30% of Americans are obese...

...according to this. That's in round figures of course.

No, that's not my line.

Say bye-bye!

From Drudge, here is a story of a woman who got to see her aborted fetus.

She didn't like it.

Small memory devices - which will survive?

I'm only now starting to consider buying some devices that use small memory gizmos like Sony's Memory Sticks. Near as I can tell, there are 3 incompatible types out there. Are there any bets about which ones will survive a shakeout?

For home experimenters

Get your fuel cells here.

Garbage power

From Yahoo and Reuters comes this:

Researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol have developed a microbial fuel cell about the size of a mobile phone that could be powered by organic household waste....The bacteria-driven cell, which would cost about 10 pounds ($15), directly converts biochemical energy into electricity. It uses E.coli bacteria to break down carbohydrates and release hydrogen atoms.

Personal lie detectors

It's cheap, it's 84% accurate, it's the Handy Truster!

Fire safety

Fresh from Google News... rooming house with no fire alarms burned down.

Maybe my years in engineering at nuclear power plants made me paranoid, but I seem to be the only one in the family who is concerned about personal or fire safety. One relative in particular has been known to shingle steep roofs 3 floors up in the rain, with no safety belt, while thunder was in earshot. Others, raised in the country, couldn't conceive of locking doors. Nobody seems very concerned about safety, especially when it comes to fires.

That's amazing. As I type this a bulletin is on TV about a local hall burning down.

Let's see if I can find a link for this one....no luck. Anyway, in the early 1990's the Quad City Times reported about a man who played a clown to entertain kids at a local restaurant.

He had boys of his own. Of course he and his wife took good care of them. They even had something fairly newfangled then - there was an audio monitor in the boys' room.

Then one day the boys were lost to a fire that started in their room. The cause? The transformer on the audio monitor.

In 2000, 85% of fire deaths were from home fires in the US. There were 3420 deaths, which was an increase of 18.1% from the previous year.

How long would it take for you to get everybody out of your place right now?

Medical miscellany

Medpundit doesn't have much use for health insurers. I don't know that I agree - I have a relative who handles health claims for a major insurer and her experience is nothing like this. On the flipside, the Bloviator is worried about financial viability of health insurance providers.

But the best thing I got from the latest visit to Medpundit was this lead to medical professionals who do not deal with health insurance. In so doing, they work at significantly reduced rates. For some people, using such doctors, in conjunction with catastrophic coverage with a high deductible, might be the best way to handle health care.

I suppose it's just a matter of time before you can buy medical care at Sam's Club or Costco.

Cellular piracy?

I just saw an ad for Sprint's new service. It can support using phones that can take and transmit pictures.

So now what - are entertainment and other venues going to frisk people for cellphones before they'll permit entry?

Good riddance

I'm no innocent when it comes to tastelessness, but then there's this.

Some of you might be aware that Darryl Kile, a star pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, died suddenly this past season.

The Cardinals recovered, won their division and went on to play the Arizona Diamondbacks.

And a DJ in Arizona called the late Mr. Kile's widow and asked her if she had a date for the games.

Now the DJ is out of a job, and the Cardinals won in a sweep.

From those wonderful people who brought you the OJ verdict

A Los Angeles jury Friday ordered tobacco giant Philip Morris Cos. (MO) to pay $28 billion in punitive damages to a 64-year-old woman with lung cancer who sued the company for fraud and negligence.

Does it occur to these juries that if one plaintiff sucks the tobacco companies dry, then many others will go uncompensated for their problems? Would a judge allow a defendant to point this out?

I can't find a link for it, but I thought I saw something once that claimed various health benefits from smoking. Specifically, I thought it somehow suppressed some other lung conditions such as tuberculosis. I'm enough of a contrarian to believe that anything as universally reviled as smoking must have some redeeming features.

Bring back slavery...

It's the obvious solution to our economic problems. Why? Because a Chicago alderman, Dorothy Tillman, says America is rich "because of the free labor of blacks". She wouldn't lie about something like that, would she?

Yeah I know, it's shooting fish in a bucket (which I guess belongs here). But I figured it made a great headline in conjunction with the Civil War stuff below..

Happy 1st anniversary, Mindles Dreck

Congratulations to More than Zero. Find out why it's one of the best blogs around.

If Forrest Gump were a genius...

You remember Forrest Gump, don't you? If not, you have to see it. The younger you are the less of it you'll catch, but there's something for everybody.

In essence for my purposes, Forrest Gump was a dummy who always seemed to be around wherever history was being made. Somehow in the process he became a millionaire (by investments in "fruit companies" like Apple). Yes, he's a fictional character.

But in real life we had a man who was a very successful lawyer, investment banker, scientist, inventor, bureaucrat, and venture capitalist. He made his millions financing our electric utility infrastructure, then turned to his lifelong interest in science, opening up a prominent lab, hiring brilliant scientists to staff it, and performing original research himself. As he saw World War II looming, he used much of his money and influence in support of critical tasks like radar and the Manhattan Project. And I'm betting you've never heard his name.

From his behavior, he would have liked it that way. Alfred L. Loomis didn't seek the spotlight, he just wanted to get things done. And you can read all about it in a recent book called Tuxedo Park.

Yes, Tuxedo Park. Loomis lived in this onetime land of the snobs' snobs and set up his personal laboratory there. There he did some of the first research into brain waves and microwave radiation, and put up with cranky neighbors who didn't want riffraff like Niels Bohr and Ernest Lawrence hanging around.

And his sons were accomplished too. The youngest was still alive this past summer and had this to say.

Take that, Kennedys.

Electric dogsleds

There's a dogsled theory of management that says "if you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes". But for the dogsleds that's completely irrelevant to what follows, but this is my site and you ought to be used to this by now.

Anyway, dogsleds aren't a bad analogy for what you're dealing with when you hook up multiple generators to provide power to the same electric grid. You'll have a lead dog. You want to make sure that all of the dogs are pulling their share of the load rather than just keeping up with the traces, and you sure don't want a dog that is soaking up power from the other dogs.

You can overextend the analogy though. There's never been a band called Three Generator Night, and whipping a turbine or a diesel isn't likely to affect its behavior. Instead, you adjust the governor.

What's a governor? A device to control the speed of a prime mover like a diesel generator or turbine. With the proper feedback, it can also impose a maximum load the prime mover will carry. It does this by monitoring the speed of the device, and if properly equipped, it also monitors the current power level. When it detects a discrepancy between the machine's behavior and its current settings, it manipulates the machine's controls to minimize the discrepancy.

With sophisticated modern controls this can be done in a number of ways. But for backup purposes a lot of them still depend on traditional flyball governors, which are neat little mechanical gizmos.

These mechanical governors are driven by a shaft that rotates at a speed proportional to that of the prime mover itself. This causes some weights to rotate at this speed, and centrifugal forces cause them to want to fly out. As they do, they displace a shaft which ultimately controls the prime mover. A spring resists this displacement, and the setting the speed the governor maintains actually amounts to tightening or loosening this spring's tension.

That shaft that displaces - what does it do? That depends on the prime mover. For a steam turbine, it would manipulate the main steam control valves, controlling the rate at which steam enters the turbine system. This of course affects the boiler, which will respond to the resulting increase or decrease in back pressure from the turbine (and more, in the case of a nuke) to adjust power as needed.

For a diesel generator, it controls the positions of the fuel racks. These control how much fuel is injected into each cylinder at each stroke. In essence it's like the accelerator pedal in a car, but the linkage is a lot more complicated.

OK, you're controlling the speed. But this only works if all of the generators are set for exactly the same speed. The ones set lower will take it easy while the ones set higher might overload.

So how do you whip the dogs, ie how do you make sure all the generators are carrying their share of the load? That's another post. Til then...

It's official - I have no life

You can be that way too. Look up Carrot Top in IMDB. You'll find that that really isn't his name (say it isn't so!). And for a bonus, they have a picture!

That's all. Where are my meds?

Synchronization

Wow, I'm actually delivering on a pledged post within a week. OK, here we go, into the wonderful exciting world of synchronization of electric generators!

Maybe you don't know it, but that juice your electric utility provides you changes direction 60 times a second (assuming you're in the US - Europeans do it slightly differently of course). That's why they call it "alternating current", or AC. There's a diagram on this page with some other stuff too.

Generating electricity that way seems like a lot of trouble, but actually it's easier than producing nonreversing "direct current" (DC). DC requires rectifiers and other impedimenta, and was economically impractical at the time when our electrical distribution network was being built out.

But that alternation creates some problems. For one, it affects the impedance of electrical appliances - vary the rate of alternation and all of a sudden your motorized appliances might overheat. For another, it requires all generators hooked up to feed the system to be exactly in step with the existing rate and amplitude of alternation. That's where synchronization comes in.

They might have better metering stuff nowadays, but many plants synchronize with something called a synchroscope that looks something like a clock with only one hand. The hand rotates at a rate proportional to the difference in speed between the generator being synchronized and the grid it's being synchronized with. The hand position indicates the relative phases of the waves - when it's at 12:00 the waves are exactly in step.

So when you start a prime mover like a diesel generator or a steam turbine, you manipulate its speed with its governor. You set the speed up just a hair higher than that of the grid (as indicated by a slowly moving hand on the synchroscope), let the synchroscope's hand sneak up just short of 12:00, and then you close the breaker to connect it to the grid.

Whoops, you weren't in sync when you closed the breaker? Well, lots of neat stuff can happen then - just don't stand too close. You might fry the windings on your generator. You might jerk your prime mover loose from its mountings, or tear something loose internally. If your generator is big enough relative to the power distribution grid you're supposed to be feeding, you could even bring the whole grid down. That's not a good career move. (And unless you think it's a good idea to redline your car's motor in neutral and then slam it into gear, don't try starting a diesel generator by just connecting it to the grid. That was done at a plant in California back in the 80's, and they managed to break the ~13" crankshaft on a diesel generator).

Well, there's more to it than that yet. You also have to fool with the voltage regulator. This varies current in the exciter to get your generator's voltage at the appropriate value. You want the power to flow out, not in, you want the right power factor (no, not another pledged post!) and you'd better have some reverse power relays ready to knock you offline to protect against idiots and emergencies.

Nowadays more and more of this process is automated. But these functions above still must be carried out in some form or another. And with any luck, if you ever use a backup generator, I hope I've convinced you to read the instructions.

Where are all the German jokes?

I stole this from Gene Expression (which now features Jason Soon and Suman Palit too - check them out).

Anyway, it got me thinking about German jokes. I don't know any. It's not like there aren't plenty of Krauts around, including me (50%). So where are the jokes?

Sillier than a simile

Once in a while I hear an expression that's, uh, memorable. But I daresay I haven't heard them all yet, so I thought I'd try to tap the collective wisdom of The Blogosphere(™ Bill Quick) to see what I've been missing. Here are some examples of the kind of stuff I'm looking for - some of them are, uh, pretty colorful...

For instance, say you want to convey the idea that someone is extremely busy. My two favorite standards are 'a peglegged man in an ass-kicking contest' or 'a one-armed paperhanger with the seven year itch'.

Then there's slipperiness. Most of the ones I've heard are kind of gross. 'Snot on a doorknob' is a worthy entrant, but it can't top this: 'two eels screwing in a bucket of snot'. I about cracked up when I heard that one from an old millwright years ago.

For tightness, there's 'a bull's ass sewn up with a log chain', or 'A gnat's ass stretched over a rainbarrel'.

Confusion? There's 'Father's Day at the trailer park' or '50 blind lesbians at a fish market'.

Human size? I like 'big enough to go bear hunting with a switch'.

Stupidity? 'Too dumb to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel'. I'm thinking the guy who pissed in the boot wasn't so bright either, but maybe some antiquarian can explain the logic to me.

Noisy? 'Like skeletons copulating on a tin roof'. I think I got that from National Review.

I suppose I could go on at great length, as I usually do. But now it's your turn - can you top these?

Uncivil comments

Let's make a deal, Sgt. Stryker. I won't claim that slavery wasn't involved in the secession of the Southern states in the Civil War, and you won't hand me this sanctimonious crap about how the Union side was fighting to free the slaves and stamp out a culture that was "evil and wicked to the core".

You don't like revisionism? Then what do you think about the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation was written halfway through the war, and didn't free the Northern slaves?

You don't like secession? The general rule is that, unless we're talking about the Mafia, we can leave associations if we choose after we join. Tell me what in the Constitution forbade secession. And if nothing forbade it, tell me why the 10th Amendment doesn't make it legal. The Southerners could see clearly that they were going to get a long brutal screwing once they were no longer in a position to block hostile legislation backed by Northerners, so why should they stick around?

One of the things that amazes me about this topic is how people who ordinarily would make fun of religious fanatics become such sanctimonious pricks themselves when expounding on Northern motives. And in fact a bunch of what could fairly be called religious fanatics provided much of the impetus. They were the abolitionists - a bunch of people who would suffer no economic impact from their radical changes, and who were bound and determined to impose their beliefs on everyone else. There's the analogy to Islamofascism Stryker was looking for - he was just looking on the wrong side.

Yankees have been morally masturbating about their role in ending slavery for a long time now, ignoring the fact that they weren't particularly enlightened about race themselves, and that most of the social disruption would happen far from their neighborhoods anyway. People would lose what historically had been considered property and uneducated ex-slaves would be dumped into the economy with even fewer guarantees than they had had under slavery. Yet back in Boston, where the likes of William Lloyd Garrison did their braying, they wouldn't see any of this. We saw just how tolerant Yankees were, especially Bostonians, over 100 years later, once blacks started migrating north in large numbers.

Slavery certainly doesn't meet modern moral standards, but it wasn't so exceptional by the standards of its time. Should it have been eliminated? Yes. At any price? Don't insult my intelligence - would anyone have voted to prosecute a war knowing it would cost 620,000 dead when many alternatives remained unexplored? Lincoln himself favored shipping blacks back to Africa. And if fighting against it was such a moral imperative, surely it is not diminished now - why aren't we sending troops into the Sudan and other places where the practice survives?

Admit it, the Civil War was about brute force politics and nothing more - the subsequent mythology is the whitewash it takes to cover up the incredible toll. The "save the Union" line sounds like the classic from Vietnam - "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". "With malice toward none"? Right - troops would invade others' property, kill them by the thousands and ruin their economies for years to come, but dammit, we draw the line there. To Stryker, people who have a problem with the way Lincoln, Sherman et al handled the war are "obstinate".

And while Stryker sheds crocodile tears for the slaves, let's note his claimed ties to Philip Sheridan. You remember Sheridan, don't you? He's the alleged source of the expression "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". That's the kind of racially enlightened moral paragons who were leading the armies of the North - after slaughtering their brothers who were defending their homes, what's a few redskins?