Methane

The methane cycle is interesting. Back a couple hundred and fifty millions ago there was a really bad one that killed mostly every creature in every nook of existence. Methane will be a product of

• All us mammals -- especially you cows -- and bacteria, etc.
  
• Melting tundra in the Arctic.
  
• Methane ice (hydrides) sublimation under the 'barely cold enough' sea floors as deep water warms even slightly.
  
• Rotting kill-offs in the oceans which increase both methane and carbon dioxide levels.
  
• Positive feedback loops that melt ever increasing amounts of methane ice and tundra which trap more heat, etc.
  

It takes a lot of heat to warm the oceans, but these events have happened at least twice before in catastrophic ways and many times before in "merely bad" ways. Once the "event" begins there is no way for humans to prevent the full effect.

It seems to already have begun, plus humans are doing very little to even slow it, let alone prevent it.

Reversal of this process by methane-eating microbes will slowly restore the planet to less horrible conditions, but not until the ability to metabolize methane has evolved sufficiently in the set of surviving species. That will take a long time.

During that time most complex forms of life will be greatly reduced. Only the most austere microbial systems will thrive to provide a food chain for higher lifeforms like scorpions that can handle such temperature extremes.

This is from NASA about 250 million years ago:

The terrible event had been lost in the amnesia of time for eons. It was only recently that paleontologists, like hikers stumbling upon an unmarked grave in the woods, noticed a startling pattern in the fossil record: Below a certain point in the accumulated layers of earth, the rock shows signs of an ancient world teeming with life. In more recent layers just above that point, signs of life all but vanish.

Some scientists think it was caused by an asteroid, and it may have been. Some think that extreme volcanism was the trigger. But, whatever the initial cause, the release of methane into the atmosphere was the final stroke of doom for the life forms of that era.

Humans might be able to survive a methane event, but only in much smaller numbers and only by employing advanced kinds of technology -- stuff we don't yet have today. We should gather together recipes for cooking "clumps of whatever" for our descendants. They won't be thanking us for much else.

Another Tragedy lost in the midst of so Many

My friend from Israel just learned that his father died. Not from a bomber, not from old age, but from a speeding police boat that ran him over while he swam in a large body of water.

You just never know what it will be that gets you.

Ruby

I made my first working program using Ruby, a kind of object-oriented scripting language. It is a simple enough programming environment, and my first app just does a simple Web CGI interface on both XP and NT4.0 using Apache2 Web Servers. My only puzzle was that with NT the Apache2 server or on XP's IE7, I needed the scripting files to be named Whatever.CGI instead of Whatever.RB for Ruby scripts or Whatever.PL for Perl scripts.

Although I have C language programs that do similar things, they are far more complex and take a lot longer to write. I will continue to use C and C++ for the heavy lifting stuff, certainly.

Of course I know C better than just about any other language, but I also use C++ and whatever JavaScript, HTML and other assorted languages for whichever special purposes they are good for. Ruby has an enthusiastic Open Source support base, although the language seems to be set off against the Powers of MS and other big profit software houses who charge through the nose for their pile of Class Hacks.

I like Ruby because I like other clever Open Source things I've tried, including Apache2.0 itself. It is FREE, has interfaces to most things I need for the job and I can write whatever pieces are missing with a minimum of C arm waving. With Microsoft I have the "ripping hair out" reactions to some of the gluttonous crap they force upon the world, and which I've usually gone ahead an towed the line if I absolutely had to.

Ruby also contends with the likes of Python, which isn't too bad either, and Perl, which I understand, but get tangled in all the punctuation marks as badly as in C. Ruby must fight the C# and Java bandwagons, too. I probably wouldn't care which language I had to use as long as it did the job adequately. However, I don't feel like spending thousands of dollars on all the Microsoft things I'd need.

Since I am an old grumpy guy I have worked on lots of old programming systems and old operating systems with machines that made my wrists and fingers gnarled and pained. But I have the disease most old-timers have, "good-enough-itus". This is the syndrome where having learned 32 bit Pentium Assembler and C, bothered to struggle with Unix, Tcp/Ip, Httpd and CGI, Windows NT, XP and "the Registry, arrrgh!" there doesn't seem to be anything missing in my tool kit.

I could do whatever needed to be done right off, even if I needed to write a "driver" to get around the OS jungle of nonsense and jumping through hoops to set some bit to 1. Unless something else comes along that is HUGELY better, faster and just as cheap I don't feel a great need to spend money on it.

I don't expect Ruby to be any panacea for my own development tools, and I'm not really one of the "evangelists" who push it (and its Zen-isms). But I like it and I appreciate that it has a lot of work that's gone into it. I was actually very excited that my little Ruby CGI program worked right off, almost like when I finally wrote a useful program on the Apple IIe in 6502 assembler some 25 years ago or whenever it was.

The Ruby on Rails issue is still pending, however, since I want to stick with Apache2 for now and the installation blob used older versions of things that I already had newer versions for. I don't have a pressing need for that much of a blob, but if I ever do, I suspect their will be a newer version -- Ruby On Rails -- Blob II.

Shoot me, Please.

I went to the Dentist today. At my age it gets more painful and less worthwhile with each visit. I almost wish I didn't have teeth -- perhaps to just suck in my food like a mosquito or something. Maybe someday that is all I'll be able to do -- suck liquified glob through a straw, until my lips fall off. Then I'll have to lean back and just pour it down, slobbering, making gagging and sputtering noises and drooling all the while.

I can only hope Republicans have to clean up after me in 3 piece suits and red power ties.

Then I'll have to buy a big alfalfa truck with bad gears and pour lard into my gas tank so it smokes like the dickens while I drive really slow and honk my horn at everybody that gives me the finger. Every once in a while some alfalfa will fall off the truck and I'll stop it right in the middle of the superhighway and use a pitchfork, real slow like, until I get every scrap back onto the truck and tie a bunch of gunny sacks over it.

It should really be a hoot going up through the mountain passes at 3.5 miles per hour with those lard fumes wafting through the beetle infested trees.

Maybe, instead, I should just rinse my mouth with salt water so it doesn't get infected and maybe it won't hurt so much.

Getting Rich

Greed has taken hold of America, especially those who are already rich. If you are poor, maybe you would like to be rich, and you work hard and work hard and get nowhere but poor.

Perhaps if you are lucky enough or smart enough you might make enough money to satisfy your desire to be rich -- the legal way. But if you get too greedy you rob banks, or something like that. If you are rich, you already robbed the bank, but you need to rob more people so you open a bank.

If you are the bank, you rob everybody (called "fees") because bankers just aren't ever rich enough to quench their greed.

The more in debt you are the more in debt you become, because the interest becomes so great that the fees become even greater, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

There is very little left to do, since you can't go bankrupt anymore, at least not with any hope of improving your financial situation. They will eventually just take your property and all you paid for all those years will be lost to those who are already rich and become richer and then more greedy.

Then you become homeless, or live in squalor while the bankers and oil barons live in ridiculous wealth and hire your children as servants and prostitutes. Things haven't changed all that much since the days of Babylon.

Madmen across the Water

The world is full of these guys. They are here and there and everywhere. Not all of them are pricks, some are just imitating other madmen. Madmen often can't think on their own. It takes some other prick to egg them on.

Our lives will just get less and less free until we are hiding in our bunkers, dependent on armored bread delivery Vans, driven by Madmen of another sort, which carry guns and shoot the other Madmen.

I don't fly anymore, for business or pleasure. I would have to be a Madman to resume that practice. There are plenty of other Madmen in the world for that.

Life Molecules Far Out

This is more ammunition for the Evolution Theory. There will always be true believers and true disbelievers, but the molecules can only tell the actual truth.

There are still questions about how all that stuff links together into such complex living forms like bacteria and babies, but the basic building-blocks have been tumbling through space for billions of years. There is little time left to complain about things though. Armageddon draws near, or so some think.

Ruby on Rails

I have recently downloaded and installed a blob of software called "InstantRails" which is a combination of Ruby, PHP, Apache and MySql, which in themselves consist of a bunch of other sub-blobs of helper software.

So far it has gone smoothly, although I was a little puzzled at first how to mix my own Web pages and CGI programs in with that stuff, making yet another "super-blob" of software. Also, since I was using Apache2.0 before this InstantRails thing, and it uses Apache1.x, I'm hoping that the next Rails release will use Apache2.0 instead.

Now that I have all the stuff running, I have about double the number of source files of various software packages than before, which makes my own Fuzzy Indexing products even more valuable to me, which greatly enhances my poor brain's ability to find stuff in that great ocean of data on my XP hard drives.

Anyway, it all works together now, so in addition to this Blog I have my HouseWideWeb Blog too, made from the "Typo" blogging interface implemented in InstantRails.

I really like the editor SciTE which handles almost every source file I can imagine and some I never heard of. (Too bad Cobol guys, not for you! But they do handle Fortran.)

I also have Python stuff, other Ruby stuff, Gnu c++ stuff, OCR'd text files, HTML and Javascript files galore, PDFs and Docs, etc, etc, and the Fuzzy Indexer still hums away.

I wonder, though, how can people learn so many programming and scripting languages, object oriented cgi methods, yada yada, without forgetting how to go to the bathroom?

Ranting and Raving Maniacs

I just want to scream sometimes when I find out the latest crap from the Middle East. I don't care who started this war, whether it was the IDF or Hezbollah or Syria or Iran. I am not "for the IDF" so much as I am "against Iran". I don't think either Syria or Hezbollah would be much more than loud mouths without the "help" of Iran.

Iran has few Arabs living amongst them, being mostly Persian. They generally dislike Arabs and what do they care whether 10 or 10,000 Arabs get killed by the IDF? As long as it provokes their political goal of "killing Zionists" they couldn't care less about the deaths of innocent children or soldiers, Arabs or Jews alike. It is like killing two birds with one stone.

In all of Islamic countries there are killings going on, senselessly and mercilessly, and not just of their "true enemies" in the West, but of each other. More Iraqis are dying at the hands of other Iraqis than from Americans or any other ethnic group. More Palestinians are killing each other to gain warlord of the month status than are killed by the IDF. And any resistance of the IDF results in more Arabs being killed than Jews.

Tribal societies tend toward these methods in times of crises. Their hierarchical pecking orders are severe and ruthless. Add AK47s, C4 and Anti-Tank Rockets to the mix and you get terrorism.

Then add incompetent, corrupt leaders in the West and you have a long, bloody descent into ruthless mass destruction, with poverty and ruin the only gain. The world is like teen-age gangs armed with the nastiest technology science can devise. The leaders of Iran act like 8 year old boys. The president of America has trouble pronouncing English words.

Methane beginning to melt

This article describes the true problem with our future. Perhaps I'll die of old age before the bad stuff happens, but I have a grandchild who may have to live through the worst of times.

There is no human way to reverse the methane hothouse feedback loop once it is tripped. It doesn't matter whether it is man-made or not, it will be devastating to all higher level life forms. The biochemistry involved will suit only the hardiest of microbes such as those found near geysers and deep sea superheated vents. They will eventually eat all the methane and carbon byproducts after numerous volcanic eruptions have occurred over millions of years.

Of course, almost nothing we do now will make any difference. Maybe some theories about injecting sulfur into the upper stratosphere to increase the planet's albedo have merit, but I think such extreme measures would cause other slightly less horrible conditions for life, such as acid rain lasting for centuries. Actually, since it is an experiment that cannot be performed in advance, nobody really knows what would happen.

All in all, though, whatever marks humans leave on this planet, they will be erased eventually. There will only be shadows of our bones etched into the rocks but no sentient beings to wonder whence they came.

Animals Vs Bacteria

There are few bacteria enthusiasts among our class of complex life forms. Generally, bacteria and similarly smelly slimy things are the most disgusting matter that exists, and our bodies must continually fight off the more invasive kind.

Yet we must live in a world created by bacteria. The oxygen would not exist, clean water could not exist, and no plants or animals could survive without the necessary preparations made by bacteria before more complex life forms ever evolved. We are a kind of parasite on bacteria, from their point of view, and of little consequence should we cease to exist.

There are some bacteria and fungi that we actually like. The stuff that turns milk to cheese and makes bread rise and ferments wines is only slightly different from the stuff that decays our discarded bodies after or even before we die. To a high complexity life form like a fish or tree or human, all that bacteria out there must more or less be taken for granted. No one is going to survive without it.

Recent newspaper articles describing flesh mutilating algae in the oceans are kind of scary. This is one study, and this one from NASA reflect many recent examples of toxic goop that benefits from human activity or rare natural circumstances. Perhaps things are somewhat out of balance. But don't worry for the bacteria. They make out like bandits no matter what happens to us. And if life gets tough for one stinky kind of bacteria when there is too much oxygen, it is only a boon for the ones that don't like so much hydrogen.

Whether humans are part of the equation makes little difference to the total population of bacteria. We could only slightly benefit certain kinds of bacteria over others, but hardly make a dent in the vast numbers of single celled life forms.

I have the feeling that in the entire Universe that bacteria-like life forms are the prime supremacy. Bacteria can evolve over vast dynamic ranges that more complex forms are too fragile to handle. Although it is improbable that lifeforms survive the conditions on the surfaces of stars, there are endless possibilities for those seemingly insignificant bits of self-replicating molecules -- life. The range of conditions on this planet are quite high and bacteria have found ways to exist in nearly every condition short of molten lava.

It is even possible that our own living molecules are from beyond our own star and that we share some ancient birth with billions of other separately evolved beings. Some arguments say that the number of combinations is too high for "random chance" to create life. But if there are some survivors from billions of separate beginnings and perhaps even spanning several "lifetimes" of Universes that have alternated big crunches with big bangs. Perhaps some molecules accidentally survive the cataclysms of ultimate black-hole destruction, like survivors of a tornado, and carry the patterns learned over trillions of evolution trials to the next generations of Universes.

That would be very difficult to prove, other than going about gathering up samples and running intricate tests, the ultimate star trek episode spanning trillions of light years. But it is also difficult to prove any other explanation beyond question. The certainty is that we somehow exist. How long? Ask the bacteria.

Free Energy

There is a lot of energy in and around our world. On the other hand, there is very little energy that doesn't cost something -- money, freedom, clean air. But the main reason energy costs money is because the people that own the energy sources sell it for as much money as they can get out of it.

But why isn't energy free? What would you pay if someone decided that oxygen belonged to them, such as if Bill Gates bought the atmosphere. Since you cannot live without oxygen you would pay whatever it cost, or would kill whoever tried to charge money for it, whichever was easiest. Fortunately no one has figured out a way to own the atmosphere, but I am pretty certain that someone is trying to do that.

Energy can be carried in buckets in the form of gasoline, in lenses or mirrors to focus sunlight, in towers which are pumped full of liquids at great heights to store "gravity", in our food that we convert into various heat and mechanical power. A spinning disc made from heavy metal can be suspended in a vacuum upon magnetic bearings which both impart the momentum and draw it down as needed -- the flywheel engine.

Water can be heated to temperatures beyond boiling and emitted in flash steam jets for powering pistons or turbines. Anything can be used to heat the water, from coal to focused sunlight. Similarly, other gases can make use of differences in heat and cold for a "heat engine" effect.

None of these things are really practical unless they are available in the same manner as gasoline or electricity. I like electricity best because it has fewer issues such as carbon monoxide poisoning or fiery explosions. (Fewer does not mean none, for I'm sure I would be uneasy with giant versions of cellphone batteries. And it depends what is used to generate electricity.)

I could really go on about the physics of this subject but it is really a political problem, and therefore I am not too qualified to solve the problem. Political problems do not seem to ever become solved so much as they provide straw men to which blame can be assigned. Beheading the king's alchemist will not increase the production of gold from lead.

Someone should be fired if a nuclear plant blows radioactive gases into the city. The party in office during environmental disasters should suffer political beheading for the inevitable lapses in competence. But, mostly, nothing is ever done and no one is every held accountable. We, the great unwashed, just keep paying the consequences in frustration and fail to ever prevent them in the future.

Katrina has turned out like that. A lot of moaning and a lot of wasted money and the water will seek its own level anyway. Nature transcends politics. Reality will win to the spin doctor's chagrin.

Global warming is a slightly different issue from free energy, but that subject is unavoidable when speaking of energy production. Lets say that all 6 billion people who now live on the Earth simultaneously can use any amount of energy at a whim, even all at once, such as when heat waves occur and the air conditioners run full tilt boogie. The act of using air conditioners to cool buildings releases a great deal of heat into the environment which really makes the problem worse, because the higher temperature the less efficient the cooling system will be.

A light source that makes 1 lumen at 100 degrees C is less efficient than a source for 1 lumen at 1 degree C.

I have an LCD flat panel screen in front of me, and it seems bright enough, but it is a much cooler device than when I had a CRT producing a similarly bright screen. Hopefully all technology can trend this way so that there is more useful work extracted from every photon lost in the conversion.

I don't think this can be extended quite so easily to moving devices. Flying objects involve pretty distinct and demanding physics equations that cannot be minimized arbitrarily. A bumblebee cannot be made from lead, and making F16s from paper mache is not an option. But making very special "pastes" made from carbon fibers and lightweight epoxies can be used in devices that fly effectively with low power.

Laziness is a common trait in human-kind. Our children will experience shortages in many commodities in their lives (we are short of electricity in heat-ravaged cities already). They will try to preserve some knowledge of technology from our time but sometimes they will just neglect it, such as we have neglected horses and buggies from our forefather's times. There are still horses and buggies, but they are novelties rather than commodities.

If we were to lose our cars, trains, planes and buses because of a complete lack of fuel, perhaps a few of us would try to use horses, but eventually we would just reduce to bicycling or walking. A bicycle is the minimum technical transportation device (or unicycle -- for purists), and they can be fashioned by reasonably skilled craftsmen from reasonably low tech materials.

We must retain our space technology if we want to use space as a supplemental power source, such as giant solar collector arrays in orbit so that manufacturing and pollution problems can be left in space, where all the energy is infinitely abundant, so that only the final products and minimum pollution is allowed back on the surface of our planet.

But this requires non-lazy, technology preserving activity on the part of our offspring. Hopefully they can keep space technology from fading into oblivion. But it is something that needs vast amounts of power just to get small things into orbit. The bootstrapping process might require more energy than we can afford.

If I were to design a bicycle for the future it would have to:

1. Store and re-use gravity and momentum, either using flywheels or electricity
2. Be durable on uneven, treacherous surfaces and in bad weather
3. Consist of easily manufactured materials, even ceramics and wood
4. Use no external energy sources other than human power or sunlight
5. Be able to safely carry baggage, such as a side of beef

This precludes a lot of stuff like fancy alloy materials but makes it more likely that an insurance salesman could retrain himself to make one. Not every man could produce such devices from scratch, but enough could. Maybe a few could even make Lexus bicycles for those who are too good to ride the "plain" ones. Also, for people with missing limbs or other disabilities there can be other embellishments and auxiliary power supplies.

6 billion bicycles are much less likely to foul the environment than 6 billion cars, and will use billions of times less energy from fossil fuels and result in far less pollution. Plus, people will suffer less cardiovascular problems caused by sedentary lifestyles.

Of course there are times when bad weather might completely preclude the use of human powered vehicles, or even horses. But there are times when weather makes the use of any automobiles or powered vehicles impossible or dangerous.

None of these ideas can occur immediately, of course, but given enough discomfort, humans can eventually do what it takes to reduce it.

Watching From A Safe Perch

Many years ago, maybe it was 1973, I watched the bloody Mideast war from the "Safe Perch" here in America. We were still embroiled in Vietnam at that time, and things like wars in Israel seemed nearly insignificant. I noted only that a lot of tanks shot at a lot of other tanks and wondered what good tanks were in modern wars.

Our war in Vietnam was much different, a war in jungles and rivers and mountains that all seemed to merge from one country into another without any particular noticeable boundaries. Literal "ant trails" would provide the super highway of war materials which seemed to cross country boundaries wherever convenient, perhaps hoping American air-strikes would not be allowed to hit across those imaginary lines. Tanks were of limited use in a land where water buffalos were still major farming machines.

I was already out of the Navy long before 1973 and it was somebody else's nightmare, just a political issue between red-necks and hippies to me. Israel had their own enemies who I barely cared about.

We are today in a kind of Vietnam again. Not all things are parallel, since the landscapes are much different -- a severe lack of water rather than an overabundance. The people are much different. They seem to want to die. People in Vietnam may have been sacrificed, but usually against their will. People in the Islamic wars will brainwash their children to volunteer as guided weapons for somebody like Iran or Hezbollah to use against minions of the Great Satan, of which there are plenty.

Is our perch so safe? Probably we are safer than Israel, since it would be harder for the same terrorists to rain missiles down on America. Perhaps Iran or WhoeverStan will try to nuke us someday, but that seems pretty suicidal and even if we did not retaliate, it would only destroy a small part of America and Awaken the Great Satan to a form unrepentant with vengeance. We would annex their oil wells and destroy their access points to commerce.

But the same people who cheered when the 9/11 event occurred are fighting Israel and crying foul when civilians are "murdered by Israel". I feel no sorrow for the adults of that land. They dance in the streets to celebrate our hardships, or a minor victory over Israel. They will claim victory from the ashes of their proud Islamic wastelands.

I will feel more tired of war, no matter who wins, or claims to win. What does the winner win? What prize do they get? What medals do they pin to their chests? What do they inscribe on the gravestones of their children? Do those who kill for God die a more glorious death than those who kill for pillage? I doubt it. From my safe perch it all seems like endless senseless murders which come and go for thousands of years.