Environmental News

Discussion in 'Environmental Discussion' started by tochatihu, Oct 22, 2015.

  1. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    I stole the math without checking from physics hypertext. As I recall.

    But the basics are e=mc**2, and well-chosen fusion is more efficient than any fission.

    Downside is that any fusion needs a fission starter, so tech needs to cover both. Inter-governmental cooperation and espionage have made such tech rather widely distributed.

    Neutron cascades from fission really opened the door. 235U half-life is so long (~700 million years) that one can scarcely imagine life evolving on a planet so old where 235U is effectively absent. So it seems this door could be opened by any civilization anywhere.
     
  2. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Nuclear fission maths are tricky. A 1 gram of pre-fission nuclear material is reduced by the fraction converted to energy:
    • 235.124 + 1.009 = 236.133 u - pre-fission
    • 138.955 + 94.946 + 2.018 = 235.919 u - post fission
    • 0.214 u - mass lost to energy conversions
    • (235.919 - 236.133) / 236.133 = 0.090627% mass loss
    Only a tiny fraction of the initial mass is converted because the resulting products weigh nearly the same. Just they have very high kinetic energy.

    Hydrogen fusion is tricky because there is a precursor, lithium converted into tritium before fusion. So let me leave a thought about hydrogen explosives. A typical sketch looks like:
    upload_2024-9-29_10-40-41.png
    Double the bang for the same fission initiator:
    upload_2024-9-29_10-39-53.png

    This is how small the "primary" might be:
    upload_2024-9-29_10-44-24.png


    Bob Wilson
     

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  3. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    'Gaia' James Lovelock died in 2022. A new book on his life:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03148-0

    Book may tell about his gas chromatograph with electron capture detector going to Mars on Viking 2. A big thing for me.

    He went a bit anthropogenic-climate-change denial in later years, but such is not uncommon, nor restricted to oil-industry employees.
     
  4. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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  5. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Another blatant expansion of what 'Environmental news" could possibly mean:

    Crystal Palace 1851.png

    The Crystal Palace, Grand International Exposition, London 1851. I suppose it was the largest constructed space with trees inside, so that's environmental right? Read some about it:

    10 Fascinating Facts About the Great Exhibition of 1851 – 5-Minute History

    Jennifer Ouellette now describes how it was built in 190 days!

    How London’s Crystal Palace was built so quickly - Ars Technica

    It all came down to screws. Screws were artisanal before James Whitworth introduced standardised design and machining. Not only was CP built remarkably fast, but later disassembled and reassembled elsewhere. Dang.

    Eiffel's trifle riveted the world's attention on iron again decades later. But I digress.

    Screw world was Whitworth's for a long time, but it was superseded by other standard systems. All survive today in a Babel of diameters, pitches and tapers. If you have a coffee can of 'maybe I'll use these someday' bolts, it contains multitudes.

    Humans came to dominate the world with many technical developments. If you called it screwing, you'd not be completely wrong.

    ==
    Screw as a distasteful epithet can only be accurately applied to ducks. But I digress, except for hoping that this Grand International Exposition included a duck pond.
     
  6. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    i wonder how the term 'screw someone over' came about. possibly a euphemism?
     
    #2366 bisco, Oct 5, 2024
    Last edited: Oct 5, 2024
  7. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Something I wasn't expecting to see in Webster's 3rd just now was their quite separate treatment of meaning 6 (to do with extortion, economic exploitation, cheating someone out of a monetary amount) and meaning 7 (to do with the genitals).

    I had been expecting to see them trace the economic meanings back to the genital one, but maybe that's not the way it happened.

    What do we know about anatid economics?
     
  8. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    so much slang gets added to the dictionaries every year, i wonder what the definition said a hundred years ago
     
  9. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    See here, you've come to the right place. On this shelf here I have Webster's New International Dictionary, not 3rd New, not even 2nd New, just plain New, and for most of the time I've owned it I haven't thought of it as a hundred years old, but it passed that mark four years ago.

    That one says:


    3. To force as if by the pressure of screws.

    4. Hence: To practice extortion upon; to oppress by unreasonable or extortionate exactions or conditions; as, to screw one's tenants.

    and the meaning to do with genitals isn't there.

    In that one, it's also an intransitive verb. A question like "so, what does your husband do?" could be answered "he screws", meaning he's a practitioner of "extortion, oppression, or exactions".
     
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  10. Trollbait

    Trollbait It's a D&D thing

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    From above, sounds like it came from fun, old thumb screws.
     
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  11. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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  12. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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  13. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    When digging a hole, the first step is to stop going down and dig your way out. China is showing us the way.

    Bob Wilson
     
  14. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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  15. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    from what i have read, it is irreversible. we can slow the digging, but not stop it.
     
  16. ETC(SS)

    ETC(SS) The OTHER One Percenter.....

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    meh.
    I'm reminded of one of Aesop’s Fables, The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.
    They've been monetizing this since the early 70's.

    The sad truth is......'science is right.'
    But after 50 years of telling us that the world is going to come to an end in 50 years, who really listens anymore?

    SSDD

    @ the CCP and 'environmentalism'
    The CHICOMMS seem to be somewhat analogous to "Star Trek's" Ferengi - a fictional extraterrestrial species in that American science fiction franchise.
    They WERE intended to be a critique of capitalism as the focus on the acquisition of profit as the highest goal - but I will let the folks in the studio audience make up their own minds...... ;)
     
    #2376 ETC(SS), Oct 10, 2024
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2024
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  17. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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  18. vvillovv

    vvillovv Senior Member

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  19. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    i'd be more interested in how fema spends the funding, but what good would it do if i knew
     
  20. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    "Congress recently replenished a key source of FEMA's response efforts, providing $20 billion for the agency's disaster relief fund as part of a short-term government spending bill to fund the government through Dec. 20. The bill also gave FEMA flexibility to draw on the money more quickly as needed."