Tag: Pique the Geek

As you know, I get questions from time to time about things.  I keep the best ones until I have enough to post them.  Some of them are serious, some are funny, and some do not quite make sense.

This is a followup to the hugely successful (for me, making the rec list) post from a couple of weeks ago.  You have Keith Olbermann to thank or to curse for stimulating me to write in the Thurber tradition.

By the way, Docudharma.com gets the scoop on this one.  I will not post it to the big orange until tomorrow because of the severe time restrictions on comments, and you all know that the comments are the best part of my posts.

Contrary to some popular opinion, salt is an essential part of the diet.  Unfortunately, it is possible to get too much of a good thing, and that is true in the case of salt.

On the other hand, it is possible to become deficient in salt, although that is quite rare with a modern western diet.  However, vegans and other vegetarians can become deficient, especially when performing strenuous work in hot weather, since sweat is about 0.9% salt.

This topic was suggested a couple of months ago by a reader who was thoughtful enough to comment and recommend it.  I appreciate reader feedback very much, and actually likely would not write this series if not for it.

There are many terms that are used incorrectly, sometimes by people who should know better.  I am not taking about casual conversation, where the rules for precision are looser, but rather in more technical communications.  News readers are particularly prone to do this, and unfortunately that is associated with an air of authority.

First, The Geek apologizes for missing last week.  He had a throbbing headache brought on by allergies and felt neither like writing nor sitting to answer comments.  I am much recovered tonight.

This topic was suggested by Eldest Son who is a lurker here.  It turns out that he has an acquaintance who will not eat food cooked or warmed in a microwave oven, ostensibly because of that person’s belief that the food somehow has dangerous radiation remaining in it, or that the food has somehow been activated into radioactivity by the microwaves.

Vegetarianism is a lifestyle that many people adopt for their food choices.  Let me post this disclaimer:  I am not personally a vegetarian, but I have no quarrel with those who are.  The only concern that I have is that some folks are not versed properly in how to get a complete diet as vegetarians, and this essay is directed toward them.

It is quite possible to have an extremely healthy diet as a vegetarian, but it takes some effort and knowledge.  There are a couple of nutritional “holes” in a vegetarian diet that need to be filled by proper choice of plant products, and this is not always evident.

Last week we discussed the Deepwater Horizon blowout and the resultant huge oil spill, and will continue the discussion tonight.  By the way, the title of this piece represents the official NOAA estimate of the release.  Some estimates are as much as five to ten times this amount, but the NOAA estimate one is the official one, so we will use it.

It really makes little difference, because even the official estimate is huge.  Since this happened on 20100420, with the rig sinking and presumably destroying the riser on 20100422, at the official rate for the 18 days now 3.7 million gallons have been released.

The explosion of the BP oil platform in the Gulf on 20100420 will certainly be amongst the worst, if not the worst, oil release into the environment in United States history.  Already at over 2.6 million gallons of oil split, there is no plan to contain the gushing until it will exceed the Exxon Valdez incident decades ago.

I have in intention of speculating on the cause of the explosion at this point, because a proper investigation has yet to be completed.  As attractive as is might be to blame Halliburton, there is, in my opinion, a dire dearth of information to blame anyone at this point.  Investigations will uncover the facts.  This incident is too big and too well publicized not to have sunlight.  However, I do intend to voice my thoughts about events prior to the explosion that were not done that should have been, and actions (or lack thereof) after the explosion for good or ill.

Electricity is the movement of electrons one way or another.  The electron is a very small mass particle that is classified as a lepton, meaning that is has mass and has a spin quantum number of +/- 1/2.

An electron has a mass of 9.0166 x 10^-31 kg, making it about 1/1800 the mass of a proton, which is a hadron.  Hadrons account for most of the mass in normal matter, as opposed to dark matter, the nature of which has not been elucidated nor ever proven, but that is for another series.

This series is concerned with the storage of electrical energy in the form of chemical energy, and converting the two into useful currents.  Most of the electricity that we use is quite transient in nature, but that stored chemically in batteries is much longer lasting, if not as intense.

Coins minted by the United States have change dramatically in design, size, denominations, and alloy since the birth of the Republic.  Whilst the basic units of dollars, cents, and mills has not changed, the relative value of these units is quite different than in 1794, when the first US coin was minted.

The most significant change, other than appearance, in US coins is that over the centuries, our coins have gone from being items of intrinsic value (gold, silver, and copper mainly) to becoming tokens.  This has been the general worldwide trend for coinage.  One reason is that there is simply not enough gold and silver to go around for coinage any more.

Distillation is a general term for several different processes, all of them involving elevated temperature relative to the materials to be separated boiling points.  It is generally a separation process, but in some cases actually involved chemical reactions to create new materials during the process.

Distillation as we generally think of it is a method used to separate two or more liquids, but it is much more general than that.  It also is a term that is used, by extension, to take a large amount of information and extract the most pertinent parts of it into a concentrated form.  Indeed, distillation is often used to concentrate a minor component of a mixture to pure (or at least more concentrated) material.

The Geek usually does not write about history, but he will make an exception.  First, Easter this year coincides with my father’s birthday.  He was born on this date in 1919.  If he were still alive, he would have just turned 91 years old.  My granddad on his side lived to that age.

Second, Easter is by proclamation the highest of the Holy Days in the Christian tradition.  Christmas is also joyful, but everyone is borne and only One has, as tradition and religion insists, been resurrected.

Third, the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences insisted on a well rounded education before anyone could be graduated.  Whilst I am a scientist, I appreciate literature, art, architecture, and especially history.

On a historical note, today is the date on which Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968.  On a more personal historical note, my father would have been 91 today, but he died in 2005.

There was no Pique the Geek last week because I was preparing for Youngest Son to visit.  We had a great time last week, cooking, eating, throwing darts, and rebonding.  For those of you interested in what we ate, I hosted What’s for Dinner last evening, here.

It is not either possible nor feasible to attempt the fusion that Sol does here on earth because of the impossibility of gathering enough mass to make a very slow reaction work (remember, fusing two protons to a deuteron requires the involvement of the weak nuclear force, and that is a very slow process), nor the temperatures required to make that happen.

Please see the two previous installments of this series here and here, to make things more clear.