Technology – Page 2 – Journeys of Heart and Mind

A time in hospital

I was admitted and given a CT scan of my head. This seemed to show a very small, superficial bleed in the brain, but the detail was not well resolved so an MRI scan was also ordered.

Gloucestershire Royal Hospital (Wikimedia)

ad hoc post – 5

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Last Thursday, I was at home and Donna was at work tutoring maths GCSE or A level (she teaches both). I had the strangest experience. First, my left leg became weak and limp, then shortly afterwards I suffered numbness in parts of my left leg and left side of my head. It was a sensation exactly like the novocaine numbing induced by the dentist when they need to drill your teeth. Both the weakness and the numbness disappeared again after a few minutes and everything seemed normal again. About an hour later the weakness and numbness returned and resolved, once again within a few minutes. At this point I dialled 111 and after answering some questions they called an ambulance for me, thinking I might have had a temporary ischaemic attack (TIA). There were few ambulances available and the wait would be very long, so when Donna arrived home she drove to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital (GRH) and we went into A&E. After some basic tests – blood pressure, ECG, and answering some questions about my symptoms, I was admitted and given a CT scan of my head. This seemed to show a very small, superficial bleed in the brain, but the detail was not well resolved so an MRI scan was also ordered. I remained in hospital for further tests and a lot more thinking by the team looking after me.

An astonishing revelation

I was amazed to learn from the hospital specialists that I’d had an earlier, much more significant stroke on the left side of my brain, they pointed it out to me on the CT scan and it was clearly there. It might have occurred years or even decades ago and I’d known nothing about it! There was a significant region of damage but it had clearly had no effect that I was aware of at the time or since. The team also consider that I may have a couple of other, underlying conditions.

So now we know that my strange symptoms had something to do with a rather small bleed on the right side of my brain. The symptoms appeared in the left side of my body because of the curious fact that the right brain manages the left side of the body while the left brain manages the right side of the body. But the symptoms are not typical for this type of brain damage; nausea, vomiting and very painful headache are common, but I’ve had none of these effects, with sometimes a temporary, very mild headache after some (but not all) of the events so far. It seems that large strokes cause the classic symptoms, while tiny ones may result in episodic but minor issues like mine.

A knowledgable and helpful daughter

My daughter, Beth, just happens to be a Professor of Psychology at York University. Both she and the medical team here at GRH independently considered that my symptoms are atypical, but that small bleeds like mine cause episodic electrical activity that might explain my situation. The returning muscle weakness and the numbness are probably caused by the electrical activity, not by repeated subarachnoid haemorrhages. This makes a lot of sense to me. The consultant suggested that anti epilepsy drugs might suppress my symptoms as well, so we’re giving that a try. I had a small dose the evening and following morning before discharge from hospital with possible signs that it might be helping. They gave me a month’s supply to take home and after two weeks I can double the dose.

I’m home again now and starting to live a more normal life, though there are some things I can’t do now, like walking steadily for long periods of time, and driving the car.

Gallery Ward 1

I can’t finish without a word about the ward I am in and the other patients and the staff. Everyone has been so kind and helpful. The ward staff are kept very busy, taking regular blood pressure readings and responding to calls from the patients. There are only four beds in this bay of the ward, but lots of time spent on us every day.

The food is adequate, not cordon bleu, more like school meals I’d say, but hospital budgets are limited and the cloth has to be cut accordingly. I have no complaints whatsoever.

My three room mates are a mixed bag. R is in his nineties but the years rest lightly on him, he soldiers on and is really friendly, E across the other side of the ward, is hard to understand when he speaks, but is a really nice guy, incredibly fond of his daughter and grandson. They are regular visitors, his daughter is visibly distressed at times and clearly really fond of her Dad. It seems to me to be a great privilege to see these interactions. D is feeling sorry for himself and tends to become anxious and sometimes agitated if he doesn’t get the attention he thinks he needs. Like any community we’re a mixed bag, but it’s clear that we want the best for one another and want to be as encouraging as possible.

And finally, what a blessing the NHS is, one of the advantages of living in the UK, expert help when and where it’s needed, and paid for by the government through National Insurance payments and taxation.

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

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Cirencester Hospital

Eradicating coronavirus

Tree shading

Put an upturned bucket over a patch of grass in your garden. Lift the bucket every day and take a look, then re-cover the patch… How long does it take for the grass to die?

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Image of the day – 178

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Trees provide shade, most welcome on a hot day, and they provide shelter when it rains (though this may be unwise during thunderstorms).

But notice the absence of grass beneath these conifers. Shade and shelter are exactly what other plants don’t need; they depend on plenty of light and water to enable them to grow. Light is essential as it provides the energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and water is essential as the raw material for this process. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere, while the hydrogen is bonded with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make energy-storing sugars for use at night and to build cellulose, the main support molecule that gives stems, branches and tree trunks their strength.

The lack of light and water under tree canopies creates a kind of local desert. You can see this clearly in the photo from the presence and absence of grass. So how do the trees survive? That’s a great question! Their roots spread out widely and deep, far enough to reach moist soil and deep ground water. In persistent rain, water drips from the drenched leaves above. And root, trunk and branch all contain stores of water so a tree can cope with a long, dry summer far better than the grass can.

Light

Here’s an experiment anyone can do. Put an upturned bucket over a patch of grass in your garden. Lift the bucket every day and take a look, then re-cover the patch. See how long it takes for the grass to turn yellow. How long does it take for the grass to die?

For plants, light is essential. There are some animals that live in dark caves or underground, with no light. Earthworms are a good example, but like all animals they get their food by consuming plants and other animals. But for most creatures, including us humans, light is essential nonetheless. Whether we are plant eaters (like cows and sheep) or meat eaters (like lions and wolves) or omnivores eating either or both (like humans and rats) we still need light to see in order to find and identify the things we must eat to stay alive.

Water

For plants, water is part of their ‘food’, it’s needed to make sugars. For animals water is of no value as food, but it’s essential to prevent dangerous dehydration. All animals know when they’re thirsty and they’ll find water and drink to keep themselves alive. Think of a man lost in a desert, the cartoons have him croaking out, ‘Water.. Water..’ Imagine someone unable to find water, they’d die of thirst long, long before they died of hunger. Most of us would be in danger after a few days without drinking, but we could live for several weeks with nothing to eat. And of course, if you are a fish too little water would mean you couldn’t breathe, and if you were a land animal too much would mean you would drown.

Spiritual (not religious)

The idea of essentials has been carried over into spiritual ideas too. Light and water (and food) are so clearly necessary for life that they make good analogies and illustrations. What did Jesus mean when he said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’? Or when he explained to the Samaritan woman at the well that he would provide water that never runs out, or when he told his followers, ‘I am the bread of life’ or ‘I am the light of the world’?

He was simply saying, I am essential, you can’t live without me. I’m necessary for life. Just as in the physical world, how would it feel to live in the dark, without water and without sustenance? How long would you last? How long would I last?

Many people today feel sure there is no spiritual aspect to life at all, it’s just about living your life in the here and now and then dying from accident, illness, or just old age. Others think there’s much more to life than that. At the very least there are moral and philosophical truths to consider. We should care for one another, help one another, and cooperate in helpful and kind ways.

Food for thought. Let me know below how you think about the essentials of life. Do you have any thoughts to share on this?

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Image of the day – 20

Churn flooding

Image of the day – 38

Cloud reflection

Just from this image the brain understands there are ripples on the surface of the water and from past experience will also know that these ripples will be moving.

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Image of the day – 176

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Sometimes we see things indirectly, and our brains are capable of retrieving far more information than you might at first think. It’s true of all our senses – hearing, touch, taste, smell and all the rest. The senses provide information but the brain makes much more of it all.

What do we see in this image? It’s just a pattern of coloured patches reflected from a water surface. That’s what the eye sees. But the brain tells us there are clouds in the sky above and there are ripples on the water. Then the brain compares this basic information with what it recalls from past experience and it can construct two narratives, one for the clouds and another for the water.

The clouds

There is a dark cloud and it’s the closest one to us, it threatens a shower of rain. A second image taken a few seconds later would be enough for the brain to decide the direction of movement of the cloud and predict whether the rain might fall here or somewhere else. Paler clouds, white clouds and blue sky suggest there’s some sunshine around as well so although there might be a brief shower, it won’t turn into ongoing steady rain. All of that from from a few colour patches.

The water

Because of the way the cloud reflections are distorted, the brain can infer the water is neither heavily disturbed not completely calm. Just from this image the brain understands there are ripples on the surface of the water and from past experience will also know that these ripples will be moving. The same brain will realise that there are two likely causes; either there is a light breeze blowing or perhaps a boat has passed recently. Once again, past knowledge in memory is necessary to arrive at these conclusions. There are some large ripples and, near the top of the image, some much smaller ones too. There was a small disturbance in the water further away as these small ripples seem to form an expanding circle of which we see only a small part.

Here and there things are floating on the water, small leaves, perhaps? If so, there must be trees nearby, perhaps with branches overhead. What a lot the brain can reconstruct on the basis of prior knowledge! And all of these conclusions come from some patches of colour in a still image. And what about the little sticks emerging from the water on the left-hand side? It’s the remains of vegetation of some kind. Was there a plant growing in the water? Did a strong wind break twigs off an overhead tree branch?

And one last point – it was not raining at the moment the photo was taken. The water would have been covered with dozens of circular disturbances if rain was falling. That’s a lot of information that your eyes and brain can glean from a single fragment of time trapped by my camera!

We are, as the Bible expresses it, fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14).

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Churn flooding

Season’s Greetings 2023

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Latest news on the Lion

I was able to put the puzzle together during a recent holiday in the Lake District. A jigsaw is a family tradition for us every year, we usually do a 1000-piece, commercial cardboard puzzle but I’d say the lion was rather more difficult.

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Image of the day – 175

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

My Sister, Rachael decided she wanted to learn to make traditional wooden jigsaws and bought a power scroll saw to learn the skills and processes involved. Having mastered the process she asked me for a clear photo of the lion picture I made in 1969. I had to take the picture out of the frame to avoid reflections in the image. I also had to adjust the image shape in GIMP to correct the geometry, and I increased the contrast to bring the black and white parts of the image closer to the way they originally appeared. Rachael used my image file to get the lion picture printed on plywood ready for cutting. She didn’t tell me she was making the jigsaw as a gift for me, so it was a lovely surprise when she handed the pieces over in a decorative container. I’m so impressed that Rachael has learned to design and cut jigsaws. She is also restoring old jigsaws, cutting replacement pieces if they are missing and lost. She even paints the new pieces to match the rest of the puzzle when necessary. So clever!

With the help of my wife, daughters and grandchildren, I was able to put the puzzle together during a recent holiday in the Lake District. A jigsaw is a family tradition for us every year, we usually do a 1000-piece, commercial cardboard puzzle but I’d say the lion was rather more difficult. Today’s image shows the completed jigsaw.

The jigsaw of life

Life is sometimes a bit like doing a jigsaw. Nothing seems to fit at first, but once you have some pieces in place it begins to get easier as you recognise more pieces with just that shade of colour or a similar texture. It takes a long time, but you get there in the end. Perseverance is necessary to complete a jigsaw, that’s another thing that’s true in life, you have to persevere; giving up is not an option. Attention to detail is crucial for a successful outcome.

Can you think of other parallels between jigsaw building and life? If so, drop me a line in the comments section below.

Two short videos about cutting the jigsaw

The two videos below show my very clever sister, Rachael, working on the jigsaw. In the first one she talks briefly about the cutouts and little lion shapes (or ‘whimsies’ to use the proper jigsaw terminology). You can see these clearly if you look at the photo at the top of the article. The second video shows a small extract of the cutting process.

Techie video

A techie maths video all about jigsaws and the number of pieces in each, picture shape ratios, piece shape ratios, probably far more than you want to know. None of it applies to the Lion jigsaw as that’s hand cut, each piece is unique and there are no rows or columns.

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The lion roars

The Sopwith Pup

The navy and the army (the Royal Flying Corp was part of the army) ordered numbers of the planes and they served well until superseded.

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Image of the day – 151

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

This lovely old aeroplane is a Sopwith Pup, as used by the Royal Flying Corp during the First World War. Sopwith was a major British aircraft manufacturer of the day. This aircraft is still flying from time to time in England where it’s based at Old Warden Airfield, itself a survivor of the First World War. This particular aircraft was built after the war and modified back to the fighter configuration.

In the photo the engine is being tested after maintenance, so a couple of side panels have been removed for inspection. The propeller was spinning, you can see the motion blur in the image.

Here’s the same aircraft in action.

Design and construction

Based on a smaller, earlier aircraft, Sopwith designed the larger Pup as a fighter in 1915 with the first prototype appearing in 1916. Both the navy and the army (the Royal Flying Corp was part of the army) ordered numbers of the planes and they served well until superseded and transferred for training purposes as newer, more effective fighting planes rapidly evolved.

This aircraft was much lighter than its German counterparts. It could take off and land on grass surfaces, in quite short distances. The Pup was very manoeuvrable, had a tight turning circle, and a high service ceiling for those times.

The Pups were replaced with Sopwith Camels during 1917.

Old Warden Aerodrome

Old Warden was a First World War air station, as already mentioned. It lies just north of Shefford and south-east of Bedford. Today it’s the home of the Shuttleworth collection of old aircraft and motor vehicles, a very fine and famous collection with a long history, originally as a private collection, but now open to the public. The old aircraft are frequently rolled out, and often one or more are performing in the air.

Everything that’s not active on a particular day is stored in a series of First World War hangers and those are all open to visit as a museum with informative explanatory material on display as well. There is active maintenance and restoration going on, and some of that may be on display too.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, and are in the area, I highly recommend popping over for a visit.

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Nearly a year ago now…

War, survival, victory

Installing our heatpump

It all took longer than we expected and some changes had to be made to the design as events unfolded, but by the beginning of February the new system was in and working.

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Image of the day – 144

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.

At the end of January our heat pump was installed, and before long we had warm radiators and underfloor heating, something we’d missed since our gas boiler developed a fault in October. At the time our first thought was to get the boiler repaired, the part would cost £500 and the labour would be a similar amount and at the end of the process we’d still have a seven-year-old boiler and we’d still be burning gas. We wanted to avoid using gas if possible because we want to reduce the amount of carbon-dioxide we produce.

There is a substantial government grant to make heat pumps a more attractive idea, so we thought it made sense to take advantage of it. After discussing it with our energy supplier, Octopus Energy, one of their surveyors visited, made a plan of the rooms, specified the required changes to our radiators, planned for pipe runs and siting of equipment, and we were ready to roll.

It all took longer than we expected and some changes had to be made to the design as events unfolded, but by the beginning of February the new system was in and working.

A different kind of heat

Our old heating system used a gas boiler, it could produce a lot of heat quickly on demand, so we had a series of thermostats to turn radiators and heated floors on and off as required to keep rooms at the right temperature. At night and during the middle of the day a time clock turned the system off entirely to save money, then came back on half an hour before we arrived home after work and half an hour before we woke up in the morning.

The new system is on all the time. A room thermostat increases or reduces the flow rate to keep the house at whatever temperature we set, and starting from cold it can take several days to achieve the set temperature. We’re beginning to like this way of working; the house stays at the temperature we prefer, around 19 C, and it only rises higher if the outside temperature is high. In that case the heat pump stops heating the house and just provides hot water.

Energy bills

It’s still early days to assess how our heating bill will change. The heat pump is an electrical system so our electricity bill will rise, but our gas bill will now be zero. The heat pump cools down outside air by extracting energy from it, and pushes that energy into our radiators and hot water tank. One kilowatt of electricity can push about four kilowatts of heat into our home, and as we have solar panels on our roof and a storage battery, some of that energy can come from the roof even at night. There is no environmental effect, we’re not producing carbon dioxide and the heat we steal from outside leaks back out again over time. The better our house is insulated, the slower it will leak and the less electricity we will need to maintain the temperature difference between the cold outside and the warm inside.

When we buy electrical power from the grid to pump heat (mainly in midwinter), that grid power is more than 50% green as well; so even that is far better than burning gas to keep warm.

Image of the day 144

This is the 144th ‘Image of the day’ I’ve posted. That is what we’d have called a gross when I was a child. Ten eggs in a box was ten, but twelve eggs in a box was a dozen and six was half a dozen. We still use those terms. A baker’s dozen was thirteen, a dozen with one extra for good measure. And a dozen dozen also had a special name – a gross. 12 x 12 = 144. So today there is a gross of ‘Images of the day’ on the Journeys of Heart and Mind website!

I wonder if I’ll ever reach a great gross, ie a dozen gross, or 1728 ‘Images of the day’?

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Time for a new paradigm

Wikipedia’s entry on Patreon

Thinking out loud – 4

Times change and businesses and organisations have to change too. You see the same situation in ecosystems: weather patterns change, or a new species of plant or animal moves in, and the balance shifts. Plants and animals that used to thrive begin to struggle or even die out, others prosper.

Internet conditions have been changing, and continue to do so. YouTube, pressured by the popularity of Tik-Tok style short video clips is bringing YouTube ‘shorts’ front and centre, and longer, more serious videos are both more expensive to host (because they are longer, slower to upload, and need more storage), and less popular with younger audiences (a recently growing sector.) Blogs have become less popular for the same reasons. Print media have been suffering too, everyone wants video reports on current events. Even TV channels are suffering, seen as boring and not for the current generation.

So what to do when the old models fail? That was the issue Fraser Cain faced.

Here’s a story of frustration and hard work when a website failed, revenues had been trending downwards for some time and the YouTube part of the operation proved problematic for a different reason. The solution? Patreon, and a new (old) approach to funding. Watch Fraser Cain’s video below where he shares the full story of the website failure and reconstruction, the problem with YouTube, and the new emphasis on Patreon going forward.

Patreon

The answer, as you have seen, was to find a new model; or perhaps it’s just an even older model come back in disguise! Provide material, perhaps in large part for free, but then charge a weekly or monthly subscription for extras. These might be coverage in greater depth, providing additional topics, giving an opportunity to provide feedback, or win prizes, or sell ‘merch’, or whatever other benefits you might think of.

Patreon is becoming more and more popular with creators, and for very good reason – the model is extremely successful. It works well for creators, and it works well for viewers who can enjoy an ad-free experience. Not everyone will be willing to pay for the extras, but that doesn’t matter. As long as the income exceeds the costs of production it’s a success. so the more people a creator can sign up, the lower the fee can become. It’s a great idea, it works for everyone.

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From the Stone Age

As mobile phones became more affordable and widely available the need for phone boxes vanished. This one was never removed and stands forgotten by the pavement, more or less unnoticed, draped in cobwebs, laden with layers of dust.

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Image 136 – What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.

Stone Age?

Well – Stone Age in terms of communications technology! A long time ago, way, way back in the 1980s, telephone kiosks like this one were widespread in the UK. You can see the red paint for which these phone boxes were so famous.

This particular box stands at the junction of the Gloucester Road and the Cheltenham Road in Stratton, where we live. It must have been quite busy when it was first installed. I well remember standing waiting at a box like this, sometimes there might even have been a queue of three or four people waiting to make a call.

And I remember the standard phone box smell as well. There was always a certain degree of dampness about them, often mixed with stale tobacco smoke. There was a little shelf containing a local residential directory and a yellow pages with business numbers and adverts.

This example of the British Telecom (BT) phone box has seen better days. It was converted with up-to-date equipment that must have replaced the original, black, bakelite handset with its black, enamelled, steel coin-box with Button A and Button B. But as mobile phones became more affordable and widely available the need for phone boxes vanished. This one was never removed and stands forgotten by the pavement, more or less unnoticed, draped in cobwebs, laden with layers of dust.

Useful? Interesting?

Greenshifting

Plants (secondary) trap some of the energy in sunlight and use it to grow and to store in chemical form. And animals (tertiary) obtain energy by eating plants or other animals.

Image: Wikimedia

Science and technology – 3

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We’ve just had a heat pump system installed in our home and it is so, so different from the old, gas-fired boiler that used to keep us warm in winter. I’ll give you some details about it in another article. But the main reason I’m writing is to explore what it means to be migrating towards clean, green energy; and what it means if we fail. But before we can focus on any of that, we need to understand where our energy comes from and where it goes.

Primary energy sources

We all use energy every day, as a species. And just like all other forms of life, that energy comes almost entirely from rearrangements within atomic nuclei. There are two ways this can happen – nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. Fusion is what happens in the centre of the sun where hydrogen atoms are combining to form helium, releasing a lot of heat in the process. Fission is what happens suddenly in a nuclear bomb or slowly in a nuclear reactor. Heavy atoms fall apart and release energy as they do so. The rule is that heavy elements release energy if they break apart (fission), while light elements release energy if they join together (fusion). Elements in the middle mass range around iron don’t break apart or join together easily and produce little or no energy if forced to do so. Indeed, sometimes these elements might require energy.

The sun’s energy comes from fusion in the core and is eventually released as sunshine. Sunshine heats the Earth’s surface and winds are caused as air masses expand or contract due to temperature changes. Waves, in turn, are caused by wind crossing water surfaces.

Some of the Earth’s inner energy comes from the spontaneous fission of heavy elements in the core and mantle, and some is remnant heat from Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago; that core energy is released in the form of volcanoes, earthquakes, and hot springs.

Tidal energy is the final source we need to consider. This is the result of gravitational forces from the Sun and Moon causing bulges in the oceans, the Earth revolves daily beneath these ocean bulges and the water depth varies as the state of the tide changes throughout the day.

It’s also gravitational contraction that gets the centre of a star dense enough and hot enough for fusion to begin in the first place. That’s it for primary energy sources. All of these count as green energy as none of them release carbon dioxide.

We can collect solar or wind energy, for example, with a clear conscience, also geothermal energy, hydroelectric power, hot springs, tidal power, or nuclear. There may be issues with all of these, but none of those issues have anything to do with releasing greenhouse gases.

Plants and animals

Everything else is what I call secondary or tertiary energy. Plants (secondary) trap some of the energy in sunlight and use it to grow and to store in chemical form. And animals (tertiary) obtain energy by eating plants or other animals. These too can be counted as green. The natural world runs on light from the sun, and all the carbon dioxide released is balanced by the light trapping mechanism of plants that uses carbon dioxide from the air and water from the ground and releases oxygen. The carbon is used to create the structural elements of wood and all the living tissues of plants and animals. Most of this is recycled naturally by decay within a few years or decades, and the carbon balance of the Earth doesn’t change. Except sometimes carbon containing materials were trapped long term in geological deposits of coal, oil and natural gas. This sequestration of carbon compensated for the continual, slow warming faced by the planet as the sun increased its output of light and heat over geological time.

Deep time

All stars grow brighter and hotter as they age, a perfectly natural and well understood process that we don’t need to consider here – except to mention that it happens. Rising temperatures cause shifts in a planet’s climate, and if it goes far enough a planet can become very hot, lose its water to space, and become a roasting desert like Venus.

This did not happen to the Earth because the continual, slow removal of carbon from the surface kept carbon dioxide levels low and significantly reduced the greenhouse effect.

Early human technology

Early human technologies did not involve the use of coal, oil or gas. When fire was first discovered and tamed for human use, the only fuels were wood and various kinds of plant and animal oils and fats. Our technology remained green, using only recently captured energy.

But around 4000 years ago, people began to discover surface deposits of coal and oil. The Romans and the Chinese knew of coal and used it on a small scale as a fuel.

We were still remaining green on the whole. The industrial revolution began with water power to mill grains, process wool into cloth, and so on. The first industrial towns were always built in valleys where there were rivers of sufficient size to power the machinery. Up to this time it’s difficult to find much change in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in, for example, ice cores or ancient timber. When carbon fuel was needed for processes needing extreme heat (eg iron smelting, pottery firing), charcoal was used; this was made by incomplete burning of wood in an oxygen poor environment.

But then came steam power!

Advancing industrial growth

It soon became clear that charcoal was not available in sufficient amounts to be a suitable fuel for burgeoning industry. Instead, coal began to be mined in ever-increasing quantites to feed iron and steel works, power pumps to move water from mines, and more and more to power transport. Railways and shipping consumed ever larger amounts of carbon in the form of coal. Oxygen was consumed and carbon dioxide released – and at that point the human race started on a dangerous path towards climate change. At first the increase in carbon dioxide levels was imperceptible and so was the increase in average temperatures.

And that is where we were 100 years ago.

Oil is not mainly carbon, like coal. It has almost two hydrogen atoms to every carbon in its structure so it’s slightly more green than coal. Hydrogen oxide (aka water) is a less powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Gases are even better than oil, methane is best of all as it contains four hydrogens to every carbon.

But to be fully green we must move all our energy production to solar, wind, nuclear, and tidal energy supplies. There are financial incentives to make the move too. To burn coal, oil or gas at a power station you must construct the power plant and transmission lines and then continually buy the raw materials to burn to generate power.

Wind turbines, solar panels and hydro also involve building infrastructure, but the fuels to run them – sunshine and wind – are free. This makes the energy they supply to the power grid much cheaper than energy from non-green technologies.

The economical costs of mining or drilling, as well as the health and environmental costs of emissions from non-green energy sources renders the move to greener energy an absolute no-brainer. And that’s before we start to take into account the serious risks of a warmer climate. These include rising sea-levels; unlivably high temperatures; heavier and unpredictable rain; forest fires; spreading of deserts; and harsher and more frequent cyclones and hurricanes. All of these horrors are already with us and are worsening year on year by larger and larger amounts.

Back-pedalling furiously cannot save us now. But it’s not too late to moderate the damage, eventually stabilise the problems we face, and see a gradual return to what was once normal. But we absolutely must act now, the longer we leave it, the worse it will get.

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Supersonic flight

A smaller development and test version is already flying and has just made its first supersonic flight. This is the Boom XB-1.

Image: Wikimedia

Science and technology – 2

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History

Most people know that Concorde was a joint UK/France development that resulted in a commercial supersonic passenger plane. It was technically successful and carried passengers across the Atlantic from 1976 until 2003, but for several reasons it was never commercially successful. There was also a Soviet version, the Tupolev Tu-144 that crashed spectacularly at the Paris Airshow in 1973.

But today, both Concorde and the Tu-144 are history.

Present development

Not so many readers will be aware of a commercial project to design and build a new supersonic passenger plane, or that a smaller development and test version is already flying and has just made its first supersonic flight. This is the Boom XB-1, specifically designed to cause less noise and, amusingly considering the company’s name, less transonic boom audible from the ground.

So far the project is going well; the test-flight program is well underway with promising results so far. The full-size airliner (Overture) would be substantially smaller than Concorde and carry fewer passengers, but if successful in service a larger model might be considered.

ad hoc post – 5

An astonishing revelation

A knowledgable and helpful daughter

Gallery Ward 1

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Image of the day – 178

Light

Water

Spiritual (not religious)

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Image of the day – 176

The clouds

The water

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Image of the day – 175

The jigsaw of life

Two short videos about cutting the jigsaw

Techie video

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Image of the day – 151

Design and construction

Old Warden Aerodrome

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Image of the day – 144

A different kind of heat

Energy bills

Image of the day 144

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Thinking out loud – 4

Patreon

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Science and technology – 3

Primary energy sources

Plants and animals

Deep time

Early human technology

Advancing industrial growth

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Science and technology – 2

History

Present development

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