Gas

Contrary to what hippies think (since I know what other people think, being omniscient and all), our civilization runs on petroleum, about a hundred gallons a month per person. Specifically, gasoline. Oil causes all kinds of problems, mostly because we use so much of it, there are buckets of money involved, and well, that kind of explains it, doesn't it?

On the other hand, we have a boatload of Natural Gas, sometimes it is more than we know what to do with. It is great for any energy hunger operation that isn't going anywhere. You can run a pipeline and suck up all the gas you want or need. For powering any kind of vehicle, it is a little more problematic. You need a big, high pressure tank to hold the gas. You can get such tanks, but they are expensive and they are big.

Then I got an idea. Natural gas and oil are both hydrocarbons, which means they are composed of the elements hydrogen and carbon. Natural gas is mostly methane, which has a chemical formula of CH4, which means one carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Oil is composed of chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms. They come in a variety of lengths. Tars are very long chains, oils are composed of medium length chains, and gasoline is made of a variety of shorter chains. Methane is like a chain with a length of one.

Cracking is a process they use in the oil refineries to break long chains into shorter ones. They use it to turn things like tar, which is like the bottom of the barrel (literally and figuratively), into gasoline which is worth more. So we can break chains. Can we make chains?

What we need is a breakthrough in chemical engineering that would allow us to build up long chain hydrocarbons from short ones, like methane. We need a breakthrough because no one has figured out how to do this on an industrial scale for a low cost. If we could do this, we could be making gasoline out of natural gas, which would give us an alternative to getting oil from the Middle East, and could postpone a war with China and India over oil.

Quote of the Day

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." ---Thomas Jefferson, 1816.

My outlook toggles between dark and light. It's been pretty dark lately (we are all doomed), but this morning a little light crept in in the form of this quote. From Gunsite, Via Tam.

Thinking is hard work, especially about things that are not intrinsically interesting. Most of our everyday lives exhibit little, if any. What's worse is that most of what you hear on TV is spoken by people who have given little, if any, thought to what they are saying. They open their mouths and stuff, to put it nicely, comes out.

Tab Clearing

Links to amazing / interesting / weird stuff I've come across this week.

• Chicken Tax via Dustbury
• Older Peron Transgression via Tamara
• Sheep eating grass via Scott

Title stolen from Tam as well.

Contact

The switch controlling the gas fireplace was being flaky. Push it once and the fireplace comes on. Turn around five minutes later and it has gone out. Flip the switch and it comes back on again. Probably because it's the wrong kind of switch. It's a standard household light switch, good for 15 Amps and 120 Volts and it is being asked to switch 800 millivolts and some small number of milliamps. I imagine that the load is not enough to keep the contacts free of corrosion. They are probably brass, and a thin film of corrosion is all it would take to keep it from working. So I go to Home Depot and buy a new switch for $2.50 and install it and the fireplace seems to be happier now. Just for grins, or because I am compulsive this way, your choice, I take the old one apart. Here, for your amusement is a picture of the contacts from the old switch.

Disaster

The Chrysler Sebring, the one my son and I spent the summer overhauling, has blown up. Coming up grapevine hill after lunch yesterday I gave it the beans and in response got a loud noise. It made it to the top of the hill but as soon I shifted into neutral the engine died. I pulled over and called for a tow.

Up till then there was no indication that there was anything seriously wrong. There were a few minor problems, like the clunk in the suspension, the whine from the alternator, something snapping down by the fan belt,  and steering wheel was on crosswise. But no indication of a real problem. Except for maybe the heat. Drive across town and the motor gets warm, as it should, but open the hood, and it seems really hot, like an oven, or an overheated motor. But we never got any of the conventional indications of an overheating motor. It didn't boil over, it wasn't loosing coolant, and the temperature gauge never got above the half-way mark.

So I don't know what went wrong. Maybe the block and heads were not flat enough. Maybe the head bolts should have been replaced. There was one funny thing, and that was when we filled the radiator with coolant it did not take nearly as much as I expected it too. So maybe there is something plugging the cooling system. But if that's the case, what's the deal with the temperature gauge? I don't know what went wrong, but things have definitely gone South and I am very unhappy.

To assauge my suffering I sit down to watch an old episode of Top Gear and they are doing a retrospective on the Rover V-8. This is interesting and a little painful. My first car was a 1963 Buick Special that I bought from my father for its' trade in value of $150. It had an aluminum V-8, the same engine that a couple of years later would become the Rover V-8, which would be used in a variety of British cars for the next 40 years.

Cars powered by the Rover V8 engine

Top Gear collected an entire fleet of cars powered by this engine for this picture. In the three years that General Motors produced this engine, they built 750,000 of them, which is more than the British built in the next 40 years*. General Motors quit building the engine because there were too many problems with the corrosion in the cooling system, due to customers using the wrong coolant in the aluminum engine.

Huh. Imagine that. Cooling problems with an aluminum engine. In case you didn't know, the engine in the Sebring is aluminum. Something is rotten in my garage and I want to find out what it is. Whether I will or not is another matter.

* Autocar has an interesting story about the Rover V-8.

Update August 2023 replaced missing picture and added YouTube link.

Jack's Jury Duty

My friend Jack got called for jury duty yesterday. For him, it's a short bus ride downtown and parking is expensive, so he took the bus. The bus is loaded with high school students on their way to school wearing their Halloween costumes. He gets to the Multnomah County courthouse where he sits and waits in a large room with 200 other people. The City of Portland, the most populous city in Oregon, is in Multnomah County, so this is the big deal in courthouses as far as Oregon goes.  At least the chairs are comfortable. Seems someone has set up a deal where you can donate your jury pay (which is some miserable amount like $10 a day) to buy better furnishings for the waiting room, like tables and chairs and TV's.

First off they need 20 or so people for a Grand Jury, which means you will be "serving" for 30 days. (Please Lord, don't pick me.) Then they pick off groups of 20 so for all the various trials going on.  Jack gets sent to a courtroom where a partially crippled woman is suing two drivers and one passenger for pain and suffering incurred from two parking lot bump-into-another-car accidents. The plaintiff's lawyer has quit.

Everybody's in the courtroom, then all the involved parties go to another room and (it's secret, we don't know what they were doing in there). They come back and it looks like it's going to trial, so now we need to select a jury. They question the jurors as a group, and some individually. In the end they excuse all but 13, 12 for the jury and one alternate, and Jack is excused.

So Jack goes back to the waiting room and waits some more. They call another 20 or so people to hang around for the rest of the day, just in case something comes up,  and the rest, including Jack, are free to leave. Another civic obligation fulfilled.

Nursery Rhymes

I'm reading Dustbury this morning which leads to What do you do with a drunken sailor? which I haven't heard in a zillion years, which leads me to the Roud Folk Song Index, which leads to my making a list of all the tunes I recognize from the list in Wikipedia. The full list has a zillion entries, but the Wikipedia page only lists about 750. Most of them I have never heard of, but then I see one I had forgotten about, which leads to looking at the next page, which leads to another tune I had forgotten about, and so I ended up reading all the way to the end. I was surprised to see how many songs about Robin Hood are in this list. Some of the tunes are just short little nursery rhymes, some have been recorded recently and become pop music hits.

        "The Streets of Laredo" (Laws B1)
        "Frog Went A-Courting"
        "The Twelve Days of Christmas"
        "Green Grow The Rushes Oh"
        "Banks of the Ohio"
        "John Barleycorn"
        "The Elfin Knight" (Child 2) (also "Scarborough Fair")
        "On Top of Old Smoky"
        "London Bridge Is Falling Down"
        "Buffalo Gals"
        "Old McDonald Had a Farm"
        "The Old Gray Mare"
        "Red River Valley"
        "Haul Away Joe"
        "Git Along, Little Dogies"
        "Cotton-Eyed Joe"
        "Old King Cole"
        "Blue Tail Fly"
        "Oats Peas Beans and Barley Grow"
        "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean"
        "Blow Ye Winds"
        "Blow the Man Down"
        "Rock-a-bye Baby"
        "Sweet Betsy from Pike"
        "The Ballad of Casey Jones"
        "Poor Wayfaring Stranger"
        "Cripple Creek"
        "Home on the Range"
        "Tom Dooley"
        "Turkey in the Straw"
        "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"
        "Three Blind Mice"
        "Skip to My Lou"
        "The Arkansas Traveler"
        "Tom Dooley"
        "Shortnin' Bread"
        "Shady Grove"
        "Yankee Doodle"
        "Barnacle Bill"
        "There Was a Crooked Man"
        "Pop Goes the Weasel"
        "Auld Lang Syne"
        "The Farmer in the Dell"
        "Midnight Special"
 6487.  "Little Bo Peep"
 6489.  "Hickory Dickory Dock"
        "Big Rock Candy Mountain"
        "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands"
        "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"
        "Polly Put the Kettle On"
 7922.  "The Muffin Man"
 7925.  "Ring a Ring O'Roses"
 7992.  "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum"
        "Do Your Ears Hang Low?"
10266.  "Jack and Jill"
        "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"
11586.  "Itsy Bitsy Spider"
        "Camptown Races"
        "Michael Row the Boat Ashore"
        "See See Rider"
        "Rub-a-dub-dub"
        "Humpty Dumpty"
13027.  "Little Jack Horner"
        "Sing a Song of Sixpence"
13497.  "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater"
13512.  "Ten Little Indians"
13711.  "Wee Willie Winkie"
13902.  "Jack Be Nimble"
15220.  "Go Tell It On the Mountain"
15472.  "Do Your Ears Hang Low?"
        "It's Raining, It's Pouring"
        "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe"
        "There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe"
19236.  "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"
19334.  "Old Mother Hubbard"
19478.  "Hey Diddle Diddle"
19479.  "Jack Sprat"
19532.  "Georgie Porgie"
19621.  "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son"
19626.  "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary"
19772.  "As I was going to St Ives"
19777.  "Simple Simon"
        "Little Miss Muffet"