NOVA show: Making Stuff Smaller

Try it before you buy it.

James Burke "Connections"

I didn't look up "The Secret Life of Machines" series but it was around shortly after "Connection" ISTR.

technomaNge

Very Cool!

?v=4Jbk1uU_JkkEtc Etc.

--Winston

cartoons:

videos:

Well when the educational system deteriorates to the point that graduates can hardly read let alone spell the media (print and TV) have to degrade along with it to be able to keep the "public" interested enough to watch/read. If you want technical details you have to read the technical journals. Not depend on the Pablum that TV dishes out. :-) ...lew...

I dropped mine when they went anti-nuclear about the late 50s, I think. (may have been into the 60s) About the same time it became about 90 % Biological. ...lew...

Funny how things come back around. Watched the first video, just cause I liked that show back when. That guy was entertaining, IIRC he was a brute along with his bro. at taking things apart.

Anyhow, I knew it, brine! I've been kicking that around for some time now and forgetting to follow up on it. I have a 517 gallon fiberglass double walled solar storage tank that I got from the late Sammy Davis Jr. that is sitting in the corner of my shop. I can't afford to fill it, the in-floor heating, and future solar experiments with antifreeze so maybe this is the ticket.

Anyone know about saturated salt water and sodium chloride with metal and plastic? I don't even know the difference, but have heard they use the latter in tractor tires up here and it is as costly as antifreeze. Salt water seems to be safer than antifreeze if it all leaked out.

As for the OP, yeah, they never tell the really cool stuff, like how it is done. Can't be that much of a secret in the industry.

SW

Uh, don't you mean "coldingist", sir? The exact same data (up to that year) they're looking at now -used- to point to another ice age, remember? All I can say for sure is that "climate" scientists have a long, long way to go, both in understanding and modeling, before they're accurate. Humans can't predict squat...yet. Humans 0, Mother Nature 1.

Those fuels!

-- Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive... then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -- Howard Thurman

No, not really. There were a few speculative papers talking about a possible cooling trend that were picked up and sensationalized in 1975 by Newsweek and others. Even then, by far, most published research pointed to warming not cooling. Pretty much all papers back then emphasized the need to more study and more computer power. See here for more info:

You stated above: "All I can say for sure is that "climate" scientists have a long, long way to go, both in understanding and modeling, before they're accurate." That would have been be an accurate conclusion 36 years ago, and that is why you did not hear a call to action back then even if you did catch pieces of the scientific debate. However, A lot of progress has been made in 36 years, and the fundamental question of human-produced CO2 causing warming is settled in the minds practically every one who has any expert knowledge in the subject.

Calcium chloride is what they use in tractor tire ballast solution, same stuff used for sidewalk ice melt.

I remember many headlines about ice and can't remember any about warming from back then, and I took up the environmental sword at that time. I've been recycling, reducing, and reusing for 40 years. That site you linked is run by an Aussie AGWKer who usurped the skeptic name, the blackguard.

OK, show me a single one of those "climate" scientists who can make their current modeling software -accurately- predict the future. Hell, they can't even make it track the _past_ accurately, and they have exact data for that. Go ahead, prove me wrong. ;)

Jayzuss, I can't believe that, even after the scandals about doctoring data and keeping skeptic papers from getting published, you bastids still don't accept facts and can't see that the burning wool is being pulled over your eyes by scam artists going for the enviro-loot.

-- We're all here because we're not all there.

Now that everybody's pointed this out, maybe it was the Great Ozone Hoax that disgusted me.

Thanks, Rich

Don't they _all_?

-- We're all here because we're not all there.

I am sorry, but these statements about models are just pure propaganda. For past correlation see for example the plot on the second page of this paper:

whole myth about inaccurate models started with this fellow's testimony to congress in 1988: falsified the data by omission by excluding Hansen's most likely scenarios.

Future predictions of various models with various assumptions can be found here:

they differ, but they all predict warming.

What convinces me is not even the models. You can do the calculation on paper to find the LEAST possible effect:

Another hallmark of propaganda is yesterday's unfounded and discredited accusation is today's fact. No one has been found after investigations to have doctored data (and there have been a lot of accusations thrown around). There was the IPCC incident which involved an exagerated conclusion by one of the technocrats writing the report (they repeated the conclusion of an older paper about Himalyan glaciers that had previously been shown to be incorrect). This was brought to light by other scientists who had contributed to the report (not a very indicative of a conspiracy is it).

If you have a good background in physics you can look at the paper calculations yourself. If not, you either believe there is this vast conspiracy of tens of thousands of people lasting for 35 or 40 years or you do not.

Excellent points, anorton.

But

What seems to stick in people's craw is attributing a cause to the effect.

What I see is nature doing its thing, regardless of man, and nothing man can do will change that.

If you want to "believe", go for it. Become a Luddite for all I care. Just stop trying to foist it on humanity, eh?

We won't change each other's mind, so I'm done here.

-- We're all here because we're not all there.

With either paper calculations or good models, you can vary the causes and see the effects.

What is really sticking in peoples' craws is the fear that doing something about it will ruin their lifestyle, ruin the economy and handicap us relative to nations that do not abide by any agreements. All this could happen with bad political policy but that is separate from the science.

My take on the policy side is that the current marginal cost of extracting coal or oil is so low that the price will always drop to put out of business any competing alternative, including nuclear. That would be fine if this were the true cost of producing fossil fuels. But the cost to cope with warming effects, fund wars to insure supply, prop up pretend-friendly goverments and accompanying terrorist backlash, and so forth are not included. If they were, the market would find an alternative. I think a good start would be a gradually increasing tax over several years on just imported fossil fuels, and use it to pay off national debt accumulated in Iraq. This will never happen due to the infuence of Saudi Arabia with our goverment and that the fact they are now 2nd largest owners of Fox News and the Wall St. Journal.

Are you going to "fix" this too???

March 10, 2006: It's official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.

Like the quiet before a storm.

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

That was a solar maximum. The Space Age was just beginning: Sputnik was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) in Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn't tell that a solar storm was underway by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones didn't exist. Even so, people knew something big was happening when Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum now would be noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather satellites and many other modern technologies.

Dikpati's prediction is unprecedented. In nearly-two centuries since the 11-year sunspot cycle was discovered, scientists have struggled to predict the size of future maxima?and failed. Solar maxima can be intense, as in 1958, or barely detectable, as in 1805, obeying no obvious pattern.

The key to the mystery, Dikpati realized years ago, is a conveyor belt on the sun.

We have something similar here on Earth?the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, popularized in the sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow. It is a network of currents that carry water and heat from ocean to ocean--see the diagram below. In the movie, the Conveyor Belt stopped and threw the world's weather into chaos.

The sun's conveyor belt is a current, not of water, but of electrically-conducting gas. It flows in a loop from the sun's equator to the poles and back again. Just as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt controls weather on Earth, this solar conveyor belt controls weather on the sun. Specifically, it controls the sunspot cycle.

Solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science & Technology Center (NSSTC) explains: "First, remember what sunspots are--tangled knots of magnetism generated by the sun's inner dynamo. A typical sunspot exists for just a few weeks. Then it decays, leaving behind a 'corpse' of weak magnetic fields."

Enter the conveyor belt.

see caption"The top of the conveyor belt skims the surface of the sun, sweeping up the magnetic fields of old, dead sunspots. The 'corpses' are dragged down at the poles to a depth of 200,000 km where the sun's magnetic dynamo can amplify them. Once the corpses (magnetic knots) are reincarnated (amplified), they become buoyant and float back to the surface." Presto?new sunspots!

Photo Right: The sun's "great conveyor belt." [Larger image]

All this happens with massive slowness. "It takes about 40 years for the belt to complete one loop," says Hathaway. The speed varies "anywhere from a 50-year pace (slow) to a 30-year pace (fast)."

When the belt is turning "fast," it means that lots of magnetic fields are being swept up, and that a future sunspot cycle is going to be intense. This is a basis for forecasting: "The belt was turning fast in 1986-1996," says Hathaway. "Old magnetic fields swept up then should re-appear as big sunspots in

2010-2011."

Like most experts in the field, Hathaway has confidence in the conveyor belt model and agrees with Dikpati that the next solar maximum should be a doozy. But he disagrees with one point. Dikpati's forecast puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010 or 2011.

"History shows that big sunspot cycles 'ramp up' faster than small ones," he says. "I expect to see the first sunspots of the next cycle appear in late 2006 or 2007?and Solar Max to be underway by 2010 or 2011."

Who's right? Time will tell. Either way, a storm is coming.