Good physics with aluminum

 

I never see good physics with these 'science porn' sites.  Nearly everything suffers from scaling.  But this one seems good.  Rare earth metals are everywhere.  You keep reading about new sites, and how great they are, but this is useless.

The nasty buggers are nearly impossible to process and get into a useful form.  That's because their very usefulness results from a very aggressive charge structure.  Try putting that in your pocket!

For a reaction, nobody cares about the stuff inside, it's all the surface.  They now claim to have a structure of aluminum that is as sizzly as the sizzliest rare metal.  If I were trymp, I would treat this discovery like the mrna discovery for the covid vaccine.  Get it out there, and compensate later.  Lots of labs sit on this stuff for rights, etc.

If it is as reactive as they say, then it scales well.  Mass production could solve all these rare earth problems without killing all the miners and processors.  I am excited.

ps note the irony, as he hates the covid vaccine.

Severe cold most likely dead in the water

 

Continuous seepage from the Arctic is no longer strong enough to penetrate the default solar heat of the lower continent.

Toronto will be at the boundary zone, which probably means snow in April.  However, I am going to start my tomatoes under the lights in the garage.  I was reluctant when we had bouts of -20.  

The only hope for a 'Texas Buster' is that the Arctic retreats into a 'recharge' and blows out a good one.  Most likely won't happen, since this 'seepage' pattern will go on, until killed by serious heat.

The general cold will continue, and we will have to wait for the May long weekend to plant tomatoes outside.  Cucumbers first of June.  This is our standard temperature for the cold decades before the warm cycle.  A great sign for our Spring outlook is the Gulf of Maine temperatures which have fallen below the chart.

On the first of May, we can summarize the 'Heating Degree Days' for the season, and it will be record cold.  This is the only legitimate measure of the 'coldness' of the winter, and is directly related to your energy use for heating.  In opposition, the warmies will look at exceptions and have nice stories.  I can't argue with them.

ps I think now it's perfectly fine to go back to the standard weather forecast.  We can talk about highs and lows, and the jet stream as objects.

Scientific Method applied to large underground openings

 

Almost everything done with the construction of large underground caverns is from experience.  I was involved with the field I now call Rock Dynamics, and it's time for some injection of physics and the Scientific Method.

This picture represents the basic large configuration of an underground powerhouse.  There are limits to the size of the cavern, and limits imposed by the quality of the rock.  In general, you need very good rock to construct large openings.  

Experience only gets you to where you've been before.  The Scientific Method can advance things.  I want the caverns to go into tectonic areas.  This is where the real benefit can happen.  A nice active mountain range provides lots of elevation for hydro power.  Right now, we are at a point where we can do large caverns in good rock, in active mountain building.

That requires knowing your basic physics.  The societal myth is that you can't build in an earthquake zone, but the SM should address that.  On preliminary evidence, caverns cannot be bothered by seismic waves, but don't do well if a rupture goes right through it.  

The testable hypothesis is such:  It is impossible for a cavern to be damaged by a seismic wave, if it is a hard inclusion in a softer rock.  This is like a steel tube embedded in rubber, being hit by a rubber hammer.  

If such a cavern would be built, I would embed instruments into everything.  The cavern would be exposed to 10 minor events before a major.  So much fun watching the seismic wave zoom right through the complex with the stress never going above ambient seismic noise.

Faults would be a different matter, but could be isolated.  There is a mine in Canada with a greasy fault going through it, and you can watch it move.  This is actually a good stress reliever and can be engineered.

Blobs of a different colour

 They are coming down like wild horses.  

This new one is backed by a lot of cold, but not much kinetic energy.  Greenland is showing a bit of white.

Blobs are stacking up, like flights to Dubai.

I've pretty well lost the plot on Arctic wind motions.  The Arctic Basin has laminar flow coming right at us.

Fun is over

 

We have no ocean heat energy, and only 'latitude heat', which is stratified like the planet Jupiter.  

Our heating event has died a spectacular death.  You will not find a death scene like that anywhere on the charts.

Stagnant heat will cause a really warm and short summer.  During that time, I expect all the warmies will crawl out of their holes and crow.  They will make endless predictions on how there is no more cold, until the cold comes again.  Then it's the magical Polar Vortex.

I am doing well, slowly shutting down, now that there is nothing to say.  Physics is dead.  

Major deflection of Arctic spills

 Earlier in the year, these blobs would certainly go down to freeze Texas.  Thank goodness we now have a strong 'default' heating effect.  This is 'latitude temperature' and it just comes from the daily solar energy.

There it is, pulsing day and night like a heartbeat.  

We have the spills, and a new, perfectly circular one.

Greenland has sucked in some heat energy, but the west is getting some good 50  below action.

Should be huge snow at the boundaries.

The Arctic spills are deflecting to the East and giving Toronto these short freezing spells.

ps since there are no great energy events coming, once a week is fine.  We are looking at a late Spring, and I have to think about a delay to the starting of the tomatoes.

Huge Arctic blob coming down

 I was in mindful meditation, then I saw this.

Time for them to bring out the ever-flowing Polar Vortex.  If only we could tap that infinite energy.

ps we have a very powerful Arctic spill coming down, and a full Gulf plume coming up to meet it.  Run away from the collision!

ps radar and wind together, neat

This sort of thing gives us the 10 foot snows of the little ice age.

Stopping the blog again

 In the next week or so, we will have incredible cold and snow coming down on us.  I am rather miserable by it all.  

Have fun listening to all the influencers.  Good-bye for now.

End of 'Rock Dynamics'

 I got excited because of a chance to consult on a big project, but I've been there before.  As a Canadian, I wouldn't want to bring in any money because it all gets taxed away.  I would just want the joy, which they can't tax.  

Although I have presented many fine ideas for Canada to get out of the poverty rut, nothing will be done.  That's the story of my life.  All ideas are 'politically unacceptable'.  

I see a future where 'ndp-ers' continue to control us, constantly demanding money we don't have.  Although 'social success' is a fine idea, it ruins any ideas to bring in more money.  However, I am living on those concepts, so what the hey!

For some reason, the influencers continue to dominate, even though they have always been wrong.  I hate to think of the disaster that would shake this, so I should just shut up.  Always be careful on what you wish for.

But I will just stick to weather physics for now, even though I hate the weather I predict.  If only wishes were fishes.

Cold in the Time of Blobs

 

The Arctic looks like it is in recharge, like earlier in the season.  Can't really call it.

ps snowed more than I thought

ps that's a true clipper, so expect a lot more snow.

ps oh, and I didn't catch this A8 blob coming down.  It's in the weather forecast.  You can see the perfect, clear lobate front.  It's been a month or two since the last one.  The big question is whether it can penetrate the US default heat.

ps I like this.  He goes with 'Ruthless Honesty', instead of my 'Ruthless Rationality' which sounds better because of the alliteration.  

The fun is that you can be an honest idiot.

ps and this guy is the last of my 'Gods of Global Warming', who is still out there.  Everybody else is an 'anonymous expert'.  I have nothing but good words for him.

Underground is our future

 

Rock Mechanics as a study, died with the turn of the century.  Everybody just decided to go with 'design build' and pay for extras.  This has resulted in a lot of disasters, pasted over with a lot of money.

Geotechnical Engineering also died because of retaining wall systems.  No need for any academic work.

Now, it is all changing.  My goal is to have an underground space so inviting that you can't tell in a blind test whether you are on the beach in California, or underground.  Really, that's not a possibility because of the travel.  But, it is a dream!

We are entering an ice cycle, or Ice Age without continental glaciation.  Do you want to be on the street at 50 below?  The Chinese are doing all this underground stuff.  They need to instrument everything and look at the bigger picture.

The study of Rock Mechanics will now go beyond rockbolts.  I hope to be part of this.

ps Rock Mechanics needs a new name.  Rock Physics?  Rock Design?  Underground Architecture? 

ps grow coca and poppies underground, or this is your future

ps That's it!  Rock Dynamics.  Big Hallmark light shows every night.

Cold Revenge for Hockey

 So, okay, the hockey gods were against us.  They enjoyed rolling a puck up the shaft of the goalie stick.  But, I can't stand gloating about it, unless it's me doing the gloating.  Therefore, I gloat about the cold!

We are getting a very narrow cold band, shoved around by Pacific warm air.  But you see hints of a Monster Blob coming down.

I've never seen Greenland as pristine white.  It is joining in the US dog pile of cold.  It was my favourite game as a kid 'Pile on!'.  Who cares about the kid at the bottom?  We were 50's kids.

This is the most ridiculous thing I've seen - straight for Marred Lugo!

An incredibly healthy Arctic cold factory.  All the northern heat shoots out here with clear-air convection.  It leaves the super cold sludge behind.  A giant factory and it's pollution, except it is natural on a huge scale.  If you are a physics person, you are just stunned by the beauty.

ps and it is sad - no more Winter Olympics.  I just couldn't take all the excitement.

ps our only hope for warmth was the Pacific Heating Event, which was not captured by the expansion of the El Nino zone to the whole Pacific.  Unfortunately, this event is deflating like your cousin's air mattress at 2 in the morning.

We'll never get rid of these guys

 

In a La Nina, warm water sticks to a deeper depth, resulting in a cooler surface. And that reduces how much energy goes out into space, says study co-author Yu Kosaka, a climate scientist at the University of Tokyo.

That's 'sinks', and warm water never sinks below cold.  I could show that in the kitchen, but everybody is supposed to know this.  I feel sad for the world.

The ice cream sandwich theory of tectonic deformation

 

Assume the ice cream is soft.  You can shear the thing back and forth, and all deformation will be in the ice cream.  There is no way to bother the hard layers, unless you take a big knife and cut it.  That would be cheating, but delicious.

Stress for earthquakes - Part 2

 

I don't pay enough money to get a video of this working with googs Artie.  But you can use your imagination.  The physics of this is exactly the same as seismic stress propagation.

The end ball is held into the group by tension strength, which is really applied compressive stress by the slight tilt of the string.  You lift and release the far end.  This is the earthquake.  In this case, we just have the compressive wave, which is the most important with underground caverns.

The compressive wave goes into the final ball and reflects off the free surface.  This is very easy to model with finite differences.  I used to do it all the time.  Then a tensile wave starts to propagate back.  The tensile stress exceeds the compressive set of the ball and it separates, or spalls in mining terms.

Off it goes to swing again.  Neat!

ps OMG, I can't believe it that something is afoot which will make my book "Ruthless Rationality" a best seller, if I actually wrote the book, which seems like work.

Thar She Blows!

 Back to my normal, happy personality.  Seems we need a little bit of Pacific plumes to get full action from the Arctic.  We have a full counter-clockwise vortex, producing endless cold.

The poor Florida iguanas.  

This is a Pacific plume, providing just enough energy to pull the starter cord on the Arctic Basin Freezing Machine.

Today, the natgas people look Cold Death in the face.  Will they blink?  Note that we have a full white Greenland, the first time this season.

ps whoops forgot the video

and this

This is Climate Change in Action!

ps And a great Death Scene for our heating event

Never fear, I understand they are going to drag El Nino from the grave any minute now.

New York gets quite the storm

 

This was in the Guardian, and of course, is proof of climate change.  No doubt about that.

We have a huge Arctic flow that will give us -14C tomorrow night.  Storms are a great mechanism of warm and cold air mixing.

Maximum stress in earthquake seismic propagation

 Earthquakes were my first interest in things that were determined by 'tradition' and not physics.  As such, they had many myths that kept them going.  As with everything else, much power was tied up in the pronouncements by senior people, and they fought like heck to preserve power.

The biggest myth was that a fault generated the earthquake.  This just 'made sense'.  As such, the callie guys went nuts mapping every stinkin' little fault, and drawing circles around them where you couldn't build anything.

Groupthink is always based on things that make sense.  It is spread by powerful influencers who ridicule anybody who opposes it.  It is all fine and dandy until it collapses.  Then those people scurry off into the corners, and you never hear of them again.  If they decide to have an investigation, it is always the guy who was warning everybody who got the can, because he didn't try hard enough.

- to be continued, maybe

Underground Caverns in Tectonic Settings

 I have brushed up on all my old papers.  Sometimes you need to excavate a cavern near an active fault, or under a glacial advance.  The glacial loading is greater.

This can be solved with Ruthless Rationality.  We can leave myth-making aside on this.  It's the same as nuclear waste at Wesleyville.  In 10,000 years, liquid waste against rock won't get more than a centimetre in, due to diffusion.  Is it politically acceptable?  Nope.

The big thing about glaciation or tectonic uplift is that every zone that is going to move, has moved.  Make a big multi-layer ice cream sandwich, with Dairy Queen soft ice cream.  Squoosh it around a bit.  All the displacement is in the cream.  You can't ever touch the hard bits.  

You can make this case, using AI, and advanced computing, in such a way to convince everybody.  You can't convince the hard mythies, but you can convince them to leave you alone, and they call you an idiot for going with physics.  

Canada needs to go with Ruthless Rationality.  Unfortunately, people still vote for the NDP.  For physics, China has my 'Gold Rationality Star'.  For their major projects, there has been nothing wrong.  And I buy all my physics toys directly from China.  Canada can't do major things, except for paving roads.

So, Mr Carney.  Go with my plan to raise Canada.  Then we can afford the dental plans.  

ps my science fiction reads include a high-speed tube system throughout the world.  I keep getting stuck on putting a tunnel through the Mid-Atlantic Rift.  I think it can be done dodging through the transform faults.

Back to Bathing in Rationality

 Early in my career, I lived and breathed in rationality.  Those were heady times.  My blog has been recently going against stupidity, but I may have a chance to dream of rationality again.

Since I knew that nobody reads me, and I had no chance in the preacher department, my style has been satirical.  But rationality beckons, and I'm digging up the old stuff.  

My greatest work was in the basic physics of rock.  We looked at stresses, and the response of undergound openings to earthquakes.  For that I needed a deep dive into the physics of earthquakes.  Most important, was the expected stresses propagated in seismic waves.

For the test cases in my papers, I concluded that, in granite, the stresses were below noise expected in a cavern, or below the expected safety factors in design.  There was heartbreak when the old company ignored all this with their Niagara tunnel.  Good thing that unstable creation was abandoned after building.

I also had to venture into the general stability of caverns.  This was all ignored when looking for underground nuclear waste storage.  I expanded into glacial loading for caverns, and lots of other things.

It was always my greatest dream to be 'not ignored'.  For Canada and our western world, this has to come at the expense of great disasters.  We are heading to those.  I would like to be in a position to prevent great disasters.

My blog now turns serious for a little while.  If you are one of my 3 readers, go along with this.  Thank you.

Cold air breakouts begin again

 

We are in full production of cold.  The Europe flow is stopped.

In other matters, I have always dreamed I would be Edward Deming, spreading basic physics to a place ready to receive it.  His was the math of quality, and Japan sucked it up.  I am looking at a similar chance now in the only rational country in the world.  Expect only 'gravitas' from me in the near future, but be happy in the knowledge I probably can't do it.

Yeah, more greenhouses

 It is my dream of success for Canada, to have a huge number of greenhouses, driven by natural gas and its carbon, to grow every pharma-plant known to man.

They would all be run by Ukrainians, who are the smartest people in the world.  That would be Coca leaves, and juicy poppies.  The base levels of these drugs heal people, the artificial concentrations just exist because of crime and smuggling.

Someone showed this to me.  10,000 Ukrainian greenhouses to go.

ps also my dream for Canada to declare 'Scientific Method Day', with my theme song.  Olympics are nice, but what did jocks ever do to raise our standard of living?

Full Arctic flow down to Texas

 

The flow is there, but the temperatures don't reflect it yet.  I think the flow is very high, and will settle down tomorrow.  Very hard to calculate total energy these days.

All impacts of the heating event are gone

 With physics, you know you have the real thing when you see impacts on all charts.

During the heating event you had Pacific plumes bashing into the west coast and sailing over the mountains like flying dragons of heat.  Now, we are back to the old pattern of weak plumes heading to the Arctic, where elephants go to die.

The Arctic is very cold, but without heat energy, it just stays there, looking stupid.  

The Arctic Cold Factory has come off its layoff.  It will start building up its inventory of cold sludge air.  Just like tires in Ontario, there will soon be no more room, and it will export to the US.  It's not paying the illegal taxes.

ps and here is my morning bowl of Delicious Irony

ps more irony served on a plate

Clange is bringing back the weather of 1794, the Little Ice Age.  

Physics folk ballad

 I wanted to do F = ma, but the poor lady just couldn't do it.  Force equals mass times acceleration, the most fundamental thing to nerdy engineers.  Really, this disaster is the end, but I'm in love with this singer.

ps the whole family says this is great.  I wanted it to play for the grandkids in the ovens (coming!), so they get an edge on physics.

World temperature report - Feb 20, 2026

 As the song says, they missed convection 'the most glorious force in the Universe'.  We had a nice little heating event that saved US natgas.

This was the area of a big ocean current reversal.  These things dump a lot of heat into the air.  The El Nino event was a huge reversal across the whole ocean.

The heating event is dead, and things are rapidly going back to a cold normal.  We are getting our cold blobs back.  The cold was stopping at the border, but we should get a trumper soon.

The weather people just see low and high pressure zones floating over the Earth.  They don't care about the primary forces.

ps Tariffs struck down.  Now I really expect another 'trump is dead' thing.  He has to blow a gasket.