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Welcome to my home page. I live in New York, NY and Oak Bluffs, MA; I'm married to Julie; I'm dad to Hazel. I work as a programmer; I have a dog, and she has a web site too.

Thatcher's rants and musings

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In nuclear power news, there was a very amazing talk at Google a few weeks ago, by a Dr. Joe Bonometti: "The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be" (click for youtube video)

In case you're not sure whether the hour-long talk is for you, here is a summary of some points. Disclaimer: I Am Not A Nuclear Engineer, so this is all hearsay on my part, and may be rife with errors and misinformation.

• Concept: The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor ("LFTR") basically works by having a reactor vessel (i.e. vat) full of liquid Fluoride, Thorium, and some Uranium-233. The reactor is around 700C (keeping the fuel mixture liquid) and not under pressure. The U-233 splits and emits heat and neutrons. Many of the neutrons are absorbed by Thorium atoms, which go through some intermediate steps and eventually transmute into more U-233, which emit more neutrons and heat, etc. Excess U-233 is produced at a slow rate and can be removed by a chemical process (bubbling Fluoride gas through the liquid fuel).

  Wikipedia on the Thorium fuel cycle

• Safety: LFTR has a negative temperature coefficient. If the reactor starts to get too hot, the liquid fuel expands due to the heat, and this expansion slows down the nuclear chain reaction because the fuel atoms get further apart. This makes it fail-safe, without relying on active control systems.

• Safety: If the reactor leaks or breaks or whatever, molten radioactive salt would flow out, which sounds pretty scary. But it's not under pressure, so it's not going to spray anywhere or evaporate into the atmosphere. If you just put a big concrete & alloy basin under the reactor, the salt that comes out will spread out and cool off by itself, and eventually solidify. You could get the reactor back on line by melting the salt and pumping it back into the reactor.

  In fact, a simple safety feature is a "freeze valve" in the bottom of the reactor. This is basically an open pipe. Hot molten salt from the reactor flows down the pipe and cools as it gets further down, to the point where it solidifies (freezes), and blocks further flow from above. If the reactor ever gets too hot for whatever reason, the solid plug of salt melts and lets the molten salt flow out into the lower basin.

• Safety/Economy: The neutrons involved are "thermal", meaning they have a relatively low energy, and need less shielding than conventional nuke reactors.

• Safety/Economy: LFTR produces far less radioactive waste than conventional solid fuel reactors.

• Economy: LFTR is a cheap and relatively simple design. Dr. Bonometti claims that a 1GW LFTR reactor would be about a quarter the size of a conventional light-water reactor with the same output power.

• Economy: Thorium is cheap and abundant. LFTR consumes Thorium very efficiently.

• Proliferation: LFTR is bad at producing weapons materials. It can do it, but it takes a long time to produce a small amount, compared to conventional reactors.

• History: the basic idea of LFTR was proposed in the 1950's, and prototyped in a working reactor at Oak Ridge National Labs which operated from 1965-1969.

• History: in the 50's and 60's, the US military decided to pursue solid nuclear fuels rather than LFTR. A big motivating factor was that the solid fuel reactor designs (the ones we use today to make electricity) were much much better at producing plutonium as a by-product. During the cold war, the US put a high priority on producing plutonium for weapons use, and LFTR lost out. LFTR's weakness during the cold war (bad at proliferation) is an asset today.

There's a bunch more interesting stuff in the talk and elsewhere. Read more advocacy at http://www.energyfromthorium.com/ .

So, this all sounds kind of magical. As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of nuclear power due to the waste and the proliferation problems. LFTR alleviates both of those concerns, and appears to be even more economical than conventional nukes as well. I'm not sure what hidden gotchas lurk, but my hot-button issues seem to be addressed.

The big problem with LFTR appears to be that we haven't been working on it, due to our legacy nuclear industry and cold war history etc. This means it will take some years of R&D to actually produce working commercial-scale plants. We should get going.

More fallout from my continuing paper purge. I've been meaning to do this for about the last, oh 15 years or so. Here it is, the cartoon I drew in college with my friend Sutty, Bilge Pump.

Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize, but I have a Scott McCloud comic. This is from back in 2003 -- I've been doing a paper-purge lately and came across my copy of the magazine where it appeared.

Our TV begs to be fed with an HD signal. I did some frantic research on satellite TV. DirecTV looks decent; it's somewhat cheaper than Time Warner Cable for similar channels, and looked like it might have more HD. I never actually called them, but their customer service couldn't possibly be as bad as TWC.

But satellite would be a bit of a hassle since we live in a NYC co-op. Even though we're on the top floor and have easy access to places to mount a dish, we don't actually own our roof, and there would be some approval steps involved.

With the Presidential Debate and other TV needs in mind, I figured I would hedge against the cable going dead. I went to Radio Shack and bought a set of $15 rabbit ears. They're on a little plastic base and sit behind the TV, with a coax output that goes straight into the TV.

So here's the thing: rabbit ears are great!!! Thanks to digital broadcasting, we pay a whopping $0/month to get the major networks in flawless HDTV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and couple random local/minor stations). We get a bunch of other digital TV signals, including a sightly cheesy, but adequate, dedicated kids network ("Qubo"), and a lot of Spanish-language stations (sometimes good for soccer coverage). We get a bunch of analog stations as well, like PBS. The PBS analog reception is acceptable but very obviously inferior to any kind of cable or any of the digital formats.

The over-the-air HDTV looks quite awesome, a bit better than on cable. The over-the-air standard-def DTV looks even better (compared to cable standard-def). I've heard that the cable networks transcode, and of course they have to make room for the fricking zillion channels of total garbage in their lineup, so over-the-air wins on picture quality.

Rabbit ears win in another seeminingly small, but IMO important way -- the Samsung TV remote controls everything, and the channels are in a reasonable order. With TWC, you get SD and HD versions of many channels, with the HD versions off in some region of high channel numbers. Like if you just tune to channel 2, you get low-res transcoded awful looking 4:3 CBS. The hi def is on channel 802 or something like that. With rabbit ears, the HDTV CBS channel is on "2-1", right next to "2", and you can easily delete "2" right out of the channel list, so you never see standard-def CBS again.

Digital broadcasting also provides a halfway decent built-in channel guide -- i.e. you press the "info" button on the remote and the TV shows the name of the show, summary, length, etc. You can go into the channel list and see the lineup for the next day or so. The TV's UI is better than Time Warner's too.

There is also the ancillary bug/feature that I will never end up watching E! True Hollywood Story or The Girls Next Door past my bedtime. I feel a little bit sad about The Daily Show and C-Span. But only a little.

Rabbit ears rule!

Here's another one:

As individuals, you seem like nice enough people. Unfortunately your policies are regressive and I don't want either of you to become President of my country. Thanks for reminding me to max out my contribution to Barack Obama, who seems to have a little more of a clue.

Sincerely,

-me

• The Oil Drum is a good site in general

• This is pretty interesting reading from Paul Werbos; gives an excellent high-level overview of what we're facing: http://www.werbos.com/energy.htm

Werbos has some good slides about the near-term future of electric cars. The battery stuff is interesting, he points out that the new Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries appear to be a major breakthrough. LiFePO4 has some great qualities:

• long cycle life (~2000 cycles)

• safe/stable (they don't burn or explode if abused)

• high current capability (good for vehicles; you can draw a lot of power quickly to accelerate)

• relatively fast initial charging

• made of non-scarce non-expensive materials

The only real technical downside that I know of is that they have lower energy/volume density than some other Lithium technologies. Their energy/mass density seems to be on a par with conventional Lithium-Ion but since they weigh less for a given volume, you need a physically larger battery for the same energy content. But it's not a major problem; they're still very good batteries.

They're not dirt cheap yet, but the Chinese (e.g. BYD) seem to be getting there fast. There are dudes in China selling phenomenal scooter batteries on eBay, and some vendors with actual web sites as well.

It looks as though these batteries will be good enough and cheap enough to make electric and plugin hybrid cars truly mainstream within the next few years!

Why I'm Against Nuclear Power

A few otherwise-rational-seeming techies loudly promote nuclear power as a way out of our oil/climate/etc energy problems. They cite some impressive facts, like its relatively low cost, proven technology, the fact that coal-burning plants release more radiation than properly operating nuke plants (due to the trace uranium in coal going into the atmosphere), and that nuke power plants use a much lower grade of fuel than weapons.

But, because I actually read the news, I know they are wrong. We should not be promoting nuclear power. The two basic problems:

• Uranium enrichment technology for power production is also applicable to weapons (see Iran).

• We still don't have a viable strategy for nuclear waste, and there's nothing on the horizon.

• In Manhattan? Need a doorknob? Not happy with the selection at Home Depot? Go to Simon's Hardware, they have lots of doorknobs.

• Broken ceiling fan? Like to fix stuff? In my case I needed a particular Rhine remote receiver. Rhine is a Taiwan company that makes ceiling fan remotes/receivers/motor controllers and only sells to OEMs. The normal dealers mostly don't list individual parts. Fortunately, these guys are specifically set up for solving the problem, they have all the spare parts, you just call them up and read off the exact model number: http://www.eceilingfans.com/order.html

BTW we've been pretty happy with the Minka Aire Concept II, except for that one broken remote receiver.

Jersey Beat turned me on to a band called Lemuria, from Buffalo NY. I heard a couple songs on myspace and ordered their album "Get Better". I've been listening to it a lot. It's wicked awesome, a little bit like Jawbreaker meets Team Dresch. Not as frenetic as that would be, but still hits my spot.

I ended up taking some time off work and letting my feet do the walking. I had to go to IKEA for other reasons, so I looked there, but they really didn't have much; their surface-mount ceiling lights were affordable but pretty heinous. Google Maps had alerted me to the existence of a cluster of lighting stores around 59th St and 3rd Ave in Manhattan, so I walked around there. Most of the stores were full of high-end gilt antiquey stuff. The first place I walked into, when I mentioned the word "affordable", the dude was like, "Nope, that's not us." LOL! He directed me around the corner, to The Lighting Center which also has a decent website. They had a pretty wide range of "affordable" stuff, and actual people to help direct me around, which was nice. But nothing there really looked great. I took a bunch of photos but was kind of discouraged.

I also stopped by Home Depot. Their stuff definitely fits within my budget, but none of it looked good to me (let alone, Mrs. Thatch).

I figured I would be back online looking at stuff. My last stop before giving up was a store right around the corner from my apartment: Lightforms. For some reason I was biased against them -- I guess I have an inherent disdain for the general concept of a lighting store, since I have never needed one before, and resented the fact that they consumed an entire retail storefront near my apartment.

Anyway, I walked in, gawked at the ceiling for a few minutes, and suddenly saw something I actually liked! And it was on the cheap end of the range! The saleslady was very helpful and turned me on to the square version of the round fixture that was on display, and had some advice on sizing etc. For the record, I ended up with the Tiella 90 at around $90 each.

Score one for bricks & mortar. That said, I want to jot down some of the semi-decent online contemporary lighting stores, for future reference:

• http://lightology.com

• http://ylighting.com

• http://www.lightingbygregory.com

Now it can be told: this is what I've been working on. You can write Google Earth apps using Javascript, including game-like things. It's pretty fun. It also integrates smoothly with Google Maps API sites; basically you just enable 3D, and most things will magically work.

As an East-coast urban-dwelling latte-sipping NPR-listening birkenstock-wearing college-educated info-working Volvo-owning non-hunting non-bowling non-veteran effete limousine-liberal ^* snob, I admit to being totally baffled by the flap over Obama's recent comments. Reportedly he told an audience in San Francisco (ooh!) that some voters in rural areas are bitter about being econonically neglected, and vote on the basis of gun rights & religious issues when election time rolls around.

So, three thoughts:

1. Hillary & McCain are falling over themselves to say it shows that Obama is an elitist. Really? The two filthy-rich candidates, whose campaigns have literally been run by Washington corporate lobbyists, think the other guy is an elitist. The half-black dude from Hawaii, raised by a single mom, who spent his time prior to politics organizing job training programs, and didn't finish paying off his student loans until after the age of 40. That guy's an elitist.

2. Are any of these looked-down-upon voters actually offended? I'm sure some patch of astroturf will complain loudly, but to me, it's pretty cool that a candidate actually wants to confront the causes of people's bitterness, instead of distracting them with a bunch of bull, as per usual.

3. Is anybody else appalled that Hillary's taking up the Republican talking point here? McCain I understand, it's still totally ridiculous, but expected. But Hillary? Sheesh.

Anyway, unlike the Wright hoo-hah, this one seems like it could be a political net win for Obama once people are done processing it. Here's Obama's spin on it:

(^* No, I don't really wear birkenstocks or sip lattes, and I've been known to bowl.)

What does MP3 compression sound like? Kind of a stupid question considering that many of us listen to it all the time. But it does have an answer, sort of.

While I was uploading Sinkhole, I tried an experiment. I compressed the albums at 256kbps which, for me, is basically indistinguishable from the original. I took one song's mp3 and loaded it into Audacity (a nice free audio editor). I took the same song's original .wav file and loaded it into a second track in Audacity, parallel to the first. Then I inverted one of the tracks (i.e. reversed the polarity). Then I zoomed way in so I could see individual samples, and found an obvious peak in the audio (a bass drum hit). I slid one of the tracks slightly in time so that the extreme value of the peak was at the exactly same time in both tracks.

Then I played both tracks together. If MP3 were lossless, in theory I would hear nothing -- the two sounds should perfectly cancel each other out, leaving silence.

In practice, MP3 is lossy, and so I heard "what MP3 sounds like". Huh? Yes -- you can think of an MP3 as just the original signal with some junk added. I was listening to the junk.

In other words:

Let A = original audio signal
mp3(x) is the signal x compressed and then decompressed by mp3.
So:
  mp3(A) = A + someJunk  (MP3 is just regular audio with some junk added)
  someJunk = mp3(A) - A  (I isolated the junk)

it contains a snippet of the original so you can hear what it sounds like, followed by someJunk.

To me, it sounds like music blasting extremely loud, and I'm next to some newspaper wrapped around a coffee can full of old screws and nails. The newspaper and stuff rattle in time to the music, but the music is so loud I can't hear the rattling at all unless the music stops suddenly.

OR

Think of MP3 as the original signal with some stuff subtracted. The stuff that's left out is -someJunk.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

My old band, Sinkhole, just released two of our albums under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This pretty much means you can do whatever you want with them, including use songs as background for your intermediate falconry tips video, but more to the point, download and listen to.

Groping For Trout

Core Sample

These two albums are the ones on Ringing Ear Records, the label that we (mostly Jon) ran. We also released two albums on Doctor Strange Records. We're checking with the Doc to see how he feels about us putting those online also. No promises.

"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." -- Barack Obama, 2002 full text

Obama is the real deal.

• No incumbent!

• There have been dozens of debates, and nobody is boycotting them.

• Campaign contribution limits have ensured that the non-corporate funded campaigns are competitive.

• http://opensecrets.org lets you check up on where candidates' money comes from -- great!

• Youtube lets you see the pitches of any candidate you want, any time you want.

• The candidate websites are pretty good & informative.

• The blogosphere gets a little incestuous but it does expand the universe of ideas.

Let's hope things stay good for a while.

Good Obama vids

I think Obama is a rhetorical and political genius. He gets the priority straight: inspire emotional motivation before trying to sell policy.

There are lots of good Obama speeches on youtube, but here are a couple representative samples.

On MLK Day at MLK's church, the poetic biblical emotional Obama:

If you don't have a half-hour to watch the whole thing, the best couple of minutes start around 17:45.

At some little community meeting in California back in November, the lower-key wonky Obama:

Part 2:

Here's another wonky speech that gets it right, addressing Planned Parenthood last summer:

rants index: current | 2007 archive | 2006 archive | 2005 archive | 2004 archive | 2003 archive | 2002 archive