An Inspirational Young Man (created 2-22-10)

The Junior Olympics in Fencing took place 2-12-10 thru 2-15-10 in Memphis, TN. My nephew, A.L. qualified and I asked to go with his Dad and him. I had fenced a little bit in college and I wanted to help with the driving.

We got to see a lot of good fencing and some great fencing.

My nephew did not embarrass himself. He had never been to a large competition like this before and he did OK.

But there was a young man there who caught my attention. I was noticing all the different styles and techniques the fencers used and got to the point where I could recognize a fencer by the way they fenced. But this one man, D. H., looked like a different fencer every time I watched him. He presented a different attack and a different defense based on what his competition threw at him. His footwork was different, his stance was different. We watched him moved through the elimination rounds, each time facing a more difficult opponent. Then we saw him matched against someone he didn't have a prepared game plan for. D.H. copied what his opponent presented, figured out the weaknesses of it and then dominated him.

In his last bout, both the opponent was presenting something new and the director was also. I have to give a little bit of explanation here. I am talking about foil fencing. The kind done to settle duels and used by Shakespeare in Hamlet. When used to settle duels, it was not to the death, it was to first blood, but with rules. There was a judge to say whether the prick you gave was legal or not. Most of it hinges on "right of way." The fencer with "right of way" can score a touch, the fencer without "right of way" does not score a touch even if he physically pokes his opponent.

So this director (judge) was giving D.H.'s opponent "right of way" for moves that D.H. didn't agree with. And here is the amazing thing, D.H. could have argued with the director, he could have gotten mad, he could have just tried harder to do the same things that he had been doing. But he didn't. He asked the director for explanations, (which the director patiently gave) and then D.H. adapted his fencing not only to his opponent, but also to the director. He was down 10 to 2 when he got it figured out and the match ended at 15 to 13. He lost but he made such a comeback and came so close.

In all fairness, when D.H. adapted, his opponent also experimented and changed and won.

We went to congratulate D.H. and were talking about upcoming tournaments where we might see him next year. He said that he is 19 and will be too old to fence at Junior Olympics next year. My brother-in-law commented that D.H. must fence on his college team.

And here comes the last thing to be impressed with. D.H. says "Oh, I've graduated from college already and have a job."

This young man was athletic, posed, polite, smart and adaptable.

I am now over 50 years old. I have been finding it hard to adapt to what the bosses in this new world want of me. I need to take a lesson from D.H. and be adaptable, to both my competition, and to my judges.

Thank you D.H. for teaching this old dog a good trick.

Carbon Sequestration 1: granite in coal combustion (created 1-2-10, slight modification 01-03-10)

Would adding pulverized granite to the fluidized combustion bed in a coal fired power plant convert the carbon dioxide to carbonate and bicarbonate, and convert the granite to silica?

This is the natural process the earth uses to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's called the weathering of rocks. This mechanism might be the cause of the earth entering it's current ice age state. When the India tectonic plate crashed into the Asian tectonic plate about 35 million years ago the Himalayan mountains resulted. This exposed so much granite to the atmosphere that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was dramatically reduced and the world entered the current ice age.

Coal fired power plants already incorporate rock into the fluidized combustion bed. They currently used pulverized limestone which removes sulfur from the waste gas. The use of pulverized granite will have some new problems to overcome. The conversion of granite (a silicate mineral) to silica will probably cause glass and slag formation and cleaning problems. But that's just a problem for the engineers to solve.

The entropy and Gibb's free energy calculations indicate that this should actually be both spontaneous and exothermic.

You heard it here first.

Bye for now, Doug

Religious 1: Heaven and Hell (created 1-1-10)

What if whether we are in heaven or hell depends upon our state of mind, on how we feel about ourselves. And the one justice in this system would be that after death we have total knowledge about how our actions affected other people. All the things we did and rationalized to ourselves as being okay or "not my problem" we realize how they hurt other people and we can't hide from this guilt and exist in torment over our own actions. The few people who look back at their lives and see only good things resulting from their actions exist in a state of the utmost satisfaction for a job well done.

Fitting this with the eastern beliefs in reincarnation, those people unsatisfied with their lives would chose reincarnation to avoid the self-loathing they cannot avoid in the hereafter.

I'm not starting a new religion, it's just a fun idea to kick around.

Bye for now, Doug

Ideas: 2: Magnetic oxygen purification (created 12-7-09)

Diatomic oxygen has a single bond and two unpaired, unshared electrons. It isn't obvious to me why this should be, the two unpaired, unshared electrons should "pair and share", but they don't. I am told this is confirmed via their spectra.

I this is true, then
1) does that mean the two unpaired, unshared electrons are locked into the same spin as each other.
2) does that mean the oxygen molecule is magnetic
3) does that mean that oxygen molecule can be oriented in a strong magnetic field so that it won't effuse through holes too small for them to go through sideways. Nitrogen molecules do not have this unpaired, unshared electron phenomenon, so they would not orient in a magnetic field and they would effuse through the hole too small for them to go through sideways, because some of the molecules would randomly be oriented to go through longways.

Indeed, I have read that oxygen IS paramagnetic. Maybe this would work.

Ideas: 1: The Idea Guy (created 12-7-09)

You know how there are stereotypic people in every organization. The whiny guy, the gossip guy, etc. An engineer (Bob Daus) I used to work with called me the Idea Guy. That's one of the biggest complements I've ever received. My brain is just wired that when I learn about something I ask 1) Why (does that happen), 2) How (does that happen) and 3) What if (we do ???). I have almost 40 years of ideas which I want to share. So this topic thread: "Ideas" will be devoted to presenting my new ideas and some of my old ideas.

Customer Service 2: Les Stumpf Ford Dealership, Appleton, WI (created 11-29-09)

I have had two, recent, personal experiences of excellent customer service at the Les Stumpf Ford Dealership in Appleton, Wisconsin.

I live about 25 miles north of Appleton. I only go to town once every week or two. I have a 1998 Windstar minivan with about 125,000 miles on it. I was driving in town when the breaks became very soft and squishy. And then smoke started to come out from under the car. I was only two blocks from the Stumpf Ford dealership so I pulled in, turned off the car and started looking under the hood. I was afraid of fire and I wanted to check it out as quickly as possible. A salesman came out to help me and when we were fairly certain the danger of fire was past he brought me to the service department. They immediately brought the car in on a rack and diagnosed the problem for me, a ruptured break line was squirting oil on the engine. I had commitments and errands to finish. They rented me a car (only about $30 for a day) and had the my car repaired that afternoon. I was happy and impressed.

About 3 months later I was heading toward Appleton to help my son move his girlfriend to a new apartment and noticed a burning smell. I stopped and checked everything and found the engine oil very low. I bought oil at a gas station and topped it off. I checked the oil filter and it was on tight so I started to worry that something was cracked to be loosing oil like that. I went straight to Les Stumpf Ford. Again, they immediately put it up on a rack and had a diagnosis for me in less than 10 minutes. The oil filter wasn't loose, but it did have a tiny hole in the bottom of it. They changed the oil and filter and had me on my way to meet my obligations in only 30 minutes and $18.95.

I can't say enough good things about them.

Education 2: no limits to learning

"The more you understand, the more you can learn."

While I was recently a teacher, the mantra at the school was don't teach or test for facts, teach skills and understanding.

I'm not certain how to separate the two.

The summer of 1974, between high school and college, I was lucky enough to be tutored by a man on how to improve my study habits and techniques. It opened new worlds to me.

Lesson #1: The human mind thinks 10 times as fast as most people speak or most people read. (I suspect this is part of what allows trained individuals to speed read.)

Lesson #2: The 9/10th of the brain not involved in listening or reading doesn't like to sit quietly and wait for something interesting to come along. It entertains itself. This is called daydreaming.

Lesson #3: The 1/10th of the brain involved in listening or reading gets sidetracked by the daydream and leaves maybe 1/100th of the brain left to listen or read. That's too little for any learning to happen. This is how you can get to the end of a reading assignment and say to yourself, "I'm glad that's done. I wonder what I read."

Lesson #4: Involve the entire brain in the listening and reading. This is not done by shear force of will. Its done by moving past passive listening or passive reading and becoming an active listener or active reader. That means that you are doing much more than just listening. You are actively thinking about what is being said. You are thinking about how what you are learning fits with what you knew in the past. You are anticipating what might come next.

Specifically for science, you aren't just trying to memorize a science fact, (in magnets, opposites attract) you are filling it out by thinking about 1) how it happens 2) why it happens, 3) why it matters, and 4) examples.

A simple fact is like a bit of dandelion fluff, and is easily blown away in the wind. Each related thing you connect to it helps it become more substantial. When you can interconnect the filled out facts, you have built a substantial structure upon which you can build true understanding.

"The more you understand, the more you can learn."