Another "Funny" Ternary: Energy Sources

This occurred to me a few days ago, but it took me some time to decide how I wanted to lay it out. Based on 2010 data from Wikipedia.

Followup: I was actually a bit surprised at how much of the total went to renewables. If I'd had to guess, I'd have pretty much reversed that with nuclear. Also, adding "geology" tag. As I commented elsewhere, "where ever we go from where we are, the geology community and professionals will be the ones to allow us to get there." Whether petroleum/coal, nuclear or REE's, geology is going to be a significant part of whatever energy future we ultimately decide upon.

AW #46: Geology, Life and Civilization- Chaotic Feedback

Cat at Knowledge Flocs is hosting this month's Accretionary Wedge with a topic that looks relatively simple and straightforward, unless it's a topic you've spent some serious time contemplating, as I have. To wit: "How has life or civilisation been affected by geology or how has geology been affected by life?" With the provision that I'm going to change the last "or" to "and," here are some conclusions I've come to over the years, with a prefatory tangent.

The concept of "chaos," as it was developed during the late 70's and early 80's, and coming to public attention particularly in the late 80's, is at once fairly simple and straight-forward, but at the same time, I think, widely misunderstood. The important idea is that arbitrarily small differences in starting conditions of a particular system can lead to arbitrarily large differences in outcomes given enough time or iterations of the equations that describe said system. The iconic images illustrative of the concept, those of the Mandelbrot set, are the result of iterating a single simple equation (albeit one using complex numbers) to determine which starting conditions do not result in tending toward infinity after approaching infinite reiterations. Even very simple systems can exhibit chaotic behaviors, such as one of the ones first recognized as such, the Lorenz attractor. Note that while this is described as "a system of three ordinary differential equations," it isn't necessary to think of them as differential equations; one could consider them as a set of iterated steps:

• Using current x, y, z positions, calculate new velocities (dx/dt, dy/dt, dz/dt).
• Add new velocities to current positions to get new positions, and go back to beginning to reiterate.

Simple, huh?

The point is, the earth's components/systems, which because of my background, I tend to compartmentalize as geosphere [solid], hydrosphere [liquid], atmosphere [gaseous], and biosphere [living], with additional influences from the environment in which it rests ["space"], are each, in and of themselves extremely complex chaotic systems, involving huge numbers of variables. The above two examples are chosen to illustrate the simplicity of systems in which chaos can arise. Any one of earth's component systems is many magnitudes more complex than these... and when one tries to integrate all five into a unitary "Earth System..." well, speaking for myself, my mind just boggles. It's not a "complete fail;" I can dimly perceive patterns, trends, I can sensibly speculate, but I feel I'm relying more on constrained imagination than data, logic, and reason. My confidence in the "conclusions" I reach is best described as "minimal."

The focus of much popular science in the public mind is on things that are simply not understood by the vast majority of us (and yes, I intentionally include myself). Ask a group of random (or selected- I doubt it makes much difference) people, "Based on what you know and read, what are the most important questions science is trying to address?" I would be willing to wager responses that come up most frequently would include:

• What is the nature of the Higgs Boson? Does it exist?
• What is Dark Matter?
• What is Dark Energy? Does it exist?
• What sources of non-fossil energy are practical, and how can we transition to them with minimum effort?
• Does life exist elsewhere in the cosmos? Where might it?
• What is the cure for cancer/HIV/the common cold (Yes, I understand that the first and last are nonsensical, the second might too, and that's kind of the point.)

And while you might occasionally get something along the lines of "What are the consequences of global warming?," or "Is global warming real?," I'd also be willing to wager that an answer you would almost never get is along the lines of, "How can we better understand the dynamics of the total earth system, and make better predictions of the consequences of our interactions with it, in order to maintain our civilization without putting ourselves and important aspects of the earth at risk?"

And I ask, in all sobriety, "Can there be a more important question than that?"

The focus here is intended to be geology, but if you've read this blog for any length of time, you know I tend to flog the point that the solid earth is, directly or indirectly, the source of almost every single resource we use. I was going to say, "excluding air," but realized even that is in part a result of solid earth interactions with the biosphere. (Plants require phosphorus, potassium and magnesium, as well as a variety of micro-nutrients, that are available over the long term only from the solid earth.) I see no real point in beating on that theme again.

However, for those a little newer to OTI, here are a couple of older pieces that address this month's theme. The first, "Geo-Biz," focuses on some geology/economics news over a period of just a few days- and those few days were by no means atypical. Keep in mind "money" is at best a symbol of value, at worst an illusion. The real issue is the central consequence of being a living organism: the necessity to acquire resources. Economics is the study of how we as a species and a culture exchange resources we have in excess for those of which we are experiencing a deficit, with some other entity for which/whom the opposite is the case. Money is merely a consensual illusion that facilitates such exchanges.

The second, "Unanswered Questions," considers one aspect of a question that fascinates me deeply, and has for many years: "How has the presence and ongoing evolution of life influenced the overall evolution of the planet?" Specifically, the question I address is "how would the earth be different if life had never existed on it?" Spoiler: my conclusion is that for all practical purposes, it would be completely unrecognizable.

To end on an optimistic note, there are uncountable numbers of people working to make sure that we as a civilization continue to acquire the resources we need, and similarly uncountable numbers trying to assess, predict and avoid chances of environmental problems, disasters, and catastrophes. In other words, the scientific question I regard as most important is being addressed. I'll grant we're a long way from definitive answers on many important aspects of that question, and further still from integrating component answers into a broad understanding of "the Earth System," but the lack of discussion in most sources does not mean no one is working on it. Millions are. Many of these are scientists, many are not. Of the scientists, many are geologists. Many are computer scientists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, climatologists, astronomers or physicists in other sub-disciplines, biologists, and so on. But it bothers me, as a matter of pride, as a matter of pragmatism, and as a concern for the future, that the media, and as a result, the general public, is essentially blind to the fact of how fundamentally civilization is grounded (pun intended) in understanding, and understanding how to responsibly use, the solid earth.

Don't Panic. Waitaminit.... No, Panic

According to this website, which I linked in last Monday's "Cobbles and Gravel" post,

The estimated overall maximum biological effect from the trace amounts of radiation currently detected in Oregon from the events in Japan is about 0.000160 mrem per day. To put this into perspective, a person would need to be exposed to this level all day, everyday for over 100 years to equal the exposure from ONE chest x-ray.

Cue frantic screaming in 3... 2... 1...

If you're really, really concerned, an overdose of potassium iodide will simply kill you outright, so you won't have to worry about radiation poisoning.

How Much is a Planet Worth?

Gliese 581 c: $160
Mars: $14,000
Earth: $Lotsa!

From BoingBoing:

Our planet's value emerged as nearly 5 quadrillion dollars. That's about 100 times Earth's yearly GDP, and perhaps, Laughlin thought, not a bad ballpark estimate for the total economic value of our world and the technological civilization it supports.

I find this kind of amazing, that one can simply plug in numbers regarding physical characteristics of a planet- quantities that don't, on the face of it, seem to have much to do with economic value- and get something that seems like a plausible estimation of the "worth" of the planet. $14,000 seems like a low value for Mars, to me, but I suspect that's at least in part because I think about its potential future value, not its value in terms of today's ability to utilize it.

The interview portion of the article goes into some detail of how the equation was pieced together, and helps clarify how this works. Still wondering about magnets and tides, though.

This is Cool

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

Though as the source notes, "Needs more Saturn." This embedding code looks like the style I was fighting with yesterday, so if the clip doesn't show up for you, follow the link to the source or to Scale, and you should be able to see it. It's only about a minute long, and quite impressive.

Followup: Yep. And as it turns out, Vimeo also offers "the old code," which is code for "the code that actually works." Hopefully, this is fixed now.

Moral: Extort From Goldman Sachs

In Krugman's Blog today, he points out that in the James Bond film Thunderball, Spectre demands 100 million pounds for a pair of nuclear weapons...

Even the big one — demanding a ransom for two stolen nuclear warheads — is 100 million pounds, $280 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $2 billion — or one-eighth of the Goldman Sachs bonus pool.

Why rob banks? That's where the money is. And it's more true today than ever before.

Why Bother?

Because I'm curious, I guess is the answer. This poll is up for the next couple of days at The Guardian, and while there was no doubt in my mind what the verdict would be, I wanted to see how lopsided it was. I'm sure at some point, Faux News has posted a poll question along the lines of "Is Obama a socialist?" The outcome there would be in no doubt to me either, but again, I'd be curious to see what the ratio was.
The point is, these sorts of things are quite meaningless. I saw and took this poll because my political leanings are more in line with The Guardian's than with Faux's, and their poll which I didn't see and take part in. It's OK if they pique your curiosity, but don't take them seriously. Oh, yeah: I voted "no" to see the results. But you knew that.

Knowledgeably Corrupt

As syllogisms go, this is logically correct. However, the first premise is patently untrue, for better or for worse.

see more Funny Graphs

He's Pausing to See if Anyone Argues

Either that or he's mentally double-checking his arithmetic, and is on the verge of changing his mind.

Via What Would Jack Do? The "Stupid Math Tricks" label has never been more appropriate.

Trends

A couple of bloggers I follow posted some thing about "beating the game" yesterday. I don't make a habit of playing games, let alone beating them, and I didn't see any keywords that grabbed my attention, so I scrolled by after a brief pause.

That's important to understand: most of the items I "read" are glances at the headline and the first few lines or sentences to quickly decide whether I want to spend the time to read the whole thing. This is especially true for RSS feeds that provide only a title and a teaser: if you want me to read your stuff, and you expect me to click over to your website to do so-especially websites loaded with ads and sidebar add-ons- try to give me some idea what the fuck I'm going to see when I do. I've been getting really frustrated with this, and I've been dropping feeds that are the worst about it.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the number of RSS items I "read" (I think of it as "sort through") in a typical day has increased by about 25% over the last few months. Last spring I was averaging a bit over 1000 per day. Now...See why I tend to put off time-consuming posts for the weekends?

Then I found the relevant article in my "Google-related" folder, and given that I started using Google Reader well over a year ago, I guess I've beaten the game too:

Eagle-eyed viewers might have also noticed we've added a new category to the trends page: clicked trends - now you can see which sources you click on the most.
And finally, something many of you have asked for before...we now show you your lifetime read item count. That's right. Every. Single.* Item.**

*Only things you've scrolled by, or clicked on - doesn't count mark all as read.
**Okay, that's not quite accurate - once you hit around 300K (which we know some of you are already over) we stop counting for performance reasons. Consider that "beating the game".

A Simple Concept

...that an awful lot of people don't seem to get. (Indexed)I have a feeling that many of them were the business majors who needed the professor to re-explain how to read a simple line graph during nearly every lecture of the intro econ series I took as an undergrad.

Dimensions

BBC has a fun project, "Dimensions," which allows you to plot various areas and distances against a landscape that's familiar to you. Above, the Mars Spirit rover almost made it to the outskirts of my little burg before becoming mired in a sandtrap on the far side of Witham Hill. The engine is somewhat limited: you can't rotate it, or shift it manually to begin and end in positions that better conform to locations you'd like, but this kind of thing really does help me get a sense of scale of things. For example, I've been reading about the awful flooding in Pakistan, but still hadn't had a gut sense of the area affected...By choosing a location that puts the ends near places with which I'm familiar- in this case, Enterprise, Or, near the Wallowa Mountains- allows me to see that the swath of destruction extends from Calgary, Alberta to near San Francisco. Wow. There are lots of these overlays, filed under various categories. Another fun one is the depth of the Marianas Trench, laid out as a north-south distance.

Temperature Extremes

According to NWS/NOAA, we just reached 100 degrees a little while ago. I don't cope with 90+ happily, and the centennial mark feels like a stake in the heart to me. On the other hand, it's a dry heat. With a dew point of 47, the relative humidity is 17%, and there's a bit of a breeze. So it's more of a convection oven feeling rather than being pressure cooked. I'm thinking I may go home and take a nap and a cold bath at the same time. As I mentioned to someone a few minutes ago, it's days like this that make me appreciate February. Could be worse, I suppose, and Monday, it looks like it might be. But we're nowhere near our all time records. This chart from Bits and Pieces is pretty wild. If I had thought about it, I might have guessed our record range was in the neighborhood of 160 degrees, but both the record high and record low are more extreme than I would have assumed.

Monday, August 2, 2010, By The Numbers

• Only 145 shopping days left... Christmas shop, selling seasonal decorations, opens in London department store.
• Scientific American takes pains to note that the Spirit Rover is conserving energy to keep itself at a minimum of -40 [Fahrenheit], failing to notice that -40 is the same temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales.
• Bajillions of charged particles headed toward earth as a result of a pair of ionic flatulence events on the sun yesterday... Aurora alert for tomorrow (August 3)? Go to SpaceWeather for updates, reports, observations and latest news.
• While you're looking at the sky, at least three planets- Venus, Mars and Saturn- should be easily visible after sunset for the next week or so. Even though the story is described as from Western Oregon, making allowances for your latitude and minor variations regarding where you are across the breadth of your time zone, these should work okay for the northern mid-latitudes generally.
• This week marks the "35th Anniversary of Global Warming." Pretty amazing call, given the uncertainties at the time.
• Value of a piece of gag merchandise, the Hot Wheels version of "Wonder Woman's invisible jet" (an empty box, with a jet form molded into the plastic window), a week ago: $5.00. Asking price for the same empty box today: $20.00. I'm in the wrong business.
• Is it over now? Best estimate to date of total amount of oil spilled at BP's Macondo prospect: 4.9 million barrels, or ~206 million gallons. This makes it half again as large as the previous record-holder, the Ixtoc spill of 1979.
  

If You Need Help, Call Somebody

Another video clip, which I had set aside to watch when there were no more important things to pay attention to, turns out to be profoundly important in the entertainment sector.

And the poor kid never does get his take away help.

Why I Take InfoGraphics With A Grain of Salt

Total amount of food eaten: 36,750 pounds... seems like a reasonable estimate. That's about a pound and a half a day.Total amount of feces produced: 6734 pounds. That's a 30,000 lb deficit, and about a quarter pound produced per day. Now much of the food has lots of water, and many of the energy producing components are metabolized to water, but I still think that latter number is, well, full of it.

What Do You Do in Your Spare Time?

I spend a lot more time reading Wikipedia than I do watching television, but I've never registered, and thus never edited or contributed. Information is Beautiful: Cognitive Surplus Visualized.

1:1 Scale Mapping

Kyle House at Fresh Geologic Froth posted a lovely near-finalized copy of his geologic map of Clark County, Nevada- the southernmost county in the state, and home of Las Vegas. Other than some concern that the first-listed component of Lake Mead is lye, I find this to be a terrific example of how geologic maps work as both an elegant way to present information, and esthetically appealing works of art. He posted it with the comment, "There are no perfect maps. Trust me, there truly aren't."

To which I responded, "I think it was Lewis Carroll who said the best map would be 1:1, but where would you keep it? Actually I just Googled it, and the actual quote, from "Sylvie and Bruno Concluded," is a delight:

"And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.

There are a number of fun 1:1 map quotes at this site; and several pages of quotes regarding maps here. My favorite from the latter is this one, by Steven Wright: “I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it.”

Followup: Saturday, June 26: I found the chapter with the Lewis Carroll quote; it shows up about the middle of the chapter. I can see why why the two Sylvie and Bruno books have nowhere near the popularity or recognition of the Alice in Wonderland pair. The style is a little grating- Bruno in particular is way twee- and many of the gags feel forced or perfunctory. That's not to say there aren't some good ones, but for example:

"One remark only I will permit myself to make—that the period of life, between the ages of a hundred-and-sixty-five and a hundred-and-seventy-five, is a specially safe one.”

“How do you make that out?” I said.

“Thus. You would consider swimming to be a very safe amusement, if you scarcely ever heard of any one dying of it. Am I not right in thinking that you never heard of any one dying between those two ages?”

I saw where that one was going by the time I finished the first sentence.

288 Seconds

A high school classmate sent me a link to this TPM graphic earlier. I had seen it this morning at Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do, but as I said in my reply, I had read the text of that post without paying very close attention to the graphic. But I do think the graphic is worth examining for a moment. Note that the estimated flow rate is now as much 300 times what was initially announced. That would be equivalent to a tanker truck driving by and emptying its load into the Gulf every 4 minutes and 48 seconds. Is it incompetence that caused the initial low estimates? An attempt to hide the magnitude of the mess? Is internal erosion causing the release rate to increase by orders of magnitude? Has the casing worn through or ruptured below the blowout preventer?

I don't know, and I don't really trust any source to be honest at this point. I read the transcript of Obama's speech yesterday and, like others, was disappointed. Prayer? Seriously? Pray? Why not sacrifice lambs, or firstborns, or something actually likely to motivate the big-bearded wizard in the sky?

In other news, Joe Barton apologizes for people being so stupid as to "misconstrue" his earlier apology to BP for the mean ol' gubmint for bein' mean to po-po li'l BP as meaning what he said. Or something to that effect. "Just don't go misconstruin' me again," he didn't add. Barton has also not apologized for a number of other historical and recent miscarriages of Justice, for example, "Joe Barton Would like to apologize to:"

• Larry Craig, who was unjustly crucified by the all powerful narrow stance elitists.
• Michael Vick, because seriously, if the good lord didn't want dogs to fight, he wouldn't have given them teeth. and if he didn't want them to be soaked in gasoline and burned to death, why would he have made them so flammable?
• Al Capone, for our totally unfair income tax system.
• Darth Vader, for blowing up the death star (twice!). that thing must have cost a lot of money to build. tell you what, we'll write you a check for it from the american taxpayer. copacetic?

Just think, it probably took you 288 seconds, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, to read this post.

Sadistics

• According to USA Today, "Federal funding for oil spill research was cut in half between 1993 and 2008, falling to just $7.7 million in fiscal year 2008, data from the Congressional Research Service show."
• Tony Hayward's annual salary: £3,158,000.00 (~$4,682,000).
• Date brown pelicans were delisted as endangered "due to recovery:" November, 2009.
• Number of pelicans killed by a 15-barrel (630-gallon) oil spill near Plaquemines Parish in 2005: 400.
• Number of pelicans oiled in that spill: 1000.
• Amount BP claimed was leaking as of April 23, after the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform: Zero
• Amount estimated to be leaking as of Tuesday, April 27: 1000 barrels per day (bbl/d).
• Amount estimated to be leaking as of Wednesday, April 28: 5000 bbl/d.
• Amount estimated to be leaking based on video of flow from the wellhead and broken riser, by non-BP employee and mechanical engineer Steve Wereley as of Wednesday, May 19: 95,000 bbl/d, +/- 20%
  
• Amount of oil estimated to be escaping from the leaky well, per day, as of today: "The team said the most likely flow rate of oil today ranges from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels per day."
• Tony Hayward's assessment of the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon Spill: " "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." (May 14) "I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest," (May 18) "There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back."(May 31)
  

Followup: Number of Senators who told BP's Lamar McKay in testimony today that he "should resign or consider suicide:" 2