My company makes hydrogen generators: devices that make ultra-pure hydrogen on demand from methanol and water using a membrane reactor. If you use hydrogen, please fill out the following survey. I need to know my customers needs better, e.g. so that I will know if I should add a compressor. Thanks.
Create your own user feedback survey
Robert Buxbaum, June 13, 2018
Men become addicted and so do women, but the view in popular movies and songs present some clear differences. Addicted men are presented as drunks or stoners. By contrast, the popular picture of an addicted woman is a middle-aged housewife who takes “mother’s little helper“: anti-depressant and pain pills, “mother’s little helper of the classic Rolling Stones song. Male addicts are presented to take their drugs in the company of friends while female addicts are pictured taking their pills in private. A question I have: is there any evidence to back these popular perceptions.
Not all who are addicted consider their addiction a liability. Though Churchill was addicted to drink, starting the day with a tumbler of whiskey, he imagined it as a virtue. One would be hard-pressed to prove otherwise.
As it happens, if you look at the statistics in a certain way, they do bear out the popular perceptions. About three times as many men as women are in treatment for alcohol or pot, voluntary or court-mandated. Meanwhile, as a percentage of the addicted, women are nearly twice as likely as men to claim pills as their primary addiction. Percentage data is plotted below. The problem with the percentage graph is that it ignores the fact that twice as many men as women are in treatment: 1,233,000 men vs 609,000 women, as of 2011. Multiply the total numbers by the percentages and you find that there are more men than women with primary addiction to pills, or to cocaine, heroin, or meth-amphetamines. For any drug you mention, the real sex-difference is that more men are addicts.
It could be argues that rehab attendance is a bad measure of addiction, but I would argue that this is the best measure, not only are the numbers are more accurate, rehab is an indication that the addict feels that his or her addiction is a problem. It is a mistake, I think, to include people who feel their addiction is not ruining their lives with people who do not, e.g. Churchill. Any person who believes he or she is benefiting, and who has managed to avoid running afoul of the police, it could be argued, does not have a serious problem. Friends and employers may disagree in terms of diagnosis, but in terms of statistics, other measures like self-reporting come to the same conclusion: if it’s a stupid addiction, more men do it than women. Men self-report that they smoke more, binge-drink more, and use drugs more. Men also commit suicide more and end up in jail more.
Main addiction of men and women. percent based on rehab records, 2011. From the TEDS Report on substance abuse. 4/3/14. The most significant sex difference, as I see it: twice as many men as women go to rehab.
In terms of age of prescription drug use, the graph below shows a difference between men and women. There is a slight tendency for women to persist with prescription drugs, but that may reflect the tendency for men to move on to some other stupid behavior.
While more female than male addicts consider opioids their main addiction, since there are twice as many male addicts as female, it comes out that the number using opioids is about the same. A greater fraction of men switch out from opioids, perhaps to another addiction. Source: ibid.
A few cheerful bits of news are in order. One is that smoking, the most deadly of the addictions, is on the decline. It seems like vaping is a contributor to this, and much safer. Similarly, with illicit drug addictions, while use is on the upswing, and while an amazingly large share of Americans have used such drugs — see graph below from Statista — only a small fraction remain users into middle age. Most seem to quit on their own — they even seem to quit heroin when it ceases to serve a purpose. At present, only 60,000/year total die of overdose out of some 120,000,000 who’ve used illicit drugs. Ringo Starr’s song, “I don’t smoke it no more“may be cited, especially when paired with his “Oh my my” song about quitting through dance. If you want to quit and dance doesn’t work for you, I’d suggest AA or NA. To quote Ringo: “You can do it if you try.”
Number of people in the US who have used different illegal drugs as of 2016. It’s about 1/3 of America. The vast majority from every category have quit, and are not using. 89% of heroin uses have quit. You can too. Statista.
As for why men more than women do drugs, all I can say is that they do all sorts of stupid things. They fight in wars more often, they go over Niagara Falls in barrels more often, and they start new businesses more often. Sometimes it works for them; usually not. Here is a more detailed article with the same semi-conclusion: men are stupid, risk takers. I suspect that’s their language of love.
Robert Buxbaum, June 11, 2018
About 40,100 Americans lose their lives to traffic accidents every year. About 10,000 of these losses involve alcohol, and about the same number involve pedestrians, but far more people have their lives sucked away by waiting in traffic, IMHO. Hours are spent staring at a light, hoping it will change, or slowly plodding between destinations with their minds near blank. This slow loss of life is as real as the accidental type, but less dramatic.
Consider that Americans drive about 3.2 trillion miles each year. I’ll assume an average speed of 30 mph (the average speed registered on my car is 29 mph). Considering only the drivers of these vehicles, I calculate 133 billion man-hours of driving per year; that’s 15.2 million man-years or 217,000 man-lifetimes. If people were to drive a little faster, perhaps 10% faster, some 22,000 man lifetimes would be saved per year in time wasted. The simple change of raising the maximum highway speed to 80 mph from 70, I’d expect, would save half this, maybe 10,000 lifetimes. There would likely be some more accidental deaths, but not more accidents. Tiredness is a big part of highway accidents, as is highway congestion. Faster speeds decreases both, decreasing the number of accidents, but one expects there will be an increase in the deadliness of the accidents.
Highway deaths for the years before and after speed limit were relaxed in Nov. 1995. At that time most states raised their speed limits, but some did not, leaving them at 65 rural, 55 urban; a few states were not included in this study because they made minor changes.
A counter to this expectation comes from the German Autobahn, the fastest highway in the world with sections that have no speed limit. German safety records show that there are far fewer accidents per km on the Autobahn, and that the fatality rate per km is about 1/3 that on other stretches of highway. This is about 1/2 the rate on US highways (see safety comparison). For a more conservative comparison, we could turn to the US experience of 1995. Before November 1995, the US federal government limited urban highway speeds to 55 mph, with 65 mph allowed only on rural stretches. When these limits were removed, several states left the speed limits in place, but many others raised their urban speed limits to 65 mph, and raised rural limits to 70 mph. Some western states went further and raised rural speed limits to 75 mph. The effect of these changes is seen on the graph above, copied from the Traffic Operations safety laboratory report. Depending on how you analyze the data, there was either a 2% jump (institute of highway safety) in highway deaths or perhaps a 5% jump. These numbers translate to a 3 or 6% jump because the states that did not raise speeds saw a 1% drop in death rates. Based on a 6% increase, I’d expect higher highway speed limits would cost some 2400 additional lives. To me, even this seems worthwhile when balanced against 10,000 lives lost to the life-sucking destruction of slow driving.
Texas has begun raising speed limits. So far, Texans seem happy.
There are several new technologies that could reduce automotive deaths at high speeds. One thought is to only allow high-speed driving for people who pass a high-speed test, or only for certified cars with passengers who are wearing a 5-point harness, or only on roads. More relevant to my opinion is only on roads with adequate walk-paths — many deaths involve pedestrians. Yet another thought; auto-driving cars (with hydrogen power?). Computer-aided drivers can have split second reaction times, and can be fitted with infra-red “eyes” that see through fog, or sense the motion of a warm object (pedestrian) behind an obstruction. The ability of computer systems to use this data is limited currently, but it is sure to improve.
I thought some math might be in order. The automotive current that is carried by a highway, cars/hour, can be shown to equal to the speed of the average vehicle multiplied by the number of lanes divided by the average distance between vehicles. C = v L/ d.
At low congestion, the average driving speed, v remains constant as cars enter and leave the highway. Adding cars only affects the average distance between cars, d. At some point, around rush hour, so many vehicles enter the highway that d shrinks to a distance where drivers become uncomfortable; that’s about d = 3 car lengths, I’d guess. People begin to slow down, and pretty soon you get a traffic jam — a slow-moving parking lot where you get less flow with more vehicles. This jam will last for the entirety of rush hour. One of the nice things about auto-drive cars is that they don’t get nervous, even at 2 car lengths or less at 70 mph. The computer is confident that it will brake as soon as the car in front of it brakes, maintaining a safe speed and distance where people will not. This is a big safety advantage for all vehicles on the road.
I should mention that automobile death rates vary widely between different states (see here), and even more widely between different countries. Here is some data. If you think some country’s drivers are crazy, you should know that many of the countries with bad reputations (Italy, Ireland… ) have highway death rates that are lower than ours. In other countries, in Africa and the mid-east death rates per car or mile driven are 10x, 100x, or 1000x higher than in the US. The countries have few cars and lots of people who walk down the road drunk or stoned. Related to this, I’ve noticed that old people are not bad drivers, but they drive on narrow country roads where people walk and accidents are common.
Robert Buxbaum, June 6, 2018.
Given the hand-wringing over the $300,000 spent by Russia to influence the 2016 US election, I thought it worthwhile to point out that Qatar spent roughly 2.5 billion on influence, mostly through Qatar’s news agency, Al Jazeera. Qatar is a Shiite (Shia) Moslem Emirate solely ruled by a Sunni Emir (king). Here’s a joke to help distinguish Sunni from Shia. It is also the 4th largest exporter of natural gas in the world behind Russia, Norway, and Canada. It’s a solid supporter of leftist political causes from anti-climate change to Hamas and Al Qaeda/ ISIS, and it is the host for the FIFA world cup of soccer, 2022. For more about Qatar and the logic of its behavior, see the American Foreign Policy Analysis. Interesting in general, but I’d like to focus on influence buying.
Al Jazeera America prepares for its first broadcast from New York, August, 2013. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews.
The Emir of Qatar is the sole owner of Al Jazeera, a news organization, that he uses as profit-losing, influence machine. It allowed him to support leftist politicians who he believes to be pro-Arab, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, anti-Israel, and anti-American. In Europe he pursues pro-immigration, anti-fracking policies. In conservative, Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran, he’s used Al Jazeera to supported free elections to unseat the king, Shah, or military president. Al Jazeera uniformly portrays Qatar and its emir well, helping it get rights to host the FIFA world cup. No other country gets anywhere near such uniform, positive support.
A bit of history: Al Jazeera began operations in Doha, the capital of Qatar in 1996, as an antidote to Saudi Arabia’s arabic-language news outlet, MBC (Mid-East Broadcast Company, now called Al Arabia). By 2003, Al Jazeera was broadcasting in Europe in various EU languages, and had an english language version broadcast out of London, Al Jazeera-English. It is available in the US via cable TV, Channels 100, 200, and 300. In 2013, the Emir of Qatar expanded Al Jazeera directly to the US, paying 1/2 billion dollars for an Emmy-winning, non-profitable, cable news company “Current TV”, partially owned by Al Gore. “Current TV” operated out of San Francisco with a left-leaning, pro-environment message and a modest audience. Their shows include The War Room with Jennifer Granholm (Jennifer is the ex-governor of Michigan), Talking Liberally, The Stephanie Miller Show, and Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer. The Emir added a news headquarters in New York and gave it a new name: Al Jazeera America, or AJAM. The old Current TV was retained as AJ+, a video arm. Over the next 5 years the emir spent 2 billion dollars setting up 12 news bureaus in the US with instructions that there was no need for profit, but only for “influence”. It is arguable how much influence he got, but it is clear he didn’t make any profit.
Despite what you might imagine would be the opinions of a petro-monarch, AJAM continues to back Gore’s anti-fracking message. I will speculate this is because he is against US gas because it competes with Qatari gas. AJAM also strongly supports the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and ISIS. Perhaps that’s radical chic (radical sheik?). He’s against any authoritarian ruler that isn’t him.
Trump, his daughter, Ibn-Said (king of Saudi Arabia) and el Sisi, (president of Egypt). Global control with no Emir.
Some notable controversies — I got these from Wikipedia –Ahmed Mansour, a prominent Al Jazeera anchor, is quoted saying that Egyptian president, el-Sisi was “a Jew carrying out an Israeli plot.” Faisal al-Qassim, another Al Jazeera presenter, hosted a segment on whether Syria’s Alawite (Shia) population deserved to be killed en-mass, and in 2014, the channel’s Iraqi affairs editor tweeted approvingly about the Islāmic State killing more than 1,500 air-force cadets in Tikrit, singling out those who were Shia and non-Muslim. Closer to home, they charged a half-dozen athletes with doping, including Peyton Manning, hero of the super bowl. In the end, Shannon High-Bassalik, former head of the documentary unit, also sued claiming bias against non-Arabs in stories and in how it treats employees.
Among Republicans, AJAM became to be known as “The Terror Network”, while they retained some good reputation on left. The Emir bought not only the network, but spent liberally on sympathetic experts, and on academic think tanks. Further, it seems that Al Jazeera writers had no fixed budget or expense limit. The Russians are nowhere near this generous.
In April of 2016, with the world cup coming to Qatar, and American oil reviving, the emir cut AJAM staff by 900 workers. Part of the decision may have been that it looked like he had the 2016 election in the bag. Al Jazeera English remains, still operating out of London, and AJ+, the old Current TV, still operating out of San Francisco. And then Donald Trump was elected 45th US president. AJ / AJ+ was shocked (as was I); and called for protests. Trump, in a publicized meeting with el-Sisi of Egypt (the Jewish Spy), and Salmon al-Saud, (above, 2017) issued a set of 13 demands including that the emir stop to support for Hamas and the Brotherhood, and that he shut Al Jazeera. The emir has not complied, and the world cup is still on for Qatar.
I should mention that the Emir and Putin work together on some things and oppose on others. They both support politicians who oppose oil and gas production while opposing each other on pipeline construction. Qatar backs the pan Arabian pipeline to Turkey, while Russia funds Assad and the PKK (Russia-friendly, Kurdish independents) to block such access. The Emir supports ISS, Hamas, and Turkish Kurds, I suspect, as a way to fight Russia. It’s Byzantine politics in both senses of the word. Given how much Qatar has spent buying influence with Clinton and Gore, I don’t understand why the FBI is so focussed on Trump and Russia.
Robert Buxbaum, May 29, 2018.
Having written on controversial, opinion things, I thought I’d take break and write about earth science: the jet stream. For those who are unfamiliar the main jet stream is a high-altitude wind blowing at about 40,000 feet (10 km) altitude at about 50° N latitude. It blows west to east at about 100 km/hr (60 mph), about 12% of the cruising of a typical jet airplane. A simple way to understand the source of the jet stream is to note that the earth spins slower (in mph) at the poles than at lower latitudes, but that the temperature difference between the poles and equator guarantees that air at high altitude is always traveling toward the poles from the lower latitudes.
Consider that the earth is about 40,000 km is circumference and turns once every 24 hours. This suggests a rotation speed of 1667 km/hr at the equator. At any higher latitude the speed is 1667 cos latitude. Thus it’s 1070 km/hr at 50° latitude, 0 km/hr at the north pole; 1667km/hr cos 50°= 1070 km/hr.
Idealized north-south circulation of air around our globe.
It’s generally colder at the poles than it is at lower latitudes — that is nearer the equator (here’s why). This creates a north-south wind where the air becomes more compact as it cools in northern climate (50°latitude and further north), and this creates a vacuum at high altitudes and a high pressure zone at low altitudes. The result is a high altitude flow of air towards north, and a flow of low altitude air south, a process that is described by the idealized drawing at right.
At low altitudes in Detroit (where I am) we experience winds mostly from the north and from the east. Winds come from the east — or appear to — because of the rotation of the earth. The air that flows down from Canada is moving west to east at a slower speed than Detroit is moving west to east. We experience this as an easterly wind. At higher altitudes, the pattern is reversed. At 9 to 12 km altitudes, an airplane would experience winds mostly from the south-west. Warm air from lower latitudes is moving eastward at 1200 or more km/hr because that’s the speed of the earth. As it moves north, it discovers that the land is moving eastward at a much slower speed, and the result is the jet stream. The maximum speed of the jet stream is about 200 km/hr, the difference in the earth’s east-speed between that at 40°N and at 50°N, while the typical speed is about half of that, 100 km/hr. I’d attribute this slower speed to friction or air mixing.
One significance of the jet stream is that it speeds west-east air-traffic, e.g. flights from Japan to the US or from the US to Europe. Airlines flying west to east try to fly at the latitude and altitude of the jet stream to pick up speed. Planes flying the other way go closer to the pole and/or at different altitudes to avoid having the jet stream slowing them down, or to benefit from other prevailing winds.
I note that Hurricanes are driven by the same forces as the jet stream, just more localized. Tornados are the same, just more localized. A localized flow of this sort can pick stuff up here’s how they pick stuff up. Robert Buxbaum, May 22, 2018
There is a new specialty in the law, both in prosecution and defense: dealing with possible school shooters and other possible purveyors of violence. Making threats of violence has always been a felony — it’s a form of assault. But we’ve recently extended this assault charge to those student who make statements to the effect that they might like to commit violence, a conditional subjunctive statement of assault. This finer net manages to catch, in Michigan alone, about 100 per month. That’s a large number. Mostly they are male high-school age students who shot off their mouth, kids caught for saying “I’ll kill you” often in an argument, or following one. They are arrested for protection of others, but the numbers are so high and the charge so major, 15 – 20 year felonies, it’s possible that the cure is worse than the disease.
Putting some faces to the crime. Eight of the 100 charged in Michigan in the last month for potential violence. All or most are boys.
Several of the cases are described in this recent Free-Press article, along with the picture at right. According to the article, many of those charged, are sentenced to lower crimes than the 15 -20 maximum, things like reckless endangerment. Many, the majority, I hope — they are not mentioned in the article — are let go with a warning. But even there, one wonder if these are the richer, white ones. In any case, it’s clear that many are not let go and have their lives ruined because they might come to commit a crime.
Let’s consider one case in-depth, outcome unknown: A top high school student, skinny, but without many friends, who gets picked on regularly. One day, one of the more popular kids in school calls him out and says, “You look like you’re one of those school shooters.” The loner responds, “If I were a school shooter, you’d be the first I’d shoot.” And that’s enough to ruin the kid’s life. Straight to the principal, and then to the police. The ACLU has not seen to get involved as there are competing rights at play: the right of the loner to have a normal education, and the rights of the other students. One thing that bothers me is that this crime hangs on the conditional subjunctive: “If I were…., then you would be…”
What makes the threat subjective is that “I’ll kill you” or “I’d shoot you first” is something you’d like to be true at some time in the indefinite future. There is no clear time line or weapon, just a vague desire that the person should be shot. It’s a desire that more-likely than not, is a fleeting hyperbole, and not an actual threat. What makes the threat conditional on the person has yet to decide to show up with a weapon or show any sign of doing violence: “If I were to become a school shooter.”
The person who drew this faces 15 years in prison. The only evidence of a threat is this picture.
It did not used to be that either the conditional or the subjunctive were considered threats. A person was assumed to be blowing off steam if he (or she) said “I’d like to see you dead” or even “I’ll kill you.” And we certainly never bothered folks who prefaced it with, “If I were a …” In theory, we had to extend the law to protect the weak from a shooter, but we’ve also put a weapon in the hands of the schoolyard bully. The school bully can now ruin the life of his fellow by accusing him of being a potential school scooter. We’ve weaponized the conditional subjunctive, and I don’t like it. The boy who drew the picture at right was charged with a 15 year felony for drawing something that, in earlier generations, would be called a fantasy picture.
It bothers me is that the majority of those charged — perhaps all those charged — are boys. Generally these boys are doing things that normal boys have often done. The picture of a shooting is considered a written threat of violence, but to me it looks like a normal boy picture. Girls have not been caught, so far, perhaps because their words and pictures are more “girly” so their threats are not considered threats. Sometimes is seems that it is boy-behaviors themselves are being criminalized, or at minimum diagnosed as ADHD (crazy). There is so much we don’t like about boy-behaviors, and we’ve elevated the female to such an extent, that we may have lost the positive idea of what a male should be. We want boys to be “girly” or at least “trans,” and that’s not normal in the sense that it’s not normative. We’ve come to worry about boyness, creating a cure that may be worse than the harm we are trying to prevent.
Robert Buxbaum, May 7, 2018. I’ve also noted how bizarre US sex laws are, and have written about pirates and transgender grammar.
Fresh from the taste atlas of the world.
As a brief explanation to the above map, Italy has had a troubled history over the last 2000 years. As the Roman Empire fell, the north-east got taken over by Germans. It still speaks German, and drinks beer. Spätzle is an Austrian pasta. The Italian northwest has been under French domination, off and on and it shows in the thick cream sauces. The south was controlled by the Moores for 1000 years, leaving dishes with fennel and olives. And then there is the amazing innovation: the tomato, a gift from Spanish America that seems to have found its home on the eastern seaboard, though Spain controlled the west. I don’t know why. Enjoy.
Robert Buxbaum, May 1, 2018
Every now and again a magazine incites a group of historians to pick the best and worst presidents. And there, at the bottom of their scale, I typically find James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson; Warren Harding, and/or Ulysses Grant, none of whom deserve the dishonor, in my opinion. For Pierce and Buchanan, their high crime was to not solve the slavery /succession problem — as if this was a problem that any PhD historian would have been able to solve in a weekend. It was not so simple; the slavery question bedeviled the founding fathers, tormented Daniel Webster and Henry Clay; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson wrestled with it. None could solve it, and we accept that they served the country well, promoting prosperity and relative levels of good feeling. Now, in the 1850s, Pierce and Buchanan inherit this monster, the slave issue, and we blame them for not resolving it when the nation was at the boiling point and Kansas was burning. They did the best they could in impossible circumstance, buying us time. Pierce also bought us southern Arizona and helped open Japan.
Similarly, with Johnson: our historians’ complaint is that he didn’t manage reconstruction well — as if any one of them could have done better. You can’t blame a person for failing in a hopeless situation. Be happy they filled their terms, avoided war with our neighbors, and left the country richer and more populous than they found it.
Moving on to Grant and Harding, their crime was to be president at a time of scandal. But the very essence of this condemnation is that it presents the scandal, a non-issue in the large sweep of America, as if it were the only issue. Both Harding and Grant drank in the white house, and played cards while members of their cabinets stole money. These are major scandals to blue noses, but not so relevant to normal people. Most presidents drank, and many had corrupt associates. Both presidencies were periods of prosperity, employment, and growth. Both presidents paid down the national debt. Harding paid down $2,000,000 of debt, a good chunk of the debt from WWI. Grant paid down a similarly large chunk of the debts of the civil war. Both oversaw times of peace, and both signed peace treaties: Harding from WWI, Grant from the civil war and the Indian wars. Both left office with the nation far more prosperous than when they came in. No, these are not bad presidents except in the eyes of puritans who require purity in everyone but them, and care little for the needs of the average American.
The worst president, in my opinion, was John Adams, and I would say he set a standard for bad that’s not likely to be beat. How bad was Adams? He oversaw the worst single law ever in American history, the Sedition act. This act, a partner to the Alien act (almost as bad), was pushed though by Adams a mere 8 years after passage of the bill of rights. The act made it illegal to criticize the government in any way. In this, it made a mockery of free expression. Adams put someone in jail for calling him “his rotundancy” — that is, for calling him fat. The supreme court had to step in and undo this unbelievably horrible law, but this was only one of several horrible acts of president Adams.
Another horrible act of president Adams is his decision to pick a war with France, our ally from the revolution. Adams himself had signed the treaty of Paris guaranteeing that we would never go to war with France. So why did Adams do it? He was a puritan, literally. He didn’t like French immorality and hated French Catholicism. He was insulted that French officials had overthrown their king (not that we had done otherwise) that they wore fancy clothes, and that they wanted bribes. He leaked their request for bribes to the press (the XYZ affair) and presented this as the reason for war. So Adams, pure Adams, got us to war with our oldest ally, a war we could not win, and didn’t.
But Adams didn’t stop there. Having decided to go to war, he also decided to stop paying on US debt to the French. He was too pure to pay debt to a nation that overthrew its king and set up a more-egalitarian state than we had. One where slavery was abolished.
Adams, of course, did nothing to address slavery, though he berated others about it. And it’s not like Adams didn’t pay out bribes, just not to the despised Catholics. At the beginning of Adams’s single term a group of Moslems, the Barbary pirates, captured some American ships. Adams agreed to pay bribe after bribe to the Barbary Pirates for return of these US ships. But the more we paid, the more ships the Barbary pirates captured. So Adams, the idiot, just bribed them more. By the end of Adams’s term, 1/4 of the US budget went to pay these pirates. When Jefferson became president, he ended the war with France by the simple solution of buying Louisiana and he sent the US Marines to deal with the pirates of North Africa. Adams could have done these things but didn’t; Jefferson did, and is ranked barely above Adams as a result. So why is it that no historian calls out Adams as an awful president? I think it’s because Adams wrote beautifully about all the right sentiments, including to his wife. Historians like writers of high sentiment. According to 170 scholars, the top ten presidents, not counting those on Mount Rushmore are FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, Obama, and LBJ, all of them fairly recent.
The bottom ten presidents. And there’s Trump at the very bottom, with the usual suspects. Harrison was only president for a month.
And that brings us to the new poll. It puts William Henry Harrison among the worst. Harrison took office, became sick almost immediately, and died 31 days later of Typhoid. The white house water supply was just down river from the sewage outlet, something you find in Detroit as well. He did nothing to deserve dishonor except drinking the water. he ran a great presidential campaign, BTW. His campaign song, Tippecanoe and Tyler too is wonderful listening, even today.
And that brings us to the historian’s worst of the worst. The current president, Donald J. Trump. This is remarkable since it’s only a year into Trumps term, and since he’s done a variety of potentially good things: He ended a few trade deals and regulations that most people agree were bad, and made some that most people agree are good. A result is that the stock market is up, employment is up, people are back at work, and historians are unhappy. What they want is another FDR, someone who’ll tell us: “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.” whatever that means; who overspends liberally and oversees 9 years of the Great Depression. By historian polls, FDR is the second or third best president ever.
Robert Buxbaum. April 25, 2018. Semi-irrelevant: here’s a humorous song about Harrison. Two other bad presidents: James Madison and Zachary Taylor. Madison started a war against Britain without preparing, and Taylor crafted the horrible compromise of 1850.
Most people assume that alkaline batteries are one-time only, throwaway items. Some have used rechargeable cells, but these are Ni-metal hydride, or Ni-Cads, expensive variants that have lower power densities than normal alkaline batteries, and almost impossible to find in stores. It would be nice to be able to recharge ordinary alkaline batteries, e.g. when a smoke alarm goes off in the middle of the night and you find you’re out, but people assume this is impossible. People assume incorrectly.
Modern alkaline batteries are highly efficient: more efficient than even a few years ago, and that always suggests reversibility. Unlike the acid batteries you learned about in highschool chemistry class (basic chemistry due to Volta) the chemistry of modern alkaline batteries is based on Edison’s alkaline car batteries. They have been tweaked to an extent that even the non-rechargeable versions can be recharged. I’ve found I can reliably recharge an ordinary alkaline cell, 9V, at least once using the crude means of a standard 12 V car battery charger by watching the amperage closely. It only took 10 minutes. I suspect I can get nine lives out of these batteries, but have not tried.
To do this experiment, I took a 9 V alkaline that had recently died, and finding I had no replacement, I attached it to a 6 Amp, 12 V, car battery charger that I had on hand. I would have preferred to use a 2 A charger and ideally a charger designed to output 9-10 V, but a 12 V charger is what I had available, and it worked. I only let it charge for 10 minutes because, at that amperage, I calculated that I’d recharged to the full 1 Amp-hr capacity. Since the new alkaline batteries only claimed 1 amp hr, I figured that more charge would likely do bad things, even perhaps cause the thing to blow up. After 5 minutes, I found that the voltage had returned to normal and the battery worked fine with no bad effects, but went for the full 10 minutes. Perhaps stopping at 5 would have been safer.
I changed for 10 minutes (1/6 hour) because the battery claimed a capacity of 1 Amp-hour when new. My thought was 1 amp-hour = 1 Amp for 1 hour, = 6 Amps for 1/6 hour = ten minutes. That’s engineering math for you, the reason engineers earn so much. I figured that watching the recharge for ten minutes was less work and quicker than running to the store (20 minutes). I used this battery in my firm alarm, and have tested it twice since then to see that it works. After a few days in my fire alarm, I took it out and checked that the voltage was still 9 V, just like when the battery was new. Confirming experiments like this are a good idea. Another confirmation occurred when I overcooked some eggs and the alarm went off from the smoke.
If you want to experiment, you can try a 9V as I did, or try putting a 1.5 volt AA or AAA battery in a charger designed for rechargeables. Another thought is to see what happens when you overcharge. Keep safe: do this in a wood box outside at a distance, but I’d like to know how close I got to having an exploding energizer. Also, it would be worthwhile to try several charge/ discharge cycles to see how the energy content degrades. I expect you can get ~9 recharges with a “non-rechargeable” alkaline battery because the label says: “9 lives,” but even getting a second life from each battery is a significant savings. Try using a charger that’s made for rechargeables. One last experiment: If you’ve got a cell phone charger that works on a car battery, and you get the polarity right, you’ll find you can use a 9V alkaline to recharge your iPhone or Android. How do I know? I judged a science fair not long ago, and a 4th grader did this for her science fair project.
Robert Buxbaum, April 19, 2018. For more, semi-dangerous electrochemistry and biology experiments.
Pi is a wonderful number, π = 3.14159265…. It’s very useful, ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, or the ratio of area of a circle to the square of its radius, but it is irrational: one can show that it can not be described as an exact fraction. When I was in middle school, I thought to calculate Pi by approximations of the circumference or area, but found that, as soon as I got past some simple techniques, I was left with massive sums involving lots of square-roots. Even with a computer, I found this slow, annoying, and aesthetically unpleasing: I was calculating one irrational number from the sum of many other irrational numbers.
At some point, I moved to try solving via the following fractional sum (Gregory and Leibniz).
π/4 = 1/1 -1/3 +1/5 -1/7 …
This was an appealing approach, but I found the series converges amazingly slowly. I tried to make it converge faster by combining terms, but that just made the terms more complex; it didn’t speed convergence. Next to try was Euler’s formula:
π2/6 = 1/1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + ….
This series converges barely faster than the Gregory/Leibniz series, and now I’ve got a square-root to deal with. And that brings us to my latest attempt, one I’m pretty happy with discovering (I’m probably not the first). I start with the Taylor series for sin x. If x is measured in radians: 180° = π radians; 30° = π/6 radians. With the angle x measured in radians, can show that
sin x = x – x3/6 + x5/120 – x7/5040 + …
Notice that the series is fractional and that the denominators get large fast. That suggests that the series will converge fast (2 to 3 terms?). To speed things up further, I chose to solve the above for sin 30° = 1/2 = sin π/6. Truncating the series to the first term gives us the following approximation for pi.
1/2 = sin (π/6) ≈ π/6.
Rearrange this and you find π ≈ 6/2 = 3.
That’s not bad for a first order solution. The Gregory/ Leibniz series would have gotten me π ≈ 4, and the Euler series π ≈ √6 = 2.45…: I’m ahead of the game already. Now, lets truncate to the second term.
1/2 ≈ π/6 – (π/6)3/6.
In theory, I could solve this via the cubic equation formula, but that would leave me with two square roots, something I’d like to avoid. Instead, and here’s my innovation, I’ll substitute 3 + ∂ for π . I’ll then use the binomial theorem to claim that (π)3 ≈ 27 + 27∂ = 27(1+∂). Put this into the equation above and we find:
1/2 = (3+∂)/6 – 27(1+∂)/1296
Rearranging and solving for ∂, I find that
27/216 = ∂ (1- 27/216) = ∂ (189/216)
∂ = 27/189 = 1/7 = .1428…
If π ≈ 3 + ∂, I’ve just calculated π ≈ 22/7. This is not bad for an approximation based on just the second term in the series.
Where to go from here? One thought was to revisit the second term, and now say that π = 22/7 + ∂, but it seemed wrong to ignore the third term. Instead, I’ll include the 3rd term, and say that π/6 = 11/21 + ∂. Extending the derivative approximations I used above, (π/6)3 ≈ (11/21)3 + 3∂(11/21)2, etc., I find:
1/2 ≈ (11/21 + ∂) -(11/21)3/6 – 3∂(11/21)2/6 + (11/21)5/120 + 5∂(11/21)4/120.
For a while I tried to solve this for ∂ as fraction using long-hand algebra, but I kept making mistakes. Thus, I’ve chosen to use two faster options: decimals or wolfram alpha. Using decimals is simpler, I find: 11/21 ≈ .523810, (11/21)2 = .274376; (11/21)3 = .143721; (11/21)4 = .075282, and (11/21)5 = .039434.
Put these numbers into the original equation and I find:
1/2 – .52381 +.143721/6 -.039434/120 = ∂ (1-.274376/2 + .075282/24),
∂ = -.000185/.86595 ≈ -.000214. Based on this,
π ≈ 6 (11/21 -.000214) = 3,141573… Not half bad.
Alternately, using Wolfram alpha to reduce the fractions,
1/2 – 11/21+ 113/6•213 -115/(120•215) = ∂ (24(21)4/24(21)4 – 12•112212/24•214+ (11)4/24•214)
∂ = -90491/424394565 ≈ -.000213618. This is a more exact solution, but it gives a result that’s no more accurate since it is based on a 3 -term approximation of the infinite series.
We find that π/6 ≈ .523596, or, in fractional form, that π ≈ 444422848 / 141464855 = 3.14158.
Either approach seems OK in terms of accuracy: I can’t imagine needing more (I’m just an engineer). I like that I’ve got a fraction, but find the fraction quite ugly, as fractions go. It’s too big. Working with decimals gets me the same accuracy with less work — I avoided needing square roots, and avoided having to resort to Wolfram.
As an experiment, I’ll see if I get a nicer fraction if I drop the last term (11)4/24•214: it is a small correction to a small number, ∂. The equation is now:
1/2 – 11/21+ 113/6•213 -115/(120•215) = ∂ (24(21)4/24(21)4 – 12(11221)2/24•214).
I’ll multiply both sides by 24•214 and then by (5•21) to find that:
12•214 – 24•11•213+ 4•21•113 -115/(5•21) = ∂ (24(21)4 – 12•112212),
60•215 – 120•11•214+ 20•21^2•113 -115 = ∂ (120(21)5 – 60•112213).
Solving for π, I now get, 221406169/70476210 = 3.1415731
It’s still an ugly fraction, about as accurate as before. As with the digital version, I got to 5-decimal accuracy without having to deal with square roots, but I still had to go to Wolfram. If I were to go further, I’d start with the pi value above in digital form, π = 3.141573 + ∂; I’d add the 7th power term, and I’d stick to decimals for the solution. I imagine I’d add 4-5 more decimals that way.
Robert Buxbaum, April 2, 2018