Tag: Pique the Geek

Easter is in Christendom the holiest day of the liturgical calender, celebration the day of the rising of Christ from the dead.  The purpose of this piece is not to discuss any particular religious viewpoint, but rather to look into the history of Easter and thus to understand some of the peculiar customs that are now associated with Easter.

This is not a “hard science” piece, but rather more of an analysis of how the modern Easter came to be.  Many of you who are regular readers know that my interests are much broader than just science and technology, and history is one of them.  However, I do believe that this piece is worthy of being called Geeky.

Before we get to the very ancient traditions that predate Judaism, not to mention Christianity, we shall look at how the date for Easter is calculated.  If it seems like Easter is very late in the year for 2011, this is because it is.

This is sort of a companion piece to Friday’s Popular Culture piece about eight track tapes.  There was quite a response to that piece, and several commentators suggested that we talk about vinyl records tonight.  I have a great respect for my readers, so I am happy to oblige.

On the surface, records seem to be quite simple things indeed.  In practice, few things are further from the truth.  While the concept behind records is fairly simple, the technology is extremely complex to attain high fidelity, defined as sound reproduced with high enough quality as to give the impression that actual performers are playing at the time.  In other words, artifacts of recording and playback should be so small as barely to be noticed.

We hear a lot about carbon these days as a greenhouse gas, sort of giving carbon a bad name.  While I agree that excessive carbon dioxide emissions from the wanton burning of fossil fuels is a  bad thing, it is not the fault of the carbon, but rather the fault of civilization for being unwise in how fossil carbon deposits are used.

As a matter of fact, without some carbon dioxide release, we would all starve because atmospheric carbon dioxide is the sole source of carbon in the food chain, thanks to the photosynthetic ability of green plants.  But this topic has been discussed in many places, sometimes in this regular series.  We shall discuss other properties of carbon and why it is essential to life as we understand life, and perhaps all life yet undiscovered.

The past two weeks we have been looking about current nuclear technology for power production.  Almost all of the plants currently in commercial production are the so called Generation II and Generation III plants, and the most advanced ones are sometimes called Generation III+.  This evening we shall examine nuclear technologies that are not yet used for commercial production.

These designs are called Generation IV plants, and may either be prototypes or merely designs that have not yet even had a prototype built, but appear to be feasible to come on line commercially by 2030 or so, give or take.  There is also a Generation V set of concepts, but they are much further out as far as construction of even a prototype in concerned, and we shall not consider them here.

There was a good bit of feedback from last week’s installment, and I want to point out that I am always glad when people point out flaws in my treatment.  I emphasized a particular sort of reactor, and neglected a couple of other ones.  I intend to set this right tonight.

The concern that seems to be in the forefront at present is the radiation leakage from the stricken plants.  As I write this (20110326), it is still not clear whence it comes, but I suspect that fuel rods are compromised and that nuclear fuel rod material is becoming commingled with the water that is supposed to cool the systems.

I say that because it is unlikely that if the spent fuel rod ponds were the source that the high levels of radioactive materials would have found their way into the turbine rooms, where the subcontractors were exposed to extremely high levels of radiation.

The primary thrust of this piece is to go through some of the fission products in the spent (and in use) fuel rods.  This will give us a basic understanding as to why used nuclear fuel is so much more dangerous than new fuel.

With the news about the horrible failure of the nuclear reactors in Japan, it occurred to me that many people do not really understand how nuclear reactors work.  This is the first part of a short series designed to demystify how nuclear reactors work.

All methods for generation of usable amounts of electricity require some sort of energy source.  In photovoltaic units, the electromagnetic energy in solar (or other) photons is the energy source.  In geothermal plants, the interior heat energy from the earth is used, whilst in wind plants the kinetic energy of moving air is used.  Hydroelectric plants use the kinetic energy of moving water.

Fossil fuel fired plants use the potential energy contained in coal, oil, or gas by converting it to heat by combustion.  Finally, nuclear electricity uses the potential energy of a very few heavy elements’ nuclei that is released as heat in the reactor.

I love to be able to fuse two topics into one!  Since almost the beginning of TeeVee, there has been theme music for its programs.  Many of you will remember lots of them, but there were some programs without music, the very first TeeVee image being one of them, although it got a theme later.  Does that pique your interest?

TeeVee became widely available in the late 1940s, in large part because of the revolutionary improvements in electronics because of the necessity of the war effort.  However, there is a backstory to that as well:  after the war was over, there was a flood of components that were military surplus, available for cents on the dollar, to be had by manufacturers.

TeeVee had been invented long before World War II, but the components were rare and expensive.  Because of the glut of surplus components, TeeVee became widely available, but that is more of a Pique the Geek piece.

For a firearm to operate, there must be an energy source to impart kinetic energy to the projectile being fired.  This is is true in general, but our discussion shall be limited to small arms with only a couple of exceptions.  These materials are called propellants, and the name is quite apt.

The first propellant used was blackpowder, the exact origin of which is lost in antiquity.  For centuries, actually up to very late in the 19th century, blackpowder was the only propellant available.

In the late 1880s what is now called smokeless powder was developed, and has replaced blackpowder in almost all applications except for what I refer to as “boutique” ones.  A substitute for blackpowder, Pyrodex(R) was developed , along with some other substitutes for reasons that will become apparent later.

Hydraulic fracturing, also called hydrofracture or just fracking, is a commonly used method to increase the yield of fluid raw materials, usually petroleum or natural gas, from formations that are not “easy” extraction targets.  Easy targets are ones that the fluids dispersed in sands or very porous rock formation.  

Let us dispel a common myth right now:  oil and gas is almost NEVER found as big pools of those materials in large holes in the rock.  Almost without exception, and perhaps quite without exception, these materials are dispersed in some more or less porous rock or sand.    When you see pictures of underground reservoirs of gas or oil, you are really looking at the fluid as it is dispersed in the native matrix.

Sand and very “rotten” sandstone are easy matrices from which to extract the fluids.  Shale and hard sandstone are much more difficult matrices, and hydraulic fracturing is used to increase yields from such formations.

Anterior poliomyelitis, mainly called polio (the old name was infantile paralysis) was a scourge for centuries, but was not recognized as a specific disease until comparatively recently.  This piece is in honor of the huge immunization program that was begun 56 years ago last week in the United States, that fact kindly pointed out by our good friend ek hornbeck at TheStarsHollowGazette.com a couple of days ago.

Most people do not know anyone who was infected with the paralytic form of this disease these days, partly because they either died or got better, but mostly because of the most successful vaccination program against an infectious disease ever attempted.  I have first hand experience with two cases, and will turn 54 on this coming Wednesday.  Few people younger than about my age will have known anyone who had it.