Category: Teaching

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, but since the topic is me, I hereby give myself permission to tell this story.  I am guessing that it happened either in 1961 or 1962, when I when I was either four or five years old.  I know that it was before I started school.

We lived in North Little Rock in 1962, because my father got transferred.  Interestingly, we lived across the street and three houses up from the Fischer Honey plant, quite a thing, but a topic for another time.

We hear a lot about carbon these days as a greenhouse gas, sort of giving carbon a bad name.  While I agree that excessive carbon dioxide emissions from the wanton burning of fossil fuels is a  bad thing, it is not the fault of the carbon, but rather the fault of civilization for being unwise in how fossil carbon deposits are used.

As a matter of fact, without some carbon dioxide release, we would all starve because atmospheric carbon dioxide is the sole source of carbon in the food chain, thanks to the photosynthetic ability of green plants.  But this topic has been discussed in many places, sometimes in this regular series.  We shall discuss other properties of carbon and why it is essential to life as we understand life, and perhaps all life yet undiscovered.

Happy Jack was the second album released by The Who and their second studio album. It was released in the UK with the title A Quick One.  That was a little suggestive for Decca Records, the US label and the single Happy Jack has charted in the US, so that title was used.  The song lineup is a little different betwixt the two records as well, Happy Jack not being on the UK version.

Released in the UK 19661209, it was delayed in the US for almost six months, finally being released in 196705 (I am not sure of the exact day).  This record was truly transformative, and is one of my personal favorites.  It was this album where Townshend really showed that the was a writing force with which to be reckoned, and he took some risks that he would not have taken previously for a large reason:  the brilliant Kit Lambert had replaced the hack Shel Talmy as the producer of the band.

If he had lived, Roy W. Smith, my father, would have been 92 years old on the forth of this month.  He died in 2005, so was “only” 86 years old at the time of his death.  He was quite a guy, and a man of many talents.  Parenthood was not at the top of his list, but he actually did pretty well, especially considering the example that HE had.

I am going to go into some things late in this post that some might find distasteful, but that is the reality.  They do NOT involve anything like “family secrets”, so no lurid stories about child abuse of anything like that.  Dad was a human being, with virtues and vices, just like the rest of us.  But any kind of child abuse, verbally, physically, or sexually was never known by me.  Let us put a close to anything like that.

The past two weeks we have been looking about current nuclear technology for power production.  Almost all of the plants currently in commercial production are the so called Generation II and Generation III plants, and the most advanced ones are sometimes called Generation III+.  This evening we shall examine nuclear technologies that are not yet used for commercial production.

These designs are called Generation IV plants, and may either be prototypes or merely designs that have not yet even had a prototype built, but appear to be feasible to come on line commercially by 2030 or so, give or take.  There is also a Generation V set of concepts, but they are much further out as far as construction of even a prototype in concerned, and we shall not consider them here.

Last week a commentator put the bug in my ear that I do not ALWAYS have to write about subjects that I like very much.  I have done it before, but usually in connexion with other topics.  This installment is different.

This one is concerned with Pat Boone, one of the most insipid and untalented “artists” ever to plague us with his presence.  He was a creation of his time, and although he could sing, sort of, was and still is, in my opinion, more of a curious relic of desegregation.

Please come with us on a very curious journey that still does not very well explain how a relatively talentless individual has continued to be in the spotlight since before I was born, and I am not that young.  Please enter here.

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, so this installment is about two long dead denizens of Hackett.

Mr. and Mrs. Chandler were old, even by my grandmum’s standards when I first met them.  They rented that little house that my grandmum owned just to the south of her place.  They moved in around, I guess, 1965 or 1966, give or take a year.  Things were much different then.

There was a good bit of feedback from last week’s installment, and I want to point out that I am always glad when people point out flaws in my treatment.  I emphasized a particular sort of reactor, and neglected a couple of other ones.  I intend to set this right tonight.

The concern that seems to be in the forefront at present is the radiation leakage from the stricken plants.  As I write this (20110326), it is still not clear whence it comes, but I suspect that fuel rods are compromised and that nuclear fuel rod material is becoming commingled with the water that is supposed to cool the systems.

I say that because it is unlikely that if the spent fuel rod ponds were the source that the high levels of radioactive materials would have found their way into the turbine rooms, where the subcontractors were exposed to extremely high levels of radiation.

The primary thrust of this piece is to go through some of the fission products in the spent (and in use) fuel rods.  This will give us a basic understanding as to why used nuclear fuel is so much more dangerous than new fuel.

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, so this installment is about a long dead denizen of Hackett.

Arthur was not a nice man, by any means.  When I was around 10 years old, I would guess that he was around 45, give or take.  I suspect that he looked well over his real age, because he pretty much abused himself.

My good friend wanted his trailer to have some metal over the sides of it to use to tie down his riding lawnmowers, his ATV, and his large pull behind mower.  He has several acres to mow, at his farm and here at his house.

Yesterday we went to the hardware store and got supplies, went to his farm to pick up the trailer, and to the welding supply firm to get material.  We welded a little last night, and finished it today.

Welding is almost like art.  One takes a design, and makes it into a fusion of art and utility.  Dad taught me how to weld.

With the news about the horrible failure of the nuclear reactors in Japan, it occurred to me that many people do not really understand how nuclear reactors work.  This is the first part of a short series designed to demystify how nuclear reactors work.

All methods for generation of usable amounts of electricity require some sort of energy source.  In photovoltaic units, the electromagnetic energy in solar (or other) photons is the energy source.  In geothermal plants, the interior heat energy from the earth is used, whilst in wind plants the kinetic energy of moving air is used.  Hydroelectric plants use the kinetic energy of moving water.

Fossil fuel fired plants use the potential energy contained in coal, oil, or gas by converting it to heat by combustion.  Finally, nuclear electricity uses the potential energy of a very few heavy elements’ nuclei that is released as heat in the reactor.

I love to be able to fuse two topics into one!  Since almost the beginning of TeeVee, there has been theme music for its programs.  Many of you will remember lots of them, but there were some programs without music, the very first TeeVee image being one of them, although it got a theme later.  Does that pique your interest?

TeeVee became widely available in the late 1940s, in large part because of the revolutionary improvements in electronics because of the necessity of the war effort.  However, there is a backstory to that as well:  after the war was over, there was a flood of components that were military surplus, available for cents on the dollar, to be had by manufacturers.

TeeVee had been invented long before World War II, but the components were rare and expensive.  Because of the glut of surplus components, TeeVee became widely available, but that is more of a Pique the Geek piece.