On Being Ephemeral

I have had 2 close friends and 2 close relatives diagnosed with aggressive cancers in the space of a year. All of them are under under 35, 3 of them under 30. I firmly believe that they are all going to make it.

For me, learning this was like the childhood experience of feeling the outlines of one's own skull through the skin, and realising of a sudden that one's beloved meat puppet, happily dancing on its bones, is not a permanent fixture of the landscape, this, or any other.

There is an odd feeling of dread, which quickly gives way to a rush of awareness that life, as it is, is a gift of sorts, and something that, if ignored, will go away by itself all too quickly.

It has not been enough to terrify me back into the stinking rat-holes of faith, that the religious have dug to shelter them from the terror of the daylight.

I rather commit myself afresh to making my life, and those of my loved ones, as much fun as possible.

Mr T.L. Cardwell, WHAT do you Do?

Recently there was a letter to the Editor of the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, that bastion of Journalism! Reposted around the Interweb as:

CARBON TRADING FIASCO by someone who should know (capitals not added)

The fellow introduces himself as someone who has worked in a power station. In what capacity we are not told. Forklift driver? Boiler Attendant? Occupation unspecified.

His big claim is "Debunking the Myth" that 65-70% of the energy consumed by a coal fired power station goes "up the chimney". He then gives some numbers for boiler efficiency and for the efficiency of the particulate scrubbers, which are both well into the 90's. DEBUNKED!

Sceptics rejoice. Better, learn some thermodynamics, people.

His language is emphatic:

"First coal fired power stations do NOT send 60 to 70% of the energy up the chimney. The boilers of

modern power station are 96% efficient and the exhaust heat is captured by the economisers and
reheaters that heat the air and water before entering the boilers."

The only trouble is, this Muppet at no time actually tells you what the conversion efficiency of his power station was.

So how much of the energy of a thermal power station is recovered from the fuel ? Its sure ain't 96%, which is the number we are left with.

His own numbers call him a liar a little later on:

"Coal-fired Power Stations are highly efficient with very little heat loss and can generate a massive

amount of energy for our needs. They can generate power at efficiency of less than 10,000 b.t.u. per
kilowatt and cost-wise that is very low"

Well, those numbers sound reasonable. Now convert the units to a common one, and divide the output (1kWh) by the Input (10,000BTU) and there you have the efficiency.

1 kWh = 1000W * 60min * 60 sec = 3,600,000J

1BTU =1055J, so 10,000BTU = 10,550,000J

N= 3.6 MJ /10.55MJ = 0.341, i.e. 34.1%

Which means that in Mr Cardwells Highly Efficient Power Station, 65.9% of the heating value of the fuel is dissipated as waste heat.

If a lay person describes this as "lost up the chimney" as opposed to " dissipated as lost heat as the cumulative losses of the equipment, plus the heat rejected into the condensers as Carnot's equation dictates that it must be" then I will not hold this against them.

Mr Cardwell presumes to teach us all about basic mathematics, but fails to teach us any basic thermodynamics. I am unsure if he knows but isn't saying, or welds for a living and avoids reading about what he welds. In either case, his argument is either ignorant or dishonest.

He then goes on with a lot of blather about renewables, which he clearly doesn't know much about, in spite of the hubris of his opening paragraph, and fails to give numbers too, other than diving the total load by the nameplate rating of a very large wind turbine.

No Renewable energy proponent that I am aware of is suggesting 100% wind generation. Its a red herring of note. 10% would be fine, and cause no hassle whatever. Isolated communities like Esperence in WA have far higher wind fractions than this, and it saves them millions of litres of Diesel, and with it millions of dollars, each an every year.

The only technology that doesn't like wind is Coal. Gas compliments it well, and buddy, Gas is coming on strong. They use Brayton cycle turbines and CCGTs to achieve higher efficiencies than your coal burning dinosaur, and they follow load, which for all customers other than aluminium refineries, is the real measure of a technologies usefulness in supporting the grid.

I don't have an aluminium smelter, and frankly I'm tired of paying the cost of orienting electrical industries towards this class of customer before then rest of us.

Wake up and smell the future, Mr Cardwell.

Out And Proud, and I don't mean that in a Gay way.

I live in a place that is packed full of Christian Goodness. There are times when it feels like I am stuck in an episode of the Brady Bunch; the other choice is to head out beyond the Flannel Curtain to the outer suburbs, which resembles Shameless.

And the trouble is, in a community this small, you need everyone on side, because there aren't enough people here to have sectarian strife. Except for those tossers in Hobart, we don't need them for anything.

We all have to get along with each other, 'cos if you pissed too many people off your social circle would shrink down to your relatives, and that would make dating and infidelity far more awkward.

But even here, I am finding it hard to be polite about people's religious beliefs. I don't believe in:

1. The Undead Flying Hebrew Construction Worker Who Said to Be Nice, or

2. The Sacred and Unquestionable (in spite of all the nasty shit he did in the Hadith) Prophet Mohammet with the Flying Horse, or,

3. Moses of the Profound and Notable Absence from the Historical and Archaeological Record.

And as I write this, I am actually feeling really creeped out to be criticizing these Abrahamic faiths even so far. That is probably because, until recent times, the Terrifying Faithful could kill you in Very Nasty Ways for even thinking such things.

Well, here goes. I am outing myself.

I don't believe in the Supernatural, and that goes for any and all Gods, Demons, Ghouls, Angels, Pixies, Reiki, Crystal healing, Spirit Guides, the Entire Hindu Pantheon, all 40, 000 of them or so.

I Believe that things happen because space, time, energy and matter interact with each other in very complex, but ultimately knowable ways.

And I believe that I am a part of that, for as long as my matter is so arranged that the energy of the universe, made available in my body as it breaks down complex molecules and reacts them exothermically with oxygen, powers the matter that is my body to wander about thinking, eating and on rare occasions when the opportunity presents itself, shagging.

I believe that I am a piece of carbon based Darwinian life, and i am extraordinarily grateful to exist, in light of the odds against me being born and the ease with which my body can cease to function.

I am seriously fucking grateful to the universe for my consciousness, not because it is an eternal Soul, but because it is an ephemeral Effect, as the prism of the physical brain 'refracts' the energy of sunlight stored in my food, and shines my consciousness out into the slightly warm almost-nothingness that is the great expanse of space, for just a very little while.

My thanks for this are deeper than can be expressed by saying thank-you to a god that I have made in my own image. I exist, for now. So do you. For now.

And as Now is all we have, lets make it a damned good Now, with as much kindness and charity and good engineering and splendid music as possible.

If you love someone, I don't mind how, so long as everyone has a nice time and no-one catches anything nasty. If you are into weird games, like S+M or Rugby Leauge, you're welcome to it, just wear protective equipment, and try not to dislocate anything.

All my love, peoples. Have a Blast.

B.

The Urge to get High

One of the things that I cannot find in the literature about young people and substance abuse is an acknowledgement that people -and I mean all of us- have at some stage, wanted to get loaded.

I'm not talking about two glasses of bubbly after work, I mean that feeling, after 40 hours in an office, where your threshold of self restraint has been busted like a banner gets busted when a football team runs through it. You want excess of SOMETHING.

Booze, Sex, downhill Skiing, it doesn't matter a damn how you get there, you just need the dopamine.

It's that cranky combination of claustrophobia, habituation to the smell in the office air conditioning, physical jitteryness from lots of inactivity and caffeine, sexual frustration and mental fatigue. And, Boredom.

Capitalised, proper-noun, weapons-grade Boredom of the ordinary kind, refined in the workplace into something that can etch glass. Its as bad as being back in high school.

It was fucking dull to be a teenager, as I recall, if you weren't beautiful, sporty and/or had parents that could (and) would dress you in a way that wasn't socially debilitating.

My nickname, for example, was Sargent Obesity because I wore so many clothes from Surplus stores and was, indeed, a proper fat bastard.

It was shit. I found my way through it later in life by loosing 30Kg and buying some proper fucking clothes as soon as I was free of the family home and financially able, but more importantly I came across ideas that inspired me and made me feel that life was worth living.

That, and I finally got laid.

The next guy that tells me that high-school was the best time of his life is going to have me tell him that he is either terribly sad, or was very, very lucky, in addition to the standard Go Fuck Yourself that will accompany either option.

Young people need something to believe in and something useful to do. Until we can give them one or both, I am not going to bitch about it if they smoke a bit of weed and listen to heavy music. Really, this is a symptom, and unless we have something to offer I cannot bring myself to feel overly righteous and/or scandalised.

In fact, I might just ask them for a joint, if they have one going spare.