Courtesy of IEEE Spectrum, we can read an English translation of the now vanished blog of a Japanese robot operator working at Fukushima.
Oct 162011
Jun 292011
The headline on CNN tonight reads, “An American Fukushima?” The topic: the possibility of wildfires reaching the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos. The guest? Why, it’s Michio Kaku again!
What I first yelled in exasperation, I shall not repeat here, because I don’t want my blog to be blacklisted for obscenity. Besides… I am still using Kaku’s superb Quantum Field Theory, one of the best textbooks on the topic, so I still have some residual respect for him. But the way he is prostituting himself on television, hyping and sensationalizing nuclear accidents… or non-accidents, as the case might be… It is simply disgusting.
Dr. Kaku, in the unlikely case my blog entry catches your attention, here’s some food for thought. The number of people who died in Japan’s once-in-a-millennium megaquake and subsequent tsunami: tens of thousands. The number of people who died as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns: ZERO. Thank you for your attention.
Jun 092011
John Deere, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, would not be the first company to come to mind when I think about a controversial issue related to the Global Positioning System… but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Large, automated farming operations rely heavily on precision (augmented) GPS.
And according to John Deere, it’s precisely those kinds of users who would be most heavily affected by the wireless data network proposed by a company named Lightsquared, permissions for which were mysteriously fast-tracked by the FCC in the United States last fall. Yes, it smelled fishy… On the other hand, the United States is not some corrupt third-world country and I was somewhat skeptical about the dramatic claims of interference. Weren’t radio devices, including GPS receivers, supposed to be equipped with sufficient frequency filters to ensure no interference from neighboring frequency bands, no matter what? Is it really valid to assume that just because a neighboring frequency band is reserved for mobile satellite applications, all transmissions in that band will be low power? Well, John Deere’s material answers my questions in full, and it seems that the concerns are valid, more valid even than initially thought. I wonder how the FCC will respond.
Jun 052011
Years ago, just about every visit to a thrift store yielded a new and interesting addition to my little museum of programmable calculators. Not anymore… the ones still missing are unsurprisingly the ones that are quite hard to find, and in any case, truly vintage calculators are becoming ever more scarce. (I suspect it has to do both with their age and the fact that far too many people discovered eBay.) So it came as a pleasant surprise that the other day (when I made a sad final visit to the veterinary hospital for Tarka’s remains) I found not one, but two vintage calculators in a thrift store along the way. True, they’re not programmables, just ordinary “four-bangers” but they’re certainly vintage alright: a somewhat unusual red LED Lloyd’s brand calculator and a first-generation “yellow LCD” model from Sharp.
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Jun 022011
After all the hype and insanity, it is reassuring finally to hear a lone voice of sanity in the debate, reignited by the WHO’s idiotic report, about cell phones and cancer.
OK, maybe “idiotic” is too strong a word… how about “irresponsible”? Everything is “possibly carcinogenic” of course. For instance, all cancer cells contain a significant amount of a chemical known as oxygen dihydride. This evil chemical can kill in many different ways, cancer is just one of them… it can also cause asphyxiation.
But back to cell phones. Unlike X-rays or UV, low frequency electromagnetic radiation does not cause chemical changes. The heat generated as a result of brain tissue absorbing a fraction of the phone’s transmitted power (a few hundred mW at most) is minuscule, a tiny fraction of the heat generated by the brain itself as it operates. Furthermore, we are routinely exposed to much stronger low-frequency EM fields generated by things like the electrical wiring in our houses, electric motors, CRT televisions, overhead power lines, other radio transmitters… or, for that matter, heat from a stove, which is also electromagnetic radiation, surprise, surprise (but of course “radiation” sounds a lot scarier than “heat” or “waves”). There is no convincing mechanism, no conclusive evidence either, and plenty of well-established reasons to believe that these cell phone concerns are pure nonsense… so how can a body like the WHO scare people like this? It is reprehensible.
May 262011
If it has atoms in it, it must be bad, right?
The government I least expected to fall for this kind of illiterate populism was the government of Switzerland… until today, that is, now that they announced that they will be phasing out nuclear power in Switzerland. I guess they, too, want more people to die.
Mar 272011
Am I a fan of nuclear power? Probably not… but I like it more than most of the alternatives, including many supposedly “clean” ones.
I have seen statistics before that showed nuclear to be one of the safest, if not the safest, form of electricity generation. I was trying to find the data, and instead, I found this excellent article on the topic, followed by a passionate, but surprisingly civilized discussion with actual information content.
I wonder how many of the purported 200,000 who protested against nuclear power in Germany actually realize that if their wishes came true, many more people would be condemned to death than those killed by all nuclear disasters combined. Here are two numbers to illustrate that point. The worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, killed perhaps as many as 10,000 people. Compare that to the worst hydroelectric disaster, the collapse of the Banqiao dam in China… roughly 170,000 killed.
Fukushima was hit by a once-in-a-millennium natural disaster that far exceeded its design limits. Not surprisingly, it failed, along with many other man-made things, buildings, oil refineries, roads, bridges, railway lines, and more. We don’t single out any one of those industries as being inherently unsafe, despite the fact that hundreds (thousands?) died in Japan as a result of these failures in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. In Fukushima, to date only one person died, in a crane accident. I’d say that this suggests that nuclear power is pretty safe even under a worse-than-worst-case scenario.
Banq
Mar 152011
Mar 122011
You gotta love these talking heads on TV.
A few minutes ago, I was listening to a CNN expert (I made a note of his name but it’s not relevant; this is not meant to be a personal attack on anyone but a criticism of television journalism in general, putting talking heads who know little more than the general public in front of live cameras). The expert was discussing the possible fate of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, making comparisons between the events unfolding in Japan and what happened 25 years ago in Chernobyl. This is when he uttered the sentence, “in Chernobyl, the core got uncovered“.
The problem with this utterance is that the core in Chernobyl was never covered (with water) in the first place.
The RBMK reactor used in Chernobyl has a graphite core that is not submerged. Water circulates in channels. What happened in Chernobyl was not that the core was uncovered, but that water boiled away. The resulting voids (containing only steam, far less dense than water) were no longer absorbing neutrons (which were still moderated by the graphite, but now in greater numbers), further accelerating the rise of heat in the reactor, producing more voids in a runaway reaction. Nothing like that can happen in a water-moderated reactor, where boiling the water away reduces the reaction rate, as fewer neutrons are moderated.
That is not to say that such a reactor cannot suffer a catastrophic meltdown. This is what happened at Three Mile Island, when a reactor’s core there was indeed uncovered due to errors in operating procedure and a stuck valve. In Three Mile Island, what saved the day was a reactor containment vessel that prevented a Chernobyl-type release of radioactive material to the environment. I fear that rather soon, we’ll find out just how good the containment vessel is at Fukushima I-1.
Mar 122011
In the wake of the unimaginable disaster in Japan, I only have one hope: that the word Fukushima will not be listed along with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in future encyclopedias.
Mar 082011
Back in the 1950, movie studios switched to widescreen in order to arrest the loss of audiences due to the emergence of television. The intent was to create a format that was intentionally incompatible with the 4:3 aspect ratio of the television screen.
In the 1990s, various standards for high-definition television were proposed but they never caught on; I suspect that part of the reason was that regular television already provided a signal that was of sufficient quality for most viewers.
So, our masters and secret overlords reinvented the wheel: a new high-definition television standard emerged that not only increased the number of pixels you see, but also changed the width. Instead of 4:3, we now had a new standard with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
I don’t know if 16:9 is in any way “better” than 4:3. I suspect it isn’t, actually (you may think HDTV adds pixels on the left and the right but it’s equally valid to think that it’s taking pixels at the top and the bottom away) but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that in the minds of most people, “HDTV” has little to do with “definition” (i.e., pixel resolution) and a lot more to do with the wide aspect ratio. What they may not realize is just how badly we have been cheated.
Why? Well, take that nice shiny new HDTV that you just unpacked and hung on the wall, verifying that all 100% of its pixels work as they should:
So you turn that TV on and tune it to the first station, which happens to be an analog station (or perhaps a digital station sending a non-HDTV signal). Unless your TV has been factory set to “stretch” (and distort) the picture, chances are that you will see two wide black bars on both sides of the narrow picture:
Not too bad, perhaps, but what if that non-HDTV signal was actually originally an HDTV program? Happens more often than one might think, especially as a growing number of non-HDTV stations are just rebroadcasting an HDTV signal with horizontal bars at the top and bottom:
And that, unfortunately, is not the end of it. That original HDTV signal often contains clips that were shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio, which means… yes, more black bars:
And this is not an extreme case. It happens quite regularly. Here’s an example from CNN just a few minutes ago:
There is the set of horizontal bars at the top and bottom and, apart from the news ticker at the bottom, two sets of vertical black bars framing the picture. That shiny new HDTV with its 42″ full-HD screen is suddenly reduced to a 26″ diagonal visible area with the resolution (1080×810) of a decade-old laptop.
Progress is wonderful, I guess. The good thing is, you can all watch it in stereoscopic vision, I mean “3D”; so long as you don’t mind wearing goofy glasses, taking lots of Aspirin for that nasty headache, and not moving your head around too much, lest the lack of parallax destroy the illusion.
Feb 212011
I have written several papers concerning the possible contribution of heat emitted by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft. Doubtless I’ll write some more.
But those RTGs used for space missions number only a handful, and with the exception of those that fell back to the Earth (and were safely recovered) they are all a safe distance away (a very long way away indeed) from the Earth.
However, RTGs were also used here on the ground. In fact, according to a report I just finished reading, a ridiculously high number of them, some 1500, were deployed by the former Soviet Union to power remote lighthouses, navigation beacons, meteorological stations, and who knows what else. These installations are unguarded, and the RTGs themselves are not tamper-proof. Many have ended up in the hands of scrap metal scavengers (some of whom actually died after receiving a lethal dose of radiation), some sank to the bottom of the sea, some remain exposed to the elements with their radioactive core compromised. Worse yet, unlike their counterparts in the US space program which used plutonium, these RTGs use strontium-90 as their power source; strontium is absorbed by the body more readily than plutonium, so my guess is, exposure to strontium is even more hazardous than exposure to plutonium.
The report is a few years old, so perhaps things improved since a little. Or, perhaps they have gotten worse… who knows how many radioactive power sources have since found their way into unauthorized hands.
May 262010
I don’t think I ever watched the unscrewing of a screw with as much anticipation as last night, staying up way past my bedtime, glued to the BP live stream bringing video from the bottom of the Gulf.
I watched as a robot was struggling to remove a screw by “hand”, and failed. I watched as another robot approached, handing this robot a T-shaped tool that turned out to be a screwdriver of sorts. I watched as this robot used its two manipulator “hands” to position the tool just right, approach the problem screw, and try again. I watched as, every once in a while, the oil plume hit the scene, making everything murky for a while. I watched as the robot finally unscrewed the screw, and I realized that I was holding my breath.
Amidst the environmental tragedy, I continue to remain amazed by the astonishing robotic infrastructure that can operate and carry out complex industrial operations a mile beneath the surface of the sea,
Nov 062009
I just added some new calculators to my ever growing online museum. Two of them are programmables: an Aurora SC-180 and a Casio FX-770P. I also added several non-programmables to the “photo album“: a Btech fx-82LB scientific model (obviously, a Casio clone), a Canon P3-DII, a Cedar CD-420, a Corvus 322 (this is a real vintage machine), a Lloyd’s Accumatic 310 (similar to my first ever calculator), a Sharp EL-531RH, and an Underwood 340 (this is a really ancient machine, printer only, no display). I also added two calculator-like non-calculators: an “RV Special” databank and a handheld Sudoku game.
Nov 042009
Here’s another fine example of a somewhat Orwellian interpretation of Draconian copyright laws: according to Texas Instruments, hacking your own pocket calculator is illegal.
Recently a friend of mine, responding on the bureaucratic nightmare surrounding the H1N1 flu shots, remarked that “it’s enough to turn one into a Republican”. What can I say? Acts like those of Texas Instruments are, on the other hand, enough to turn one into a commie. After all, when corporations treat their own customers as the #1 enemy, what is the customer to think?
Aug 302009
I’ve been looking at the Web page of Hungary’s Museum of Electrical Technology. A fascinating site, pity it’s in Hungarian only.
The Museum has many permanent exhibitions, one of which is about the technology of electrical lighting. One of the pictures available online shows some period lighting fixtures.
Period street lighting fixtures
Fixtures like these were still seen on many Budapest streets when I was a child. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find these lighting fixtures rather unfriendly in appearance, hostile even. It is almost as if their main purpose was not to provide comfort through light, but to intimidate.
Jul 212009
In one of my favorite cartoon series of television, Futurama, there is an aging science professor with many fictitious inventions. One of them is the smelloscope: a device used to detect, amplify, and measure smells.
Except that this device is not fictitious. They might not call it a smelloscope, but CBC News was using it nonetheless to measure that unpleasant consequences of Toronto’s ongoing municipal strike:
Smelloscope in Toronto
Ah, the wonders of modern science. Is there nothing in fiction that does not eventually get turned into reality?
Jun 292009
I was watching the noon local newscast and learned that the Wakefield steam train, a popular tourist attraction nearby, is back in service, after it has been shut down in the middle of its track Saturday due to an electrical fault in its engine that could not be repaired right away.
Wait a minute. Steam train? Electric fault?
May 312009
I’ve been learning a lot about Web development these days: Dojo and Ajax, in particular. It’s incredible what you can do in Javascript nowadays, sophisticated desktop applications running inside a Web browser. I am spending a lot of time building a complex prototype application that has many features associated with desktop programs, including graphics, pop-up dialogs, menus, and more.
I’ve also been learning a lot about the intricacies Brans-Dicke gravity and about the parameterized post-Newtonian (PPN) formalism. Brans-Dicke theory is perhaps the simplest modified gravity theory that there is, and I have to explain to someone why the gravity theory that I spend time working on doesn’t quite behave like Brans-Dicke theory. In the process, I find out things about Brans-Dicke theory that I never knew.
And, I’ve also been doing a fair bit of SCPI programming this month. SCPI is a standardized way for computers to talk to measurement instrumentation, and an old program I wrote used to use a non-standard way… not anymore.
Meanwhile, in all the spare time that I’ve left, I’ve been learning Brook+, a supercomputer programming language based on C… that is because my new test machine is a supercomputer, sort of, with its graphics card that doubles as a numeric vector processor capable in theory of up to a trillion single precision floating point instructions per second… and nearly as many in practice, in the test programs that I threw at it.
I’m also learning a little more about the infamous cosmological constant problem (why is the cosmological constant at least over 50 orders magnitude too small but not exactly zero?) and about quantum gravity.
As I said in the subject… busy days. Much more fun though than following the news. Still, I did catch in the news that Susan Boyle lost in Britains Got Talent… only because an amazing dance group won:
May 022009
Rogers is an interesting company. Sometimes, they are super competent. I remember when cable modems were new… I got one fairly early (and still use a cable connection as my backup Internet connection) and whenever I had a technical problem (which was rare) I was immediately able to get competent help on the telephone. Or when a contractor managed to cut our underground cable… Rogers was here almost faster than it would take for the police to arrive. Within half an hour they had a temporary solution rigged, and by the next day, everything was back to normal. They even apologized that they had to unplug us for another few seconds once the underground cable was repaired and reconnected.
Yet at other times, they are just blatantly incompetent. Such as when it took them months to sort out billing issues that only amounted to a few cents in the end.
Or take this past week. I phoned Rogers because I noticed that on CNN, instead of getting stereo audio all I get is the right channel. Perhaps not so much a problem for a news channel, but I am seeing similar problems with other channels, including MuchMusic, where it can be a bit more problematic, for all the obvious reasons. I reported this over a week ago, but no solution yet, not a peep from Rogers.
And then there is this other thing… being a weekend, Rogers is showing a preview of a premium channel, which this weeks happens to be the CBC’s Documentary Channel. So far so good, and I in fact caught a rather interesting program on it, about the history of the East German Trabant automobile and its current fans. Much of the dialog was in German, and it was subtitled. Except that every so often, the subtitles were covered for an extended period of time by a Rogers banner about the preview. Now yes, of course they want us to know that it is a preview and that this channel can be ordered along with many others… but must they demonstrate at the same time just how little they actually care about their viewers?
Not that Rogers is alone in this regard… many channels have picked up the nasty habit of overlaying a rather large, often quite disconcerting banner advertising the next show, for instance. And not infrequently, they do so while subtitles or other important pieces of information would appear there.