WEEKEND GUN REPORT, APRIL 26-28,2013

Joe Nocera reports weekend gun deaths and injuries on his blog in the NY Times.  Here is his report for the weekend of April 26-28, 2013: http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/weekend-gun-report-april-26-28-2013/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20130429

The U.S. is all by itself at the top of gun deaths/100,000 population: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2012/12/in-aftermath-of-firearm-newton-ct.html

PLENTY OF WIND POWER

There has been a lot of discussion about wind power not being constant and the difficulties of storing its power generation.  There is also talk about subsidies being paid for wind power; however, with the subsidies, wind power is economic now.  Contrast this with fusion power that always seems to be 20 or 30 yrs in the future with $18 billion spent on it as of 2008.*  The U.S. expenditures on nuclear fusion power seem to be about $290 million/yr.  And who knows how much oil would cost if you added in the cost of Middle Eastern wars (including the deaths and injuries, many injuries being life changing) and other subsidies to the cost of oil?

The point is that there is more than enough wind power to power everything we can think of, says a brief article in Carnegie Science.**  Their finding is that about 400 terawatts could be extracted from near-ground winds and 1,800 terawatts from winds thoughout the atmosphere (meshing turbines with kites), whereas civilization uses only about 18 terawatts of electricity.  High altitude winds are usually more constant and faster than near surface winds thus solving to some degree the constancy and increased amounts of the power generated.  Think of the jet stream, for example.

It is true that if you cluster too many near-surface turbines you will change the local climate.  "At the level of global energy demand, wind turbines might affect surface temperatures by about 0.1 degrees Celsius and affect precipitation by about 1%."

* http://www.polywellnuclearfusion.com/NuclearFusion/FusionReactors.html
** Caldiera, Ken, "More Than Enough Wind Power," Carnegie Science; the Newsletter of the Carnegie Institution, Spring 2013, p.5  The article is abstracted from the  Journal Nature Climate Change by Kate Marvel, Ben Kraveta, & Ken Caldiera, "Geophysical Limits to Global Wind Power", 9 September 2012 (online) .  The whole article may be purchased for $32.

OBAMA: THE DEPORTATION KING

Although President Obama strongly pursues immigration modernization, few seem to know that he is the deportation king in the meantime (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/22/us/politics/growth-in-deportations.html?wpisrc=nl_wonk&_r=0)

Although there was a steep increase in the annual number of deportations By President W. Bush, his peak year (his last year) was about 360,000 deportations, up from about 180,000 in his first year.  The first three years of the Obama administration averaged just under 400,000/yr and in 2012, the number of deportations topped that number to about 410,000.

(To enlarge picture, click on it.)

THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME

Most people probably go through life without realizing what dangers they face each day.  For example, I hear that most automobile accidents happen within 5 mi of home.  Most people who are shot know who shot them, e.g. Adam Lanza's mother in Newtown, CT.  The single biggest challenge to your health is smoking.  You can be a careful driver, but, if that semi-truck trailer comes over the median strip at the wrong time, you can be history.  It is not only the deaths in automobile accidents, gun deaths, or bombs as far more people are injured with many having life changing injuries.  We hear of such things, but they don't seem to apply to us because the probabilities are they won't happen to us.

Then something happens, like the Newtown school Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut and people go bonkers and want armed guards or armed teachers in every school (and how would you feel teaching a class if students were allowed to pack heaters?).  But there were 98.817 public schools and 33,366 private schools in America in 2009* so of the 132,183 public and private schools only one had the mass murders.  Yes, the Newtown shooting was a tragic event and we should see if we can do better identifying dangerous mentally unstable people, but this school happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In fact the students were in the wrong class at the wrong time as most classes were untouched.  There were 456 students in the school and 20 were killed.  There is hardly any reason to arm every school no matter how much the arms industry would benefit from it. You could have attended the Boston Marathon and chances are high you would not have been damaged by the Boston Bombers.  A lot of life is fate, you just happened not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but there are people who are.  I have discussed my own experiences with the probabilities of being injured or killed in dangerous situations.**

So it looks like we are ready to accept that over 32,000 automobile deaths/year*** because we think (subconsciously) that we won't be the wrong person at the wrong time.  Of course, automobile safety has been improved in spite of ourselves, what with seat belts and air bags among other safety features.  We accept over 11,000 murders per year**** because we think these murders have nothing to do with us.  Deaths by firearms in the U.S. per hundred thousand inhabitants are three time those of France, eight time those of Germany and 36 times those in the United Kingdom.  We are told that background checks don't work, but one place that has them has had a different experience.  According to the governor of Colorado speaking on less strict background checks than Colorado has now (http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/04/03/watch-this-thing-works-says-colorado-governor-on-new-gun-law/):

In 2012, 38 people who were accused or convicted of homicides applied for gun ownership in Colorado. In addition, 600 burglars, 1,300 people who committed felonies, and 400 people who had restraining orders from a judge also tried to buy guns.

* http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84 (There are some schools that have guards in dangerous neighborhoods that may be justified)
** http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/01/working-underground-my-rational-self.html
*** http://www.statisticbrain.com/car-crash-fatality-statistics-2/ (in 2010)
**** http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2012/12/in-aftermath-of-firearm-newton-ct.html

YOU COULDN'T HAVE BEEN ON THAT PLANE (Conclusion)

I asked to see N.I. Stupnikova and was taken to see her and her laboratory.  She is a chemist of some international reputation.  She turned out to be pleasant, nice-looking middle-aged lady.  Her laboratory was nothing special, except she had a 6 ft high philodendron growing right next to her fume hood!  I'm sure I had never seen a plant in a chemistry laboratory before, especially one that was supposed to be a clean laboratory..

We went to Leningrad where I did a repeat of my talk.  I'm not sure how much people understood it, but it eventually appeared in Russian so if they were interested they could read the paper in all its glory.  At any rate they were very polite.  I asked to visit the retired head of a famous geochronology laboratory staffed completely with women.  We went to lunch and had a soup of little meat balls and cabbage.  Frankly the cabbage was like cardboard, but I figured if the Soviets could eat it, so could I.  When I looked up from finishing my soup, I noticed that the director and my translator had pushed the cabbage aside on their soup plates.  I said something like you haven't eaten your cabbage?  They replied that it was bad for their stomach.    Gulp!  But I was all right.  I visited the isotope laboratory and was surprised to see some male electrical engineers in this all-women institute. They replied that women didn't go into engineering.  This was not what we were told in the West, but this is what they said.

There were also many cultural experiences.  I did see a performance of Giselle, not by the Bolshoi Ballet, but they were very good and saw a circus that was impressive.  They took me to a number of art museums, including the famous Hermitage, with the famous gold room, in Leningrad.  I was surprised that I was allowed to take my camera into art museums with just the promise that I wouldn't use the flash.  In fact I was allowed to take pictures wherever I wished although I was told beforehand I wouldn't be.

My stereotype of the Soviet person was a contrast between accepting some innocent mistake with humor and being upset by others.  At the Hermitage, we had a museum translator in addition to my scientific translator.  After getting a lecture on some items in a display case, I asked the museum translator whose likeness that was on an enameled box.  Haughtily she replied "Sir, if I knew who that is, I would have told you who that is.  I do not know who that is.  No one knows who that is."  Bong!  But then later when I misidentified the painter of a modern painting, she sympathetically corrected me. You never knew what kind of response you would get.  Recall in Part I the billboards urging people to be nice to each other.

We did have our gum incident.  Soviets could not buy gum, and my translator asked me to buy his son some gum.  I did this but I had heard stories of Westerners being jailed for giving Russian citizens gum.  So after I bought the gum, I went into his room and surreptitiously gave him the gum.

In spite of what I was told would be the situation, I was able to photograph anything I wanted to.  In fact I saw everything I wanted to see on the trip and more except for two things.  One was the Kremlin diamond museum, which I was told was reserved at the time for the national congress which was meeting at the time, and the instrument that could measure changes in helium isotope composition, of which they were very proud.  At the time they were ahead of us in this endeavor.  They said they were thinking of commercially selling the machine.  When I was denied seeing the equipment, I said that we would not buy one if we couldn't see it.  They were disturbed by this, but said the instrument was classified and beyond their power.

A few words on eating.  Typically for breakfast in the Academy of Sciences hotel, I had a small individual frying pan with two egg, sunny side up, and a couple of hot dogs.  I can't find the word for this but phonetically it was something like "yayushniku."  We also had a feast at what my scientific translator called the best restaurant in Russia.  The Russians start this with zakuska or hors d'oeuvres which are excellent and in this case included black caviar in the mix.  I'm afraid that by the time the main course arrived, I was pretty filled and couldn't do it justice.  It certainly was one of the best meals I ever had.

Some final comments.  Women in the Soviet Union seemed wild about women's shoes in the West.  It wasn't that the shoes they could get weren't serviceable, more so than women's shoes in the West, it was just that they weren't stylish.  We were in a taxi in Leningrad when it started to snow.  The driver turned on the windshield wipers, but there were no blades so every once in a while we would stop and the driver would wipe off the windshield.  I said to my translator, "In my country, this would be illegal."  He replied, "I think it is illegal in my country too." When we returned from Leningrad, we could not find our limousine so the translator suggested we get a taxi.  We had to get in line, a line with maybe a dozen people ahead of us.  After waiting for about 10 min. with no taxi arriving, I suggested we go to the subway station about a block or so away.  It was cold.  My translator said he would look again for our driver and did find him, but my impression of the taxi service in Moscow was not good.

My impression also was that alcoholism was rampant.  For example, when we would go down into a subway station (which were exquisite), you might see soldiers lying drunk on the floor of the station, which I am sure embarrassed those accompanying me.  Lastly was the time we were looking for a restaurant to have lunch.  We found one, but there was a sign on the door.  I asked my translator what the sign said, and he replied, "Closed for lunch."

When I went to leave, I was given what was left of my prize money, which was not a lot, maybe 70 or so rubles.  You were not allowed to take money out of the Soviet Union so I just handed it to the guard at the gate, but he wouldn't take it and pointed to a kiosk and said get wood carvings so I did which I still have today.  I still had some coins left which again I handed to the guard but he shook his head and said, "Souvenir."

Above have been some of my reminiscences of my trip to the Soviet Union in 1976.  My flight out of Moscow was delayed by fog, but when we finally got going, this time on a regular passenger plane, I felt great relief.  I wondered why because I had been there under some of the best conditions imaginable.  I got to see everything I wanted to see and then some.  I was ferried around in limousines.  I was wined and dined wonderfully.  The entertainment was first rate.  Yet, there was always a tension, I guess.  Like the time we were walking in the Kremlin in a group and were crossing over a street and then turning right crossing again.  I heard a whistle blowing but thought nothing of it.  A hand came out and pulled me into the group and the whistling stopped.  I was cutting the corner too wide.

YOU COULDN'T HAVE BEEN ON THAT PLANE! (Part II)

I found my interpreter with difficulty, and he seemed annoyed that I didn't know where to find him.  He took me to a Academy of Sciences hotel, we saw billboards saying something.  I asked my interpreter what they said, and he said that they were telling people to be nice to each other.  At the hotel he got me checked into a room on the third floor, a floor I was later to learn was bugged.  It was a plain but serviceable room.  I was to go down to dinner by myself, a scary prospect because I knew only a few phrases in Russian.  It was the custom to fill a table so they sat me with three young women who turned out to be graduate students in history.  One, a plain overweight young woman, was majoring in American history.  A pretty one majored in English history, and the third one in some other country and didn't seem to know any English.  The American history student said that she was very glad to meet me because she could not figure out how policy was made in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  I replied that I didn't know but, if she ever figured it out, would she tell me?  She asked me what I thought of the Soviet hockey team. I said I thought they were excellent, and they all smiled.  Then one of them asked what I thought of the Czechoslovakian hockey team.  I replied that they were very good also.  They frowned.

The English student asked what I did and I said I was a geologist.  She asked if Soviet geologists were any good?  I said that your country has more than double the geologists than in the U.S.  At that she slammed her fist down on the table and said, "I didn't ask you how many geologist we have.  I asked you if they were any good?"  So I mumbled something about they didn't have very good equipment.  Again she slammed her fist on the table and said, "I knew it.  They aren't any good.  But you will see, we will get better."  To which the other two nodded and eagerly mumbled agreement.  I had visions of young Soviets saying, "We will get better,  We will get better!"  They sounded very competitive though I think they never got the chance.

The next day I was taken to the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry*.   On the way we drove a bit on Vernadsky Prospekt.  Soviet scientists were treated handsomely, a least some of them as there now is also a Vernadsky Museum.**   At the Institute, I met my host, Prof. A.I. Tugarinov.   He was a squat man with a large black beard.  At a meeting in Switzerland, I had given a toast to him, calling him the Friendly Bear.  He seemed to like that.  There was a problem in giving my talk as I had to give it through an interpreter and slowly.  This threw me off, and I didn't do very well.  After a reception, I was to return to the hotel, but there was some confusion.  People were milling about and there was a delay.  Finally I was taken to the hotel and when I got to my room, I could tell someone had been looking through my things. I went to the bathroom and there was a cigar in the toilet.  I smiled.  They wanted to make sure I knew I had been searched, but nothing was missing.

The following day I went to the Vernadsky Institute to look at their facilities.  The chemical laboratories were primitive by Western standards of the time with rudimentary glove boxes.   The equipment was home made and not of high quality.  There were mass spectrometers, very complicated and sensitive weighing machines to separate isotopes of an element and measure their relative abundance.  I couldn't believe it, but the electricity was turned off in the building at night so the mass spectrometers lost their vacuum.  So the first thing to be done in the morning was to pump the mass spectrometer down to a hard vacuum, which took a couple of hours of lost time.  Later we were to visit a physics laboratory elsewhere that was better.  Their mass spectrometers were designed to hold a hard vacuum overnight, and I was quite impressed.  The two laboratories needed to get together.  Why was the electricity turned off at night?  The scientists were told they needed their rest, something you never hear in the West.   But I got the impression that they had a severe electricity shortage.  When we drove around at night, there were street lights, but they were turned off as well, for example.

* http://www.mathnet.ru/php/organisation.phtml?option_lang=eng&orgid=35
** http://en.travel2moscow.com/where/visit/museums/object1349.html

YOU COULDN'T HAVE BEEN ON THAT PLANE! (Part I)

Back Story My parents were not happy with the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  My memory is that they viewed the Soviet people as being slobs.  Then came WW-II and the Soviets suddenly became our friends.  Following WW-II, the Soviet Union became our enemy; the Cold War  ensued.  A big event in my life was the Berlin Blockade* where I thought there would be a nuclear war within five years, by accident if not by design.  Countries began to fall to Communism like China and Cuba or half countries like North Korea after what was called at the time, a "police action."  I observed that somehow, all the Communistic countries became dictatorships and not benevolent ones at that.  I had barely recovered from the Berlin Blockade fright when the Soviets launched Sputnik** that showed they had the intercontinental missile with the possibility that they could atom bomb us.  And so it went: the Cuban Missile Crisis*** and Viet Nam.  Then came another surprise.  In the early 1970s began a period when the Soviets became our friends again, or sort of friends, called detente (or a lessening of tensions) under president Nixon.  So in 1976, I received an invitation from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to present the annual Vernadsky Lecture (Vernadsky was one of three founders of the field of geochemistry)* to commemorate his birth, the first Western scientist to do so.  Though I was an anti-Communist, they were now sort of our friends so I accepted.

The Trip  In early March I began my trip to Moscow fraught with personal complications I will not go into.  I had to get to London.  I worked for the Federal government and there was a hard freeze on travel at the time, but I was given an exception because I was the first Western scientist to be given such an invitation.  My brother, however, never believed this and was sure I worked for the CIA, which was not true.  In London, I picked up an Aeroflot plane to Moscow.  I almost missed the flight because I got off the shuttle at the wrong stop and had to run after the shuttle with my suitcase to get back on.  Yes, this trip was full of stress.  The plane seemed to be a converted bomber and the flight was very jerky.  It seemed like you could feel the pilot shifting gears.  When we deplaned we had to go through a check point where there was a stern faced young man who checked your name against a manifest.  When he got to me he checked and checked and checked and then said, "You could not have been on that plane!"  Naturally, I was taken aback by this and, since I am sort of a smart ass, I wanted to say, "How do you think I got here, parachuted in?"  But for once I kept my humor in check and just said,"How else could I have gotten here?"  After some consideration, he let me through.  My baggage was checked, and I was sure they would confiscate a copy of "Doctor Zivago" I brought for my scientific interpreter, but they didn't.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis.

SOME NATURAL GAS PROFITABLE AT $4 PER UNIT

A recent study says that the Barnett Shale of Texas is said to be profitable at $4 per million British thermal units (mmBtu) of frac gas.  The study was made when the price of natural gas was around $3.50/unit, but recently the price of natural gas actually has hovered around $4/unit.  With about 839 rigs operating at the time of a Baker Hughes Rig count study (February 15, 2013), Texas has about half the total rigs operating in the U.S.  (http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/02/28/barnett-shale-gas-to-remain-profitable-study-finds/)

It is said that power plants switching from coal to natural gas will be profitable at prices up to $8/unit. (http://rtec-rtp.org/2011/07/04/is-shale-gas-production-profitable/)

An extensive discussion of shale gas can be seen at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas

REPUBLICANS RESIGNED TO BEING MINORITY PARTY?

The core of the Republican Party are the wealthy and business people.  These people are not numerous enough to win elections so the core undertook a Southern Strategy to incorporate a large conservative group that had been the Solid South of the Democratic Party.  This move changed both the Republican and Democratic Parties in many ways, but the Democratic Party became more socially liberal and the Republican Party became more socially conservative.  For example, it was Republicans that put the Civil Rights Act of 1964 over the top (Republicans voted 27 for and 6 against in the Senate; 136 to 35 for the House).*  Even in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans voted overwhelmingly for the bill (30 to 1 in the Senate and 111 to 20 in the House for the conference Report).**  This change also brought the religious right or so-called Evangelicals into the Republican Party, a group that had a lot of religious fervor.  The Republican Party also attracted many white working class people who viewed initiatives for Blacks, women, and other minorities as being unfair.  This coalition is big but seemingly not large enough to win national elections.

Perhaps the last straw was President Obama not only winning the electoral vote for his second term but the numerical vote as well.  Republicans were primed to fight the election because they were sure that Mitt Romney would win the numerical vote which would seem to be a move to the popular vote rather than electoral votes.  Thus the Republican Party seems to be resigned to being the minority party  and have abandoned a move to the popular vote endeavor.  So what can they do to win major elections?  They already had mastered the art of Gerrymandering congressional (redrawing congressional districts to favor one party) districts to win a sizable majority in the national House of Representatives even though the Democrats received more popular votes.  The Gerrymandering story with the state Senate and Houses have had even more success, if anything.  There was an original move to Gerrymander presidential electoral votes by district rather than state-wide voting, but this attempt has so far been abandoned, for now, by all except Pennsylvania (as of the date of this writing).

Perhaps Republicans can take some solace in that even though there are more Blue States than Red States (20 to 12 in 2012),*** there are 30 Republican governors and only 22 Democratic governors.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 (The vote among the South Representatives was 7 for and 97 against in the original House version.  The South here is the 11 states in the Confederate States of America during the Civil War.)
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act
888 http://www.gallup.com/poll/160175/blue-states-outnumber-red-states.aspx