A long time ago in a hamlet far far away, I shared a house, worked and drank an occasional beer with somebody who was slightly taller, but lamentably (for him) far less handsome than myself. His name was Andy and he was a rather impetuous boy: a life ruled by impulse and extremes, as evidenced by the “flamingo” photographs.

Due to a seemingly random series of events, the wiser and more benevolent side of Andy’s internal self has acquiesced with the over inquisitive and but danger-to-itself “curious child” part of his brain and managed to sign the whole of Andy up for the Xtreme Everest expedition; a medical study aiming to see how the human body reacts at altitude.

Expedition

The expedition are hoping to help understand the effect of hypoxia (low blood oxygen) on supposedly healthy adults. This is relevant in the field of intensive care as patients almost universally suffer from hypoxia so understanding how to get more oxygen into people’s bloodstream is how you keep them alive. Or so the doctors on the project say anyway.

The upshot is 3 weeks trekking at altitude, interspersed with tests involving needles, physical jerks, general prodding, putting different shaped blocks in holes (apparently you get stupid at altitude) and whatever other weird things the doctors can dream up.

Carbon Gilt

For some reason, Andy decided that just a single act of (uncharacteristic) philanthropy wasn’t enough and figured that he might as well raise some money for a good cause while he was up there; and decided to offset the guilt of flying long haul to Nepal by choosing a charity dedicated to the environment – namely Friends of the Earth.

He then asked me to “use my colossal internet presence to spread the word and put forth the metaphorical cap of pleading for donations to this cause“. How could I refuse? Donate, donate, donate! Now, now now!

Turn the screw

If anyone thinks of any tests that might inspire the doctors to find inventive, painful or (preferably) embarrassing ways to prod Andy in the name of medical science, do speak up!

I’m wondering if hypoxia affects the time taken for a tongue to become stuck to a frozen metal pole.

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The pictured shape toy was designed by Melissa and Doug.

When making a pot of tea, I tend to add teabags and sugar at the same time; once the tea has brewed, I give it a stir, remove the teabags, add milk, and then with the aid of a knitted tea-cosy I get several hot mugs of tea in succession and can keep working without the need to return to the kitchen.

However, when I do return to the kitchen a recurring question bounces around my head: how much sugar is absorbed by the teabag before it is removed from the pot? i.e. exactly how much is the taste affected and how much energy is lost?

I recall from GCSE science that one way to test this would be to take sample teabags that have been percolating themselves in teapots with differing amounts of sugar, then once dried, burn them in a controlled environment and measure the energy given off.

Perhaps different teas have different absorption qualities too. Perhaps different bag shapes and materials also affect absorption. Who knows…

Anyhow, it strikes me that:

1. there are probably better ways to do it than I can think of, so what are they? and
2. someone’s possibly already done the experiments, so are any results published?

So I’ll let the web do it’s thing, no doubt the answer will one day arrive with a knowledgeable reader (hello you), and in the mean time, I can stop wondering because I know the answer is on it’s way.

If you’re going to do something where you have just one shot, then you have to get it right first time, there can be no deviation. This is a very different requirement to just getting it right every time after a short teething period . Space exploration is full of one-shot right first time problems. For special problems you need special people.

High costs result in only the smallest error margins being afforded, so in mitigation, any part of a space mission that can be automated, is automated, and the use of commodity items helps. Whenever possible, human tasks are removed from the equation, but sometimes they’re a necessary part of the machine. There are times when a problem cannot be analysed without having a dynamic flexible and adaptable tool (the human) on board.

The Human within The Machine

The first astronauts (Gagarin, Shepard, Grissom, Titov, etc.) were all military pilots (often test-pilots) shortlisted because of their proven abilities in extreme flight conditions. The Apollo & Soyuz missions that those pilots undertook were real journeys into the unknown, not just testing unknown machinery, but journeys into an unknown environment where their vehicle would behave in uncertain ways.

Such was the success of those missions that journeys into Earth orbit appear to have become fairly routine. The first few Shuttle missions were televised live, but after that, they were relegated to an “and finally…” item on the news, and often not covered at all. The loss of Challenger and it’s seven crew refocused press attention on space travel and the fact that one-shot right-first-time problems can fail catastrophically.

If things do go wrong, the crew needs to be informed and focused, taking in a lot of information, filtering out the irrelevant and acting instinctively. When warnings and malfunctions are day-to-day events, intensive training aids the cognition process, helping complex tasks to become routine; keeping the human a part of the machine focused on the mission, to the exclusion of all else.

Mission Focus, No Deviation

In 2005, we had the opportunity to meet the Commander of Apollo 15, Col. David Scott, when he presented a lecture at the University of Portsmouth. Something occurred during his presentation that was, unintentionally, quite revealing about the astronaut mindset.

Speaking for an hour can be quite hard on the voice, so the university had provided a glass of water.

Midway through explaining something quite complex (he covered things like trans-lunar injection) Col. Scott caught the glass with the back of his hand and it fell from the podium, smashing on the carpeted floor, quietly but audibly.

There was no pause, not even a glance at the debris, not even the slightest break in sentence or paragraph.

Afterwards several of us commented about the glass, one person remarked “it was like it didn’t happen; he knew the it was lost before it hit the ground, so continued without falter”.

Col. Scott was not diverted from his task of delivering the lecture, and as a result, the audience were not diverted in their reception of it, nobody felt embarrassed for him, nobody rushed to clear it up, everything continued at full pace. There was absolutely no deviation.

The Human without The Machine

Singular focus on a goal is beneficial in an otherwise automated one-shot project, but what about afterwards, back on earth? When it’s combined with personal & emotional issues it can result in extreme and startling actions.

Yesterday, an astronaut was arrested at Orlando International Airport and charged with attempting to kidnap a love rival. The suspect had driven 900 miles non-stop from Texas to Florida wearing disposable nappies (to avoid having to stop for a wee). She then donned a wig and trench coat and followed her target to the car park, carrying the following: pepper spray, a BB gun, a steel mallet, a 4-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, rubbish bags and $600 in cash. She’s a married mother of three, and could face a life sentence if convicted.

So it seems nobody’s perfect, not even astronauts. Astronauts do things that would make the rest of us feel clumsy. Astronauts fall in love with the wrong people and go to extreme lengths in order to “just talk to” their love rival. Perhaps the unseen problem of being an astronaut is that you have to keep getting it right even after your last mission. An astronaut is put on a pedestal and expected not to screw up, ever. Right first time, right every time, no deviation.

Wikipedia has some interesting quotes from NASA spokespeople who are stunned and perplexed by the incident.

Picture this: it’s a sunny day at the seaside and you’re enjoying an icecream. The human predilection to follow scripted conversation formats is such that you cannot fail to overhear somebody appreciatively inhale before joyously proclaiming “mmmmm, smell that sea air!”, to which a companion will invariably offer a helpfully informative “ah yes, that’s ozone“.

The “ozone thing” is something I’ve heard many times, and it’s discussed all over the web, including this article by Dr. H. Rzepa of Imperial College London’s Chemistry Dept.

However, according to the University of East Anglia it’s not the ozone that’s smelly, it’s dimethyl sulphate.

Somehow I don’t think the ozone story will go away, it’s a far easier name to remember than di-sulpher-thingy.

Schrödinger’s cat, bless it’s little white paws, had a pretty tough time of it; what with being locked in an imaginary box, and having to share that space with only a decaying radioactive isotope. At the end of the experiment, when the box is opened and the cat is observed, it’s probability wave collapses into either a live cat or a dead cat. It’s not exactly an easy life (or death).

I was therefore especially pleased today to read of Kirsher’s Hall of Mirrors for cats.

Schrödinger never saw fit to describe the interior decoration of the box, so it struck me that if the box were a hall of mirrors, such as Kirsher’s, then the cat could observe itself; thus collapsing it’s own probability wave and therefore, either

1. instaneously ceasing to exist, the moment the isoptope decays, or
2. continuing to exist, and spending an hour in a private preening booth (surely this is cat heaven?).

Ok, so there’s unlikely to be a Nobel prize for this one, but if I keep coming up with ideas then the probabilty has to increase, and if I sit in a room full of mirrors whilst I think…

Nuclear Energy is neither carbon-free, nor is it a secure energy, yet our government representatives appear to be drinking in everthing the Nuclear Industry offers them.

This morning on the BBC’s Breakfast Television programme we were treated to an interview with Alan Johnson MP, the Trade and Industry Secretary. The interview follows coverage of the the announcement that the government has ordered the Health and Safety Executive to assess all UK nuclear reactors.

In the interview Mr. Johnson ignored the questions and instead answered several easier ones that he felt the interviewer should have asked. During this dalliance into happy nuclear thoughts, Mr. Johnson repeated two statements that are so unbelieveably incorrect that I felt compelled to make a note of them, so that when he (and his political and business associates) at some point in the future venture that “nobody ever said X“, I will remember that he did indeed say it most emphatically.

Mr. Johnson’s incorrect assertions are:

1. Nuclear energy is carbon-free.
2. Nuclear energy is secure energy.

Later, Keith Parker (of the Nuclear Industry Association) was shown in a recorded statement saying that

Nuclear contributes to the long term security of energy supply as part of a diverse mix of energy sources, and it’s also a clean source of electricity generation, it doesn’t produce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

It looks like our elected representative for Hull (Mr. Johnson) has been fully briefed by Mr. Parker; both are indefensibly wrong.

Keith Parker and Alan Johnson are spouting fallacies in advance of a public consultation, in order to sway the public to their way of thinking – they’re attempting to influence the consultation. From Mr. Parker’s perspective, it makes sense, he’s representing the nuclear industry which has a rather definite vested interest in the continued usage of nuclear power. But to hear these fallacies argued so strongly by an MP was utterly repugnant.

Nuclear Energy is not Carbon Free

I’ll tackle the “nuclear carbon free myth” with a small analogy.

Twins Bob and Jimmy are chatting in the pub and agree to enter the local 10Km fun run. Several weeks later the day of the run arrives and Bob takes his place at the start. Jimmy joins him shortly afterwards and explains that he needed to fill his water bottle up. Bob teases Jimmy that they’re not running a marathon so water will be unnecessary. The race begins, and every kilometer, Jimmy takes a swig of water. Bob and Jimmy run together, and finish together. Bob and Jimmy’s family are waiting at the finish and are surprised at how Bob gulps down the water that they have with them. Jimmy, in comparison, appears fresh and needs no water at all.

The fact is both runners need water, but only Bob’s water usage is conspicuous because it occurs at the stage where it can be noticed.

Similarly, only one part of nuclear energy production, the part that is most visible to the public is “carbon free”. The process as a whole which involves the manufacture of enriched uranium is anything but “carbon free”, but industry representatives like Mr. Parker conveniently ignore this issue in their televised filibustering.

Mr. Johnson should know better. It’s certainly the case that the amount of CO₂ generated in the process as a whole will differ for each source of energy, but to present nuclear energy as a carbon free solution as Mr. Johnson did this morning, and to do so with a blatant disregard for valid questioning on national television, is wandering into the realms of negligence.

Nuclear Energy is not Secure Energy

The second major point that both parties covered was the fairly straightforward issue of energy security. The UK’s requirement is an energy industry that is capable of scaling it’s output to meet the needs of the public. The industry must therefore have a surplus of energy, or we will face the rolling blackouts or brownouts that have recently affected North America. To achieve this kind of surplus the UK must either generate or import energy.

The problem of importing energy is that that if you become reliant on it, market forces will drive the price up, a scenario which is increasingly likely as North Sea Gas fields are depleted. The Russia-Ukraine gas pricing row is a perfect example of this. The UK government is therefore forced to look to insular energy generation, and thus, the supposedly clean nuclear power is presented as a solution to our energy requirements.

Thus if importing energy is so insecure, generating it at home in nuclear power plants is the secure solution. This incidentally is a non-sequiteur.

There is an angle in the energy security debate that cannot be avoided due to our unavoidable involvement in international military operations through UN commitments. The arrest of ten terrorist suspects in Australia last November who, it was suggested, were planning to attack Australia’s only nuclear power plant, highlights the fact that such installations are certainly on the list of targets that “bad people” might select.

Distribution is Key

Knocking out a couple of nuclear power facilities is certainly unthinkable for normal people, but it is potentially possible for a few well equipped nutcases to achieve. Knocking out a distributed network with multiple energy sources is far more difficult however, and therefore far more secure.

This is the underlying theory behind the Internet, it was designed by DARPA to be a resilient network that could continue to function at near full capacity if one, or multiple nodes were to be destroyed through thermonuclear war.

So, if Nuclear Energy is not carbon-free, and not a secure energy source, what is in it for our government representatives? Does Alan Johnson MP know something we don’t or is he being deliberately naive?

For me, the arguments against nuclear power-plants in their current form are overwhelming; the most significant of these being the collapse of the “nuclear is clean” argument (because of the apparent hidden CO₂ costs of preparing the enriched uranium).

What’s important for the UK right now is that people engage in an informed debate about how we want to live our lives and the legacy we aspire to leave our decendants.

If, at this juncture, we (the collective British democratic consciousness) opt to create more nuclear plants and they turn out to be global polluters, then several hundred years from now everything else that we stand for will appear irrelevant because our legacy will be an uninhabitable planet. We cannot even hide behind the ignorance of those who went before us, because thanks to the World Wide Web the information that is available to the general public is now infinitely richer – more is known, more is understood and with this increase in knowledge comes a greater collective social responsibility.

I’m certainly not saying Nuclear Power is entirely bad, it’s just that there are too many negatives associated with it at present for it to be a viable global option. Of course, if nuclear power is the wrong answer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is an obvious right answer that doesn’t have it’s problems or detractors.

So, debate is good, and debate now, whilst there is not a power crisis (unlike North America) is especially good, because we can take the time to consider and hopefully opt for, a fundamental change in the way we generate, share and use our power.

I’ll be wearing the yellow badge.

Update
A few people have asked if high resolution badge images are available for print purposes. Please contact the copyright holder OOA Fonden, who’s task is to make the logo available for use by the antinuclear movement world wide and to protect the integrity of the logo.

I’ve been intermittently toying with the idea of fitting an Anti-Limescale device to the water supply in our home.

Today, with the delivery of a new phone book, I got a flyer describing a product called ScaleWatcher which reminded me of my occasional curiosity with the subject. It’s a nice convincing-looking flyer, with a money back guarantee, so I’m tempted to give it a go.

We have a nice glass sided kettle so it’ll be really obvious if it actually works.

I may be forced to try a little experiment and take daily pictures of my kettle, so please spare me from the madness and give me some definite answers:

• Has anyone I know actually used a household electric water softener?
• Was the experience worthwhile?
• Are they any better than the magnetic or salt based ones?