Under the Radar: August 2010

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The most astonishing app I have ever seen

You just hold the iPad up to the sky... or down at the floor!... and it shows you what the sky looks like there! Jawdropping.

Star Walk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMHxMSa4HVw

I did not know exactly why Cepheid variables varied the way they do

And then I heard this on a podcast and said "Doh!"

From Wikipedia

The accepted explanation for the pulsation of Cepheids is called the Eddington valve,^[11] or κ-mechanism, where the Greek letter κ (kappa) denotes gas opacity.

Helium is the gas thought to be most active in the process. Doubly-ionized helium (helium whose atoms are missing two electrons) is more opaque than singly-ionized helium. The more helium is heated, the more ionized it becomes.

At the dimmest part of a Cepheid's cycle, the ionized gas in the outer layers of the star is opaque, and so is heated by the star's radiation, and due to the increased temperature, begins to expand. As it expands, it cools, and so becomes less ionized and therefore more transparent, allowing the radiation to escape. Then the expansion stops, and reverses due to the star's gravitational attraction. The process then repeats.

The mechanics of the pulsation as a heat-engine was proposed in 1917 by Arthur Stanley Eddington^[12] (who wrote at length on the dynamics of Cepheids), but it was not until 1953 that S. A. Zhevakin identified ionized helium^[13] as a likely valve for the engine.

Monday, August 9, 2010

LEDs go from 0 to 64% of lighting sales in Japan in one year

The Japanese economic newspapers are reporting that sales of LED light bulbs in Japan went from essentially zero in July of last year to 64% of sales now, about one out of five units sold.

The prices are dropping really fast.

The best ones I have tested so far are Panasonic EVERLEDS. At small specialty shops near Akihabara Station in Tokyo, they are now going for about $22. The warm white ones have output of 450 lumens for just 6.9 watts. Unbelievably nice. I think they are on track to drop to about $10 by next year. At the electricity rate in Tokyo of about 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, one will pay for itself in two months if used about 10 hours a day. After that, each will save $50 per year in electricity compared to a 60 watt incandescent if used about 10 hours a day.

I think there is going to be wholesale adoption in 2011 in Japan.

Next year, I think about 600 LED light bulb factories are going to come online, so prices should really drop and brightness should go up. Whatever you do, buy one first and test it. There are many issues to learn about before buying many.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

I don't understand people who lease their land for fracking natural gas production

It seems to me that many people do not understand that what makes their land worth something is a supply of water. By taking even $100,000 in exchange for fracking rights, I think they will wind up with a groundwater supply contaminated with heavy metals and volatiles for millennia, which in many cases will render their land worthless.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/

I think this will turn out to be The Last Delusion, the last time the US does enormous damage to itself instead of just ramping up energy efficiency and investing in alternatives. I already reduced the energy use of my house to 90% less than the energy use of the average US house with no change in living standard, so it can be done easily and for no cost in the long run if you plan what to do properly. I say this not to brag, but because people don't believe me. It can be done. It just takes a little planning. I could reduce this to zero with a $10,000 photovoltaic system, but I will wait as the price is continuing to collapse. If you think this is not possible, you will not spend the time learning how to make it possible, and then of course it will actually be impossible.

The fracking companies say there is no problem with groundwater contamination. And of course that is possible. But as we have seen, cutting corners and mistakes can lead to disaster in very short order. One way to confuse an issue is to discuss everything from a perfectly executed example that has nothing to do with actual execution in reality. During the Vietnam War, Agent Orange was sprayed over huge areas. The representatives of the manufacturers sat before Congress and said things like "Agent Orange does not cause cancer. Here is experimental proof." And what they were saying was technically true, but was a lie of distraction. What was sprayed on the jungles was not the extremely pure Agent Orange they were showing, but industrially produced Agent Orange which is far from pure and had many side products (unintended and undesirable molecules of different structure) that are impossible to completely remove at a reasonable cost. The Space Shuttle was supposed to be very safe and be lost in no more than 1 in 1,000 missions, but as we saw, the loss is more like 1 in 50.

Investing in energy efficiency is cheaper and safer and makes you way more than $100,000 in the long run.

I cannot believe that PBS Now and Bill Moyer's Journal have been cancelled. They have done us a wonderful service.

ISBN-13: 978-0295985350

みなしご元禄津波
The Orphan Tsunami of 1700

One winter's night in the year 1700, a mysterious tsunami flooded fields and washed away houses in Japan. It arrived without the warning that a nearby earthquake usually provides. Samurai, merchants, and villagers recorded the event, but nearly three centuries would pass before discoveries in North America revealed the tsunami's source.

The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 tells this scientific detective story through clues from both sides of the Pacific. The evidence uncovered tells of a [magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest] a century before Lewis and Clark...

You can see a summary at
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1707/

http://www.amazon.com/Orphan-Tsunami-1700-Japanese-Earthquake/dp/0295985356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204357404&sr=1-1

Video simulation of the megaquake.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=72698052150208427&q=pacific+northwest+megaquake&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Map of simulation of the megaquake.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/supercomputer/02-08Virtual90Megaquake.asp

A tsunami is unlike any "wave" you have ever seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jixyBvjJZQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl8giZ66j7o

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)

Liberal, optimistic, exhilarating. The most spectacular lectures you will ever see.

www.ted.com

Try these to start

The best presentation ever... legendary... your view of the world will change in many ways... and there will be hope...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

The World Now Eats (and Dies) Like Americans
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/10

Extremely graphic... even made me queasy... but you cannot understand the light without knowing the darkness...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/142

The Law of ACCELERTING Returns

You have probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns: more effort gets you only marginal increase in reward (for example, if you exercise for half an hour a day, you get most of the health benefits; if you exercise for an hour a day, you get almost all of the health benefits; and exercising for two, three, or four hours a day will give very little added health benefits).

However, there are situations in which reward does not diminish (at least for a long while) and actually speeds up over time. People tend to see progress in technology as proceeding in a linear fashion, so they expect the 21st century (barring something truly unfortunate) to progress something like the way the 20th century did. But according to Ray Kurzweil, the technical progress in the 21st century will be more like 1,000 times that of the 20th century.

Here is an example. Cost to read the DNA of one person
in 1990: 3 billion dollars
in 2005: 2 million dollars
in 2006: 200,000 dollars
target for 2010-2015: 1,000 dollars

Being able to read your DNA will allow medical treatments to be tailored specifically for you, vastly improving outcomes.

This BBC Horizon program is, granted, sensational infotainment, but it is probably the most efficient introduction to this topic.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3882715179234602208&q=human+v2.0&hl=en

The article below is very long, and there may be parts that are difficult to follow, but look over the entire article because it is a map of the world we are already living in, and it shows what looms up the road.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Step 1: Slow the ageing process

Something that humans have seen only once is about to happen again: functional lifespan will vastly increase.

This happened the first time in the 20th century with improvements in public health, sanitation, nutrition, vaccination, and pharmaceuticals. Someone from the 19th century would not believe how low our risk of death is, how free of disability and pain we are, and how long we live now. Things are hardly perfect, but to all humans who lived before the early 1900s, the world we live in now would be an unbelievable paradise.

In the next leap, we will not only live even longer, but disease and disability will often be delayed by years if not decades. If we can just make it through the next 15 years or so, the interventions will be unbelievable. It is quite possible that many of us, even those in middle age, will live to see the dawn of the 22nd century, looking and feeling like 40. I am not joking.

So, how do we improve our chances of getting there? Doing basic things to take care of your health is obvious, but there are other things that can be done.

We have known for 70 years how to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of the diseases of old age: eat less. Or more exactly, reduce the number of calories while maintaining adequate amounts of protein, fats, vitamins, and other nutrients. The difference is shocking, and it has been shown in animals from ameba to monkeys without exception. Basically, when calories are low, cells turn on genes that fix damage, so you age more slowly. Fasting at least once a month seems to produce most of the desired effect.

If you have not seen this New York Times article, take a look at the monkeys.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/health/nutrition/31agin.html?ex=1163480400&en=193a4a4fe169ec69&ei=5070

The monkeys are both about 25 years old. The one on the right ate a normal diet and is old, frail, gray, scruffy, and has the shrunken skull of an old monkey (like a 90 year old human). The one on the left ate a diet with the same nutrients, but with about 30 percent fewer calories. The contrast is shocking. The monkey that ate fewer calories still looks young and healthy (like a 60 year old human).

So, step one is avoid excess calories, especially from sugar, white bread, white rice, and white potatoes.

But the amount by which you have to reduce calories is quite difficult for most people to maintain. Is there another way we can turn on the damage repair genes? The answer seems to be yes.

Throughout human evolution, we have always eaten plants that were far from perfect. They were drought stressed, attacked by fungi, and attacked by insects. Ironically, this seems to have been good for us. When plants are attacked or do not receive enough water, they produce huge numbers of chemicals to defend themselves. In seasons when there were a lot of these chemicals in plants, animals eating the plants used that as a signal that hard times may be coming, so their cells turned on the damage control genes to protect what the cells already had. We also did not have steady supplies of food, so whenever we didn't eat for a day, again the damage control genes turned on. Specifically, unnecessary molecular tags are removed from the DNA, returning gene expression to the way it was when we were younger. In modern life, all the plants we eat are completely protected from fungi and insects and are watered carefully. All the stress response chemicals that they would normally produce are not there. We never go for a day without eating. Therefore, our damage control genes are never turned on, so the molecular tags on our DNA become more and more different from the way they were when we were young, our gene expression becomes more abnormal, and we age at a high rate.

If we consume chemicals that plants make in response to stress, it turns on the damage control genes, and voila, the effect is the same as caloric restriction, although it is unclear what dose is necessary. One chemical that has been shown to turn on damage control genes is resveratrol, which is found in the skin of grapes, especially when the grape plants are stressed by drought or fungus infection, and is found in many other plants as well. Since people who drink red wine made from grapes harvested and processed in the French way seemed to have extremely low levels of heart disease, researchers tried screening red wines from France to find out if there were compounds which produced the effect. Resveratrol is the most potent found so far. When given to laboratory animals, it slows ageing by 20% and even much more, and it decreases risk of cancer by up to 70%. Further evidence comes from numerous studies showing that consumption of 3 glasses of red wine per week is associated with 70% reduction in colon cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and other cancers.

I have been taking resveratrol for two years now, and I think the effects are apparent. When I stopped for 6 months because I ran out, the skin started to look old and wrinkled. Resveratrol is easily destroyed by exposure to air, heat, and light. I take the one from Longevinex at
http://www.longevinex.com
because it seems to be the most biologically active. It costs about a dollar a day, which is much cheaper than a glass of wine, though much less fun, so I do both.

These results are not obscure, but you may not have heard about them. Do a Google search for any of these topics and you will find thousands of hits.

So, step 1, let's at least do simple basic things to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of serious diseases of old age. You may be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. 万歳！

Under the Radar