In Where I Hammer Thor...ium, Again

So, once again, I am being sent links from advocates about thorium.  This time, though, it's not about the LFTR or breeder reactors or anything related to that.  This time, it's a little weirder...  it's about a Thorium-powered car.  Now, I am not strictly ruling out the theoretical possibility of such a car just based on that description alone.  One of the nice things about thorium is that you can breed U-233 out of it with relatively low-energy neutrons.  Also, the part about making a thorium reactor small enough that it can fit inside a car is conceivable in principle, although what you'd have is many times more massive than a traditional ICE.  However, there are practical barriers to using it in a car, not the least of which include the public fear of nuclear anything (and no amount of reason or factual knowledge can possibly weigh in).  More than that, the mechanism by which nuclear actually does its thing is tremendous heat output, and it's a fairly huge challenge not just to carry that heat away, but in a car, you also have to prevent the transmission of all that heat to the passengers and also to just about anywhere else within a few inches of your core.  That's not easy.

Using steam to generate power in a car is not an entirely new concept, mind you.  BMW toyed with the idea of using a water-alcohol (vodka?) coolant to draw excess heat away from the ICE's exhaust gases to drive a small steam turbine.  Although it was providing power assist and not generating electricity, it worked in practice, but current hybrid technology probably yields better results overall.  With a nuclear source, though, you pretty much have to generate electricity, and you can generate lots of it on relatively little fuel.  The actual press release as well suggests that start-up times are around 30 seconds, which sounds reasonable to start superheating steam from a dead cold state.  Nonetheless, as you read into it, it's pretty obvious that it's a big fat hoax, and it turns out that all these claims go back a few years as it is, and they've unsurprisingly gotten nowhere.

So what was the obvious problem with it?  Well, that comes when you get a little more specific about the actual claims made.

Don't Just Read Labels; Read Books.

There's a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in my fridge that is labeled as having no preservatives.  This is profoundly amazing to me seeing as how the tomatoes are packed in oil.  I wonder what that does?  In the store the other day, I saw a bottle of vegetable oil that is marked as having no cholesterol...  hmm...  vegetable oil that has no cholesterol.  I wonder how that can be?  Well, I have fat-free ice cubes in my freezer, so I guess I've done some amazing stuff, too.

There's a certain thing about the stuff that's printed on the labels of the boxes and jars.  By law, no one is allowed to print something that isn't true, and this is fairly heavily regulated.  So in that sense, everything they say on the bottle is pretty trustworthy, right?  Ummm...  sure.  Of course, true doesn't necessarily mean that something is not misleading or somewhat incomplete.  I could tell you that I have ladies' clothing and undergarments in my home.  This is technically true, which may give people the impression that I apparently engage in cross-dressing.  But it only seems that way when I exclude the crucial detail that I happen to be married, and the aforementioned ladies' clothing is, without exception, worn by my wife.

Remember that when the law says that people are required to be truthful in their advertised claims on the labels, it's also the law that defines just what "truthful" really means.  It's not enough to read -- it's kind of important to have an idea what they're talking about and be careful when you read.

There is Only Nonsense in the Stars

I felt the need to put this up as I spent some time expressing my unbounded grumpiness when I saw this post on a mailing list at my office.  For the sake of protecting the innocent, I will leave out the original post and merely describe its message, posting only my rant.

Basically, a certain person had recommended a particular astrologer who offers his readings for an apparently reasonable fee (about 35% less than the average astrologer)...  and described this individual as a "No-Nonsense Astrologer."  Now, to those of you who have a little understanding of my character...  I think you know how I would react to such a description.

Of course, I prefaced the message by pointing out that there was no way I could ever possibly restrain my boundless anger at such a proposition.  What follows is the bulk content of the rant.  Removed are only the points where I preface the message by pointing out the necessity of it, and the closing statements which were more specific to the content of the original post.  The rest is entirely generic in where I eviscerate the very concept of astrology itself, and could apply to any message about recommendations thereof.

I Can Fix You...

Do you suffer from horrifying arthritis pain?  I've got a fix for that.  Are you overweight and out of shape?  I've got just the thing.  The stress of work and paying the bills got you down?  I can fix that!  Not enough time to cook a healthy dinner?  Well, now, there's a cure!  All you have to do is send me money!

There's always a product or service out there to help you with every ill.  Sometimes, when I fly, I take a nice load of amusement reading some of the absurd products in the SkyMall catalogs.  The best one I saw was actually labeled as a "Wireless Umbrella."  I had to wonder...  I can't recall the last time I ever had to plug my umbrella in.  I like dogs and cats as much as the next person, but seriously...  dog nail-polish?  A walker cart for your goldfish?  There exist minor products to solve the most inane problems, like a neck lanyard to hold a wine glass level while leaving both hands free.  Who the devil buys these things?!?!

Well, as it so happens, there's a plentiful array of buyers.  This is America -- where nobody does things to deal with their problems, but rather, they just figure there has to be a product or service to fix anything.  In fact...  let me rephrase that -- we NEED to buy a product or service to fix whatever we have.

I will go vomit now.

More Free Energy Nonsense...

Recently, at work, there was a discussion thread about the Genepax car as a recent article popped up on a Canadian news website.

The link is here -- http://presscore.ca/2011/?p=1910

It basically brings up the claims of a Japanese company called Genepax, who say it's possible to run a car on water by electrolyzing the water into Brown's Gas and run on that gas as fuel either for combustion or for a fuel cell.  The actual claim came out in 2008, and the company apparently shut its doors in 2009, though the Canadian Presscore writer didn't seem to know about that last part.  The reason this article came out was because the writer totally swallowed the claim that you can somehow electrolyze water with no external energy input to provide hydrogen from the water and run for about 1 hour on it.  This is also a time when Honda has its hydrogen fuel-cell car, the FCX Clarity, and it's actually proving to be quite feasible as a vehicle (provided there's a hydrogen economy, which is a big conditional)...  so the writer of the article thought...  what if you could combine the two and have Genepax's hydrogen generator in line with Honda's hydrogen fuel cell?  A water-powered car that spits water out the tail pipe?  How cool would that be?

Very cool, especially since it violates the laws of thermodynamics!  Yay, non-science!  I'm sorry...  but what did you think would happen?  You think you can make fuel and burn it and get no loss of energy in the process?  But you know what...  even if you could assume zero loss of energy in the process (that is to say, perfect 100% efficiency), it still doesn't work.  When I responded to the thread, I basically showed that point, and it pretty much silenced the discussion.  Here's an inline quote of my response to the email thread where I was responding to the question "Can it be true?"

NO.
It's physically impossible to break down water for the same energy you get out, and the only way this can work as described is if electrolysis is done through an external power input while you're loading in the water and then it stores the hydrogen and oxygen separately for use during the power cycle.

Think about a high-end automotive alternator that puts out, say, 100 amps. Assume that all 100 amps go towards electrolysis, for argument's sake.

Note : 100 amps of current is not typical for a car alternator, but there are performance-oriented aftermarket alternators made for very large high-power V8s (e.g. 6.0 Liters and up) which are conservatively spec'ed to output up to 100 amps.

100 coulombs per second = 0.00103642688 moles of electrons per second.
Since it takes 2 electrons to electrolyze one water molecule, we'll divide this in half and multiply by the molar mass of water to get --
9.32784192 milligrams of water per second can possibly be electrolyzed.

Out of that, only 1/9 of that mass is hydrogen, so you're getting 1.03 mg per second of hydrogen coming out of there. Not significant at all. You can get more hydrogen than that just from the atmosphere when running a turbo. That too, this is what you get with 100 amps going towards powering the electrolysis and assuming that you are operating at 100% efficiency.  Still, for combustion, this is about equivalent 3 mg of gasoline vapors, but since hydrogen combustion gives up its energy with a very high speed flame propagation, it can yield a stronger impulse.

On the link to the company website, it mentions a lot of other existing technologies for the generation of Brown's Gas (HHO gas) as a fuel efficiency booster for regular gasoline engine.  Problem is that you can't do this. The only way you'll get enough hydrogen to improve your combustion characteristics is to have a separate storage tank and mix it in like you'd do with nitrous oxide.  HHO gas is a transient product in the course of electrolysis, and cannot be stored -- it's just too unstable.  Try putting it in a tank, and it'll just become water vapor again in under 1 second.  That said, you could argue there are some theoretical possibilities for Brown's Gas (HHO) to do better than diatomic hydrogen alone since it is an unstable molecule that will dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen very quickly under high heat, and so you're getting both hydrogen and oxygen into the combustion mixture. The dissociation in the chamber can either help or hurt since it will increase pressure inside the cylinder. This also happens with nitrous, but with nitrous, the dissociation occurs in the heat after spark ignition, so the increased pressure (increased because you now have two gases instead of one and they each want to take up space) actually aids the power stroke. With HHO, it's unstable enough that it may break up in the compression stroke long before TDC, so you'll end up losing that advantage since the engine will have to work harder to compress. Either way, it'd probably be the same as pumping in both the hydrogen and the oxygen you get from full electrolysis.

Going back to the prior example of 100 amps directed to electrolysis, consider this :
Pure hydrogen-oxygen combustion will only net you 38 KWh per kilogram of hydrogen. While this is technically higher energy density per mass than that of gasoline, it's mainly because you need a lot of hydrogen to yield one kilogram.

To make the math easy, lets say you run this 100 amps for 1 hour --
100 amps * 3600 seconds = 360,000 coulombs or 3.73113678 moles of electrons.
This can electrolyze 1.86556839 moles of water or 33.58 grams...  or 0.03358 liters.
33.58 grams of water, of which 1/9th is hydrogen.
All of that combusted at 38 KWh per kg of hydrogen yields us a grand total of
0.141783197 KWh of total energy

Now in the video on the link, they talked about running at 80 km/h for approximately 1 hour.  Let's just say one hour to make it easy, which means that all that energy is spread out over the span of 1 hour.  1 KWh spread out over 1 hour means the output is 1 KW...  so in this case, we can basically say 0.14178 KW of output.

This by the way, means that we have an internal combustion engine that can put out a whopping 0.19 horsepower! You could get better performance out of the technology used in Fred Flinstone's car. Given the resistance of the whole drivetrain and the mass of a crank and the amount of torque necessary to turn the gears, you can't even move any car at all on that little power.

And considering how much power you had to use up to get there. 100 amps over 1 hour? Even if your circuit had a miraculously low 1 ohm of resistance, you had to use 10 KWh of energy to get 0.14 KWh output, and that's assuming 100% efficiency in everything.

Yeah. Totally possible.

Even if you assume that everything the guy said [in the video] about using ~1 liter of water per hour...  1 liter of water means 0.11111 kg of hydrogen...  at 38KWh per kg, that's 4.222222 KWh of total energy.  Spread out over 1 hour, that's 4.22222 KW output, or 5.66 hp.  Do you really see that working out?

There is no water car.  There never will be.  Let's put this damn pipe dream to rest, please.  And if anybody ever brings it up to you, do point them to this blog post, where they can be thoroughly blinded with science.

Swamis talking science

Every morning on my commute to work, I pass by a giant electronic billboard situated just a few miles straight north of the Stanford campus.  It's one of those where the ad changes on regular intervals, so that as you drive by, from the moment you first see it, you'll see at least 3 different advertisements.  Unsurprisingly, there's always at least one ad for some hocus-pocus "spiritual" leader or some psychobabble swami peddling more of his nonsense.  Not that long ago, the inimitably crazy "Sri Sri Ravi Shankar" was up there.  A while before him, there was someone speaking on behalf of LifeBliss.org (I wish I was making that up).  Prior to that, there was some lecture series featuring Sri Sakthi Amma (someone who is such a great humanitarian that he built a temple complex wider than the friggin' Tevatron at Fermilab and covered it in 1.5 metric tonnes of gold).  Now, for the past month or so, it's been advertising Sadhguru Jagadish (or Jaggi, as if it makes him more 'hip') Vasudev and his "Inner Engineering" program.

Many of these people sell the allure of having some sort of profoundly insightful philosophy which will awaken an instant and measurable change in your life...  for the low price of $500 per session.  The kinds of nonsensical babbling reaches levels of outstanding obfuscation at some points.  One occasionally hears things about some sort of "ultimate truth" which is not attainable through visual means, but through visualization of elements beyond the basal truth of fact which is discovered through spiritually dead modes of exploration...  what?

Beyond the fleecing, though, one of the most insulting and unforgivable common veins to all these swamis is whenever they get on the topic of science.  The kind of disdain they express for science, technology, and even the human intellect is not merely disingenuous, but downright vile.  It is indeed a valid point that the pace of the work-a-day world is a major source of stress for a lot of us when we face the pressures of our jobs, the pressures of financial troubles, the work involved in keeping our day-to-day lives at a stable quality of life...  and on top of it all, we keep our social networks actively up to date, or write more and more on our blog pages...  and being in a modern age has also yielded the reality that there are many more of us experiencing this sort of lifestyle for a longer time.  So what do our brilliant spiritual gurus do?  They put all the blame for all this squarely on science and technology.  The bane of our contemporary lives apparently lies in Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and the Internet.  The very same Internet that allows swamis to deliver their messages of spiritual growth on Youtube.

I find a large part of the disingenuous nature of this practice lies in the need for these charlatans to sell their snake oil.  There is no point to simply declaring modern medicine to be a sham.  But when you declare modern medicine to be a sham and that true healing can be found on a spiritual plane, urging people to dismiss the value of scientific veracity in favor of yogic awareness of some unconfirmed (and unconfirmable) alternate reality, you can give weight to your own notions.  Selling the message of spiritual "truths" as a higher form of truth depends on the ability to trivialize science, technology, and the intellectual age that gave rise to them as very shallow avenues of inquiry.  When you do that, you are trivializing everything that gave us the modern lives we have today.

There is a general lack of understanding of what science really is among the general public, and swamis reinforce the average person's misconceptions.  Science is a method, and the technology which has become so endemic to our daily lives is a product of that method.  There is nothing innately evil or good about it.  It is about the choices we make in how we handle these tools we are given.  If you discount medical science in favor of spiritual yoga practices and unverified curative tinctures of nondescript composition, you are devaluing everything which has allowed us to live over 2 decades longer, and has increased the survival rate of all our children.  When you conflate something like the internet with the science and technology that brought us nuclear warheads, you are doing a disservice to all of humanity with your fallacious thinking.  Dismissing scientists as vain characters wrapped up in their own intellects who decipher only trivial realizations about nature, you sweep under the rug all the advancements that moved us from an age of geocentrism to an age of understanding dark matter and black holes;  from an age that treated by bloodletting to an age where we actually understand microbes and parasites and cancer.  It betrays a stunning ignorance about what value has come about not only by the methodical study of the world around us, but the ability to move that knowledge and all its fruits throughout humanity.  Perpetuating that ignorance throughout the people who follow you is nothing short of an egregious crime, and I find it a pity that there is no hell for you to burn in for that crime.

The other fallacy you commit in order to sell your philosophies that the human intellect and even logic itself are bad things which we must eradicate from our lives...  is this rosy retrospection bias.  This irrational belief in the "good old days" before we had Google and Microsoft...  back when taxes weren't among the certainties of "death and taxes."...  back when caste bigotry was the status quo and infant mortality rates exceeded 50%.  Oh wait, never mind that last one.  I'm sorry, but any notion of the "good old days" are based on days that never actually existed.  The ancient times were not some prosperous paradise where people rode flying chariots on a daily basis and were graced by the presence of deities walking the Earth and filling the lives of everyone with boundless splendor, while a benevolent king ruled justly for 60,000 years as the epic tales might tell in their glorifications of their characters.  It was a cruel and harsh time where people died young and struggled and toiled in horrible living conditions, suffered debilitating illness, and violent conquest was the most common means to every end.

At the same time, most of these swamis genuinely believe that faith in the mysterious spiritual realm is a path to a deeper understanding.  It is because of the fact that scientists and scientific thinkers generally reject the spiritual realm as an unproven and baseless assertion that it is seen as adversarial.  The fact that basic logic shows holes and flaws in their thinking is why spiritual figureheads must train people to ignore fact and logic and bask in wonder at mysteries which are seemingly illogical by nature and should be accepted as beyond understanding, at least through intellectual means.  This is nothing more than a philosophy of ignorance, and it is something that is inexcusable.  It leads in a vicious cycle where a stronger phobia unto intellectualism leads them to be more ignorant of it and breed more ignorance based on suppositions about the reality of science and technology.  But ignorance is important to spiritual leaders because it is only through ignorance that they have business.  So yeah, cast aside your intellect, your technology, and your material wealth and let the swamis who taught you to do so broadcast their message of anti-thought across "teh interwebs" from a gold-plated temple lit with 5700K spectrum fluorescent bulbs talking into a wireless condenser microphone with a Photoshopped background printed on a woven vinyl sheet.  No irony here.