CF Industries

CF Industries Ammonia Plant, Port Neal, Iowa
The long white bar is a 1700 foot long warehouse for storing urea.

When we were in Sioux City Iowa last week, there was a story in the news about how a $2 billion dollar expansion of the local ammonia plant was nearing completion. $2 billion is a sizable chunk on change, you can almost build a new integrated circuit fabrication facility for that kind of money. Intel's Ronler Acres plant is just down the road from where I live and it's huge. It's huge and it's full of high-tech, whiz bang equipment, so I can understand why it cost so much money. But $2 billion for a fertilizer plant, well, that just boggles my mind. Not a lot of high technology going on here. It's just basic chemistry on an enormous scale. It might be that building big things out of steel, big things that will be operated at high temperatures and pressures is more expensive than electro-mechanical stuff that isn't subject to those extremes.
     Looking for information about this plant I found this story about a minor disaster:

The Port Neal fertilizer plant explosion occurred on December 13, 1994 in the ammonium nitrate plant at the Terra International, Inc., Port Neal Complex, 16 miles south of Sioux City, Iowa, United States.^[1] Four workers at the plant were killed by the explosion, and eighteen others were injured.^[3] The seven-story building at the seat of the blast was completely destroyed, leaving only a crater, and significant damage was inflicted to the surrounding structures.^[4] Four nearby electricity generating stations were disabled by the explosion, and the effects of the blast were felt up to 30 miles away.^[5] A high-voltage line running adjacent to the plant and over the Missouri River was damaged, disrupting power in the neighboring state of Nebraska.^[6] Two 15,000-ton refrigeratedammonia storage tanks were ruptured, releasing liquid ammonia and ammonia vapors which forced the evacuation of 1,700 residents from the surrounding area.^[7] - Wikipedia

Curious thing is that another outfit is building another nitrogen fertilizer plant on the other side of the state, down near Fort Madison Iowa.

Iowa Fertilizer Plant, Wever Iowa

With two big fertilizer plants nearing completion, I guess Iowa is expecting a continued high demand for fertilizer. I guess that's sort of obvious, isn't it?

Muscle Shoals

TVA Wilson Dam, Muscle Shoals, Alabama

The Wilson Dam was built in the early 20th century. It generates over 600 megawatts of electricity. The government needed gunpowder for the war, so they built this dam, the attached power house and two plants for producing nitrates. WW1 ended, and the need for gunpowder went away, so the plants were converted to making fertilizer. When WW2 came along, they went back to making gunpowder, and after that they went back to making fertilizer again.

Air View of Nitrate Plant No. 2 at Muscle Shoals, AL
Wilson Dam can be seen in the background.

There is still a fertilizer factory there, though it seems to be much reduced in scale.

I was reminded of this by the similarity to the Norsk Hydro plant in The Heavy Water War - hydro power being used to generate electricity which in turn is used to make fertilizer.

Radioactive Tobacco

Some time ago (days, years, decades?) I read a story where the fertilizer that was being applied to tobacco plants was being blamed as the root cause of cancer for smokers. The idea was that the fertilizer contained radioactive lead (!?), it was absorbed by the plant, and lodged in the lungs when the leaves were smoked. To support this theory, they had mapped the radiation deposits (using some sort of imaging process) in smokers lungs and found that they had much higher levels of radiation than non-smokers. So the problem wasn't the tobacco at all, but the fertilizer the growers were using. Now I find this report that asserts something similar. It does not mention fertilizer, but I suspect that just means the secret organization that really runs things still has some power to suppress the truth (grin).

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11974&feedId=online-news_rss20

Afghanistan Bananastan

Just read a story in the paper about finding 500,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Afghanistan (couldn't find the story on my paper's website, or the Times either, whence it supposedly came). They busted a couple of dozen people. It looks like they were using this stuff to make bombs. But then I thought: it could all be a put up job. Any countries biggest business is agriculture (big in volume of material and land area, not in money), and fertilizer has legitimate uses, like being used as fertilizer. So secret bomb material cache -or- legitimate fertilizer warehouse? Of course, having a bunch of other bomb making material on hand (like timers, wires, diesel fuel) does make it look a little suspicious. Of course, those items also have legitimate uses in agriculture. Farm equipment runs on diesel, irrigation needs timers, and timers need wires, and a dry place like Afghanistan could use some irrigation. So if it's not just the good ol' boys havin' a little fun, then we may have put a real crimp in bomb making in Afghanistan .

This whole Afghanistan thing has been percolating in the back of my mind lately, and I am beginning to wonder just why we are there. Our avowed purpose is to wipe out Al-Queda and terrorism in general, but we don't seem to be making any real progress there. I mean we are trying to stop the beaters from beating other people, and at the same time we are trying to teach them to be civilized, and all the while we are trying to pull the wagon train out of swamp where it has been mired for the last 500 years. I am beginning to think it is just all too much.

Then there is the conspiracy theory that says we want control of Afghanistan so we can build a pipeline to India. That one has to be really convoluted because the Russians would be using it to sell the oil to India. Okay, we could have some Russians and Indians in cahoots with some people in Washington to get this done, but man, the payoff time is in years, and iffy to boot. It's a stretch to believe something like that.

But then we have heroin. Whenever TV show detectives get some screwed up case that makes no sense, they fall back on the adage of "follow the money", and the only money in Afghanistan is in poppies. But then we still don't know who is benefiting from the US being there. Are we trying to make Afghanistan safe for heroin producers? Or are we trying to gain control so we can suppress it, because Afghan heroin is competing with SE Asian heroin, and somebody doesn't like that.

Title comes from a line in the movie The Hot Rock. It seems to be a popular title for articles this week.

Death lurking in your kitchen

Oh, I love this! Food for one of my favorite conspiracy theories. From an article in the NY Times about granite countertops (Andy sent us the link):

"The E.P.A. recommends taking action if radon gas levels in the home exceeds 4 picocuries per liter of air (a measure of radioactive emission); about the same risk for cancer as a half a pack of cigarettes per day."

and

"Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking and is considered especially dangerous to smokers, whose lungs are already compromised."

I remember reading a story many years ago about a study done of cigarette smokers who had died of lung cancer. The researcher found high levels of radioactive lead in their lungs. Where did the lead come from? It doesn't normally come from plants or from the atmosphere. He traced it to the fertilizer that the tobacco farmers were using on their plants.

Fertilizer is big business, and we certainly don't want to blame big business for cancer, so we'll blame tobacco. Of course we ended up blaming big business (the tobacco companies) anyway, but I think all this means is that the chemical companies had political ties into the military industrial complex and the tobacco companies didn't.

Naturally, this researcher was never heard from again. I may be the only one carrying his standard.

Here is a chart I found that illustrates the decay of Uranium (U) to Lead (Pb) via Radium (Ra), Radon (Rn) and a whole bunch of other elements. I wish the text was clearer, but I had to blow it up so I could see it.

The vertical axis shows the number of protons (Z), the horizontal axis has the number of neutrons. Beta decay is a neutron emitting an electron and turning into a proton, which causes the element to move one place to the left AND one place up. Weight does not change, though the electron may leave at relativistic velocities.

Alpha decay has an alpha particle (essentially a Helium nucleus) leaving. You loose two protons and two neutrons, so you move two places down and two places to the left. In both cases the number of protons change which pretty much determines what element you are. Notice that atomic weights change by 4, but are not multiples of 4. I smell another conspiracy here.

Updated December 2014 because the Hungarian decay chart vanished.

The Heavy Water War

The Heavy Water War Teaser
We started watching this series on Netflix last night. It's pretty good. Back during WW2, the USA wasn't the only country trying to build an atomic bomb, Nazi Germany was working on the idea as well. 'Working' might be exaggerating their effort a bit, flailing might be a more apt description. But we didn't know how inept their efforts were, I mean the Germans are obviously very talented technically. Maybe they will succeed, and we sure don't want that, so we need to stop them if we can. Failing that we need to slow them down as much as possible, hence the raids on Norsk Hydro.

We started watching this and I'm wondering how it is that Norway has this monopoly on heavy water? Do they have some mystical spring where they get an abundance of the stuff? It took a little digging, but what I eventually figured out was that they were electrolysing water to get hydrogen so they could make fertilizer. They had built a power plant and factories, in fact a whole town, all to produce mass quantities of fertilizer.

All water contains a very small amount of heavy water, something like 0.03%. Electrolysis tends to preferentially break down light (normal) water, so after you have been running your electrolysis for a while, the water you are left with has a higher concentration of heavy water. Since heavy water is such a small percentage of natural water, in order to get useful amount of heavy water, you need to be electrolysing tons of water, which is what they were doing to Norsk Hydro.

Norsk Hydro Power Plant. The pipes running down the side of hill supply water to the turbines that drive the generators that make the electricity that is used to electrolysis the water.

There have been a number of films made about this. I saw one some time ago. There is one from 1948 available on YouTube.

Nauru

The rock that started it all
The rock's story

Today I came across a feeble story about an Australian Refugee Detention camp in, of all places, Nauru (nah oo roo). Nauru is small island is the South Pacific. The name sounds familiar. It wouldn't be that island with the huge deposits of bird poop, would it? Well, yes, it would.

Okay, so maybe the crags were only 20 or 30 feet tall

    I remember hearing about this place when I was a kid and it was described as being a roundish island with a narrow strip of habitable land around the outside edge. The interior was filled with these giant crags of rock (2 or 300 feet tall in my minds eye) and all the space between the crags was filled with bird poop, which could be mined for use as fertilizer.
    Australia has a policy of not letting any boat people into the country on the premise that more people are drowned trying to make the crossing than actually make it, so by discouraging them, fewer people try and fewer people die. Sounds like fodder for a big political argument.
    The Australian coast guard sweeps the northern sea. Any boats loaded with refugees get picked up and shipped to Nauru, a thousand miles away. Australia pays Nauru handsomely for accepting these people and this seems to be the one bright spot in the Nauru economy. (The economy is really tiny, so any kind of government activity is going to have big impact.) The Australian taxpayers are footing the exorbitant bill, but that is the Australian taxpayers problem and I'll leave it to them.
    Nauru was riding high for a while on the bird poop business, but like many lottery winners the money wandered off, and the bird poop mining business removed all the bird poop, so now Nauru is reduced to  running a concentration camp for the white man.

Nauru Phosphate Mining

     Then there was the bit about how all the phosphate deposits might not actually be bird poop, but were actually fish poop that accumulated when Nauru was on the bottom of the sea. That's not a half bad theory. Volcanic action produces new islands all the time, well, at least occasionally. These new islands are usually made of molten lava, but I suppose a piece of the seafloor could be pushed up, intact. And if these phosphate deposits were made by birds, where are all the birds? And why is this island the only one with these massive deposits?
     Nauru seems to be a stellar example of the horrors of a welfare state. What those people need is a religion, a religion that would put them to work doing something strenuous. Like carving massive stone heads and transporting them to the coast.

Big Brother

    E.B. Misfit put up a post today about a Supreme Court ruling about electronic surveillance. There was a movie not too long ago about the East German Secret Police listening to everyone (back when there was an East Germany). Then there was the bit about the Soviets listening to everything everyone said and you had to mind your P's and Q's if you didn't want to be sent off to the Gulag. Now we have the NSA listening to everything.

Points:

1. The Soviet Union collapsed because they could not continue to fund their national security apparatus, which meant mostly the armed forces, but you can include the KGB and all their apparatchiks as well.
2. The NSA may be recording everything and stowing it away in some vast great server farm, but how much of this stuff is anyone actually going to look at or listen to? Not much. What they'll do is wait for the computer to highlight something and then they'll go look at it, and it won't be of any interest, so they'll go on to the next highlighted item.
3. Occasionally, someone will realize that all clandestine communications will be done using code words, so all conversations will become code. "Picking up the kids from soccer" will mean picking up the terrorists from the safe house. "Going to the store for groceries" will mean stocking up on fertilizer and fuel oil. Now every conversation will be suspect and will have to be investigated, which means absolutely nothing will get done.
4. The Soviets only listened to people who mattered. If you didn't do anything to get noticed, no  one paid you any mind.

    Remember the old Pogo quote? "We have met the enemy and he is us." It costs the USA about a million dollars a year to put a soldier in the field, mostly for the same reason that it costs a $100 million dollars to make a movie. It's an expedition. You need to bring everything with you, and you need to bring a bunch of people to bring the stuff, and then you need to feed them, which means more people and more stuff. It's like a pyramid scheme.
    I keep thinking the Taliban is couple of guys walking around with a shovel and a gun, but it's not. It's actually a sizable organization, and like any big outfit it takes money to run it. I imagine it probably takes about $10 thousand a year for the Taliban to put a soldier in the field, or about ONE PERCENT of what we are spending.
    We hire contractors to build things in Afghanistan. The contractors have to deal with the local people in order to get things done. Pay off the local warlords so their workers don't get shot on the job. I would not be surprised if ONE PERCENT of what we spend to put our own troops in the field ends up in the hands of the Taliban, who use that money to put one of their own soldiers in the field. In effect we are paying the enemy to fight us.
    We are all going to hell.

Real Talk About Nicotine

Hrayr Karagueuzian on radioactive particles in cigarettes
UCLA

Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about cigarettes, nicotine and the evil CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), a branch of the evil Federal government. It's great stuff, but he left out my favorite theory about lung cancer: 

It's the radioactive lead in the fertilizer that is used on tobacco plants in the field. Some dude did a study many moons ago and found that lung cancer lungs were full of radioactive lead.

Google found a bunch of links that apparently confirm my theory.

The post had a couple of terms that I had to look up:

• Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are a class of drugs that inhibit the activity of one or both monoamine oxidase enzymes: monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B). They are best known as effective antidepressants, especially for treatment-resistant depression and atypical depression.[1] They are also used to treat panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, Parkinson's disease, and several other disorders.
• Nootropics, also known as “smart drugs” are a diverse group of medicinal substances whose action improves human thinking, learning, and memory, especially in cases where these functions are impaired.

CO2 & U

Disney '43 - The Winged Scourge
Celtoon
Talking to a guy I know, he tells me he was plagued by mosquitoes last January, here, in Oregon. Seemed a little far fetched, but winters are pretty mild here, and he insisted, sokay, fine, mosquitoes in January. He showed the county bug man a sample and bug man, said, yup, that's a mosquito. He actually went into some scientific detail about it. Seems there are 40 or 50 different species of mosquitoes living in Oregon. They set up some mosquito traps around the house. Mosquitoes travel in straight lines out from their breeding grounds. They checked on the traps a few days later and the traps showed a definite direction for the source of the mosquitoes. They did some searching and quickly located a covered swimming pool that hadn't been adequate poisoned (chlorinated). Cleaning that up eliminated the mosquito problem.

I'm watching another video about how they control mosquitoes at Disney World and I notice that they are using a whole bunch of animated clips. A search on YouTube turned up the above video. The mosquito traps they use at Disney World give off CO2, which seems to be a mosquito attractor. Don't want to be bothered by mosquitos? Quit breathing.

Nitrogren Atmosphere Warning Sign

Or not. When you are holding your breath, it is the increasing level of CO2 that makes you desperate to breath, not the loss of oxygen. As such you can suffocate a person with nitrogen. They aren't getting any oxygen, but their CO2 concentration is not increasing, so they have no sense of being desperate. If you don't get any oxygen you will just pass out and die. It works so well that some states may start using it for executions instead of lethal injection. Some produce warehouses employ a nitrogen atmosphere to help keep produce fresh. Don't be walking in there to get you some veggies, well, not unless you are looking to become fertilizer.

Paris Green, mentioned in the Disney video at top, is a poison. It is made from copper(II) acetate and arsenic trioxide. Didn't I just run into arsenic trioxide? Yes, I did:


Freezing 200,000 Tons of Lethal Arsenic Dust
This is the Giant Mine at the Great Slave Lake in Northwest Territories in Canada. Makes me wonder how many people died of arsenic poisoning at this mine when it was in operation, or, if nobody died, how did they manage to keep people from being poisoned?

Update November 2012 replaced missing video.

Big Bang

Smoke rises from the debris after the explosions at the Binhai new district in Tianjin, China, August 13, 2015. Two massive explosions caused by flammable goods ripped through an industrial area in the northeast Chinese port city of Tianjin late on Wednesday, killing 17 people and injuring as many as 400, official Chinese media reported. All the cars in the foreground were burnt to a crisp. REUTERS/China Daily

When I read that these explosions were large enough to be measured on the Richter Scale, I thought they had to be pretty big. But then I read that there had been another industrial explosion last year, and I thought, well, typical Chinese business. When you push too hard and too fast mistakes are bound to happen. 

     Today I decided to check to see just how bad it was. It was bad enough to make Wikipedia's Top 100. The last big bang was the Canadian oil train fire in 2013. Also in 2013 there was the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, and it was only half as big as this one in China.

Post about the Houston Ammonia Truck Explosion. Not big enough to make Wiki's list.

The World's Deadliest Arms Race

The World's Deadliest Arms Race
Tsar
This video is just over a year old. There is some good reporting being done, I'm just not in touch. Searching itv dot com website turns up lots of results for Exposure (the name of the show), but nothing for the name of the video. Likewise, National Geographic only has the last segment. Thank god for YouTube.

The prime ingredient in the bombs is ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Some people say it is coming from Pakistan, Pakistan says there are other countries around Afghanistan that could be the source. Doesn't really matter. It would only take 1% of Pakistan's production to supply the bomb makers with all they need. From an ABC news story from January of this year:

"It's like narcotics crossing the U.S. border," said the senior U.S. military intelligence official. "We don't know if we're getting 1 percent or 10 percent that's crossing." 

Update April 2016 replaced missing video. While it has the same title, I suspect it is not the same as the one I posted originally. That one produces this message:

This video has been removed for violating YouTube's policy on spam, deceptive practices, and scams.

Seems the makers of that video made a couple of errors.

Update March 2019 replaced missing video.

Update March 2021 replaced missing video.

Anti-Drone Weapons

Vulcan Cannon Smashes Drones in Iraq
Dark Footage
I don't particularly care for the narrator's breathless delivery, although I do wonder how he manages to keep it up, video after video. However, he does give us some good footage of CRAM's (Counter-Rockets, Artillery and Mortars) in operation. It's hard to get a sense of how big these things are from the video. This picture fixes that.

Centurian C-RAM

Problem is the Centurian is shooting zillions of 20 mm bullets and those bullets aren't cheap. According to John Hoh on Quora, each 20 mm shell costs $27. Since this gun fires 75 rounds per second, a full second of firing costs like two grand. You can buy a drone with enough carrying capacity to carry a small bomb for about one thousand dollars. The cost of the fuel oil and fertilizer necessary to make the bomb is negligible, and jihadists work for free, so turning a drone into a bomb costs almost nothing.

C-RAM is pretty effective, I don't think any of those bursts of fire in the video lasted a full second, so the cost of shooting down a bomb laden drone is about the same as the cost of the drone. However, that doesn't include the cost of the weapon system, or the cost of operating it on the other side of the world where everything, including the ammunition has to be shipped in. 

High Speed Intaglio Printing Press

US soldiers are paid something like $40K a year. However, it costs about one million dollars a year to have a soldier in the combat zone. Using the same multiple of 25 (one million divided by 40 thousand), I'm guessing it is costing us in the neighborhood of $25,000 to shoot down a drone. I would say that at that rate with a zillion cheap drones the ragheads could force us into bankruptcy. Well, they could if we were spending real money, but ever since the mint got that tune-up on their printing presses, we can print another zillion dollars in the time it takes you to sneeze.

Aluminum

Powerhouse, Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), 1950

You need a great deal electricity to make aluminum. That's why we have these giant dams with their giant hydroelectric power plants all over the Cascade Mountain Range here on the West Coast. Or maybe the aluminum smelters came because of the relatively cheap power. But aluminum is evidently so valuable that building your own power plant is a worthwhile proposition. 

By the mid-1950s, the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) had 220 normally scavenged and 22 supercharged Nordberg radial engines installed in its Port Lavaca, Texas aluminum plant. Combined, these engines could produce 475,000 hp (354,207 kW). The engines were arranged in seven powerhouses, consisting of around 40 engines each. - Old Machine Press

The plant at Port Lavaca was shut down a couple of years ago. 

Alcoa Plant, Point Comfort, Texas

Point Comfort is on the Gulf Coast about 100 miles SW of Houston and a hundred miles SE of San Antonio. Looks a lot like other industrial sites around the shores of Galveston Bay, east of Houston.

Gunpowder and fertilizer (ammonia) production are also big power eaters.

Via daily timewaster

Morocco

How Morocco Secretly Controls China, India, The United States, And the World
Jack Chapple
Jack's presentation is a little breathless, a little OMG what are we going to do? But he lays out the facts pretty well. I kind of thought that the population explosion was due to our conquering many of the nasty diseases that killed so many people. I never consider the impact of food production.

This kind of explains why Morocco is fighting rebels over Western Sahara and why Morocco has the longest conveyor in the world and a very long wall.

Previous posts that mention fertilizer.

Post about Fritz Haber.

Catalysts

I came across a claim on Quora that Epicatalysis is really wonderful, so I go look it up on Wikipedia, but the explanation is totally opaque. I eventually found a decent explanation here. To get some background I start reading about catalysts and I dug up this stuff, all from Wikipedia. Turns out it doesn't help explain epicatalysis at all, but it does make some interesting reading.

Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934)
1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Fritz Haber was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize for his invention of a method to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.

Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. Second Battle of Ypres (World War I) was the first mass use by Germany of poison gas on the Western Front.

Haber actively recruited physicists, chemists, and other scientists to the gas warfare unit. Future Nobel laureates

• James Franck, 
• Gustav Hertz, and 
• Otto Hahn 

served as gas troops in Haber's unit.

In his studies of the effects of poison gas, Haber noted that exposure to a low concentration of a poisonous gas for a long time often had the same effect (death) as exposure to a high concentration for a short time. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the gas concentration and the necessary exposure time. This relationship became known as Haber's rule.

During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide gas formulation Zyklon A, a predecessor to Zyklon B, the brand name of a German gas pesticide that was used during the Holocaust.

Carl Bosch (27 August 1874 – 26 April 1940)
1931 Nobel prize in Chemistry

Carl Bosch, nephew of spark plug man Robert Bosch, was a German chemist and engineer. He was a pioneer in the field of high-pressure industrial chemistry and founder of IG Farben, at one point the world's largest chemical company.

From 1909 until 1913 he transformed Fritz Haber's tabletop demonstration of a method to fix nitrogen using high pressure chemistry into an important industrial process to produce megatons of fertilizer and explosives. The fully developed system is called the Haber–Bosch process. His contribution was to make this process work on a large industrial scale. To do this he:

• discovered a practical catalyst
• designed large compressors and safe high-pressure furnaces
• developed a means to provide pure hydrogen gas in quantity as the feedstock
• developed a cheap and safe means to clean and process the product ammonia

The first full-scale Haber-Bosch plant was erected in Oppau, Germany (now part of Ludwigshafen). The process enabled the economical synthesis of large amounts of ammonia which fueled a revolution in industry and agriculture. This large scale production of ammonia led to increased agricultural yields throughout the world.

Irving Langmuir (January 31, 1881 – August 16, 1957)
1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Irving Langmuir was an American chemist and physicist. His most famous publication is the 1919 article The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules in which he outlined his concentric theory of atomic structure. While at General Electric from 1909 to 1950, Langmuir

• advanced several fields of physics and chemistry
• invented the gas-filled incandescent lamp (Edison's bulb was evacuated)
• invented the hydrogen welding technique
• won the Nobel Prize for his work in surface chemistry

The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research near Socorro, New Mexico, was named in his honor, as was the American Chemical Society journal for surface science called Langmuir.

Gerhard Ertl (born 10 October 1936)
2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Gerhard Ertl is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin, Germany. Ertl’s research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry. His detailed explanations of  the molecular mechanisms involved have helped explain how fuel cells and catalytic converters work and why iron rusts.

Suicide Kills

Combat deaths versus Suicides

No shit, Sherlock. Problem is that more military people are committing suicide than are being killed by the enemy, many more, like four times as many. Brown University in Rhode Island came up with these numbers. It sheds a little light on the subject:

The report finds that these high suicide rates are caused by multiple factors, including risks inherent to fighting in any war such as high exposure to trauma, stress, military culture and training, continued access to guns, and the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian life. But the study finds that there are factors unique to the post-9/11 era, including a huge increase in exposure to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), an attendant rise in traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), and modern medical advances that have allowed service members to survive these and other physical traumas and return to the frontlines in multiple deployments. The combination of multiple traumatic exposures, chronic pain, and lasting physical wounds is linked to suicidal behaviors. - Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

The bit about 'continued access to guns' is pretty much a sop to the east coast liberal morons and should be ignored. Anyone who really wants to end their life will find a way to do it, gun or no gun.

I've posted about traumatic brain injuries before. Maybe we should outlaw fertilizer.

Via RT

How Shit Happens

 

In the beginning there was the Plan.

And then came the Assumptions.

And the Assumptions were without form.

And the Plan was without substance.

And darkness was on the face of the Workers.

And they spoke among themselves, saying

"It is a crock of shit, and it stinks".

And the Workers went unto their Supervisors and said

"It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof".

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying

"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none can abide by it".

And the Managers went unto their Directors saying

"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength".

And the Directors spoke among themselves, saying one to another

"It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong".

And the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents, saying unto them

"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful".

And the Vice Presidents went unto President saying unto him

"This new Plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of this company, with powerful effects".

And the President looked upon the Plan and saw it was good.

And the Plan became Policy.

This is how shit happens. 

 

Just in case you had forgotten. Via Tidbits.

Robotic Tractor

Autonomous Tractor at Work
I heard that farmers were using GPS with their tractors to control the amount of fertilizer being applied, but I hadn't heard anything about self-driving tractors. Via Detroit Steve.

Quote of the Day

Researchers in Dr. Chirik’s lab are also hunting for ways to use catalysts to convert nitrogen from the air into forms used in various products, from fertilizer to carpet fiber. The current method, the Haber-Bosch process, is so energy-intensive it accounts for 1 percent of all global energy use. - Hillary Rosner in a story in The New York Times

One percent of all global energy use?!? One percent of all the coal, oil and uranium burned for fuel? Even if we don't count wood or food energy, that's a stink load of power. (And yes I know, we don't literally burn uranium, but we use it up none-the-less.)