I need to wear some tailored suits.
I need excuses to wear suits.
That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to Target.
Geothermal Energy 2
A great peculiarity is that radioactive decay seems utterly immune to influence. High magnetic fields, electric fields, movement, and spin don’t seem to change the rates of radioactive decay at all. Nothing does. Particle interactions, including some really high energy photons, can cause a radioactive particle to decay differently right now but that’s usually a different decay. There doesn’t seem to be any particular way of changing the halflife of some whatever.
In numbers, the halflife of U238 is 4.468 billion years. If one sample of U238 has a hundred nuclei, in 4.468 by that sample will have fifty nuclei. We can’t change that without seriously altering the decay path. If an experimentalist whacked those one hundred nuclei with high energy neutrons, one could get some other decay path and decay reaction, meaning in far less than 4.468 by the sample would have only fifty or less nuclei. But the natural decay path is more or less immutable. Exposing the sample to a high magnetic field doesn’t change it. Putting the sample in zero g doesn’t change it. Putting it at the center of the Earth doesn’t change it. Whacking the sample with high energy neutrons doesn’t change the characteristics of the existing natural decay path (ie decay reaction); whacking the sample with neutrons may shift the decay reaction to something else. So instead of decaying into Thorium 234, we could smack it until it decays into something else.
So what does this mean?
It means the radioactive elements in the Earth’s core are naturally decaying in some fashion, releasing heat at some fixed rate, and there’s not much we can do to change that. This energy and the process of harnessing it are both called geothermal energy, sort of like how football is the game, the physical ball, and the activity.
So how good an idea is taking this fixed supply of energy for our purposes?
There’s a finite amount of sunlight that hits the Earth, right about 1300w/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere, and about 1kw/m^2 at the surface of the Earth. It’s coming whether we use it or not. Solar and wind are both fundamentally solar energy, as wind is caused by temperature differentials in the air, caused by sunlight hitting the heterogeneous Earth.
There is no consequence on the Sun by us harnessing solar energy. It’s close to free. To be more accurate, the energy is free; building stuff to harness the energy has costs, and so when we talk about the cost of solar energy, we talk about the costs of building the stuff. And maintaining the stuff. And hiring someone to go out to the solar panel farm to clean away the bird crap, pull the squirrel nests out of the wiring box, replace the wiring the squirrels ate, and replace the broken solar panels, etc.
If we take energy out of the Earth, would we be cooling the Earth? Is it radiant free like sunlight, or could we cause serious negative consequences? What happens to plate tectonics if we cool some part of the crust by 200k in a localized area?
Probably nothing, but that same probably nothing that people thought about greenhouse gases.
Remember the source of the energy, radiant heat from radioactive decay, is (as far as we can tell, but I find this kinda sus) utterly invariant.
Inflation, Rates of Change, and Prices
The price of something is how much it costs in absolute dollars and cents. A burrito at the shop near me is $7.99. That’s the price.
The rate of change is how much the price changes. A RoC of 10%/yr means that next year, the burrito would cost $8.789, which would probably get rounded to $8.79*. This is the rate of change.
If the rate of change is 10%/yr one year and 0%/yr the next year, the prices went up and DID NOT GO BACK DOWN. So the burrito in year 2 is $8.79 (and going forward, I’ll just assume this gets rounded). Even if several years of 0%/yr RoC pass, the price of the burrito remains $8.79. For the price to go down, the RoC would need to be negative, and to go back to where it was, it would need to be -9%. It’s going down from a bigger number than it went up from, so -9% and +10% are offsetting, within the limits of rounding.
Inflation is a rate of change.
So if
A) transitory inflation occurs, prices go up. Even if inflation, the RoC goes down, the prices don’t go down unless inflation goes negative. Negative inflation is called deflation**.
B) permanent/nontransitory inflation occurs, prices go up continuously every year.
As human beings we care more about prices than RoC (inflation), because the price is the number we have to pay. Economists and policy makers tend to think more about RoCs. This isn’t malicious. The Fed isn’t buying eighty million burritos, and my corner burrito joint isn’t selling eighty million burritos. But the Fed is looking at price trends across the US and world, and the most useful way of doing that leans heavily on RoCs.
We can argue about ‘most useful’ so if that term doesn’t work for you, substitute with ‘most popular right now’.
Lumber prices recently spiked and came back down. They’re still about double what they were two years ago, though half what they crested at. That doubling, ~50% inflation, isn’t going away. For the immediate future, it’s permanent.
Car prices, new and used, housing, and so forth all climbed significantly. The RoC, inflation, seems to have dropped, but the prices haven’t dropped. The prices just aren’t going up as much as they used to.
If prices drop, we generally call the temporary peak a bubble. That’s not really a good term, because the temporary peak could be due to supply constraints or demand spikes, and bubbles are generally associated with speculative excesses. Price movements due to underlying factors unrelated to whether a buyer is buying only to sell to someone else later are sometimes aren’t proper bubbles. But if prices go up and down, people will call it a bubble regardless of underlying reason. People do things for multiple reasons. You can live in a house, get mail there, and also sell it later. Which is most important? Depends on the person.
Anyway, we now have some inflation, the Fed is claiming it’s transitory, but parsing that statement, understand the simple fact that prices have gone up and without deflation, they’re not going back down.
*Yes, it would actually get rounded to $8.99, but I’m trying to keep the math simple.
**Deflation is one of those things that’s good if it’s happening to you and bad if it’s happening to other people. Think of it like cutting in line. If YOU can cut in line, that feels great! If other people can cut in front of you in line, that’s an injustice.
Inconvenient Timing
I with I got as sleepy in my bed as I get in my lab.
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I never got the hang of cell arrays.
Posts
Can’t let this turn into meaningless complaining. There’s way too much of that already.
I like turtles. I think they’re neat.
Empathy for Science
Being a physicist talking about climate change feels like this:
True or False? Murder is bad because 2+2=6.
- False (100%, 1 Votes)
- True (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 1
Loading ...Big Business and Customer Service
I get the frustration with big business, especially in ecommerce, and at one level I sympathize. But on the other hand, when I buy something from Amazon, I get it or I get a refund.
I recently bought something from Menlo House, and they simply didn’t ship it. They took my money and didn’t send the product. Customer service is a Kafkaesque nightmare. I had the same experience with Babbitt’s Online. They just don’t ship what I paid for, and both of them avoid and delay returning calls or emails.
Amazon will at least email me back. Menlo took weeks to reply, and then they lied to me. Babbit’s still hasn’t sent me my order or a refund.
Muscle Cruisers
Benelli, Benda, and Alrenda are all following Ducati’s Diavel/xDiavel styling pretty closely.
I like the Ducati, and motorcycles rarely stay unique for long.
Bubbles
High prices are only in a bubble if they deflate. Otherwise, they’re just expensive.