Tag: Pique the Geek

Boron, the chemical element with an atomic number (Z) = 5, is an uncommon element.  The reason is that there is no really easy way for stars to make it except through going supernova.  A more technical way of saying this is that stellar nucleosynthesis is not a viable pathway to produce boron.  As a matter of fact, it is the least common very light element except for lithium.

Tonight we shall look into some of the properties and uses of boron, as suggested by Kossack shrike Friday evening during comments on Popular Culture.  The interest that shrike has in some new medical uses for boron, and we shall go into some detail near the end of the piece.

This week we shall explore misconceptions about science generally, and then take a few specific cases for further examination.  There are a few concepts that are essential to understand about what makes science work, and why it is the best tool that we have to understand the natural world, and to use science to improve the human condition.

There are two fundamental large scale misconceptions about science, and we shall treat them first.  Then there are an almost unlimited supply of what I call false science, meaning that scientific terms and logic based on incorrect premises are used in attempts by those who actually know better to influence people.  The fundamental misconceptions are sort of to be expected from folks who are not educated in science, but he false science is used by nefarious persons to influence those not versed in real science, usually for a monetary or a social goal or goals.  Please let us explore.

The process of curing meat (including fish, shellfish, and poultry) is an ancient process, the origins of it lost in antiquity.  The origin of our verb to cure comes from the Latin verb curare, meaning “to take care of”.  The word passed into Middle French as curer, and after the Norman conquest in 1066 into what became Middle English as curen.  Thus is shares its roots and ultimate meaning as the medical use, “to take care of”.

Real curing requires salt, but for several reasons salt alone is not the ideal curing agent.  In a truly cured meat (I shall continue to use that term to include the items in the first sentence), the salt content is high and the moisture level is low.  Remember, the primary purpose of curing is to prevent bacterial and fungal attack on the meat, but there are other factors at play as well.

Lyme Disease is a new condition in our infectious disease panoply.  It has only been suspected since 1975, and only in 1978 was it suspected to transmitted by ticks.  The causative agent was not identified until 1981.  This piece is intended only to be a very basic survey of the condition and some of the controversies surrounding it, not a comprehensive dissertation.  There is a very good group at Dailykos called Lyme Disease Awareness with contributors who have more personal information than I do.  However, do not take anything you read in this piece or in the group in general as a substitute for competent medical advise and treatment.

Let us think about that for a minute.  Western medicine had recognized most all serious infectious diseases since the time of Herodotus!   Certainly some exceptions are present, such as syphilis, with seems to be a New World import to Europe and certain, very long latent period virus diseases that we are just now discovering.

Lyme Disease is different, though.  It is caused by a bacterial agent, a specific spirochete called Borrelia burgdorferi, the species name from its discoverer, the brilliant Swiss-American biologist, Dr. Willy Burgdorfer.

Yams have served as staple foodstuffs in Africa for millenia, having been under cultivation for over 8000 years according to some authorities.  There are dozens of species, but only a relative few are suitable for agriculture.  Yams are members of family Dioscoreaceae and are all of the genus Dioscorea.  Most of them are tropical, but there is one North American species, Dioscorea villosa, aptly called Wild Yam.

Whilst a staple in many tropical areas, yams are not eaten very much in the United States.  What we call a yam is in almost all cases a sweet potato, not closely related to real yams.  It gets even more interesting, since the sweet potato is not a potato at all!  After the fold we shall discuss a different use for yams not involving food.  Since today is 5/15, I though we might start with a bit of music of that name.

Everyone is exposed to elemental nitrogen every day.  Since it makes up about 78% of the atmosphere, it is impossible to avoid.  It is nontoxic, so being impossible to avoid is not in this case a problem.

Actually, it is good thing that nitrogen comprises that much of the atmosphere.  If the atmosphere were much richer in oxygen than it is (around 21%, the rest carbon dioxide and a few others), it would be impossible to fight fires.  More on that later.

In addition to being an inert diluent to oxygen in the atmosphere, nitrogen is also essential for life for many reasons, and we shall examine some of them in a bit.  It is also an essential building block for many important industrial materials and for fertilizers for plants.  Come with us after the fold and we shall examine this important element.

This is going to be a busy evening, because there are several things to cover.  First, I shall give a correction to last weeks’ Pique the Geek after the fold.  Next, we shall discuss the very silly notion that 20121221 is the end of times.  Finally, we shall get some more information about 8-track tape technology from one of the original developers.

That is one of the nice things about blogging:  you “meet” a lot of people.  This individual (who gave me permission to identify by name) was on the development team just about from the start, and has written a memoir (JUST for Pique the Geek, by the way) and I shall add parts of it, in suitably sized pieces, at the end of PTG until we reach the end.

I had originally planned to write about the Noble Gases of the Periodic Table, but I happened to be puttering around the house when a TeeVee show about this came on today.  The interesting thing to me is that almost everything is just made up from whole cloth.

Easter is in Christendom the holiest day of the liturgical calender, celebration the day of the rising of Christ from the dead.  The purpose of this piece is not to discuss any particular religious viewpoint, but rather to look into the history of Easter and thus to understand some of the peculiar customs that are now associated with Easter.

This is not a “hard science” piece, but rather more of an analysis of how the modern Easter came to be.  Many of you who are regular readers know that my interests are much broader than just science and technology, and history is one of them.  However, I do believe that this piece is worthy of being called Geeky.

Before we get to the very ancient traditions that predate Judaism, not to mention Christianity, we shall look at how the date for Easter is calculated.  If it seems like Easter is very late in the year for 2011, this is because it is.

This is sort of a companion piece to Friday’s Popular Culture piece about eight track tapes.  There was quite a response to that piece, and several commentators suggested that we talk about vinyl records tonight.  I have a great respect for my readers, so I am happy to oblige.

On the surface, records seem to be quite simple things indeed.  In practice, few things are further from the truth.  While the concept behind records is fairly simple, the technology is extremely complex to attain high fidelity, defined as sound reproduced with high enough quality as to give the impression that actual performers are playing at the time.  In other words, artifacts of recording and playback should be so small as barely to be noticed.

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.

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.

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.