Meltdown at the DePriest House

The Fighting Texas Aggies just lost to the Red Wolves of Arkansas State University. The final score was 18-14. The Ags missed 2 field goals and failed to punch it in with 2nd and goal from the 1. Don't bother calling because I am not answering the phone.

I blame myself. Sophie is not wearing her Aggie Cheerleader uniform. I figured we were playing ASU and the Ags wouldn't need the big guns. I don't think I will make that mistake again. Soph has tried to comfort me the only way a 4 year-old knows how. She gave me a big hug. I did feel better and the game didn't seem important anymore.

I will be ok in a little while. Probably not tonight, but definitely by tomorrow morning. If this had happened 10 years ago, I would have been in a funk for a week. I guess that is called "perspective". I just hope this whole season doesn't need a lot of this kind of perspective.

By the way, I wouldn't call Chip or Cable after this particular game. They haven't figured out this perspective thing yet. I hope your teams fared better this weekend.

College Football Returns!!!

Well, it has been over 8 months since the last college game. The wait for real football (not spring games, recruiting, or NFL exhibition games) is over. I am very excited about it. College football is my favorite sport these days (once this was major league baseball). Sadly, the two teams that I am interested in watching are playing "directional" schools, so they will not be on television.

I gave you my reasons for hating soccer last week, so this week I will give you my reasons for loving college football.

Debates -- The system of determining a champion in college football's highest classification is so screwed up that it actually encourages debates about "Mythical National Champions". For example, invite an Alabama and Arkansas fan to your next party and ask them who won the 1964 National Championship. I bet they have different answers. Arkansas's argument is so legitimate that the AP changed their rules after that season.

Teams You Love To Hate -- To about half of the population of college football fans, the Fighting Irish are a symbol of all that is wrong with our country (entitlement, elitist, etc.) while the other half believes that Notre Dame is the best team on the planet. My list of teams that I want to see lose every Saturday includes Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, Miami, Oklahoma and Texas. I would likely throw a big party if all were to lose on the same day.

Irrational Fans -- These are the guys that lurk on message boards for the faintest hint that a 17-year old from Timbuktu who runs a 4.3 40-yard dash has included their school in his final three. It is kind of sad that their weekends can be ruined because the whims of a teenager didn't include attending their favorite school. These irrational fans include my dad who begins EVERY season with the expectation that the Razorbacks will lose at most 2 games because, "The Hogs are good, but you know how stout the SEC is. You KNOW that they would win any other conference."

Rivalries -- Michigan/OSU, USC/Notre Dame, Texas/Texas A&M (the BEST ONE!), etc. Sure, I know the Yankees and Red Sox don't like each other, but you will see the players that play for both teams during their career. The same goes for the Bears and Packers. In college football, they play 3 hours for 365 days of bragging rights that can't be escaped until the next clash with that rival. You will find strange and humiliating wagers associated with these games.

So, if you are wondering my plans for weekends over the next few months, I will be trying to find someway to watch football on Saturdays. If fate is kind to me, the Aggies will be on TV. If not, I will be re-living the last two Fridays after Thanksgiving. I have bragging rights until that day. That's when they go up for grabs in the Lonestar Showdown.

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**Cross Posted at the Arkansas 7-on-7 Football.

Kindred Spirits*

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Well, my soccer post generated more than just a comment. In my email, I had a note from my buddy Cable who was mentioned in the post. He has put even more thought into his hatred of the foul Un-American game that is soccer. I asked him if I could put the email into my blog. He has agreed.

So, what should you know about Cable? He is a nuclear engineer working as a researcher at Texas A&M. He will finish his Ph.D. soon, right Cable? He has two kids and a very patient wife. I imagine living with him is almost as difficult as living with me. Basically, I believe that the only thing that has ever caused us to disagree is an R. C. Slocum/Jackie Sherrill debate that has gone on for at least 10 years now. He has finally (reluctantly) admitted that the dismissal of R. C. as the Aggies head coach was a mistake.

Without further ado, here is Cable's top ten list. It even finishes with a David Letterman twist.

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*Post by Guest Blogger Cable Kurwitz

Hey Russ,

Nice article. You should read this Guardian editorial. However, there is growing evidence that it is a weak link [between soccer and communism/socialism].

I continue to stand by my soccer = socialism theory and feel Jack Kemp said it best when he stated, "a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport." I do not agree with Franklin Foer who stated in his book, “[soccer] represents a direct threat to American culture and tradition.” I felt his conclusions were more anti-American than anti-soccer. I dislike the global game of soccer because of its simplicity, constantly running clock, and the idea that you could essentially never take risks and tie every match. I dislike the European terms, the lack of grading, and/or the failure to develop a method of accurately grading players performance. Most of all, I dislike the continued desire by those socialists within our borders to be more like the world and embrace soccer. As Europe slouches back toward socialism and a communist wave pours over South America, I realize that doing the opposite of what world thinks is the better course of action. So, with this in mind, here is my top 10 list of arguments against soccer:

1. Soccer is the ultimate game of the state that seeks to smash the individual and promote the state. Why do you always see the shots of the Proletariat cheering with the little, faceless players on the large expanse of some super stadium with a name like The Giant of Alberdi or the Big Stick? Baseball is perfect because it promotes the individual. A bad pitcher can’t be helped by the rest of the team. Also, because all 162 games in baseball count (no friendlies), one can compile statistics to accurately rank each player. As in America, the individual triumphs.
2. Why do the officials appear to be secret police types with black uniforms?
3. What is a yellow or red card? Do you collect them like baseball cards? What would you do if someone ran up and shoved a yellow index card in your face? I would have a hard time not laughing or ripping it up and handing it back to Mr. KGB.
4. My favorite example is the organized hooligans associated with each team similar to the Nazi stormtroopers or red guards. Heck, this is celebrated in Berkeley with a match of anarchists named after the Kronstadt or communist aptly named the Left Wing.
5. Everyone gets an equal chance to play!
6. As one city official told me (and I later saw on TV), “We don’t keep score so everyone wins.”
7. As Russ mentioned, soccer is played with the feet like some animal versus proper sports that utilize our hands.
8. Why is the timing of the world cup similar to the typical Russian/Chinese 5 year plan?
9. Soccer is the only sport with the capability of ruining a WWII Stallone movie.
10. Finally, soccer shoe maker Umbro markets the Zyklon shoe. What a gas!

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Thanks, Cable. I don't feel like the lone kook on this one anymore. There are at least two of us.

Why I Hate Soccer

Over the years, people have noticed that I have distinct dislike for the game of soccer. When people first asked about the hostility toward futbol, I would usually say something like, "It is boring." The dislike was actually a gut feeling that went beyond the fact that the game is boring. I just didn't know how to say, "I have a visceral hatred for the game that I can't quite define."

Years later, my buddy (Cable) brought forth the theory that the popularity of soccer in Latin America was well correlated with the spread of communism in the same region. So, for lack of a better explanation, this became my answer when I was asked about the growing hostility toward the game. I know that correlation is not the same as causation, but I wanted to avoid being associated with anything that might be communistic.

After pondering the question for some time, I think I have finally hit on the real answer. First, I believe that three things separate humans from animals: (1) a soul; (2) the ability to reason; and (3) opposable thumbs. While I don't want to call soccer players and fans soulless (even though it is possible), I think that the game of soccer insults at least two of these three differences. In other words, it draws us closer to animals rather than further from them.

Here is how soccer works against reason. The basis of the human intellect and reason is our brain. A very hard skull protects it from injury. Parents are now putting helmets on kids for all manner of activities. In sports that have the possibility of head injury, they put on helmets. The athletes getting prepared for football, baseball, cycling, hockey, and NASCAR stop to put on a helmet to protect their brain. Think about that. The redneck climbing into a race car puts on a helmet while youth soccer coaches encourage kids to go home and practice hitting the soccer ball with their heads. This is contrary to every human instinct of protecting the brain. The only other sport that comes close to this is the brutality of professional boxing.

Soccer violates another of the differences between humans and animals when it requires the players to ignore their hands. Other sports (basketball, tennis, curling, even poker) pay homage to the fact that we have opposable thumbs and can pick up and control tools with our hands. In soccer, you can be kicked out of the game for exercising the instinct to use your hands.

So, there you have it. That's why I hate soccer.

AND, I didn't even get into the non-competitive attitude of youth soccer and how that will damage American competitiveness in the world economy. Before you say it, that doesn't make me a kook.

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Here is a very good article about the some of the problems facing the nuclear renaissance that I wrote about earlier.

For Those of You That Still Doubt the Agenda...

Ok. Thanks to all commentators (Josh, Kristy, Annie, and Lora Lee) for encouraging me to continue writing for a while longer. A day doing hands-on "approach to critical experiments" with highly enriched uranium (HEU) in the famed Superblock facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has given me some inspiration to find something to write about. For those that don't know (no offense, but I am pretty sure that is almost anyone that is not a nuclear geek or anti-nuclear protester), Superblock is LLNL's plutonium research facility. Here are some pictures from previous classes (if you look closely, you can see the cute little PU [plutonium] skunk on the lab coats). They have been taking pictures during the class, so eventually my class will make onto that site.

So, it took me about 10 minutes of web surfing to find something that really ticked me off. To me, it also proved that government science is not what it once was. On August 4th, Anthony Watts posted a story about a negative trend in the carbon dioxide level as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory for the first time since the measurements began. On August 5th, Anthony decided to check the data again. Amazingly, the data has CHANGED less than 24 hours after his post. Anthony has a very nice blink comparator of the changes to the data that occurred.

What's the big deal? Well, for one thing, the increasing trend in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is one of the driving forces behind "Cap and Trade" legislation for energy producers and huge carbon taxes on individuals. If the trend was started to go negative despite increased energy production in such places as China and India, it would conclusively show that humanity has little effect on the already trace amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In any case, I couldn't find a statement of the NOAA website that either explained why the data had been changed (or even that it had changed). There is a disclaimer on the site that says it is "subject to change." We are talking about a measurement with an instrument. If my data from experiments (like those today) were "subject to change," no one would ever have confidence in me as a nuclear scientist and my ethics would be called into question (especially if all my changes favored my hypotheses). It is truly astonishing the amount of change that is tolerated in the name of climate science.

Anthony was a little more industrious (you can see how if you read his post) and got an answer that satisfied him. A commentator on Watt's Up With That summarized my entire problem with this adjustment:

• "The changes go all the way back to 1974 (for those who haven’t seen the other thread). I sometimes theorize that NOAA & GISS must have time machines that allow them to get new readings 34+ years after the fact. I can imagine no other reason that policy makers base decisions worth hundreds of billions on an ever-shifting chimera of data."

We are being asked to support further research on global warming by people that are not only adjusting temperature data on a monthly basis, but they are also now adjusting carbon dioxide measurements (not model calculations) that go back over 30 years. To me, this requires faith in both the time travel abilities of these teams and a high confidence in their ethical standards. I just don't have either. And until James Hanson or Pieter Tans (the latest data adjuster) walk on water, I never will.

AND, I will continue to believe that the whole man-made global warming thing is a big grab for governmental control of our lives.

Crossroads

I don't know if it is the summertime doldrums or something else, but lately when I start to think about something to write about, I hit a brick wall. Nothing seems to charge me up enough to put the fingers on the keyboard and churn out a post. So, I am beginning to wonder if I will keep going with this project that started as basically a dare (see the last paragraph) from Annie. When you really think about it, that is kind of a silly reason for writing a blog.

In any case, I am struggling with whether to continue to search for things to write about or to discontinue writing MPU until I get re-motivated by something. The struggle is not because I have a large audience. (An average of 50 or so people drop by on a daily basis. That's not very many.) It stems from the fact that if I stop writing on a regular basis, it is likely that I will never get back to it.

SOOOO, that's where I am. I will keep my eyes open for something to get me revved up, but it may be a couple of weeks. I suggest that if you want to know when I put something new up, use the "Subscribe" button below my "Favorite Sites". If you have never used a feed reader, the Google reader is pretty awesome. Let me know in the comments if you need an invitation for a Google account.

Why? Why? Why?

Ok. I have a question. Why do things break at the most inconvenient times? Here are some examples from the last month or so:

• My brother-in-law and his family had arrived Friday afternoon to visit us. I was leaving for a trip to Denver on Saturday afternoon. So, that is the time that the damper motor that controls the AC in the guest room decides to strip a gear.
• We had to shift our plans for the guest sleeping arrangements.
• On July 2nd, our neighbor knocks on the door to let us know that he had to turn off our sprinkler valve because it was flooding the street. Of course, we were headed out of town for the weekend.
• The sprinkler repair company couldn't get it fixed until the Monday after the Independence Day break because everyone had scheduled vacation that week.
• On the Friday morning before my brother and his family arrived, the same damper motor breaks AGAIN! (Or maybe it was never fixed right the first time. Regardless, we had a hot house and people coming to stay with us.)
• We had a great experience getting this fixed (see below) after dealing with the crappy home warranty company. BTW, avoid 2-10 Home Warranty Company like the plague. They're supposed to be "one of the better ones", but they certainly weren't very helpful with our problem. They gave Kristy a ton of trouble, but she won. She always wins.
• Today, before heading to Albuquerque in the morning, I came home from dinner and gathering stuff at the office to find water flooding the street. Again.
• Hopefully, the sprinkler will be fixed this time. Apparently the glue they used the first time didn't hold. Yeah, you heard that right. Glue.

There are FOUR examples of this inopportune timing for breakdowns. I have others from our time in College Station and Albuquerque. Not that it really matters, but what are the theories out there for WHY this happens? I know I can count on Josh for a theory, but I am hoping for other contributors.

Here is the good story that I promised you earlier. When the AC zone system broke down, I called my friend Brian who owns Da Vinci Construction in Northwest Arkansas. He does fabulous work, and we trust him to help us with these types of things. He suggested that we use his HVAC "hook-up" to look at it. Hutcherson Plumbing & Air (specifically Eric Heckathorn) came over and fixed our problem on his way home from work. He had already worked a full day, but he spent another hour working at my house. THANK YOU, ERIC (and Hutcherson Plumbing & Air)! If you ever need help with HVAC (or plumbing), give them a call. They were great!

So, Josh, I am anxiously awaiting THE theory.

Stupid Human Assumption

Early this week, I experienced another "poke the monkey" episode (see the comment section). This time, my loyal commenter, Josh, sent me a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article that links global warming with increased incidence of kidney stones (here is press coverage that attempts to explain the journal article). In a previous post (Wanted: Fact Checker), I talked about the seeming lack of rigor in the peer review process at PNAS. I don't think peer review was the problem in this case, but the article does have some serious issues.

The first serious issue that I have with the journal article is well covered at Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit website. Here is the kernal of importance from Steve's site:

• "... it turns out that the current kidney stone dataset is not so good for a variety of reasons. These include undiagnosed, asymptomatic stones, lack of correct documentation of recurring events, or those who just plain don’t go to the hospital. In fact, there could be up to a 35% error in the baseline prevalence of kidney stone disease! See, reconstructing climate records is nothing compared to ascertaining a census of those suffering of kidney stones."

Apparently, we really don't know how many people suffer from kidney stones very well. Since we don't this number now, how will we be able to determine whether a future increase in kidney stone incidence is due to medical science improvements in kidney stone diagnosis or to increased temperature caused by global warming.

The other real issue I have with this sort of study is that it makes the classic assumption of "stupid humans". I don't follow kidney stone medical literature, but from what I can gather, a mean annual temperature above a certain degree (I think it is 13 degrees C) is correlated with increased risk of kidney stones. Basically, where it's hot, there is higher percentage of the population that is diagnosed with kidney stones.

The authors of the study assumed the worst case among the climate scenarios published by the IPCC (SRESa1b) and placed the GCM modeled temperature increases on top of today's instrumented temperature record to get mean temperatures in the future. I have no problem with this except for my well-known objections to GCMs that I will lay aside for now. What we end up with is a greatly expanded "Kidney Stone Belt" in the southern and southwestern U.S.

Where does the "stupid human assumption" come into play? In the press account, we find out the best way to prevent kidney stones is to simply drink more water. The authors implicitly assume that humans will not change their behavior in response to climate shifts. Does that make sense to you? I know if I started hearing about 30% rises in kidney stones among my neighbors, I would start drinking more water. Actually, the response of an individual to this sort of increased risk is "so easy even a caveman could do it."

Finally, an interesting tidbit that came out on Climate Audit: "The SE United States has actually undergone slight cooling over the past century." Isn't that a kick in the pants to the authors? It is cooling in the present Kidney Stone Belt.

Now, if there were just someway to tell me if the authors of this study are looking for more funding of kidney stone research... Ahhh, there it is. "The related cost of the predicted increase in kidney stones would be $900 million to $1.3 billion as the kidney stone belt expands northward and westward from warming, the researchers said."

As my buddy Chip would say, "What ARE the odds!?!"

What Can Replace Petroleum?

I saw this article about 4 weeks ago, so I apologize if you have seen this already. Since I first read this article, I have been too busy doing other things (like this) to write about it. It is also a little bit perkier than the stuff I normally write about. The article appeared in the Times Online and discusses the fact that some researchers in Silicon Valley have engineered bacteria that excrete substances very similar to petroleum.

Apparently, a company called LS9 has been asking a very intriguing question. They have been asking, "If you removed all constraints, what would the ideal biofuel be?" Interestingly enough, they came up with petroleum as the answer to that question. So, some genetic engineers, biochemists, synthetic biologists, metabolic engineers, bioinformatic specialists, and chemical engineers got together with venture capitalists to make petroleum derived from biological organisms. The initial results seem to suggest that they have done it, but we will find out for sure over the next couple of years.

This is the silver lining to $4/gallon gasoline and $140/barrel oil. High energy costs leads bright and daring people to come up with innovative ideas like this. The initial projections based on pilot production is that with optimum feedstock (like sugar cane), the company projects that it can break even if the price for the end product (bio-petroleum) is approximately $50/barrel. The equations are more difficult when the initial feedstock is something less the optimal, but there is a tremendous amount cheap (or waste) biomass available.

As you might expect, there are questions about the scale up to commercial production. Others (like Walt) might wonder when the greedy oil companies are going to get together and buy the patents and company to make this apparent solution disappear like they did with the water car and the spaceship from Roswell. The basic question I have for the LS9 people is whether the bacteria can be modified to efficiently use cellulose based materials as the feedstock.

In any case, I think the answer to the question of what will replace petroleum in the future is ...(drumroll please) ... PETROLEUM. I guess we will need that 12 step program for oil addiction recovery just a little bit longer. WHOOP!

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As a side note, I have added to my list of 101 Things About Me.

Ho Hum, Physicist Claims End Is Near, Again!

OK. These days I am struggling through the day to get my work done with a nagging ailment (see Item 7, Number 3 here). So, finding new material for posts on subjects that I am used to writing about has becoming very secondary when I get a free moment. Luckily, I have friends like Cable and Brett (guest blogger extraordinaire) to, as Kristy says, "Poke the monkey."

A couple of days ago, I arrived at work to an email from Brett asking me what I thought about this article. If you don't feel like going through the effort of clicking the link, here is the summary. The international physics community (along with many governments) has gotten together to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the border between France and Switzerland. Some people including physicist and lawyer (that's a real combination) Walter E. Wagner have filed a lawsuit in Hawaii (somehow this group thinks that the state of Hawaii has jurisdiction over an international accelerator located in Europe). The lawsuit seeks to prevent the facility start up because there is "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet (emphasis added)." I quote the lawsuit because I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to do so.

This would be extremely funny if it was the first time Wagner and his group tried to stop an accelerator from starting up. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory faced an essentially identical lawsuit back in the late 1990's. RHIC overcame that legal challenge and has been operating (or destroying the world depending on your perspective, I guess) since mid-2000.

Perhaps physicists bring this on themselves by being somewhat flippant in the face of grave questions or before world changing experiments. For example, Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) tells us that to lighten the mood shortly before the first ever test of a nuclear weapon (Trinity test at White Sands Missile Range), Enrico Fermi offered to take bets from other physicists on whether or not the fission implosion weapon would ignite the atmosphere. He also allowed the side bet as to whether this ignition would just destroy New Mexico or the whole world. None of the physicists really believed that this would happen (a few weeks before Edward Teller had done the calculations anyway), but the soldiers were not so sure of the outcome after listening to the wagers being proferred.

Anyway, my first reaction to these claims of world destruction by physicists is to chuckle whether the prediction is made by giants like Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller or by Lilliputians like Walter Wagner, James Hansen, or Gavin Schmidt. That's what the giants would want while the others will never understand why I am laughing at them.

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By the way, gout is a real b&*^%. Avoid it like the plague if at all possible. I have had trouble walking the last few days because of the pain in my foot.