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Smokers Are Cancer Denialists

Smoking causes lung cancer. Nobody disputes that fact. Yet, 1 out of every 5 Americans still lights up at least occassionally. Smoking feels really good, it’s really relaxing and awesome. Cigerettes with a glass of whiskey and coke, full of ice is so wonderful. That intense sensation from nicotine is out of this world. And by the way — it’s awful deadly.

Flames Char the Wood

There was a time when industry spokespersons downplayed the danger from smoking, and there were some doctors and other professionals that questioned the scientific consesus that smoking wasn’t bad for you. Those claims, while never particularly crediable, did give cover to some people who wanted to dig their heads into the sand, and continue to smoke because it felt so increadibly good.

Tobacco companies never forced anyone to smoke. People want their products because they are so damn pleasurable. Anybody is free to quit smoking at any time, but most don’t. There is no real function to smoking, justifying it rationally is very hard to do.

Sitting at a Campfire

Fossil fuels are the exactly like cigerettes.
It’s so damn pleasurable to burn them.

I often ride my bicycle around town or catch the bus to work and shopping. It gets me where I need to go around town. But nothing is as fun as when Friday evening rolls around, I hop in my truck, slap it into gear, and I’m off to buy some beer or head up into the mountains. Hell, even the sound of the engine makes as it clunks into gear statisifies one’s ears. The feel of effortless 315 HP, as slap my foot on gas pedle (leaving rubber on the road if I so choose), and off we go. You can even push the accelerator harder, and it will speed up effortless — even going up hill!

When you drive, you can take any road you want to. You can drive out into the countryside, up into the mountains. It can take you to the wilderness, to a mountain lake, a farm, or some other remote place, at a rate of roughly 45-75 miles per hour. Cars are elegently styled, you are free to choose your music taste, they can provide solitude and a carefully controlled climate to your choice of temperature, such as 72 degrees, and they take you exactly to your destination. Cars are such wonderful things.

Driving Down Truck Trail in Heavy Fog

Let’s be honest, the sensation one gets driving is so awesome … even we all conceed its so deadly. Automobiles kill roughly 40,000 people nationwide in a year, and roughly 1,500 New Yorkers. It’s the most common cause of death for people under Age 40. It’s also warming the planet, and putting us rapidly on a course for a time when there will be no mankind, or certainly no mankind living in a world like today.

There will probably no action on climate change, until the damage is serious enough that it can no longer be ignored. A far higher percentage of Americans drive automobiles then ever smoked, and we are all quite happy denying climate change as we push our ways towards the cliff. Until it becomes so obvious that we are all in a sucide pact, Americans have started dying in mass, and their has been clear and unrefutable evidence on climate change, don’t expect a lot of action…

Truck 2

I sure like my truck. And hell, smoking cigerettes sure is a lot of fun. I guess we are all going to die one of these days at any rate.

Be cognizant of environmental impacts of renewables

Climate change action is important but let’s be cognizant of the environmental impacts of renewables

Burning fossil fuels has largely known and well documented impacts. From the much touted carbon emissions to air pollution and acid rain to acid mine discharge from coal mines and scarred landscapes from mountain top removal and strip mines to drilling cuttings, fracking chemicals and produced water to cracked casings and oil spills the impacts of fossil fuels are well documented and somewhat regulated and controlled but probably not to ideal levels as production and low cost is often emphasized over safety and environmental protection.

But what is much less discussed and documented is renewable energy impacts. It must be green so there is no environmental impacts or the impacts are de minimus. But that’s far from the truth. Renewable energy consumes enormous amounts of land, it in future years has a real possibility of urbanizing enormous parts of countryside, paving over farm land and forest, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste like wind turbine blades and discarded, broken solar panels to impacting watersheds and fisheries alike, reducing scenic beauty and take land out of other uses. Things that deserve serious consideration and environmental analysis.

To be sure we do need to build more renewable energy but we have to always thinking about the consequences of our choices, not blindly building it because renewables are good and climate change is really bad and scary. Being aware of the environmental impacts of renewables doesn’t mean you’re pro fossil fuels, it means that you are a thinking society, trying to avoid negative environmental problems down the road.

  • We need to take a serious look before we leap – is the solar plant or wind farm appropriate for the place we are sitting it
  • We need to mitigate like planting pollinators friendly or native grasses around solar farms
  • We need to look at building more renewables in cities – be it mandatory solar panels on buildings, over highways or in urban waste lands like old garbage dumps, highway medians, or contaminated industrial sites

Wind Turbine Looking Towards The Adirondacks

Why build a solar farm over green farm fields or forests when you can build over Love Canal?

The truth is …. 60 Hz Alternating Current Kind of Sucks

The truth is …. 60 Hz Alternating Current Kind of Sucks

Power Lines

In North America, 60 Hz is the standard of alternating current. It was a rather nasty compromise between frequencies, chosen as a “sweet spot” between:

  1. Line losses due to high-frequency currents – The higher the frequency of AC the greater loses due to impedance caused by the voltage and current becoming out of sync due to the induction created by the line (time it takes for the magnetic field to appear and collapse on the wire). It’s not practical to send 400 Hz over any length of wire due to losses.
  2. Size of the transformer needed to step and step down voltage – The higher the frequency of AC, the smaller the transformer needs to be. The magnetic energy in alternating current “exists” in the alternating voltage, so if the voltage is alternating faster, a small transformer can move more power.  Smaller transformers use less copper, they’re cheaper to build, and they’re generally more efficient.
  3. The ability to power light bulbs with minimal smoothing. Incandescent bulbs can be powered directly from 60 Hz alternating current, as it takes more then 1/60th of a second for an incandescent bulb to cool down enough to notice the crossing of zero point. Additionally, with 60 Hz power, a relatively small capacitor can be used to smooth out rectified power to drive an LED light, for fixtures that use a large number of LEDs in series.
  4. The ability to power low-power AC motors. 60 Hz alternating current can and does drive many AC motors, but it does require relatively large motors compared to motors operating at 400 Hz. Not only do 60 Hz alternating current motors require much larger coils then 400 Hz motors, they are less efficient.

Airplanes traditionally use to 400 Hz power, as it saves quite a bit on weight for their electrical motors and transformers. Likewise, traditional automotive alternators generate power in the 400 Hz range, before going through a bridge rectifier and a series of capacitors to smooth out the voltage to direct current. But transferring 400 Hz power, or for that matter boosting and bucking high-current DC can be difficult and prone to electronic failure compared to traditional mains frequency transformers.

But increasingly, we are seeing more uses of high frequency alternating current and direct current, especially in consumer devices. Most modern electronics are powered by switch-mode power supplies, which use high-frequency transformers (as high as 1,000,000 Hz) to safely step down voltage in an isolated fashion. More motors today are driven using inverters, which similarly create a higher-frequency current to provide more power with loss copper and less losses. Controlling the frequency of the current, allows motors to be precisely controlled in their speed, it’s more efficient and accurate then simply chopping off part of the sine wave using thyristor as was done in the olden days to control motor speed.

What is Light Therapy & Does it Actually Work?

What is Light Therapy & Does it Actually Work?

Here is a partial list of what one company promises sitting under a small panel of red lights will improve: athletic performance and recovery (owing to faster muscle recovery and joint repair), sleep (thanks to increased melatonin production and a “healthy circadian rhythm”), and skin quality (because of reduced inflammation and increased collagen production).

These red lights, in this case made by Joovv, are one of dozens of at-home versions of what’s known as light therapy, or photomedicine, or photobiomodulation, a technology based on the idea that light can change us on a cellular level. This past summer, the journal Frontiers in Medicine published an issue dedicated to photomedicine, and its 12 articles have an overwhelming effect similar to Joovv’s marketing copy, covering dermatological concerns like aging, skin cancer, and psoriasis as well as autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes. I like the way a 2016 journal article phrases it with a bad joke that gives away the researcher’s quiet exuberance: After a brief overview of peer-reviewed light-therapy treatments (for arthritis, hearing loss, and chemotherapy side effects), the conclusion states that “after decades confined to the ‘scientific wasteland,’ [photobiomodulation] may be finally emerging into the light of day (pun intended).”

It's pretty amazing what you can do with light these days, with narrow spectrum LEDs that can only produce the light you want.

PVEducation

PVEducation

As solar cell manufacturing continues to grow at a record-setting pace, increasing demands are placed on universities to educate students on both the practical and theoretical aspects of photovoltaics. As a truly interdisciplinary field, young professionals must be fluent with the science, engineering, policy, and market dimensions of this technology, in the context of a growing renewable energy economy.

While I support renewable energy production, especially the solid state energy from solar on roof tops and in urban areas I have many questions about industrial solar facilities, especially when big corporations are asking for exemptions from long standing environmental laws designed to protect our water and land.

While I support renewable energy production, especially the solid state energy from solar on roof tops and in urban areas I have many questions about industrial solar facilities, especially when big corporations are asking for exemptions from long standing environmental laws designed to protect our water and land. Industrial solar not converts green space – farm land and forest to an industrial wasteland covered with panels made out of hazardous materials. I think we should be skeptical of industrial solar.

Indeed, the whole purpose of the NEPA and SEQRA is to take a hard look at these industrial facilities to review their environmental impacts and take steps to mitigate their impacts. I’m not saying that industrial solar has no role in energy generation but I think we should be skeptical, especially due to the low energy density of the panels – they consume enormous amounts of land for tiny amounts of energy. Unlike agriculture, where a field can be left fallow and revert back to wilderness, industrial solar facilities are littered with hazardous waste and metals that must be removed and disposed off site when the facility closes.

Ice Forming

Farm fields to solar facilities

There are some that would like a massive conversion of farm fields to industrial solar facilities…

I think this is a terrible idea. Farm land, while working land producing crops to feed humans and livestock 🐮🐷🐔 is still largely wild green space home to many common wildlife need as part of the mixed land cover that sustains them.🌲🌽🌾☘

Agriculture tills the soil, spreads manure, plants and harvests the ground. 🚜 But all but a handful of hours a year is mechanical farm equipment on the land. Some chemicals are used like nitrogen fertilizer or herbicides but for the most part the land is natural and green, soaking up carbon dioxide and providing habitat for a wide variety of animals. Fields are minimally driven in by tractors to minimize soil compaction, often worked with duals to spread the weight of the tractor.⚫ Proper aeration and fertility can take generations to achieve and can be quickly destroyed by heavy equipment.🚚

In contrast, industrial solar is a full industrialization of the land. 😎🏭Years of gently cared for soils risk compaction. Land that once was rural and agricultural will become industrialized and potentially toxic. Green landscape and dirt are replaced silicon panels.

I don’t have a problem with homeowners and businesses going solar by putting panels on their buildings 🏢 but I don’t like the idea of turning green fields 🌾 into the industrial solar facilities.

Farm Field At Enterance