I'm well into my staycation in New Jersey - wherein I fall in love with my home area - by exploring the wonderful things I don't do because they don't seem "exotic."

I live near the place that George Washington crossed the Delaware, turning himself from a lunatic mob leader into a brilliant military genius in a few hours time.   I have availed myself frequently of a few of the historical treasures of this area, including some of the splendid re-enactments of colonial life.   Every 4th of July here on PA's side of the Washington's Crossing Parks, local citizens show dress up as colonials and show us how to spin wool into yarn, how to bake bread, how to be a wheelwright, how to print incidiary political phamplets and, of course, how to shoot cannons at any redcoats who might be in the area.   The re-enactors are all splendidly informed people and if you really want to understand the industrial basis of American life, this would be a great place to learn about it.

Today I want to report on a place I have never visited in 13 years of living in this most magnificent place:   The Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve, which is a short distance South of New Hope, PA (About 100 km north of Philadelphia.)   This will be a short throwaway diary.

These are, I expect, nervous nights in Ukraine, a country with a history as tragic as any in Europe.

One of my favorite neighbors when I was growing up was Ukrainian, a kindly gentleman who left early in the age of Stalin and came to the United States and as an old man took me for long walks in the woods, always telling me that he would introduce me to "the wolf" who he personally knew.   I was a preschooler.  I was far too young to understand metaphors at the time but now, reflecting on those walks, though he has been dead for decades, sometimes in the quiet of the night, I think of him, and I whisper questions about about the real wolves he knew.

Oh to discuss the famine of the 1920's, the collectivization, with someone who lived it!   (His wife grew to be 100 years old, and to the day she died she never failed to plant potatoes in the yard.)

I'm on a brief vacation - a "staycation" where I get to do what I love best - stay home with my wife and kids - talk, read, go bike riding with my sons, throw pitches and have my little guy work on his batting swing.

Yesterday I got to make breakfast for the boys - and we chatted - and the little guy, who is less and less little, somehow got on the subject of Issac Newton.   Newton, I told him wasn't a modest man, but even Newton, with all his ego, acknowledged that he stood on the shoulders of giants, and though he used the plural, as is well know, the greatest giant of them all was Archimedes.

These days science involves heavy duty - and often expensive - instrumentation, software programs with arcanely programmed guts - LIMS systems, speed, speed, speed, dense arrays of information, and all too narrow focus.

But all this was brought here on the shoulders of giants well after Newton, giants who labored maybe in more obscurity.  

Some of what I was looking at today was science from the 50's and the 70's, the men and women of the time who first moved beyond this planet's atmosphere and gravity.   And I was struck by the beauty of their jury-rigged lives, where they built stuff from scratch.   Look at the description here:

Here's an interesting paper in the literature:

Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 2063–2068

This is a paper about the use of molten carbonates - which have been proposed for certain kinds of fuel cells - to reduce zinc oxide carbothermally.   I wrote about molten carbonate fuel cells in an obscure diary I called Brief Notes From The Journal of Unrealistic Expectations.   Fuel cells are real popular with the "distributed energy" set for whom I have little use since I don't regard them as thinking all that clearly.

I have written before about the energy implications of reducing metal ores to the native metals, in a diary Alcoa Can't Get Electricity In Texas, Shuts Aluminum Plant where I asked whether having aluminum siding made one eligible to become Emperor of France.   But I couldn't care less about reducing zinc, but still this paper from Chinese scientists about zinc has most interesting greenhouse gas implications.

Most of my diaries are about fish and most of my polls are about dead fish from Norway.

It's better than giving a rat's ass, I suppose.

Speaking of fish, as most Kossacks and other American citizens know - it is often a topic of discussion that is on the tips of everyone's tongue - the largest human accidental exposure to toxic crude oil occurred in 2003, when an Iranian oil tanker, the Tasman Spirit went aground in Karachi harbor, releasing 31,000 metric tons of crude oil, and exposing 3,000,000 people to the carcinogenic mixture, the largest such exposure in world history.   More than 2,000 square km of sea habitat were destroyed, an area that is more than a third of the size of New Jersey, and 270 sq km of sea bed floor were permanently destroyed.

Because everyone is deeply concerned about this disaster, which severely impacted fish and shellfish populations, I am reporting on the long term toxicity follow up...

I have had lots of vitalism talk directed at me in my lifetime, by people who claim that say, vitamin C is worthless outside of an orange.

What is "vitalism?"

There used to be an ancient theory called "vitalism" which involved the claim that organic chemistry was best explained by appealing to a mystic "life force" that could not be explained by any experiment.

The first serious blow against this view came in 1828 Friedrich Woehler was playing with inorganic chemicals, lead cyanate and ammonia, trying to make an unknown salt (which he expected) called ammonium cyanate.

To his surprise he got urea, the constituent of urine that was understood to be an organic compound derived from living things.   By the 1950's, organic chemistry had advanced enough that Melvin Calvin, who was simultaneously director of the Berkeley Laboratory of Biodynamics and the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, had established the precise mechanism by which, as is now known, that almost all of the carbon involved in life's chemistry, biochemistry, is dependent on carbon obtained from the reaction of an inorganic molecule, carbon dioxide, with another inorganic molecule, water.

You would think that concept of vitalism was thoroughly destroyed by these scientific achievements, but you would be wrong.

Every few years California thinks it's running out of water - it really is - and starts proposing desalination plants.

An internet friend of mine got me to thinking about the matter.

The separation of mixtures (of which solutions like seawater are a subset) always implies a thermodynamic (energy) cost because of entropy.   There's no point in discussing the theory - science is not a very interesting topic these days - but the empirical costs in energy terms are well understood.

Here's a little primer from the California Coastal Commission.

...every form of climate change gas free energy, except the trivial one they research.

Before we start freaking out about NNadir "bashing" renewable energy, I note that the following quotation comes from a journal called Solar Energy and is written by two solar energy researchers.

Here's the quote:  

The high deployment rates of renewable power all over the world testify that the transition from fossil fuels to renewables has probably started. The limited oil and gas resources, the concern about greenhouse gases emissions, the unsolved radioactive wastes disposal problem for nuclear plants pave the way to the development of abundant, inexhaustible natural sources of energy. Wind is almost competitive with conventional energy, but its worldwide potential is limited. Biomasses grown for energy purposes are characterized by a disappointing overall efficiency (in the order of 1%) and consume water and soil nutrients...  ...Solar energy has the potential of satisfying indefinitely the mankind energy needs. Photovoltaic cells technology, although attractive, exhibit a very high electricity cost...

Upset to learn that my kids have been under communist influence and the even worse realization that lutefisk have been discovered on Mars, I decided to engage in some light reading this weekend, and what could be lighter than reading about Stalin?

First I read excerpts of Milovan Djilas's "Conversations with Stalin."  And then I read the even more interesting "Lenin's Embalmers" by Ilya Zbarsky, biochemist, and the son of Lenin's embalmer and his wife, who happened to be Boris Pasternak's lover.  

Stalin - who had been an Orthodox seminarian before becoming a "revolutionary" - had a real appreciation for sainted relics and the way they provided power to their possessors, not metaphysical power, but pyschological power.  There is really nothing more fascinating in Stalin's use of Lenin than the use he made out of Lenin's corpse in order to translate that essentially religious power to himself - while at the same time declaring religion to be the opiate of the people.

The dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste - which is largely unrestricted throughout most of the world - kills.

Unstated however is that much of the world relies on biofuel - wood mostly, but also paper with a little plastic mixed in - for cooking fuel.  Although I plainly confess that I use wood in the winter to heat my home - at least some of the time - I have written on the topic of third world use of renewable biofuels before, in the diary called This Power Plant Produces More Energy Than The Nation Of Cameroon.

For a long time, I've been coming here to offer my opinion on the fact that the anti-nuke community couldn't care less how many people die each year from dangerous fossil fuel waste.   In that time, I have had to scour the scientific literature for some easily accessible data on the subject.

Well I have one such link to produce now.   It's below:

When I was young and single in Southern California there was always this girl who was beautifully generic.   She was always blonde and she never shaved her legs and she always wore a pleated linen skirt that was well worn and worn well that was dyed with walnut derived dyes from the Mountains around Laurel Canyon.    She was always a vegetarian and lived in a house with sunflowers all around it, and had variable mauve trims and yellow painted shingles that somehow always seemed right in an unconventional way.  She always had a name like Allison, or Ailee, or Judith or Desilee, or Druwinda, Winda for short, and she always wore sandals, cloth sandals with wooden soles.   Her feet, always lightly coated with dry dust from her organic garden, were always long and slender and thin and at times, she'd sit on a divan, never a chair, that was upholstered with seaweed colored cordoroy and her sandals would fall away from her soles and you'd think that you'd never seen lines so clean, so perfect, as those that ran along her arches to her tiny smooth pointed toes.

When I began my last diary on this website, I reported that if I spent more than 10 minutes writing it, I was wasting time.

The diary was a waste of time, like all of my diaries - most of which are about energy although sometimes they are about Ulysses S. Grant - but the fact that it was a waste of time did not depend on how many minutes it took to write the diary, an amount which fell, happily, in to the category, "not much."

I spent part of the time wasted saying how I love to say, "The bold is mine."

Then I finished the diary by saying, "Time's up."

As it happens, I like to say that too, "Time's up," especially when I am confronted with some fantastic energy scheme that is supposed to save our asses from now inevitable tragedy or even better, keep our Western car culture lifestyle.    (Can you say 'Tesla?')

If I spend more than 10 minutes writing this diary, I am wasting time.

I have an interest in the chemistry of molten salts, as I may have remarked elsewhere.

There are some molten salts these days that exist at room temperature - an active and exciting area of research if you must know - but I am here to talk about high temperature molten salts.   High temperature molten salts - and yes you can melt table salt if you have the right kind of vessel - have been the object of some truly visionary, and I think, viable, technological consideration, but, like any technology - from Amory Lovins' hydrogen HYPErcar to the spray on solar cell - considerable hype as well.    The report I am going to discuss here is not actually from the "Journal of Unrealistic Expectations" - no such journal exists, although it might be a great place to study Greenpeace propaganda, but from the Journal of Power Sources.   The reference is below:

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I was born in Brooklyn, and raised on Long Island and for me there was only one real city, "The City."   I've been to the Modern, the Met, the Guggenheim, I've seen Arthur Blythe blow in Haarlem and at 7th Avenue South, and John Ambercrombie grimace over notes at the Bottom Line.

I've been to the observatory in the Empire State Building many times.

But I never went up the World Trade Center Towers, not once.   I have never been to Ellis Island which in my heart - even though I am now a Jerseyan - is always New York Territory.

I fell hopelessly in love with my wife while staring at the Statue of Liberty with her, but I never went to it because somehow one never tours home.

Maybe it's for the best.   I mean isn't it cloying, that poem?

"Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."  

Where's Lou Dobbs, racist, when you need him?

This past January, in a diary that was ostensibly about constructed wetlands, I plaintively asked whatever readership I have why, at long last, I can't be like everyone else and hate Switzerland instead of Norway.

It may have something to do with the relative amounts of time I have spent in each country - I've spent a total of about 8 hours in Switzerland, during which time I never got out of the bus.   Norway, well, we won't talk about that.   Part of the problem might have to do with the question of what it is like to be an insomniac in Oslo during the summer solstice, and the rest of it seems to involve lutefisk, but maybe it's better we don't go there.

Switzerland is reportedly - it's seldom visited by civilized people - a country where they speak a kind of grammatically mangled German, not that speaking German correctly is a particularly wonderful thing, since, as Mark Twain remarked, German is a language where the correct pronoun for a little girl is "it," and the correct pronoun for a potato is "she."   It's also reported that they sometimes speak a decidedly less than euphonious form of French, with the worst of Italian thrown in, obscenities mostly, I've heard, but who cares?