Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale is under way in rural areas of southwestern Pennsylvania and other parts of the state.The US has far more natural gas at its disposal than anyone thought three or four years ago:

The U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas a year, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency (EIA). The Potential Gas Committee (PGC), an organization headquartered at the Colorado School of Mines, put the country’s potential natural-gas resources at 1,836 TCF in a biennial assessment released in June. That’s 39 percent higher than its estimate of two years earlier. Add to that the 238 TCF that the EIA has calculated in “proved reserves” (the gas that can be produced given existing economic conditions) and the PGC pegs the future supply at 2,074 TCF. In other words, there is enough natural gas to supply the country for 90 years at current consumption rates. Even if we used natural gas to totally replace coal in generating electricity, domestic supplies would last for 50 years.

Almost all the newfound resources are in shale deposits, which are now estimated to contain 616 TCF of recoverable gas, says John Curtis, a professor of geology and geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and director of the Potential Gas Agency, which provides technical assistance to the PGC. Supplies in the Appalachian basin alone are calculated at 227 TCF, with the Marcellus accounting for the bulk of that. And Curtis says he expects that even more shale gas will “be in the mix” in the committee’s next assessment.

Indeed, some geologists believe that gas supplies in the Marcellus and other shale deposits might be even more abundant than the PGC estimates. In January 2008, Lash and Terry Engelder, a colleague at Pennsylvania State University, calculated the amount of recoverable gas in the Marcellus deposit at 50 TCF. But initial drilling efforts in the region have gone so well that Engelder now puts the recoverable supply of gas at 489 TCF. If that’s correct, it makes the Marcellus the second-largest natural-gas field in the world; only a massive offshore reserve shared by Iran and Qatar is larger.

Running Out

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

John Derbyshire shares one of those caustic jokes that used to circulate in Brezhnev’s USSR:

An elderly couple hears that there will be a delivery of meat at a local store. The husband hurries off to the store. After he has waited in line in the freezing cold for several hours, an official car pulls up and some KGB men get out. They tell the people in line that the meat delivery has been canceled, and that everyone should go home.

This is too much for the old boy. “Is this why we fought and suffered in the Great Patriotic War?” he calls out in exasperation. “Is this all we have to show for sixty years of socialism?”

One of the KGB men comes over to him. “Pipe down, Grandad,” he says. “That’s subversive talk. You’re old enough to know what would have happened if you’d spoken like that in Stalin’s time.” The KGB man makes his hand into a gun shape and points it at his head. “Go on home now and stop making trouble.”

The old boy goes home. Seeing him empty-handed, his wife says: “Oh no! Don’t tell me they’ve run out of meat again!”

“It’s worse than that,” says the old boy. “Now they’ve run out of bullets!”

Zinc-Air Batteries

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

A Swiss company called ReVolt has developed rechargeable zinc-air batteries that can store three times the energy of lithium ion batteries, by volume, while costing only half as much:

James McDougal, the company’s CEO, says that the technology overcomes the main problem with zinc-air rechargeable batteries — that they typically stop working after relatively few charges.

So, how does a zinc-air battery work?

Unlike conventional batteries, which contain all the reactants needed to generate electricity, zinc-air batteries rely on oxygen from the atmosphere to generate current. In the late 1980s they were considered one of the most promising battery technologies because of their high theoretical energy-storage capacity, says Gary Henriksen, manager of the electrochemical energy storage department at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The battery chemistry is also relatively safe because it doesn’t require volatile materials, so zinc-air batteries are not prone to catching fire like lithium-ion batteries.

Making them rechargeable has been a challenge:

Inside the battery, a porous “air” electrode draws in oxygen and, with the help of catalysts at the interface between the air and a water-based electrolyte, reduces it to form hydroxyl ions. These travel through an electrolyte to the zinc electrode, where the zinc is oxidized — a reaction that releases electrons to generate a current. For recharging, the process is reversed: zinc oxide is converted back to zinc and oxygen is released at the air electrode. But after repeated charge and discharge cycles, the air electrode can become deactivated, slowing or stopping the oxygen reactions. This can be due, for example, to the liquid electrolyte being gradually pulled too far into the pores, Henriksen says. The battery can also fail if it dries out or if zinc builds up unevenly, forming branch-like structures that create a short circuit between the electrodes.

ReVolt says it has developed methods for controlling the shape of the zinc electrode (by using certain gelling and binding agents) and for managing the humidity within the cell. It has also tested a new air electrode that has a combination of carefully dispersed catalysts for improving the reduction of oxygen from the air during discharge and for boosting the production of oxygen during charging. Prototypes have operated well for over one hundred cycles, and the company’s first products are expected to be useful for a couple of hundred cycles. McDougal hopes to increase this to between 300 and 500 cycles, which will make them useful for mobile phones and electric bicycles.

ReVolt is also developing a novel battery structure in which one electrode is a liquid — a zinc slurry:

To generate electricity, the zinc slurry, which is stored in one compartment in the battery, is pumped through the tubes where it’s oxidized, forming zinc oxide and releasing electrons. The zinc oxide then accumulates in another compartment in the battery. During recharging, the zinc oxide flows back through the air electrode, where it releases the oxygen, forming zinc again.

In the company’s planned vehicle battery, the amount of zinc slurry can be much greater than the amount of material in the air electrode, increasing energy density. Indeed, the system would be like a fuel-cell system or a conventional engine, in that the zinc slurry would essentially act as a fuel — pumping through the air electrode like the hydrogen in a fuel cell or the gasoline in a combustion engine. McDougal says the batteries could also last longer — from 2,000 to 10,000 cycles. And, if one part fails — such as the air electrode — it could be replaced, eliminating the need to buy a whole new battery.

The General Intelligence Factor

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

General intelligence, or g, can be measured with IQ tests and does predict success in life, Linda Gottfredson says, citing some interesting statistics:

For example, a 1969 study done for the U.S. Army by the Human Resources Research Office found that enlistees in the bottom fifth of the ability distribution required two to six times as many teaching trials and prompts as did their higher-ability peers to attain minimal proficiency in rifle assembly, monitoring signals, combat plotting and other basic military tasks. Similarly, in school settings the ratio of learning rates between “fast” and “slow” students is typically five to one.

The scholarly content of many IQ tests and their strong correlations with educational success can give the impression that g is only a narrow academic ability. But general mental ability also predicts job performance, and in more complex jobs it does so better than any other single personal trait, including education and experience. The army’s Project A, a seven-year study conducted in the 1980s to improve the recruitment and training process, found that general mental ability correlated strongly with both technical proficiency and soldiering in the nine specialties studied, among them infantry, military police and medical specialist. Research in the civilian sector has revealed the same pattern.

Furthermore, although the addition of personality traits such as conscientiousness can help hone the prediction of job performance, the inclusion of specific mental aptitudes such as verbal fluency or mathematical skill rarely does. The predictive value of mental tests in the work arena stems almost entirely from their measurement of g, and that value rises with the complexity and prestige level of the job.

Half a century of military and civilian research has converged to draw a portrait of occupational opportunity along the IQ continuum. Individuals in the top 5 percent of the adult IQ distribution (above IQ 125) can essentially train themselves, and few occupations are beyond their reach mentally. Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 110) are not competitive for most professional and executive-level work but are easily trained for the bulk of jobs in the American economy. In contrast, adults in the bottom 5 percent of the IQ distribution (below 75) are very difficult to train and are not competitive for any occupation on the basis of ability. Serious problems in training low-IQ military recruits during World War II led Congress to ban enlistment from the lowest 10 percent (below 80) of the population, and no civilian occupation in modern economies routinely recruits its workers from that range. Current military enlistment standards exclude any individual whose IQ is below about 85.

The importance of g in job performance, as in schooling, is related to complexity. Occupations differ considerably in the complexity of their demands, and as that complexity rises, higher g levels become a bigger asset and lower g levels a bigger handicap. Similarly, everyday tasks and environments also differ significantly in their cognitive complexity. The degree to which a person’s g level will come to bear on daily life depends on how much novelty and ambiguity that person’s everyday tasks and surroundings present and how much continual learning, judgment and decision making they require. As gamblers, employers and bankers know, even marginal differences in rates of return will yield big gains — or losses — over time. Hence, even small differences in g among people can exert large, cumulative influences across social and economic life.

In my own work, I have tried to synthesize the many lines of research that document the influence of IQ on life outcomes. As the illustration shows, the odds of various kinds of achievement and social pathology change systematically across the IQ continuum, from borderline mentally retarded (below 70) to intellectually gifted (above 130). Even in comparisons of those of somewhat below average (between 76 and 90) and somewhat above average (between 111 and 125) IQs, the odds for outcomes having social consequence are stacked against the less able.

Young men somewhat below average in general mental ability, for example, are more likely to be unemployed than men somewhat above average. The lower-IQ woman is four times more likely to bear illegitimate children than the higher-IQ woman; among mothers, she is eight times more likely to become a chronic welfare recipient. People somewhat below average are 88 times more likely to drop out of high school, seven times more likely to be jailed and five times more likely as adults to live in poverty than people of somewhat above-average IQ. Below-average individuals are 50 percent more likely to be divorced than those in the above-average category.

(Hat tip to Al Fin.)

Does the Vaccine Matter?

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer ask, Does the vaccine matter? They’re referring to the flu vaccine, and they make a number of interesting points:

  • The elderly account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu.
  • Unfortunately, the elderly, particularly those over age70, don’t have a good immune response to vaccine.
  • At most half, and perhaps as few as 7 or 8 percent, of “flu” cases are actually caused by an influenza virus in any given year. More than 200 known viruses and other pathogens can cause “influenza-like illness” — respiratory syncytial virus, bocavirus, coronavirus, and rhinovirus, etc. — and, in up to two-thirds of the cases of flu-like illness, no cause at all can be found.
  • Every year, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collect data from 94 nations on the flu viruses that circulated the previous year, and then make an educated guess about which viruses are likely to circulate in the coming fall. Based on that information, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issues orders to manufacturers in February for a vaccine that includes the three most likely strains.
  • Most reports coming from the Southern Hemisphere in late August (the end of winter there) suggested that the swine flu is highly infectious, but not particularly lethal. For example, Australian officials estimated they would finish winter with under 1,000 swine flu deaths—fewer than the usual 1,500 to 3,000 from seasonal flu. Among those who have died in the U.S., about 70 percent were already suffering from congenital conditions like cerebral palsy or underlying illnesses such as cancer, asthma, or AIDS, which make people more vulnerable.
  • Study after study has found that people who get a flu shot in the fall are about half as likely to die that winter — from any cause — as people who do not.
  • When researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases included all deaths from illnesses that flu aggravates, like lung disease or chronic heart failure, they found that flu accounts for, at most, 10 percent of winter deaths among the elderly.
  • Tom Jefferson, a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: “For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a vaccine, that’s a miracle.”
  • Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all.
  • In 2004, for example, vaccine production fell behind, causing a 40 percent drop in immunization rates. Yet mortality did not rise. In addition, vaccine “mismatches” occurred in 1968 and 1997: in both years, the vaccine that had been produced in the summer protected against one set of viruses, but come winter, a different set was circulating. In effect, nobody was vaccinated. Yet death rates from all causes, including flu and the various illnesses it can exacerbate, did not budge.
  • Sumit Majumdar, a physician and researcher at the University of Alberta, in Canada, offers another historical observation: rising rates of vaccination of the elderly over the past two decades have not coincided with a lower overall mortality rate. In 1989, only 15 percent of people over age 65 in the U.S. and Canada were vaccinated against flu. Today, more than 65 percent are immunized. Yet death rates among the elderly during flu season have increased rather than decreased.
  • The federal government has spent $3 billion stockpiling millions of doses of antiviral drugs like Tamiflu.
  • Flu can become resistant to Tamiflu in a matter of days.
  • On average, Tamiflu (which accounts for 85 to 90 percent of the flu antiviral-drug market) cuts the duration of flu symptoms by 24hours in otherwise healthy people.
  • In exchange for a slightly shorter bout of illness, as many as one in five people taking Tamiflu will experience nausea and vomiting. About one in five children will have neuropsychiatric side effects, possibly including anxiety and suicidal behavior. In Japan, where Tamiflu is liberally prescribed, the drug may have been responsible for 50 deaths from cardiopulmonary arrest, from 2001 to 2007, according to Rokuro Hama, the chair of the Japan Institute of Pharmacovigilance.
  • More than 50 percent of health-care workers say they do not intend to get vaccinated for swine flu and don’t routinely get their shots for seasonal flu.

People don’t trust corporations

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Luigi Zingales had a friend who worked as a consultant for the now-infamous insurance giant American International Group:

To prevent him from starting his own hedge fund, AIG offered him a non-compete agreement: a sum of money meant to compensate him for the opportunity forgone. It is a perfectly standard and well-regarded practice — but unfortunately for my friend, his payment under this agreement was to be made at the end of 2008. So he spent the early months of 2009 living in terror: His contract was classified as one of the notorious AIG retention bonuses.

At the height of the fury against those bonuses, he received several death threats. Though he had no legal obligation to do so, he returned the money to the company, hoping that the gesture might keep his name from being published in the papers. In case that failed to protect him, he prepared a plan to evacuate his wife and children. It was the responsible thing to do; after all, angry protestors had staked out the homes of several AIG executives whose names appeared in print — and only luck had prevented someone from getting hurt.

People don’t trust large corporations anymore:

In one recent survey, 65% of Americans said the government should cap executive compensation by large corporations, while 60% wanted the government to intervene to improve the way corporations are run. And those views hardly reflect confidence in the government: Only 5% of Americans in the same poll said they trust the government a lot, while 30% said they do not trust it at all. It is just that, at the moment, Americans trust large corporations even less: Fewer than one out of every 30 Americans say they trust them a lot, while one of every three Americans claims not to trust large corporations at all.

Such attitudes are common — outside the US:

In a recent study, Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch showed that public support for capitalism in any given country is positively associated with the perception that hard work, not luck, determines success, and is negatively correlated with the perception of corruption. These correlations go a long way toward explaining public support for ? America’s capitalist system. According to one recent study, only 40% of Americans think that luck rather than hard work plays a major role in income differences. Compare that with the 75% of Brazilians who think that income disparities are mostly a matter of luck, or the 66% of Danes and 54% of Germans who do, and you begin to get a sense of why American attitudes toward the free-market system stand out.
[...]
In most of the world, the best way to make money is not to come up with brilliant ideas and work hard at implementing them, but to cultivate a government connection. Such cronyism is bound to shape public attitudes about a country’s economic system. When asked in a recent study to name the most important determinants of financial success, Italian managers put “knowledge of influential people” in first place (80% considered it “important” or “very important”). “Competence and experience” ranked fifth, behind characteristics such as “loyalty and obedience.”

Selecting Talent

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Bob Sutton quotes a meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published in 1998 on the factors found to affect job performance:

  1. GMA tests (“General mental ability”)
  2. Work sample tests
  3. Integrity tests: surveys design to assess honesty … I don’t like them but they do appear to work.
  4. Conscientiousness tests: essentially do people follow-through on their promises, do what they say, and work doggedly and reliably to finish their work.
  5. Employment interviews (structured)
  6. Employment interviews (unstructured)
  7. Job knowledge tests: To assess how much employees know about specific aspects of the job.
  8. Job tryout procedure: Where employees go through a trial period of doing the entire job.
  9. Peer ratings
  10. T & E behavioral consistency method: “Based on the principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. In practice, the method involves describing previous accomplishments gained through work, training, or other experience (e.g., school, community service, hobbies) and matching those accomplishments to the competencies required by the job. a method were past achievements that are thought to be important to behavior on the job are weighted and scored.”
  11. Reference checks
  12. Job experience (years)
  13. Biographical data measures
  14. Assessment centers
  15. T & E point method
  16. Years of education
  17. Interests
  18. Graphology (e.g., handwriting analysis)
  19. Age

Arnold Kling loves that years of education just barely beats out handwriting analysis.

Ugly little creatures that don’t get cancer

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Naked mole rats are ugly little creatures, but they’re ugly little creatures that don’t get cancer:

Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind — and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why.

The findings, presented in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat’s cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells “claustrophobic,” stopping the cells’ proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells’ growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.
[...]
Like many animals, including humans, the mole rats have a gene called p27 that prevents cellular overcrowding, but the mole rats use another, earlier defense in gene p16. Cancer cells tend to find ways around p27, but mole rats have a double barrier that a cell must overcome before it can grow uncontrollably.

McAlpha Deception

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Alpha is like secret sauce, and Eric Falkenstein estimates that 90 percent of alpha is misrepresented:

Anyone in charge of a business line making money, is usually too embarrassed by the straightforward nature of their advantage to admit it, so they have to point out some nuance that makes absolutely no difference. Thus, every market maker, making money off order flow, will swear they are adding value ‘reading the tape’ or trading like a turtle, or some other such nonsense. Finance is probably the worst, because there’s so little alpha and so much branding and ‘sticky money’, that truth-telling is a strictly dominated strategy. If you ask your average financial executive to explain what he does, chances are he won’t tell you even if he knows. Further, many are actually clueless. They don’t know their job is to provide the appearance of a method to the whims of the main decision-maker, that they fit the right diversity box, or their husband is a senator. Admitting the truth would be too depressing, and the mind is very good at protecting its self image.

Falkenstein takes the secret-sauce metaphor one step further:

I like McDonald’s: it’s clean, I like the burgers and fries, my kids enjoy their play areas and have a fairly nutritious lunch (hamburger with apple slices and milk). But their burgers tend to lose adult taste tests against Burger King. Why? McDonald’s burgers are primarily loaded with ketchup, which appeals to kids, where BK has more mayo, which appeals to adults. The solution might seem easy, add an option to replace ketchup with mayo.

But that would make the burger choice seem much less alpha-like. A burger chain has a reputation, and they carefully project one of having super quality and care, or something outside the box like a square shape, or flame broiling. Heaven forbid they state, these are hamburgers, not steak. They are cooked by people who have trouble remembering to wash their hands after using the bathroom (thus the prominent signs), let alone the ordinal ranking of rare, medium, and well-done. A multinational corporation can’t produce a medium rare burger without generating a class action E. coli lawsuit, and a well-done piece of ground beef is about as nuanced (yet still enjoyable), as an ice-cold light beer.

But that’s like a finance professor saying all investment analysts can’t predict the market. A thriving industry goes on, acting as if they have alpha in every ‘buy’ recommendation, every burger. Thus, the newest McDonald’s creation are their new Angus burgers. They have… lots of mayonnaise. Too much in fact. So, even though they know this is the true ‘secret sauce’ in the adult burger battle, they emphasize the Angus dimension, and then overload the key ingredient. I prefer the more predictable double quarter pounder with no pickle.

Dr. Malthus, Call Your Office

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Dr. Malthus, call your office:

I’m reading this story about a refugee camp in Kenya. The refugees are from Somalia. The interviewer finds one of the earliest arrivals, Mohamed Nur Hajin, who’s been in the camp since 1991.
I have no hope of returning now. I have to stay here. Every day there are 500 new arrivals, so it shows you that there is nothing to go back to.

Things are rough in the camp.

Our life here in the camp is peaceful, but it is still very difficult … There is a severe shortage of water, and the food ration is not enough for everyone. It is very hard here.

There are consolations, though:

When I came here, my family consisted of three, but thanks to God, I have had six more children so now we are nine.

Lying King

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Richard Fernandez presents his four simple steps to becoming the Lying King — steps that Shephard “Hope” Fairey and Ward “Little Eichmann” Churchill discovered without his help:

  1. The first and most important thing is for the impostor to claim the motivation of revolutionary impulses. That way even those who know he is lying will think he is lying in a “good” cause. If the last refuge of scoundrels is the flag, the ultimate protective banner is the Red Flag. Hannah Arendt once wrote “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.” Find the hole in your audience’s brain and drive your truck of manure through it.
  2. The second rule is to put forward the most extravagant claims. Don’t be half-assed about lying. The more extravagant the fib the better. A sufficiently resourceful fraud clears his path of unbelievers by sheer audacity alone. Tell a big enough lie and no one would believe you could be so bold. As the fictional Rudolf Rassendyl proved in the Prisoner of Zenda that it is better to pass yourself off as King of Ruritania rather than a minor noble. A minor noble may be questioned, but the King will not be. It is all or nothing. And given that no one wants to tug at the Royal Robe to see if it is real ermine, the fraudster often gets it “all”.
  3. The third rule is that when questioned, destroy the questioner. When impersonating the King be determined to have everyone who doubts your identity thrown in the tower for treason. Once you succeed in beheading the first challenger there will be no second challenges.
  4. The fourth rule is the most important. Avoid trying to bluff those who are too big to be faced down. What undid both Fairey and Ward Churchill was that they didn’t know when to stop their imposture. They finally took it too far. Fairey, who had been successful up to that point tried to bluff his way past a major news organization and failed. Ward Churchill was already a professor when he made his “little Eichmanns” speech after 9/11 unleashed a tide of outrage he couldn’t outface. If Fairey had not launched his poster and Churchill had not made his “little Eichmanns” speech, they might still be intellectuals in good standing.

(Hat tip to Donald Pittenger.)

Pro-Business, Not Pro-Market

Monday, October 26th, 2009

True capitalism lacks a strong lobby, Luigi Zingales says, because lobbying seeks to tilt the playing field in one direction or another, not to level it:

Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.

We stand at a crossroads for American capitalism, Zingales says:

One path would channel popular rage into political support for some genuinely pro-market reforms, even if they do not serve the interests of large financial firms. By appealing to the best of the populist tradition, we can introduce limits to the power of the financial industry — or any business, for that matter — and restore those fundamental principles that give an ethical dimension to capitalism: freedom, meritocracy, a direct link between reward and effort, and a sense of responsibility that ensures that those who reap the gains also bear the losses. This would mean abandoning the notion that any firm is too big to fail, and putting rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets. It would mean adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach to the economy.

The alternative path is to soothe the popular rage with measures like limits on executive bonuses while shoring up the position of the largest financial players, making them dependent on government and making the larger economy dependent on them. Such measures play to the crowd in the moment, but threaten the financial system and the public standing of American capitalism in the long run. They also reinforce the very practices that caused the crisis. This is the path to big-business capitalism: a path that blurs the distinction between pro-market and pro-business policies, and so imperils the unique faith the American people have long displayed in the legitimacy of democratic capitalism.

I agree with Arnold Kling; read the whole thing.

Shark-on-Shark Violence

Monday, October 26th, 2009

A 10-foot great white shark — pardon, a 3m white pointer shark — was found missing some enormous chunks:

The massive chunks were probably taken out by a giant white pointer that could easily be more than 5m long, based on the size of the huge bites on the sides of its smaller rival, experts say.

The shark-on-shark attack occurred off North Stradbroke Island, east of Brisbane.

The monster took advantage of the smaller shark being snared on a baited drumline set off the island’s popular Cylinder, Main and Deadman’s beaches.

Super Concrete

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

The technology of cement-making has been repeatedly lost and rediscovered — and now “new” super concretes may lead to super bunkers:

The Romans knew how to mix crushed rock (”caementitium”), with burnt lime and water to make a versatile building material. The Pantheon in Rome boasts the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, still just as strong after 2,000 years. But cement was unknown in medieval times, with lime mortar serving as a poor substitute.

However, by the 1950s, it was obvious that much modern cement is not as durable as the ancient variety, and many buildings succumbed to concrete cancer caused by water penetration and chemical action. Ukrainian scientist Victor Glukhovsky looked into why the ancient cement recipes were so much more durable than modern ones and found that adding alkaline activators gave a greatly superior product. His work inspired Joseph Davidovits, a French chemical engineer, to discover the chemistry behind geopolymers and how it can be manipulated.

Professor Davidovits was awarded the French Ordre National du Mérite, and is President of the Geopolymer Institute. His most remarkable claim is that the pyramids were built using re-agglomerated stone, a sort of geopolymer limestone concrete, rather than blocks of natural stone. This would explain many of the mysteries of pyramid construction. Handling barrels of liquid concrete and casting in place would be much easier than moving giant blocks of stone. Remarkably, recent X-ray and microscopic study of samples has supported the theory that the pyramids are made of artificial stone.

The progress of geopolymers as building materials has been slow. Builders have an understandable tendency to stick to materials which have been around for decades and whose properties are well understood. However, the U.S. Air Force has been among the more enthusiastic early adopters — I look at military applications in the current issue of Defense Technology International (page 42).

For example Pyrament, a geopolymer-based cement is handy for the rapid repair and construction of runways. After just a few hours a Pyrament runway is ready for the heaviest aircraft, reaching a strength that conventional concrete can only match after several days.

The Air Force Research laboratory has funded geopolymer research for runways, insulation material, rocket nozzles, and other applications. It’s even been developed as special glue for holding satellite components together in the harsh conditions of space.

But the U.S. does not have a monopoly on this sort of technology. A couple of years ago Danger Room reported suggestions that Iranian scientists were working on ultra-high-strength concrete compositions. (Incidentally, high-hardness concrete is used in the construction of nuclear plants.)

The University of Tehran’s Faculty of Civil Engineering has its own Construction Materials Institute, which conveniently lists research papers in English. And it turns out that there is a lot of research into concrete technology, including fiber-reinforced concrete and concrete with ultra-high electrical resistivity. The Iran University of Science and Technology also displays some of its research in English — including a number of patents for new geopolymer cement formulations. The expertise is there; the only question is over whether there are other, unseen Iranian projects in this field.

The giant new Massive Ordnance Penetrator is reckoned to be able to break through 200 feet of 5,000 pounds-per-square-inch concrete, but just 25 feet through 10,000 psi concrete. Much harder concretes might be a real challenge.

Holiday in Cambodia

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

It’s amazing what falls down the memory hole:

My daughter, a high school junior, has a classmate whose parents are attracted to Buddhism. They accordingly went off to some Buddhist countries for their summer vacation. One of those countries was Cambodia. The classmate came back and told Nellie about the trip, then Nellie told me: “She said it was so poor, she couldn’t believe it. People begging everywhere …”

Well, I said, in view of what happened there in the 1970s, it’s not surprising they’re still poor.

“Why?” asked Nellie, puzzled. “What happened there?”

Subsequent enquiries revealed that at no point in her eleven years of public schooling had my daughter been told about the Khmer Rouge dictatorship of Cambodia. All right, it’s a small and inconsequential country: but this was one of the great horrors of the past forty years. It doesn’t even get a mention? The lowest estimates of deaths in the killing fields are of 20 percent of Cambodia’s population being murdered. Some other scholarly estimates go up to 32 percent — one Cambodian in three. This, in the name of a revolutionary peasant socialism not far removed from that preached by current leftist icons like Che Guevara.

And you can graduate from a good-quality public high school without knowing anything about it? Good grief.