Occupy Wall Street! And Then What?

    Occupy Wall Street!
    Somehow a protest movement has ignited without anyone really noticing, but there it is.  Day and night protestors are camped out in Wall Street as well as other centers in major cities around the United States.
    So is this a fad?  Or where do I sign up to occupy Morgantown WV?  
    I'm old enough to remember the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's and in fact I attended some rallies around the country as a concerned teen.  Later, as a seminarian at United Theological Seminary in the 1980's and 1990's, I had the opportunity to study the theological underpinnings of Civil Rights, and some of the practical considerations of protest.
    It struck me that, as far as I know, almost all of the operations initiated by Rev.Martin Luther King and other leaders seemed to have a specific objective.  The objective might be to end racial segregation on buses in Montgomery Alabama, or to allow African Americans to sit at lunch counters in Greensboro, or to end discriminator voter registration laws in Mississippi.  As long as they did this, they generally kicked Jim Crow's ass.  Other marches called for the end of the Viet Nam War, or to free the Chicago 7, or whatever.  The point is that they usually had a specific agenda to accomplish.
    By the 1990's, however, many of these protests had deteriorated into symbolism.  To cite a small example, in the city of Dayton, where I lived at the time, we used to have an excercise where people from the West Side (predominantly African American) would meet folks from the East Side (predominantly white) and hold hands on a bridge than spans the Little Miami River.  Then everyone would sing "We Shall Overcome" and rush home to see ourselves on TV.
    That is what I fear about the current protest movement.  I can't figure out what the protestors are seeking to accomplish, other than to register displeasure with people that buy and sell stocks.  I can think of lots of possible reforms that could be made, but so far I'm not aware that anyone has articulated any kind of demand for specific reform.  Mainly I see calls for increased media coverage, and to enlarge participation in the event with the help of celebrity protestors.  Perhaps its therapeutic to vent rage in this way.
    A lot of people are mad at rich folks for not paying their fair share of taxes (actually nobody is paying their fair share, that's why we have a 1.5 Trillion dollar deficit, folks.  But rich folks are benefitting most, that's for sure).  So is this whole thing about taxes?  By the way, that's how the Tea Party started, as a rebellion against what they perceived was too much taxation.  So is Occupy Wall Street a liberal version of the Tea Party?   I hope not!
 


 
photo:  Kevin Hagen, New York Daily News. 


   Currently it seems to me that there are a lot of angry people ready to protest even if a cause has not been identified.  At some point, someone may supply an agenda to the movement.  We shall have to wait to see what agenda does emerge. 
    For the moment, however, it seems to me that the Occupy Wall Street movement is a substitute for America's Got Talent.  For those who can not sing as well as Landau Eugene Murphy, Jr., this represents the best chance for many of the protestors to get on TV.  
 


     

Solar Power Company Takes the Fifth

   The Federal government is now up in arms after the bankrupt Solyndra Company defaulted on a half a billion dollar loan. 

 US Congressional Representatives preparing to investigate the failure of the Solyndra solar power company. 

   Last week, the Village Elliot advised his readers that solar power as a means to replace fossil fuels or nuclear enegy is simply a farce because of the 50 times higher capital investment required per kilowatt.   You can check out what I said here:

http://elliotkennel.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-there-are-no-solar-power-plants.html


So it should not come as a surprise that if you invest money in something that is that far out of whack economically, it isn't going to work out. 

    The problem is that the government desperately wishes for people to believe that solar power is economical.  Therefore there must be crooks that made the company default on its loan!  Yeah, that's the ticket!

    The fact is that the federal government willingly convinced itself that solar photovoltaics is going to be a viable source of cheap electric power, just as it convinced itself that ethanol and hydrogen were going to be viable in the Bush administration.  None of this stuff makes any sense economically however.   

    So no wonder the Solyndra people are pledging the Fifth Amendment rather than helping Congress carry out its "investigation."  Well, Congress, the Village Elliot already told you the real problem:  solar power ailn't economical.  Investigate that.  

Morgantown Wednesday Night Jam at Clifftop, 2011

 

  Once a year the Morgantown Wednesday Night Jam moves from its normal location at the Morgantown Brewing Company to Clifftop West Virginia, as part of the annual Appalachian String Music Festival (to see the full-up version on youtube, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWKCUkR2w6Q ).

   Wednesday night at Clifftop is famous because that is the normal night for the string music jam in Morgantown. So naturally the jam just moves to Clifftop, since everyone who is someone is at Clifftop. People literally come from around the world to visit this humble gathering.  Since Kristian is from Sweden it is perhaps not surprising that there is a large connection with Sweden to group, but even before that people from Europe seem to really love our music and there are always a number of groups that attend.

  Here is an awesome video (not sure who took it, but thanks, whoever you are) of the Clifftop version of our jam.  Keith McManus, as usual, is the ringleader, with many other of the usual suspects from Morgantown WV present, plus the entire Swedish contingent, and a few other dozen stray musicians thrown in for good measure.  One of the interesting things about our jam is that we usually have a couple of really good horn players, which gives it a little bit of a ragtime sound. 

     Despite being filmed in the dark, the video does an excellent job of conveying the festival feeling, and you can get a sense of what it is liked to be surrounded by the almost deafening sound of fifty or a hundred instruments.  The jam, by its nature is completely unrehearsed, which results in a spontaneous kind of atmosphere.  Not everyone sings the same words to each verse, and it's impossible to know exactly what is going to be performed on each verse. Everyone has to develop a sort of extrasensory perception in order to make it all come together.  


  Think of Woodstock, West Virginia style.  Only we do it every year.  So y'all come and visit next year, okay?

  This song is entitled "Down the Old Plank Road." One version has been recorded by  Stewed Mulligan group on their album Liv and Howl. I'm not sure about the origins of the song, but one of the early recordings of this song was made by Uncle Dave Macon in the 1920's.  I would call this a "nonsense song," intended to make the audience laugh by telling jokes in verse.  For example one verse talks about a fellow whose wife passes away on Friday, and then remarries by the following Monday. Ostensibly, the song tells a story  about a person who  was in prison, with an iron ball and chain to make sure he would not run away.  The singer pledges that he "won't get drunk no more," down the old plank road.  Back in the old days, wooden planks were sometimes used to create makeshift roads, in place of bricks or asphalt.  We might question whether the promise to not "get drunk no more" will be kept.   
     Keith's version is similar to Uncle Dave Macon's version which went something like this:  

Rather be in Richmond with all the hail and rain
Than to be in Georgia boys wearin' that ball and chain

   Won't get drunk no more
   Won't get drunk no more
   Won't get drunk no more
   Way down the Old Plank Road

I went down to Mobile, but I got on the gravel train
Very next thing they heard of me, had on that ball and chain

Doney, oh dear Doney, what makes you treat me so
Caused me to wear that ball and chain, now my ankle's sore

Knoxville is a pretty place, Memphis is a beauty
Wanta see them pretty girls, hop to Chattanoogie

I'm going to build me a scaffold on some mountain high
So I can see my Doney girl as she goes riding by

My wife died on Friday night, Saturday she was buried
Sunday was my courtin' day, Monday I got married

Eighteen pounds of meat a week, whiskey here to sell
How can a young man stay at home, pretty girls look so well

  

Why There are No Solar Power Plants

   Isn't it time to quit relying on fossil fuels and switch to nice clean solar electricity?  Philosophically, it's the best possible scenario. There is an inexhaustible amount of energy from the sun, so why not try to harness it and use that to power our society.  Yet, there are no major solar power plants anywhere in the world.  Why is that?

   Power plants based on  natural gas, coal or oil can easily top 1000 Megawatts.  Solar power plants are usually in the range of 10 MW or less.  Mostly the reason why we have solar power plants at all is for a political show, and have no practical economic advantage.  

   For example, the largest power plant in the US east of Arizona is a 3 MW plant being built in Pennsylvania, occupying 16 acres at a cost of some $20 Million.   However, the plant doesn't produce 3 MW all the time.  Solar power won't work at night, works less well in the morning or late afternoon.  Cloudy days likewise limit the performance of solar systems. Also,there is less sunshine at higher latitudes than at the equator, and less well on cloudy days.  When you add it all up, the Solar power plant average power is 422 kilowatts (0.422 Megawatts), or 14% of the rated value.  

   So the capital cost (the amount that a utility company has to pay to build the plant) is $47000 per kilowatt. This is about 50 times more than a power plant built for natural gas (the only type of new power plant that can be realistically approved for construction in today's political environment in America).   Advocates claim that the government should throw money at the problem and soon it will become cheaper. Well, how much money should the government throw, and how much cheaper will it get?  Let's see some numbers, please.

   As another example, there are some interesting numbers posted on the web by the German organization Bundesverband Solarwirtschaft.  In this case the numbers are even more intimidating, the average power output of solar photovoltaics in Germany is less than 10% of their rated value. 

   

     A real plant---say 1000 MW average power---would cost the utility company some 47 billion dollars. That's more money than the entire gross domestic product of Bulgaria.  

     But wait a minute!  Isn't the operational cost of a solar plant going to be zero?  Well, no. First of all, you have to figure that the money you spent on the plant could have been invested in something else.  If the expected rate of return is a measly 5%, then that's $2.4 billion dollars per year that you need to earn from the sale of electricity.  It works out to some 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, or some 3 or 4 times the going rate for electricity.  That's just for the interest on the plant, assuming zero maintenance and zero electrical switching requirements (which is grossly optimistic). 

    But isn't it true that there is no environmental impact of solar power?  That also is blatantly false.   First of all let's consider the capital investment, which as you will recall is some 50 times higher than a natural gas plant.    The structure is made of metal, which requires consumption of coke made from petroleum and coal.  Are silicon semiconductors used?  That requires mining of silicon, and a significant amount of energy to melt and refine the silicon to create solar cells.   The energy is supplied mainly from fossil fuels (hint:  no plant that produces solar cells for profit could ever be powered by solar energy).  The capital cost must certainly be associated with consumption of raw materials.    
  
     We can argue about whether a solar photovoltaic plant has more or less environmental impact than some other, but there should be no question that all plants have some impact.   

    Proponents may argue that some other photovoltaic plants, notably in the American southwest where there is more access to sunshine, might have more favorable economics.  That's true to a limited extent, but the point remains that fossil fuels are far and away more economical than photovoltaics.  American industry could possibly remain competitive if they pay 10 or 20% extra for electric power, but 1000%, or 50000% is just unfathomable.   
    That is why solar energy continues to account for less than 1% of the total electrical energy produced in America.  

    Solar power, in its own way, is the subject of fantasies that are every bit as weird as, for example, the fantasy that President Obama has no birth certificate and is a secret agent of an Islamic group trying to take over the world.  But we're on to him!   Similary, solar power is highly economical, and that some massive conspiracy, usually led by the oil companies or defense industry, is preventing their use.  Well, the fact of the matter is that Obama may not be such a great president but he has a birth certificate, and solar power plants are unaffordable. 
   

Are phytoplankton disappearing from the ocean?

  In 2010, a spectacular claim was made in the prestigious journal Nature that the population of phytoplankton in the ocean had declined by something like 40% since 1950  (Boyce et al., Global Phytoplankton decline over the past century, Nature Vol 466 pp 591-596, 29 July 2010). 

At the time, one of the things I was working on was a way to absorb oil spills and to clean up oil contaminated seawater.  You may recall that the BP Deep Horizon disaster had occurred at that time, and I took a centrifuge (I would tell you who donated it, but the company wishes to remain anonymous) down to Port Arthur Texas to work with a company interested in remediating contaminated seawater.  Although where we were, the beaches were spectacularly clean and fishing was excellent, we were rightly concerned about the impact on ocean life.  But we knew the Gulf would survive even this serious spill.  By contrast the claims of Boyce et al were that FORTY PERCENT of the plankton were missing from ALL THE OCEANS OF THE WORLD.  This was such as serious claim that it dwarfs all concerns about overfishing or spilling oil or anything else.  Fish and sea animals can't survive without phytoplankton and I doubt whether life on land including humans could survive very long if the phytoplankton were going extinct at such an alarming rate.  It's hard to quantify the significance of billions of tons of ocean life,  but let's such say it would be orders of magnitude more serious than any hurricane or oil spill or other event that we have experienced.  

Boyce et al were convinced that this mass extinction had occurred due to the ravages of global warming.  I  doubted that, based on the following reasoning:  suppose there were a lake somewhere with a healthy population of phytoplankton.  Suppose overnight the temperature rose from 55 degrees Fahrenheit to 56.  Does that kill half the plankton in the lake?  Not likely!  Even less likely if you give the plants 60 years to make the adjustment. 

Still I was surprised that many people seemed content to a) accept the claims of Boyce et al, and b) didn't seem too concerned about it.  My feeling, in a nutshell, was that the scientific community needed to find out whether it was true or not, and if it were true it was time to push the panic button.

But over the past year, other articles have appeared which suggest that the orginal contention of Boyce et al may be due to a ghastly error.  Rykaczewski and Dunne published a rebuttal in Nature (A Measured Look at Ocean Chlorophyll trends, Nature Vol 472, pp E5-E6, 14 April 2011).  They suggest the Boyce's data was in error because of changes in sampling methodology and analysis.  A similar note appeared in Nature from Ohlman (Nature 466, 591 - 596 (7306)
Published online: 2010-07-29). 

Phew!  So maybe the reason everyone seemed unconcerned about the data was due to its fishy smell. 

Does this mean that the world is off the hook?  Not necessarily.  I still remain very concerned about ocean pollution and curious about the attitudes of my friends and colleagues.  A number of us were outraged, rightly so, by the BP Horizon spill last year.  But few people complain about the amount of pollution that we dump into the same body of water.  The United States is the most powerful agricultural economy on earth, and most of the petrochemical fertilizer runoff from that economy winds up draining into the Gulf via the Mississippi and other rivers.  It is millions of tons per year, and has resulted in enormous dead zones near the mouth of the Mississippi in which life can not be supported. If you go to the Florida Panhandle and are lucky enough to get a hotel with a view of the ocean, you may be surprised to find that it is now green.  The ocean is supposed to be blue, folks.  The reason is that in this area all that fertilizer has caused phytoplankton to proliferate (the opposite effect claimed by Boyce et al, by the way).  You can definitely see it.  And yes, changing the color of the ocean means that there are other effects as well.  Some years ago I wrote an article explaining that greener water might absorb sunlight more effectively near the surface, and that there could be some effect on climate change.  Some of my friends in the business are aware of that now and trying to incorporate such effects into global climate models.  
  

I believe that we should seek the means to recover millions of tons of chemicals from rivers in the US.  Our emphasis is mainly on stopping pollution at its source, which is a good approach, but in the case of the Mississippi and other rivers, we just have to admit that millions of tons of chemicals are getting into the water anyway, and it makes sense to figure out ways to clean it up.

BAre phytoplankton increasing due to massive quantities of fertilizer being dumped into the ocean? Or are they vanishing? We need the right answers to feed into the computer models that tell how our climate is behaving.

The Atlantis of Japan--Yonaguni

Are these terraces a freak of nature, or proof of the existence of an ancient civilization?

    What?  Underwater pyramids near Japan? Yes, in shark-infested shallow waters off the island of Yonaguni Japan lie stepped pyramids.  Nobody knows who made these pyramids.  Indeed, it may be that much of the site is natural.  The rocks are shale, which is naturally flat.  Because Japan is in an earthquake zone, geologists say that these rocks can split along a fault, creating a terraced effect. 

        Thus, listening to the geologists,  the hugeness of the geometric features actually support the notion that the site may naturally have terraces.  On the other hand, the details may argue in favor of human activity.  For example, in the second drawing there appears to be a drawing of a human face. However, I should point out that this photo came from a for-profit TV show and it's not clear to what extent the photo is digitally "enhanced"  (i.e., fraudulent). 

        I kind of think that the answer may lie somewhere in between.  The large terraced features are much more likely to be natural than man-made, given the nature of the shale rock layers.  But the details are too perfect, and tend to suggest that people may have helped to smooth over the features of the site. 

        If for the sake of argument, we assume that the site was sculpted to some extent by humans, what does this show?  Unfortunately we can know very little about who might have used the site.  We can't conclude that this was some super lost civilization liike Atlantis.  We really need to examine pottery, tools, artwork and written records (if any exist) to know about a society.  We have none of this in the case of Yonaguni.  A pottery fragment or two would go a long way towards helping us understand the role of humans at the site, but so far nothing like that has been found, as far as I know. 

      Nor do we know when the Yonaguni Monument may have sunk beneath the waves.  One hypothesis is that it may have gradually been overtaken by water at the end of the last Ice Age, some 11,000 years ago.  Alternatively, it may be sunk more abruptly during an earthquake, perhaps as recently as 1500 years ago. 

      Ultimately, Yonaguni may not tell us much that science didn't know already.  We know that anatomically modern humans have been around been around for some 40,000 years or so.  So there have been several opportunities for proto-civilizations to rise and fall, although archeology doesn't attest to much of a civilization prior to the Sumerians.

     I am not a professional anthropologist by any means, but it seems to me that some of the early civilizations might have been seafaring ones, and it wouldn't come as a great surprise if the end of the Ice Age might have set back the advance of civilizations such as Yonaguni. Our main problem is that it is hard to gather data on civilizations that are now underwater, but in this case the lack of data shouldn't be construed as proof they didn't exist.  
   
     I think it would be really cool to try to map likely locations for port cities during the ice age and to have the resources to excavate them.
     It will be interesting to see what future archeologists make of the the Yonaguni site. 

  

Is this real?  This shot came from a video on History Channel, but I'm not sure if it is simply digitally enhanced, or completely made up (i.e., fraudulent).  We need to see the unaltered photography.  If the lines are real, I don't see how they could be natural. But I think this is digitally "enhanced."  I believe TV make it up to make their documentary more exciting.  Other photos of the same formation look like this:

You can see the video "evidence" at about 33:00:

The straight lines and "stairs" look very impressive.  However, they remind me of the cleavage planes of crystals as seen under a microscope.  Below you can see some electron micrographs of the break plane of a crystal, which I guarantee was not made by a pre-ice-age civilization, but by scientists in a laboratory.  A geologists could better comment on what rocks can look like in a heavily faulted region such as Japan, but I think I need to see something besides planar formations and right angles to get excited.  





P. A. Gurjiyants et al., Effect of growth conditions on the strength of shaped sapphire, Journal of Crystal Growth, Volumes 198–199, Part 1, March 1999, Pages 227–231, 

NASA: Fossilized Extraterrestrial Bacteria Found?

Is this a fossilized bacteria? Or an inorganic fiber grown from an iron catalyst and hot ceramic molecules? http://journalofcosmology.com/


　


NASA has dropped another bomb, making what seems to be the strongest claim ever for the existence of extraterrestrial life. The claim is that they have found fossilized bacteria in a meteorite fragment.


The Village Elliot has made a cursory examination of the original paper, and here's what I can tell you:


a. This is not the first time that NASA has made an extraordinary claim. Some fifteen years ago, another meteorite fragment was proposed as a possibilty for extraterrestrial life. In that case, however, it seemed that the meteorite had the right sort of catalysts in it to promote the growth a ceramic fibrils that might look like bacteria. The Village Elliot himself had made such materials, which are related to carbon nanotubes. Briefly, all you needs is the right kind of iron catalyst, and if you heat it up to the point where it is nearly molten, the catalyst will cause ceramic nanotubes to grow, They look exactly like the NASA "fossils," so I figured that they are probably not fossils, but ceramic nanotubes grown as the meteorite washeated, possibly during reentry.






b. The current generation of claimed fossils is a bit more impressive. They are the right size to be bacteria, and indeed the authors (Hoover et al.) believe that terrestrial bacteria may have been seeded from comets based on the resemblances. I wouldn't rule it out,but on the other hand, I've seen similar large diameter structures form when the conditions are right. So, the question is whether these things *are* fossil bacteria, or whether they just look liike they are. On the grounds that extraordinary claims require extraordinary justification, I'm not buying it just yet. In fact, I'd like the opportunity to put the same materials on a plate and heat them up to the temperature regime at which these nanotubes form, and just see what we get.






c. Although the leader of the current team, Richard B Hoover, is a veteran scientist, he was one that on record supporting the claimed fossil bacteria circa 1995 from McKay et al. That suggests that he is a bit overeager to believe in the fossilized bacteria theory.






d. This new claim comes on the heels of another spectacular claim, for a fundamental new life form discovered on earth that doesn't need phosphorous to survive, using arsenic instead. A number of people think that that claim was made prematurely as well.






e. NASA is also out in front on the issue of global warming. Rather than striving to be an impartial arbiter, as one might expect from a government agency, NASA seems to increasingly view its role as an advocate for certain controversial theories.










All that said, I think the current article is much more formidable than it's predecessors. I've written to the Journal of Cosmology and asked to be put on the panel of reviewers being assembled. The role I've proposed for myself is to see if it is possible to make these kinds of structures by taking these materials and sticking them in an oven and heating them up. I'm confident that some kind of fibers will indeed grow spontaneously. What I'd like to know is if the meteorite structures have specific features uniquely identified with bacteria, that can not be duplicated in my lab.