Brad Ideas - Observations - Comments

So, here we are 5 months on...

Baylink — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:29:15 -0700

Any followups on this, Brad?

The news seems to have fallen off the newscycle, but actually *gotten* worse.

(I'm a LFTR fan, myself, and my best friend likes CANDU and Pebble-bed designs seem pretty well adapted safety wise too...)

"is the one who didn

aracelistorrez — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 08:26:15 -0700

"is the one who didn’t fall truly even the best on that day?" - yes, by the measure which counts - the Olympic gold medal. Any other measure sounds like poor sportsmanship to me, somehow.
The jumping examples you give are ones where the landing is irrelevant, although the number of failed attempts is (in the case of a tie). These events are judged objectively (the measure is absolute, no points for execution). I think you are talking about something different, the artistic events which are subjectively judged.
In artistic events, the landing is critical as it looks poor if you don't get it. I guess I just can't imagine Nadia Com?neci having three goes and still having the same impact on the sporting world, and I can imagine such a rule spoiling the events, with competitors deliberately falling if they didn't perform the routine at their best. A high jumper would never deliberately fail.
I'm still not convinced that the audience values (slightly) more daring routines over seeing an athlete fail to land it twice and then succeed. I guess we disagree.
greating

Many People

brad — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:54:38 -0700

I apologize for saying “many people” but I did so because this article was meant to be about the Japanese situation, not the nuclear vs. non-nuclear debate. Some sources to read are David MacKay, whom I have linked to before on this blog, and Saul Griffith. Neither of them imagine we would go all-nuclear, but at the same time their calculations show that unless we develop new technologies (like Griffith’s own kite-based wind tech) there needs to be a lot of nuclear. Everybody also hopes there will be savings in conservation and increased efficiency, but there are harsh realities here which show these efforts have only modest success. (Conservation — reducing to help the planet — seems to have a hard struggle, while efficiency — getting the same with less energy has more luck.) I am skeptical of claims that we, as a people, are likely to conserve our way out of this crisis. It does little good to say that we can conserve, that matters is demonstrations of what actually makes that happen.

Just looking at my numbers, for example, I see strong eco-advocates putting up solar panels when they would do far more with the same money applied to conservation or efficiency. There is a psychology of it that seems hard to beat.

I will admit that my intuition that the nuclear waste problem can be solved is still just an intuition. There are several promising approaches but they are not proven. At the same time, you could take all the nuclear waste and grind it up in front of giant fans and it would still cause a tiny fraction of the devastation predicted by some forecasters by global warming due to fossil fuel use.

I think it was a very dangerous mistake not to realize that in the past, reduction in nuclear was very much correlated with increases in coal. Today I have more optimism that better methods will come along, but that’s still how it is right now. I would like it to be otherwise, and expect it to become otherwise, but it is not yet that way.

Optimisation

Nat — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:31:29 -0700

The nuclear debate is indeed complex, and that's the reason why, with all due respect, IMHO we need hard facts instead of "many people have concluded". Moreover we need to double-check our sources, because "many people", in this debate, may not be objective. I'm not paranoid, and don't write about any conspiracy but about efficient "public relations" :-)

All the energy sources under consideration have a host of problems, indeed, so let's analyze and select a bunch of the less dangerous ones.

To avoid burning more coal and oil we may first try to waste less energy.

Thorium reactors are not field-ready, they need at least 10 more years and probably more. That's an already 45 years-old serious research field, not so easy to tackle. The "traveling-wave" approach. is probably even further. The concept is not easy to implement (known for approx 50 years, many attempts)

Nuclear waste may be one time seen as valuable, however let's agree on the fact that such hopes are to remain... hopes, not assertions leading to any waste-neglecting decision, OK?

I don’t know if waste needs to go underground for X years, but I pretty know that, for now, this stuff is an annoyance and that all superb plans so far devised to seriously cope with it fallen down, one after the other.

Our option are not limited to nuclear and coal/gas. Let's "stop" wasting energy, conserve it, then seriously promote decentralized production (just big enough to obtain a good conversion efficiency, not far from the consumer to reduce loss). Our way to let our overcentralized "jacobinist" governements bias towards planification and huge programs isn't adequate anymore (I'm French, and IMHO Washington isn't far from Paris from this point of view).

Bots

Nat — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 04:48:16 -0700

Soviet tech wasn't great, indeed, but low-tech approaches are often hardening the product, and iirc the Chernobyl bots failed because they were too fragile.

A Monirobot is at work at Fukushima, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/03/japanese-send-robot... ( funny quote from Mr. Tadokoro )

Nuclear is indeed far from perfect

brad — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:44:25 -0700

The nuclear debate is indeed complex, all the energy debates are. And all the energy sources under consideration have a host of problems related to cost, pollution, scaling and other environmental damage. While we hunt for a solution that doesn’t have this, many people have concluded we must have more nukes, because if we don’t, we’ll end up burning more coal, plain and simple. This is not a statement that nukes solve all the problems.

There are different reactor designs with different fuels, including thorium. And dreams for reactors like the traveling wave approach. In time, I think nuclear waste will be seen as valuable rather than a problem. I would not store it the way Fukashima did, but I don’t think it needs to go underground for 10K years. Very little is carbon clean, even solar, but the point is that we’re comparing nuclear and coal/gas.

Sorry to hear that

brad — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:39:03 -0700

Soviet tech was not great. But this is 2011 and it’s Japan, so I am curious as to why they don’t seem to be (as far as we can tell from the news) doing a lot putting their robotic expertise to work. Even if just to see what’s happening.

Solve energy needs

Nat — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 03:04:04 -0700

"To solve the world’s energy needs ((...)) right now it seems that there is no choice but to build lots more nuclear".

Nuclear only produces grid (electricity) power, which is a just part of the problem.

An all-nuclear electricity gridpower will may one day power all cars and heat all buildings, among others needs, but for this to happen we will need at least at least decades.

Nuclear plants produce now at best 6% of such human-produced energy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2004_Worldwide_Energy_Sources_graph.pn... ), therefore replacing other current energy sources leads to approx 20 times more nuke plants and a massive retrofit program for most our energy-consuming stuff.

Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

Given fuel availability (we now have approx 80 years, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_market#Available_supply ) a currently economically realistic approach leads to ask for huge money in order to build 20 times more plants, for which only 4 years of fuel are readily available. Financial officers considering such program may not like recent price surges ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MonthlyUraniumSpot.png ), which happened without any serious "push" towards nuclear energy.

If some want to invest in such a way, I have an Eiffel Tower to sell.

Some hope that new thingies (taping new uranium sources, other fuels, fusion...) may save the day, but there is no economically and field -proven approach.

There are various other show-stoppers (waste management, adequate sites, public opinion...)

Moreover nuke plants aren't carbon-clean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sovacool_2008_life-cycle_study.png .

No bot efficiently attended Cherno

Nat — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 02:08:02 -0700

"The Chernobyl cleanup was in part done by remote control bulldozers that the Russians made.". Doubt so, cause IIRC by various distincts accounts all bots broke pretty fast, and were quickly replaced by human 'liquidators'.

A reactor where meltdowns are mandatory.

Mike Swift — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 01:36:12 -0700

A little known reactor type developed in the 1960s has several features that may now get some attention. Back then it was called MSRE, Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Todays version LFTR pronounced “lifter”, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, would not have the problems that solid fuel reactors have. With no water it could not have a loss of coolant accident. If the core overheats a frozen plug of salt in the bottom of the reactor vessel melts sending the core fluid down into a dump tank where natural convection keeps the salt from over heating. With no Zirconium metal no hydrogen gas would be produced when the core overheats. Development was stopped because with the Vietnam war going on cash was getting tight for the government, and the competing Sodium cooled fast fission reactor could produce power, and simultaneously copious quantities of weapons grade Plutonium a product highly prized at the time. If LFTRs were involved in this Japan accident, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl there would have had no damage done. There are several other major advantages, but I will let you go to a few links to more information on LFTR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR and http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/

Thanks Mike

Your arguement is flawed.

Anonymouse — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 07:38:26 -0700

First off the second law of thermodynamics doesn't contradict evolution, nature is an open system with many things coming in and out. Evolution still obey the laws of thermodynamics.

I havent looked up stuff about the other 2 though.

Volunteering vs getting stuff done

Moz — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:55:27 -0800

My first reaction is actually from the WorldCon that will be here this year. It's structured so that it *only* provides the social side to volunteers - you still have to buy a full ticket to the con and there's no reward other than the social. Which hopefully will work, but it means that few to no outsiders will step up - I won't, because I don't know anyone who's involved and don't see the point in paying full price then committing con time to volunteering in a completely unknown environment. Volunteering might be great, it might really suck, but the organisers don't seem to care (which makes it more likely that it will suck, IME).

But that's "organised use of volunteers", which is somewhat different from your main point.

Having done this sort of random organising I'm a little tired of being pigeonholed as "the bike guy", so I definitely feel your boredom with the power supply. But the transition for an event from "spur of the moment" to "regular feature" is IMO almost certain to spoil the experience. My inclination is to step back early and try to help while I'm still interested. That way each "unevent" has a new group of keen fans organising it and gets the benefit of people who've done it before offering advice and helping out a bit. If the keen fans don't exist or won't step up... better luck next time. I have no time for whiners at the best of times, admittedly, and people whining that I won't do a heap of work for no reward just so they can have a good time are way, way down the list. The social benefits of organising wear off for me after the first couple of runs through, and after that I tend to explicitly ask for money. Otherwise the cost of volunteering starts to annoy me.

A couple of things that have helped us with explicitly anarchist events are being willing to use public space, especially enclosed public space, and building in flexibility. With unervents it's quite practical to say "we'll announce the unvenue at the event" and leave it at that, so you can finalise the unvenue once the weather forecast is known with some certainty and a last-minute free unvenue can be used (or you can stand up and say "we still don't have a good unvenue so we're using the band rotunda in the park"). If the organisers are willing to put out calls for help that's... helpful :) but even without that a single local willing to ring venues can work wonders for unorganisers coming in for the event. We've shown movies in parks just using a projecter and a white wall (a Sydney Harbour Bridge support pylon at one event). It's an unevent, of course it's going to be unorganised :)

Competitive Landscape Painting

brad — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:26:03 -0800

You may never have seen Bob Ross, who would clearly have take the Gold during his lifetime.

Art forms as sport?

Bill P. Godfrey — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:20:24 -0800

I don't really get having art forms such as ice dancing at athletic tournaments anyway. Will competitive landscape painting be next?

Judging

brad — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:54:55 -0800

I still find this circular. I am saying, we should examine and decide what is best, and that’s what a gold medal should be for. The Olympics get the attention of the world, and come only every 4 years making them even rarer, and that’s why people consider them the pinnacle. Not necessarily because of how they work.

Judging does make it harder to be sure you have done the right thing, but that doesn’t mean you give up entirely. You can minimize the judging, making somethings objectively measured, and some subjective, and work to move it more towards the objective.

One idea would be to move towards an event of “jump skating” which would be more like the some other events, with multiple attempts. Some judging still. But more athletic, and easier to see objectively. Leave the artistic impression mark for ice dancing.

Figure skating is as it is because it began with figures, which were finally eliminated from competition this year, I think. Figures were aesthetic. Then it started becoming more athletic, eventually leading to quadruple jumps etc.