
was not broadcast) and generally sounded believable. It may be all made
up, but so far I have no evidence that it is not true. We have come to the
point where bizarre stories turn out to be true. The arrogance of our
masters sometimes knows few bounds. There were calls from others to whom
much the same thing had happened. I agree: it sound unlikely. But the
store owners were intimidated and did not resist. I now find that a state
legislator has been on the talk show to say yes, that's the law.
I would be pleased to find that it was all made
up. I suspect that it may have been fraud by a pretended agent because I
really don't like to think we have come to the point where Monsieur le
Marquis can run his carriage over a child and toss out a gold coin while
riding on -- or walk into a store demand that a product be surrendered for
product safety testing without giving compensation -- but I am no longer
sure.
You or I would have challenged their right to
seize property. Or I like to think so, but I at least have been
intimidated by TSA agents, one of whom threatened to have me jailed for
writing down her badge number. I surrendered the paper rather than miss my
flight. Madame la Marquise had her way. Of course I memorized the number
and sent my account of this to the Inspector General of TSA, but it has
been years and I have had no answer, so I suspect that was a waste of
time. The purpose of TSA is to drum across the fact that we are no longer
citizens, but subjects, and that purpose is being served well.
=============
Letter from England
The education mess here continues to unwind. The
private sector has clearly figured out how to game the system: <http://tinyurl.com/3ag5rl4>
<http://tinyurl.com/35ub7cz>
Discussion of the Australian approach to university
education: <http://tinyurl.com/2wle2fw>
. A bit too profit-driven.
Guardian comment on Labour's restructuring: <http://tinyurl.com/2wyosdz>
Android marketplace discourages app developers: <http://tinyurl.com/32ctr58>
What *did* cause the dinosaur extinctions? <http://tinyurl.com/2gx59y5>
From during the week:
University crisis hitting high school students.
Explanation: UK students studying for their A-levels (college entrance
exams) attend sixth-form colleges (corresponding to the last years of high
school in America) after they complete their GCSEs (between 14 and 16, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Certificate_of_Secondary_Education>)
. Older students who cannot find university places often return to their
sixth-form college for another year to improve their A-level test results.
This eliminates places for 16-year olds who would be entering a sixth form
college. Additionally, universities are now using GCSE results to break ties
between equivalent A-level results.
Daily Mail article: <http://tinyurl.com/3y4njkw>
Guardian article: <http://tinyurl.com/28uesxk>
Telegraph article: <http://tinyurl.com/39rdkcz>
A Dutch university is offering English-language
courses (at half the cost) to UK students who missed out on their university
places. <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=413025>
The down-side is that only 30% of students entering Maastricht University
graduate, about a third of the graduation rate the UK Government now
requires--which, by the way, is probably one of the reasons UK employers are
unhappy with UK graduates.
-- Beware Outside Context Problems--
Harry Erwin, PhD
=============
Record cold snap in Amazon kills six million fish...
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/
100827/full/news.2010.437.html
Jim
Global Warming, I presume.
============
: My nomination for quote of the year
There is a recent column by James Taranto in the WSJ
concerning the liberal elites and their disdain for common Americans.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB100014240527487041478
04575455523068802824.html?
mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
The entire article is worth a read, including this
memorable gem:
> The liberal elites cannot comprehend common sense,
and, incredibly,
> they think that's a virtue. After all, common sense is so common.
Steve Chu
============
Funny nuclear decay rates
Jerry
Dr. Rolf Andreassen provided a very nice description
of how one normally models alpha decay. However it still comes down to 'the
alpha particle "pops" through the barrier' and Quantum Theory only tells us
the rate (or % chance) not the why. Consider a tunnel diode in electronics,
you know that a certain percentage of the elections will tunnel through the
barrier, but the theory makes zero prediction as to "which ones".
As a Solid State Physicist, I find this all very
fascinating, but Nuclear decay physics is a different field entirely. If
it's not at the "that's funny" stage, it's certainly at the "what in the
world could be causing that?" stage.
Mark E. Horning, Physicist
==============
What Climate Change Advocates Believe
Jerry:
I saw this at Jon Ray's "Greenie Watch" blog, and
thought of you. http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-do-warmists-actually-believe-list.html
........Karl
<quote> An email below from John Droz, Jr., [aaprjohn@northnet.org]
physicist & environmental advocate. Droz welcomes comments
I have dialogued with many pro-AGW parties, and have
tried to ferret out their underlying (often unstated) assumptions. Below
is my current list. AGW proponents have the following stated or embedded
beliefs:
1) We currently have the ability to measure and
report on an average annual global temperature to .01 degree Celsius
2) We have the ability to empirically calculate the
average annual global temperature, with this same degree of accuracy, over
the last few thousand years
3) Based on the data from #1 & #2, the earth has
recently (100± years) been warming
4) Based on historical records (#2), the earth is
warming to an unusually high degree
5) This increase (in the last 100 years) has been
.74± degrees Celsius
6) Assuming business as usual, this warming will
continue (or increase) for the foreseeable future
7) This warming will soon have profound negative
environmental and economic consequences to all of the earth’s inhabitants
8) The mechanics of the earth’s recent warming are
essentially entirely explained by the Greenhouse Gas theory
9) CO2 increases is the primary greenhouse gas
driver that explains earth’s recent warming
10) That 350 PPM of CO2 is a critical concentration
that we should not exceed
11) Other greenhouse gasses (e.g. water vapor) are
discounted as consequential causes of recent warming
12) Most CO2 increases are man-made
13) The fact that we don’t understand a significant
amount about CO2 sinks has been deemed to be irrelevant.
14) The solution of restricting man-made CO2 has
passed an objective cost-benefits analysis
15) That proprietary computer models produce results
equivalent to empirical testing <end quote>
Well some of us can believe six impossible things
before breakfast...
===============
The 'Iron Law' marches on...
Jerry:
Apparently, the Iron
Law of Bureaucracy is alive and well in Virginia. I just came across
this on CNN's web site -
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/27
/virginia.paid.for.no.work/index.html?hpt=T2
...under the title "Worker at taxpayer-funded agency
in Virginia plays hooky for 12 years".
The part that really got my attention was the
statement that -
When McGuire was asked how a person who got paid for
not working could have escaped detection for so long, she said she was
unsure.
"We don't know at this point how something like this
can happen. We're very concerned," she said. "[We're] working on procedure
to prevent this from happening again."
As with any self-respecting bureaucracy here had to be
at least one supervisor to whom this person was assigned. And, over 12
years, that position was likely to have been occupied by several different
people. And apparently NONE OF THEM noticed that one of their minions simply
didn't show up... day after day after day. How could any 'procedure' deal
with this kind of culpable incompetence?
John L.
We need a procedure to answer that question.
=============
Study shows that wind power increases air pollution
http://www.bentekenergy.com/files/userfiles/file/BENTEK%20-%20Executive%20Summary%20-%20How%20Less%20Became%20More_100416.pdf
The short version is that using coal generation to
supplement wind is inefficient and adds to pollution because boiler based
systems are not designed to start and stop a lot. They are designed to heat
up and run for a long time. (In my Navy days, lots of ships needed several
hours notice to get the boilers hot before they could leave port. Luckily,
unless you were a fireman, my ship steamed 7x24 even in port, but I
digress.)
Its interesting to me that they ignore the option of
running the power generation 'steady state' at optimal efficiency and air
pollution levels and somehow storing the excess power when the wind is
blowing and generating sufficient power. Then they could use the stored
energy to supplement the generation capacity when the wind isn't blowing.
It isn't currently easy to do (except for pump
storage) but with some R&D it ought to be reasonably doable. I'd personally
lean in the nanotube capacitor direction as a workable storage medium.
Regards,
John Harlow
President BravePoint
It's not ignored, it's that all the storage
methods are too expensive.
==
Dangerous Wind Turbines -
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/
business/energy-environment/27radar.html?_r=2
The United States military has found a new menace
hiding here in the vast emptiness of the Mojave Desert in California: wind
turbines
R
==============
Neutrinos
Jerry,
I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to write earlier. The
past couple of days have been interesting, in a "terror-induced surge in
marketing activity ahead of the pending round of layoffs" way. And I'll add
that I'm a bit rustier that Dr. Andreassen, since most of my recent work on
radiation has been on practical effects rather than mechanisms. (And my
recent work on radiation, despite also have a Ph.D. in particle physics, has
been subverted to project assignments normally more suited to civil
engineers and data managers.)
(1) Dr. Andreassen provided a correct description of
alpha decay. He is also right about the complexities of the strong force at
nuclear scales.
(2) The mechanisms for beta decay are based purely in
the weak force; a neutron disassociates into a proton, an electron, and an
electron anti-neutrino; the nucleon goes from atomic number Z, atomic mass
A, to atomic number Z+1, atomic mass A, and the electron and the
anti-neutrino recoil against the changed mass-energy of the resulting
nucleon.
(3) Gamma radiation exists because both alpha decay
and beta decay often result in target nuclear which are in
electromagnetically excited states; gamma rays are the products of
transition back to rest.
I'll add one note I ran across in the early 1990's but
haven't seen followed up. Neutrinos are well known to have very low levels
of direct interaction resulting in conversion into electrons (or muons) and
other products. However, there is still a probability of elastic scattering
where the neutrino encounters an electron or nucleus and changes direction
without changes in energy. About 17-18 years ago, I saw a series of papers
about a group of neutrino physicists were considering whether neutron
scattering could be detected by measurement of the thermal energy generated
when the recoil electrons settled back into their initial state in a
supercooled semiconductor.
There is a lot about neutrino scattering currently in
the literature. A quick search turns up this reference:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/95p07226ut516p78/
Proceedings of the International Conference “Nucleus,
2009: Fundamental Problems and Applications of Nuclei Physics from
Nanotechnology to Space” (LIX International Meeting on Nuclear Spectroscopy
and the Structure of Atomic Nuclei)
Temperature effect for an inelastic neutrino
scattering cross section
A. A. Dzhioev <http://www.springerlink.com/content/?Author=A.+A.+Dzhioev
> and A. I. Vdovin <http://www.springerlink.com/content/?Author=A.+I.+Vdovin>
Abstract snippet: ...for neutrino energies lower than
the energy of the Gamov-Teller resonance, the inelastic scattering cross
section depends substantially on temperature.
Your View article on Thursday notes that the rate of
radioactive decay appears to increase closer to the sun; that is, in higher
neutrino fluxes. If neutrino flux is the mechanism, then it becomes
plausible to consider that inelastic neutrino scattering in a nucleus yields
either prompt or delayed decay of the nucleon, which is not that different
than other low energy transfer nuclear reactions.
http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb/SNviewgraphs/
Opacities/colorbahcallserenellibs05OP.pdf is a plot of the solar
neutrino flux as a function of (modeled) source of neutrinos. Just to put a
scale on the number, the flux of 10E11 low-energy neutrinos per square
centimeter per second (from pp interactions), results in about ten neutrinos
per average nucleon (I used a mass number of 27 for the approximation but
with heavy rounding) per day, or three thousand per year. For a species with
a nominal half life of 200 years and a 1% change in the decay rate, the rate
for neutrino inelastic scattering transferring enough energy to a recoil
nucleus to result in induced radioactive decay would be about once per ten
million interactions.
If I've not slipped any digits anywhere, and
remembering that I'm working with "very" round numbers.
Back of the envelope, this seems to hold water. Maybe
I need to write the paper.
Dr. Jim W
Obviously even small increases in radioactivity
levels in the interior of Earth would have SOME effect on the internal
temperature, and that must eventually affect the bisophere temperature.
How much over how long is beyond my ability to calculate although I am
still looking for some numbers, at least orders of magnitude.
The more I think on it, the more I wonder about
internal temperature and transfer of energy to the seas. It doesn't take a
lot of change to make a change, so to speak.
============
Public Education: a Modest Propposal
Hi Jerry.
As a fellow CBHS Memphis alumnus (1980) and a reader
of your fiction in my misspent youth, I was delighted to find your blog. It
has been entertaining and thought-provoking.
The LA Times story you linked is very interesting,
especially coming from that particular source. It noted that individual
teachers are significant factors in student performance. As I'm sure you're
aware, many other studies have failed to demonstrate much correlation
between overall funding levels or class size.
Having read many of these studies over the years, I
have been advocating a modest proposal to reform the system. It has several
advantages: It is budget neutral (does not "add one dime to the deficit").
It addresses teacher complaints of low salaries, It is likely to improve
educational outcomes based on the available evidence.
It is not politically feasible, although in most
respects it is very simple.
First, fire the bottom half of the teachers.
Double class sizes, since they don't appear to affect
outcomes.
Double the salaries of the remaining teachers, while
making their continued employment contingent on performance.
The biggest problem that I see is what metrics would
be used to evaluate the teachers. It is a non-trivial problem.
All students in the system would immediately have the
advantage of teachers at or above the 50th percentile, which should result
in improved outcomes.
The higher salaries would create more competition for
teaching jobs, resulting in more competent teachers over time
Not really a workable solution for lots of reasons,
but fun to think about.
James
Perhaps drastic, in that 10% would probably do
the job, but I like the notion that it leaves all the teachers above
average...
===========
LAUSD Teacher Rankings
Dr. Pournelle,
The last time this subject came up, I was intensely
critical of the teacher effectiveness models that had been proposed. I am
happy to see that the recent work by Richard Buddin for the LA Times
corrects the deficits noted in earlier studies. I finally feel that the
evidence supports the conclusions.
If one were to forge ahead and try to improve the
public schools given this information, the biggest stumbling block seems to
be sheer number of poor teachers who would need to be let go. This would be
a challenge both because the teachers and their unions would object, and
because you would need to find replacements that we still don't know how to
predict whether they themselves would be good teachers. However, given that
in the LA Times study, Buddin did not find any effect on class size, perhaps
an easier path is to not replace the poor teachers, but instead place extra
students with the most able teachers, and increase their compensation.
This would be an ideal followup study, to see whether
you could place extra students with a teacher who did well and have that
teacher maintain their effectiveness. My observation of the public schools
here in Arizona is that the primary driver of smaller class sizes is
discipline problems, but as you have noted, we could deploy retired gunnery
sergeants to good effect.
-- Benjamin I. Espen
There are obvious limits, but in general class
size is not terribly significant. In my old country school we had about 25
pupils per grade and two grades to the room. Four teachers for the entire
1-8 regional school (the 7-8 grade teacher was the Principal Teacher; the
5-6 was the librarian). We learned, I would say as much as it taught in
contemporary public schools. Christian Brothers College (which was a JC
with a high school attached) was a superior college track high school and
had about 25 students to the class. There are many studies all showing
that teacher quality is far more important than class size.
The effectiveness models are troublesome, but it
is very clear that if we randomly fired 20% of the teachers every year and
made those randomly chosen teachers reapply it would improve the heck out
of the system. Clearlyw e can do better than random in selecting the worst
teachers.
==========
The Mars Hoax. Every year??
Dr. P,
Why is it that we (Internet users)
get this Mars e-mail
every August? This has been going on since 2003, when Mars really was
closest to Earth and as bright as it could be (but nowhere near as bright as
a full moon. Are we that dumb that this meme continues on an annual basis?
Are our memories that short? I used to blame this hoax on inexperienced
users (like my parents) who forwarded on e-mail from friends. Also, every
August? That isn’t possible, with our 365.24 day orbit and Mars’ 686.91 day
orbit.
Is this a case of someone meaning well and not
understanding, or are we really that gullible?
Best regards,
Bill Kelly
It's the silly season. As I noted I have no idea
why I included that other than that it's so obviously absurd.
==========
Subj: The Menace of Wind Turbines
http://xkcd.com/556/
Rod Montgomery
===========
: Bush warned Blair off Brown
See the following stories: <http://tinyurl.com/3y6lh33>
<http://tinyurl.com/3a4xgmv>
By the way, if the Austrian school does have a
prescription, the Con-Dem Government here in the UK needs to learn about it.
They've lost focus in their budget cut-backs.
-- If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not
be called research, would it? (Albert Einstein)
Harry Erwin PhD
============
Neutrinos & Half-life
Jerry- It's been 'known' for some time that neutrinos
have an effect on radioactive materials. The following article is from 2003:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/
dn3734-neutrino-beam-could-neutralise-
nuclear-bombs.html
Clearly, if the effect of additional neutrinos is to
accelerate decay, then an absence of neutrinos would be... no decay? The
determination of this could be extremely interesting. We have no way to
effectively shield solar (or interstellar) neutrinos, but we could certainly
run some tests to see if there is a relationship between neutrino flux and
decay rates and if that relationship is linear or not.
Story idea: Perhaps the sun has a 'neutrino cycle'.
Perhaps solar neutrino output is normally much higher. Perhaps there are no
'little green men' running about the galaxy because nuclear energy is
unavailable to them because their suns produce enough neutrinos that their
home worlds have no usable actinides left. Be a pity if our sun decided to
emit a neutrino burst sufficient to detonate all the nukes we have lying
around the planet.
-Jim
======================d
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