The Climate Project people created their own version, but apparently they didn’t test it very well. One of our strident climate change deniers seized on their corner cutting and showed their demonstration didn’t demonstrate anything. I considered this part of healthy discourse: people cut corners; they got called on it and taken to task. Since it was my voice, I was considered to be a co-conspirator in the plot to fool the world into believing that our climate is changing. That’s reasonable in its way.

The Climate Project people used jars with lids that were too thick, the thermometers were not well placed, and the volume of gas in each vessel was greatly diminished by the presence of handsome, but voluminous globes and pedestals. When I’ve done this in the past, my apparatus did not have any of these shortcomings, so I got different results.

As the famous Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston remarked, “One test is worth a thousand expert opinions.” Try it; try your own version, and see if you measure a temperature difference.

One thing to note though, the guy who called us out on this drew an incorrect conclusion, or he made an erroneous claim. He says any change would have been caused by “… a completely different physical mechanism than actually occurs in our atmosphere…” That’s wrong. It is this mechanism. The model has to be set up properly. Keep in mind that our troposphere is several dozen kilometers thick, and it doesn’t comprise pure carbon dioxide. This is a model, a demonstration. Real atmospheric models are astonishingly complex.

Regardless of any shortcomings or shortcuts in the model shown by the Climate Reality Project advocacy group, the world is getting warmer, and we had all better do something about it.

To escape the humidity and heat of the city of Washington, DC, my family often made for the coast. We could often be found on one of the quiet Delaware beaches. As lovely as most beaches are, they are replete with tiny grains of sand and saltwater, neither of which is especially good for a mechanical watch. So around 1965, my dad had the idea to leave his valuable gold watch safe and dry elsewhere and reckon time with a sundial. He developed the “Sandial®”.  You can tell time plenty well enough for a summer vacation, while your wristwatch or mobile phone stays high and dry in your luggage somewhere “back at the house.”

I hope you’re not surprised to learn that the Sandial did not sell like hotcakes on a Tuesday night. I came across one of the original, 46 year-old blocks of wood that served as the Sandial’s table (a term of art in sundials). I calculated new hour lines, inserted one of dad’s original compasses along with an original gnomon (the triangle piece), and the Sandial tells time as well as ever.

This business of timekeeping got in me too— big time. I served as a visiting Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Professor at Cornell University for five years. Along with being a very popular University President, Frank Rhodes got a building named in his honor. Everyday, I walked by Rhodes Hall, and there above was a 3-meter (10 foot) diameter circle, which must have been intended to bear a large outdoor clock. So for the last 13 years, I’ve been contributing to a fund to place a clock up there. Well, it’s done. It is to honor my parents, who worked so hard to get me into such a terrific university and to honor my many remarkable teachers and professors, who nurtured my love of science, mathematics, and ultimately engineering.

Incidentally, this kooky love of horology, the study of timekeeping, led me to enthusiastically convince the people who explore Mars with robot rovers to ensure that the test pattern for the rover cameras be modified just a little so that each one serves as a sundial— on Mars, what we call the “MarsDials.” Check us out on Planetary.org as we help reckon time on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover called Curiosity, which will launch from Earth this November and land on Mars next August.

In keeping with my father and mother’s love of science and sundials, and since Cornell’s Rhodes Hall isn’t especially well-placed for a sundial (it faces Northeast), I have contrived a system that brings sunlight from the roof to the clock through a highly reflective (very, very shiny-on-the-inside) duct. At Solar Noon, when the Sun culminates, that is, reaches its highest point in the sky, the sun-shaped feature will light up. It is the marrying of mechanical and electrical engineering with astronomy. What could be better? Stay tuned as the workers are putting the Solar Noon system in place even as I write.

Among my father’s favorite sundial mottos is this: “Horas non numero nisi serenas;” “I count not the hours, unless they be sunny (bright).” The Rhodes Hall Clock will reckon all the minutes of the day, but glow for the sunny ones.

"Sandial"

In the factory

Installation at Rhodes Hall

Keeping time

I came upon three 8th graders with chalk working along the curb of a very quiet neighborhood street. They were standing around a small box. They were all looking at the box and thinking. So, I thought, “Hey, maybe they’re about to blow something up (something in the box).” It turned out they were working on some geometry problems. They had a rectangle with diagonals in chalk. They were discussing which angle was equal to which, which triangles might be congruent, and a few other wonderful conclusions that might be drawn from this fundamental sketch.

I was and am just delighted thinking about it. They were working as a team, two girls and a boy, outdoors, with hand-drawn sketches of line segments, angles, and intersections– all with chalk on pavement. On this Sunday morning, some learning was happening right before my eyes. We talked for a bit about geometry and its importance in our daily lives and in the history of our civilization. I asked them if they knew or embraced the two fundamentals in Euclidian Geometry. They knew them, but perhaps not immediately. I went on, as I am wont to do about the planets, the Solar System, and our place in space. (Check out planetary.org.) After a bit, I realized that they recognized me, but were playing it cool. It was fun, after a fashion. I rode away.

I got back to the bottom of one of the steep hills and started for home. About a kilometer later, I thought, “I should go back and get a picture or two.” I turned around and climbed that steep hill again, this time from the other side. The kids were not around; maybe they were back inside tweeting and booking of Face. At any rate, they left their chalk drawing. While I was gone, they completed a record of the two fundamental rules in Euclidian Geometry right there on the street:

1) ⎢⎢ NEVER MEET [parallel lines]
2) X EQUAL [vertical angles are always]

If I may, how cool is that?

As I rode off, I shouted for the world to hear, “GEOMETRY RULES!!!”

I am gratified by all the good wishes from students and concerned fans. Please note: the students who came to my aid were attentive, thoughtful, and gracious. The medical professionals who looked me over were expert, efficient, and treated me with excellent greenroom-furniture-side manner.

I am perhaps not as concerned as many of your readers, who felt the students should have done more to help me more quickly than they did. Although my presentation is intended to do nothing less than inspire my audience members to change the world, it is generally considered funny…on purpose. So when students found me down and talking from the floorboards, I’m sure some thought it was part of making a serious point. In a few moments, the event’s student organizers did indeed come to my aid. They did indeed provide very appropriate and very thoughtful assistance.

As a public figure and minor celebrity, I can assure you that having 1200 strangers run toward you when you’re sick is not appealing. The audience members were respectful; they waited for me to continue. While they waited, they sent messages, as is their wont – instead of rushing to payphones to pass the news as people of my father’s generation would have done.

With all this, I predict we’re in a phase. In a few years, people will learn to reduce their message sending, the same way many of us have learned not to answer the phone during dinner. Technology enriches our lives. I’m hoping the students of today will embrace the nearly instantaneous electronic communication that modern mobile technology enables, and use it to make things better – in short, to change the World.

These young people have done amazing work. The worldwide winners in rocketry, Jordan Franssen and Nathan Bernhardt, just kept winning and winning with their outstanding attention to detail and cool use of materials. Speaking of our Planetary Mission– Erika DeBenedictishails has a new navigation system for interplanetary flight.

We saw a proposed cure for cancer, a system to discourage driving and texting at the same time, a beautifully planned efficient city, and a prosthetic chair to help a partially disabled classmate.

Amy Chyao’s cancer cure was so well presented that as I sat with Steven Chu for a half hour talking about energy policy, I could tell that he was turning the band-gap conduction diagram over in his mind. Steven Chu is the Secretary of Energy– and he has a Nobel Prize. This is but one example…

I was seated next to Adam & Jamie of the Myth Busters. We all had a great time and were amazed at the quality of the work and the enthusiasm of the young people and our hope for the future. The President really believes in our science business. He pointed out that most of the top corporations are run by engineers rather than financiers or economists.

I am proud of course. I am an engineer; we use science, and especially math, to solve problems and make things. Right now in the world, there are plenty of problems to solve, and plenty of things that need to be made and made well.

Let’s change the world.

Right now, I hope it will be my next car. For a small car, it’s quite spacious. This may surprise you. In general, electric drive trains are much more compact than ICE systems. Nissan spread the batteries out low in the unibody; all this leaves more room for you and me.

The Leaf is an all-electric car– no gas cap (no place to put gas). It’s got batteries instead. Keep in mind that electric cars cost much less per mile than gas powered ones. Electricity can be sent right to your house. There’s no need for tanker trucks plying our roads on the way to gas (petrol) stations. Electric motors are well over 90% efficient. An Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is a heat engine. It depends on how hot the gas can burn and how cool it is outside the engine. They can get to around 30%– that’s it.

Electric cars are also very much quieter than cars most of us are used to. When you drive one, it’s magical.

To my eye and to the eyes of other people I test drove and rode with, it has the best instrument panel– what your car-people call the best “driver interface,” of any electric vehicle I’ve seen or driven. It’s easy to figure out. Your speed is presented on a heads-up display at the base of the windshield, visible even in bright sunlight.

It has marvelous features in its navigation system: O yes, it shows you where you are on a good-looking map. But, it also displays a circle on the map, like a target with you at the bull’s eye, indicating your range– how far you can drive from where you are right now given how much charge is left in your battery pack– very cool. When one is new to electric vehicle driving, it’s easy to get what they call “range anxiety.” You worry about your range– about whether or not you’ll be able to get home. After you’re used to running all your errands and completing your commute with plenty of charge in your pack (your battery pack), you don’t much notice the range. Once in while though, it’s important. It’s beautifully displayed and very clear how far you can keep going.

It has five seats. Really, five people can sit inside. My recently returned Mini E (Electric Mini Cooper) that I was able to drive for a year had no such feature: two seats, and just barely those. The trunk could hold a manila folder or so. And the battery cooling system of the Mini E, is like, so totally, 20^th Century. The cooling air flows right through the cockpit. Put a bag behind the passenger seat, the batteries overheat, and your car just stops. Not so with the Leaf. Its cooling system has been much more thought through. It’s a real production car. Oh, and the Leaf has a pretty good trunk (boot) for a small vehicle.

I can face it, though. The Leaf is just not as sporty as the Mini E but it’s sporty enough for me. By sporty, I mean the Mini E goes like a bat out of someplace dark and hot… fast. The Leaf is not quite like that, but it’s close enough for me.

This is the future, my friends. An electric car that is built so that it feels very much like a car– like a gas-powered ICE-style car that you might be used to. I hope to get one before 2011 gets underway. I’ll use it for almost all of my driving, and in Los Angeles, one can do a great deal of driving. Where I live it’s often no fun, and it’s only as safe as cars are. That’s about a 100,000^th as safe as flying. All things considered though, I drive. I do my best to enjoy it. I’m looking forward to the near silence of an all-electric machine. My commute will get quieter, cheaper, and just more fun.

This week, I was asked to comment on the big heat wave along the east coast of North America and the resolution of the scandal that came to be called “Climategate.” Along with these serious subjects, an egg got fried on a sidewalk.

As you may know, I strongly believe humans are making our world warm. The egg on the sidewalk provided me with a chance to talk about the fundamentals of heat transfer and about our changing climate.

I commented briefly that indeed Climategate was much ado about very little. The scientists were proven to not be hiding anything, and so on. Unfortunately it nearly derailed the real climate conference in Copenhagen. Several minutes later at the end of her show, journalist Campbell Brown showed some video of one of her CNN producers taking a shot at cooking an egg on a New York sidewalk.  He had a bit of trouble, but I think he got the idea across. It’s hot back east, very hot.

Using my radiant thermometer (pyrometer, such a word!), I satisfied myself that an egg on a griddle cooks well if the griddle is around 125 Celsius (260 Fahrenheit). Doing a bit more messing around, I found that an egg will cook on a surface that’s only 55 Celsius (130 Fahrenheit). It just takes time – almost 20 minutes. So indeed, it can be hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk.

The little hand-held radiant thermometer is upside down, but it shows around 53.8 Celsius. This took about 22 minutes to cook under ideal cast iron skillet sidewalk temperatures. Along with the temperature, we need the pavement to hold a lot of heat (high thermal capacity). Sometimes the sidewalk isn't hot enough through and through; it depends on the pavement. Sure; try it...

I can tell you from experience in the airplane electronics industry that you can, for just a moment, put your hand on a metal surface that’s around 65 Celsius, about 150 Fahrenheit. Much above that, and you can’t leave your hand there for more than an instant. You may have found yourself walking on a hot sidewalk or on hot sand, and you can just barely stand it (pun intended). That’s the temperature we’re talking about.

If you want to try this, please do. Post a picture on my Facebook page. Some more advice: use a little olive oil or butter on the sidewalk or street. This allows more heat to flow into the egg. This is “conduction” of heat. Then, use an egg “ring” to keep things under control while the egg gets hot. You get your egg rings (if you don’t already have ‘em) in the gadget section of a grocery store or cooking specialty shop.

The science to discover or keep in mind is that the sidewalk can get hotter, much hotter, than the air. The air this week was around 40 C (a little over 100 F). But the egg cooking area was a bit hotter than that because it’s not only heated by the air, it’s heated by sunlight, or sun-heat. It was heated by convection with the air, and by radiation of the sun. Black surfaces do indeed get hotter than not-so-dark surfaces. Asphalt gets hotter than cement. Hot enough to fry an egg. Oil helps conduct heat into the egg.

For me, this has everything to do with climate change. Everyone should keep in mind that if we made every black street a pale color, like white, or close to white, the world would indeed cool off. If we did indeed embrace solar hotwater systems for our houses and buildings, we would pump out much smaller amounts of greenhouse gasses.

If you’re a young or young-at-heart engineer or entrepreneur, consider coming up with an economical pale pavement material and getting rich! Same with a standardized solar hot water system. Rich! I tell you!

Two more good ideas. Think about it over fried egg, your poached egg, your egg salad sandwich, and your soufflé.

Let’s change the world,

Bill

I have mentioned Professor Phelan often to my engineering colleagues, and well, to anyone who’ll listen. He specialized in a niche area of mechanical or electrical engineering generally called “control theory.”

Professor Phelan realized that the way most engineers and scientists go about controlling things like the temperature of an oven or a house– a thermostat, or the speed of a car– cruise control, is not nearly as good as it could be. And the reason is elegant and mathematically simple.

Thanks for reading this far, if you did. I will go on about Dick’s big idea in the next few paragraphs. I hope you get that he had an idea that could change the world and allow us to do so much more with less. Richard Phelan meant a lot to me.

****

Dick Phelan and Pseudo Derivative Feedback (PDF)

If you’re into this kind of thing, you know that most controllers work best with an integrator in the forward loop. For most of us, the classic example is sticking your hand in the shower to get a signal (hot, cold, cool, or warm) that your nerves, brain, and muscles use to set it just right. You adjust a faucet knob and wait. Your brain integrates the signal; you subtract what you feel from a suitable proportion or fraction of what you want, and eventually–  Ahh…

An old trick, and a seemingly reasonable one, is to put a differentiator in the feedback loop. That way, the feedback signal gets stronger (uh, bigger), with not just the change, but with the rate of change. All good.

The scheme I described above is Proportional+Integral+ Derivative (PID) control. It is everywhere. I mean everywhere. Even the most sophisticated satellite attitude controller systems are PID. Oh yes, one can analyze the Laplace Transform heck out of those things, what with their spindly struts and drilled-out, mass-saving, trusses, busses, and brackets. But, when it comes down to it, often, very often, our colleagues abandon all the extra analysis and just optimize a few PID variables.

Here’s what Dick Phelan realized, pointed out, and fixed. With PID, we’re integrating a signal we just differentiated. Any transducer noise or vibration often makes the feedback signal too big, or just wacky.

Instead of PID, try this: Feedback a signal in two places. On a control diagram, it’s two summing junctions. Feed the signal back upstream of the integrator, and then, with a separate proportionality constant, downstream of the integrator. The signal downstream of the integrator acts as though we differentiated. But, there is no, or much less, noise.

Dick called his scheme Pseudo Derivative Feedback, or PDF. I’ve seen others refer to the same thing with an I in front of the acronym to indicate integration. That’s not bad, but in tribute to Professor Phelan, I prefer PDF.

Now, Dick Phelan was a bit of character. Although one of his earlier textbooks gives the reader a solid understanding of Laplace transforms, later in life, he didn’t think much of them. Consider these words from his textbook: Feedback and Control Systems, Cornell University Press, 1977:

“The apparent justifications for past use of Laplace transforms were (a) it was a good way to keep students occupied in an intellectually stimulating way for quite a period of time, and (b) it established a jargon for the fraternity while effectively sophisticating– in the true dictionary definition of the word– a basically simple field of study into one that was awe-inspiring to the unknowing…”

Well, control theory can get complicated, but it’s the key to our future. We have to find ways to not just use less, as traditional environmentalists wanted us to do. Instead we have to find ways to be more efficient, much more efficient. We need to find ways to do more with less. PDF will help us engineers and designers do that. Thanks Professor Phelan. Let’s change the world.

The last few days, I’ve appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News regarding the oil and gas gushing from the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor. Watching and listening to spokesmen and reporters up close gives one a deep sense of how serious this whole business is. From the chairs in these various studios, it’s quite a ride.

When we drill into a deposit of oil, it often comes gushing out because the hollow spaces underground hold natural gas along with liquid oil. The gas acts like the propellant in a can of hairspray or paint. It was produced by ancient bacteria, and its pressure is still there. When we poke a hole in the underground cavity, sometimes we get a gusher; sometimes we get what petroleum workers often call, a “blowout.” The Deepwater Horizon rig was destroyed by a catastrophic blowout of natural gas and oil. It caught a spark, probably from one of the dozens, or hundreds, of electric motors on board, and the whole rig blew up killing 11 men.

With all this, oil workers look to avoid blowouts. Whenever we run pipes anywhere, we put valves in the lines. For a couple of centuries, we have been drilling for oil. So at the top of each well, we put a shutoff valve.  The bigger the well; the bigger the shutoff. This well is huge, 53 centimeters (21 inches) across. So, the shutoff valve is huge. It weighs more than a hundred tons. By long tradition, it’s called a Blow-Out Preventer (B.O.P.).

Here, the expression “preventer” is, at best, inappropriate. It didn’t prevent anything as far as we can tell.

The idea now is to pump a fluid that will block the flow. In the oil field this fluid is often a special mixture whose molecules lock together when it’s under pressure. Oil drillers call it “mud.” It looks like mud, but there’s more to it.

The molecular lock-together feature of a fluid is called “dilatancy.” The classic dilatant fluid in our everyday experience is cornstarch mixed with a small amount of water. It’s goopy, until you slap it or shake it. It locks up and does not splatter at all. So it is with drilling mud.

British Petroleum (BP) has been pumping drilling mud into the Preventer plumbing for almost two days. It seems to have slowed the oil flow a little, but not enough.

The engineers, or at least the spokesmen for the engineers, said they plan a “junk shot.” The idea is to add bits of hard  material to the mud. Traditionally, in the Texas oil field, drillers add cut-up car tires and old driving range golf balls. This “bridging” material sometimes helps the dilatant mud molecules lock up. The pipe is so big, and the flow so fast, that a golf ball isn’t really that big an object. It could easily jam against an edge or pipe joint– and that would be good. Looking at the BP executive’s faces, it doesn’t seem like this is going to work either.

Next, I expect engineers along with the Remotely Operated submarine Vehicle (ROV) drivers will cut some large portion of the top preventer off. The next pipe up the drill string is called the “riser,” and I imagine that’s what they’ll go after next. It’s big job because the material is a hard type of stainless steel. And, it’s a long way around the big pipe with a fancy saw and buffing grinder, especially when you’re doing it with a claw-fingered robot to work the material and grainy video to guide you.

After that, I hope the managers let go of the idea of trying to capture any more oil until the relief, or drilled-in-from-the-side, well is cut. I hope they put a cap or slug made from a few thousand tons of concrete on top. They could let it ooze very slowly for a few weeks, until they can get to the well casing or liner by coming in from the side. Drilling these relief wells will take a few months, because it’s, once again, miles down and hundreds of meters of solid rock.

About the rate of oil flow: there have been a great many questions about how much oil is flowing per day. At first, looking at satellite data, people thought it was about 5,000 barrels a day. A barrel is 42 gallons. So, it’s a great many gallons. (A “drum” is 55 gallons– another confusing feature of the old English system of units.) Well, it turns out most of the oil isn’t making it to the surface of the sea. It’s floating somewhere in between the sea floor and surface– a goopy mess for any living thing in the ocean.

I have some small experience in oil fields, or in the “oil patch.” I worked for a shipyard that built the world’s premier oil slick skimming boat. We had a machine derived from skimming technology that performed the seemingly trivial task of separating oil and water.

You might think it would be easy, but in nature, dust particles or plankton organisms (plankters) get covered with oil in such a way that they neither sink nor float. They’re neutrally buoyant. As small globs of oily goo, they clog up all kinds of plumbing– including the gills, fins, and wings of fish and birds.

This fundamental experience helped me explain to news anchors and viewers why there was such discrepancy between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations satellite assessment of size of the spill compared with the measurement of the pipe gusher’s oil leak.

I hope BP takes this business very seriously. Any information they are not disclosing will come out one day when various employees or friends of employees reveal the true decision process. I remain concerned that the traditions of oil spills on land are too strongly influencing the procedures being developed on the bottom of the Gulf, an ecosystem people all over the world depend on.

We use a lot of energy. This disaster helps us recognize how complex or oil technology is, and how much can go wrong. Let’s learn from this, wean ourselves from oil, and change the world.

This has come up on account of my involvement with Activeion, a company that sells a remarkable set of products: systems combining electronic and hydraulic devices to produce very, very small bubbles in water. Now when we say small, we are talking  especially small, on the order of 50 nanometers in diameter. That’s 50 billionths of a meter, which is somewhat less than a ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair, or a tenth of the wavelength of green light, for example.

I too was quite skeptical of the existence of what we now call nanobubbles. After all, one cannot easily photograph them with visible light. They are smaller than the lower limit of optical wavelengths.

Nevertheless, compelling calculations show that one in about 250 water molecules can be replaced with an oxygen molecule carrying an electric charge, and a nanobubble will persist for a substantial fraction of a minute.

That aside, I ran my own tests of the efficacy of what has come to be called “activated” water– nanobubble-bearing water. From my direct experiments, I conclude that electrically charged nano-bubbles disrupt the cell walls of bacteria. Rigorous lab test show that they also denature viruses. As you look into this, you may come across the expressions, “bactericidal” and “virucidal.”

In science educator fashion, I baked very clean cotton swabs in an oven at 75 Celsius (170 Fahrenheit) for about an hour. I prepared a bacterial growth medium using boiled bouillon and gelatin cooled in sterile-baked aluminum dishes. I swabbed a number of household surfaces before and after I sprayed them with nanobubble-bearing water. I prepared otherwise untainted control versions of the medium in dishes. I left the dishes covered for three days at room temperature. The treated surfaces produced substantially fewer bacterial colonies on my growth media. My results are consistent with the rigorous results from ATS Laboratories in Minnesota. This lab routinely checks the efficacy of antimicrobial products, the kinds of things used in restaurants, cafeterias, and the like.

While nanobubbles cannot be photographed in conventional fashion, consider these recent micrographs of bacteria. Visit Activeion.com. Use your judgment. See if we’re on to something.

Keep in mind also that the Tennant Company, which supplies floor and surface cleaning equipment to many institutions around the world, has incorporated nanobubble-generating cells in many of their floor washing systems for a few years. Skeptics like you and me have to consider that Tennant’s customers buy these products for some reason.

What I find so appealing about these products is that they are a way to accomplish more with less. As you may know, I strongly believe that this way of thinking is the key to our future. We have almost seven billion people living on what’s proving to be a pretty small planet. If we can find ways to do more with the less, it will help many of us live into the next century.