Category Archives: Current Events

Federal regulations. Death by 1000 cuts.

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Tea baggers whose lily white faces flare deep red when discussing government regulations should put down their Hitler signs, unstrap their firearms in the garage, and tune into C-Span. What they will witness is a real time picture of how the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) got so thick.

The House of Representatives has been calling witnesses from the firms involved with the Deepwater Horizon accident to give testimony before congress.  What is presently occuring is the fact finding phase of what will no doubt turn into a series of bills and enforcement actions. Representatives are interested in whether or not regulations were ignored and what kinds of gaps there may be in the regs.

The BP-Transocean oil spill just off the mouth of the Mississippi River has fouled public fisheries and threatened to leave a splash of hydrocarbon “heavies” on vast stretches of beach and estuaries along the Gulf coast. The economic harm to the public and the material insult to the environment is still evolving.

In all likelihood, statutes relating to oil production at sea will be modified as a result of this incident. Good men perished horribly in the fire and sinking of a drilling vessel which was registered in the Marshall Islands and operated by an “American” company based in Switzerland. Changes in safety requirements, if not implemented by the industry, will certainly be mandated by federal law.

This is how most government regulation seems to accumulate. It is by stimulus and response. A bad event happens or somebody games the system for their own gain and people are harmed. Elected representatives respond by writing statutes that cover the circumstance and anticipate related problems.  Eventually, the new regs will be published in the Federal Review and some agency will be required to promulgate the changes.

Federal law accumulates like rime ice on the leading edge of an airplane wing in a storm.  Eventually the accumulation becomes so onerous that the airplane can no longer fly. It’s like death by a thousand cuts.  Unfortunately, the constitution does not mandate a sunset feature or the periodic review and streamlining of regulations. 

I suppose it is more titillating for teabaggers to imagine a cabal of preening liberals sipping Pinot Grigio and pulling the strings of their liberal agenda. You know, manditory spanish language and gay studies in the elementary schools. But for now, everyone is working on this oil problem.

Deepdoodoo Horizon

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It has transpired that Transocean, Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon semisubmersible drilling rig that recently sank off the coast of Lousiana, has petitioned  in federal court to limit the damages relating to the incident to $27 MM in total damages.

According to an interview on NPR today, the company is interested in limiting the payout with the stated goal of maintaining a more orderly court action.  I’m sure they really are interested in a slow and orderly litigation.  They protest that they were required by their insurer to file this petition. Probably true as well.

Only a team of oil industry lawyers under the enchantment of serious groupthink could have come up with this kind of a ploy. Of course, their insurers are keen to limit the payout. Gotta stretch the action out over as long a period as possible and issue as many office actions as possible to try to make the other side bleed out. Gettin’ lawyered up is expensive.

Insurance companies are a major employer of lawyers. Many people are unaware that no small amount of the litigation that consumes our courts is on behalf of insurance companies acting against any deep pocket within reach to recoup their losses.  Had to pay a claim on an industrial accident? Well, surely somebody or their equipment is at fault.

The conservatives would have you believe that the courts are choked with liberals litigatin’ against god fearin’ lumbermen and McDonalds coffee makers. There may well be some truth there. But there is a constant buzz of legal action happening against manufacturers of nearly everything by insurance underwriters anxious to recoup their losses. The insurers do a simple calculation. Is it likely that the award from a suit will exceed the litigation costs? If you have a stable of lawyers on staff, you might be able to keep the costs down.

If I were an equipment maker of anything relating to the drilling string on the Deepwater Horizon, I’d be plenty worried.

The people most outraged are the lawyers who represent the families and those injured by the explosion and fire. If the dollar pool for all settlements is limited, then the fees for the law firms is likewise limited. Sorta takes the fun out of it for all of the litigators.

Adolescent Phillies fan receives Joules from constable

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Have you seen the footage of the police officer who tasered some 17 year old  kid who ran onto the ball field at a Phillies game the other day? What kind of world do we live in when cops feel they’re required to electrically stun a kid who stupidly ran onto the field? Why is this a stunnable offense? Welcome to the city of brotherly shove.

It wasn’t a meeting of the United Nations or a drunken brawl at a biker party. It was just a ball game- entertainment for the idle- where a fun lovin’ kid was trying to outrun the baseball authorities. We have become so intolerant of unstructured behavior that we allow our police to partially electrocute citizens.

This is only the latest incident where a law officer seems to use his stun gun when he’s merely inconvenienced. Maybe if Philadelphia had skinnier cops, they could catch more of their suspects rather than having to zap them like livestock.

Naturally, the police chief stated that it appeared that the officer was within department guidelines.  This kind of answer from a chief of police is really disturbing. The fool didn’t have the wits to say it was under study or some other delay tactic.  Yeah, the kid was a bonehead for running onto the field. But when the state feels justified in using this kind of force on some goofy kid, it has gone too far.

Brother Joe

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VP Joe Biden was in the building next door today. He handed a large stimulus check to a company that will make power trains for electric vehicles.  Secret Service guys in dark suits and dark glasses have been standing around all day. Local constables of all descriptions had a piece of the security action as well. The motorcade and attending security circus was interesting to watch. There were two identical armored limos, at least a dozen motorcycle coppers with flashing red/blue lights, and an ambulance. I think it would be more sporting if the motorcycle coppers each had a red fez with tassles. It would amuse the child in each of us.

Eyjafjallajökull Volcano

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A few decent links-

It has been estimated that the magma source for the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano is greater than 20 km below the surface. 

A great source of information is the Icelandic Met Office. This organization issues daily reports on the status of the volcano.

A local Icelandic company providing  webcam coverage of the volcano is Miles Telecommunications.

Eyjafjallajökull Volcano (Nasa Photo)

The worlds most unpronounceable volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, located under a glacier on the south central edge of Iceland, continues to erupt with fountains of lava and prodigous volumes of dispersed ash clouds.  The NASA image above shows the lava fountains and steam emanating from the volcano. Others have captured excellent photos as well. 

“The Geology and Geodynamics of Iceland” is the title of a paper by Professor Reidar G. Tronnes, presently at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo. The Tronnes paper gives an excellent overview of the tectonic circumstances of Iceland and outlines some of the latest thinking on the basis of Icelands seismic and volcanic activity. 

The Icelandic landmass is the result of some very productive vulcanism stemming from a buoyant plume of magma that drives the vulcanism of Iceland. Figure 1 of the Tronnes paper shows the extensive subsurface ridge system extending from Greenland to Scotland. Figure 3 shows how the line of divergence sits in place while spreading of the sea floor and the Iceland plateau occurs on either side of the rift system. The rifting produces swarms of fissures which are coincident with the siting of the volcanos. The Mid-Atlantic ridge cuts across Iceland and assures that this location is a center of seismic and volcanic actitity.

Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland (Photo Credit: Nasa Earth Observatory)

 NASA Earth Observatory link.

Note to Larry King

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Note:  The rest of you please go about your business. This is a private letter  to Larry King.

Hey old buddy,

I heard that you was getting ready for yer, what, eighth deevorce? Dude, you really need to think about puttin’ that horse out to pasture. I can understand one or two. Hell, I been deevorced myself. But eight? Sssshoot! It only takes two points to make a straight line. Ain’t it gettin’ a might pricey? Don’cha ever wanna retire from that damned station in Alanta?

Here is what ya do. Ya go into yer back yard and dig up some of that money ya got buried back there and ya git yerself a condo and a dog.  A fella like you prob’ly needs a mastiff or some other big dog. Whatever. The dog will love ya no matter who else you may be fooling around with that month. Catch my drift? Git my meanin’?

Okay then. ‘Nuff said.

Your pal,

Th’ Gaussling

Drill baby dr … what was the question?

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I keep seeing video footage of citizens who have been asked to comment on the recent plan to open up offshore oil exploration. President Obama and his crew have read the tea leaves and have concluded that, in addition to advancing alternative fuel technologies and markets, it would be useful to open up offshore drilling, at least a bit. Invariably the people who appear on air seem to concur that we need to find and tap the petroleum resources under the sea floor.

Rarely one hears an interviewee who will openly say that we should reduce petroleum consumption, or at the very least, its growth rate.

Here is my question. Why are we so anxious to tap all of our resources as soon as possible?  Isn’t oil in the ground a little like money in the bank? Oh, I forgot. We are not a savings culture.

Obviously, the new exploration emphasis is to support a decent growth rate in consumption. A high throughput of fossil carbon and energy is needed to sustain the profitability of certain large public corporations.

As I see it, the problem with public corporations is that they are run on behalf of what are essentially absentee landlords. The stockholders demand a good return on their investment or they’ll bail. Can’t blame someone for that. So, management runs the corporation in a way that affords maximum profit rather than maximum sustainability. As a result, in the same manner as absentee landlords, management drifts into the mindset that they can justifiably milk the resource to depletion for fast cash. If cash is king, fast cash is divine.

The market is very much like a stomach. It cannot plan. It only knows that its hungry or not hungry. It seems to me that an organ with a bit more wiring should be in charge of energy resources.

Schneier on Security

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Over at CNN.com there is an excellent post by the security expert Bruce Schneier. Finally, somebody has spoken what must be said. Schneier, by the way, was the one who invented the Blowfish encryption algorithm.

“Security theater” refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards …

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them. –Bruce Schneier

My take on Schneier’s thesis is that the public, i.e., the teeming masses, must not allow the many arms of government to further tighten its grip on our liberties. Liberties once taken are hard to recover. The combination of media sensationalism, advanced information gathering, and authoritarian reflex is driving the USA into a permanent security state. A mature and thinking public must buffer the exaggerations and sensationalism that is broadcast into our homes every minute of every day.

Counterterrorism is also hard, especially when we’re psychologically prone to muck it up. Since 9/11, we’ve embarked on strategies of defending specific targets against specific tactics, overreacting to every terrorist video, stoking fear, demonizing ethnic groups, and treating the terrorists as if they were legitimate military opponents who could actually destroy a country or a way of life — all of this plays into the hands of terrorists. –Bruce Schneier

By closely following the exploits of a handful of radicals as though they could bring down our civilization, we legitimize their efforts as being worthy of our sustained attention. These are low frequency high visibility events.  Unfortunately, lingering and repeated gawking at sensational events against a constant buzz of soaring narrative is what television does best.

PETN in his BVD’s

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History will record an underwear bomber and a shoe bomber. Luckily for the passengers of one transatlantic flight, the anonymous martyr on board was incompetent. Like the shoe bomber before him, this murderous buffoon failed to plan for a reliable means of triggering his bomb.

PETN, or pentaerythritoltetranitrate, was found to be the explosive agent used in the attempted inflight bombing of  Northwest Flight 253. This is a relatively common and powerful explosive in the category of aliphatic nitrate esters. It is a colorless powder that can be used in mixed and cast explosives or as the pure material. Like many detonable materials, it does not need to be placed in confinement to produce an explosion. PETN becomes unstable above 71 C, a fact that limits its suitability for some applications. My references do not clarify what is meant by unstable, but the material could be prone to chemical degradation above this temperature which would adversely affect its quality.

Other aliphatic nitrate esters include nitroglycerin, BTTN or 1,2,4-butanetriol trinitrate, EGDN or ethylene glycol dinitrate, and PETRIN, the trinitrate analog of PETN. A nitrate ester has a C-O-NO2 linkage and differs from aliphatic or aromatic nitro compounds which have C-NO2 linkages instead.

Nitrate esters are made from an alcohol or polyol and nitric acid. Nitro aromatics like TNT are made by acid catalyzed nitration of reasonably electron rich aromatic compounds like toluene or phenolics. The oxygen in the C-O-NO2 ester linkage confers some extra measure of instability to the molecule.

PETN is commonly used in Primacord, an explosive cord comprised of a PETN core inside a thin fabric or plastic sleeve. Primacord can be used as a blasting agent itself or it can be used as a fuse or delay line to trigger other explosives from a central point.

PETN is an explosive with a high brisance value. That is, it produces a shock that has a shattering effect on materials. In fact, brisance is quantified by the “sand test” which measures the production of fines from the shattering of 200 g of 30 mesh Ottawa sand. After the test, the sand is re-screened and the finer material that later passes through the screen is weighed. The greater the mass of fines, the greater the brisance.

Explosive         Sand Crush (g)   Heat of Explosion (cal/g) 
Black powder         8                                    684
Lead Azide            19                                  367
Comp C-4             55.7                            1590
TNT                      48                                1080
RDX                  60.2                        1280
Nitroglycerin         51.5                           1600
AN                               nil                                346
Picric Acid              48.5                           1000
PETN                         62.7                            1385
Source:  Cooper & Kurowski, Introduction to the Technology of Explosives, 1996, Wiley-VCH, p76-77. ISBN 0-471-18635-X

Pentolite is a composition prepared from a 50/50 blend of trinitrotoluene (TNT) and PETN with wax as a bonding agent and plasticizer. There are many blends of explosive materials. The composition is adjusted for the application.

The job of an explosive is to do PV work on objects. It does this by generating an abrupt pulse of heat and a large number of small gas molecules like N2 and CO2. The detonation velocity of PETN is ~ 8 km/s, so that a relatively small number of PETN molecules in a small volume are converted rapidly into a larger number of  gas phase molecules, all seeking to occupy the molar volume of 22.4 L/mol. 

The prompt generation of many moles of hot, small molecules results in the expansion of decomposition gases which forcefully press against the surroundings. The gases resulting from the 8 km/s detonation wave in the bulk solid explosive expand and compress the nearby air into a shock front that expands approximately spherically. As it does this the gases cool and the shock dissipates.

Explosive Power is a measure of an explosives ability to do work. Explosive power = Q x V,  Q = heat of explosion and V = volume of gas generated. The Power Index of a material is the ratio of explosive power to that of picric acid times 100 %. The power index of PETN is 167, TNT is 119, and RDX is 169.

CT scan abuses. Who is actually in charge of the use of X-rays?

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The latest news  about CT scan abuse and the subsequent excessive radiation exposure to the public is very disturbing. A recent issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine features 2 articles describing their findings in regard to the use and possible misuse of CT x-rays. There is no point in my regurgitating the details of the two articles. The reader can study the articles without my noisy input.

What I would like to point out is that this is a case of faulty administrative control over the exposure of patients to hazardous energy. Who is the gatekeeper for access to a CT scan-  the primary care doc or a consulting radiologist? If it is the primary care doc, is he/she up to speed on the exposure/dose details? Does the primary care doc know the dose and variability in radiation exposure for a given workup? Does the dose vary with the model of CT scanner? How much resolution is really necessary, anyway? Does half the dose give half the resolution, or is there some other law relating transmitted energy to resolution?

Maybe the gatekeeper should be the radiologist. The radiologist should be able to calculate a radiation dose and speak knowledgeably about the details of the risk. But should the radiologist be in a position to second guess the primary care doc? Does anybody provide feedback to the primary care doc as to the wisdom of a given CT scan? Doesn’t sound like that would work very well.

So, who is really the gatekeeper in regard to the merits of any given CT scan given to the patient? But more importantly, how the hell can it transpire that radiation exposures are far higher than anybody apparently realized??? Radiation technology and radiation biology are mature sciences now. And presumably, radiologists are trained to pay attention to these kinds of details.

Where the HELL were the radiologists when these instances of excessive exposure were accumulating?? Isn’t that why we train them … to provide expertise in the use of ionizing radiation in medicine??  Were they busy? Did they have something else to do besides monitoring the use of radiation on actual patients?

Could it be that people in the CT business are more captivated by the industrial light and magic of imagery and special effects rather than the grubby details of dosimetry?