World Wildlife Foundation donations suspended

At the July 8-10, 2009 G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, Allianz (a global insurance company) partnered with the World Wildlife Foundation to deliver and publicize a report on how the 8 richest countries in the world are doing at reducing their greenhouse gases. Sounds good.

WWF/Allianz "does not consider electricity generated by nuclear power a sustainable option", an opinion shared by many. Their trouble was that any simple ranking of countries will show that nuclear power has made France the world leader in reducing greenhouse gases. Since WWF/Allianz doesn't want to promote nuclear power, they cooked the numbers.

They didn't lie. There have been a number of outraged comments about this report, but these folks did not lie. Their footnotes say specifically that numbers for France were "adjusted as if electricity from nuclear power was generated from natural gas." The report also includes, in footnotes, the numbers correctly calculated.

One of those same footnotes says that "without the adjustment, France would rank first with Germany." Unfortunately, this comment is not supported by either facts, or by the WWF/Allianz numbers. By any numeric measure, France is way ahead of the rest of the industrialized world.

Because I feel that this report is intentionally misleading, my wife and I are suspending our donations to the WWF until they amend their report to rank countries based on facts. We're also going to have a talk with a few friends who also donate to the WWF. We don't do business with Allianz, so there's not much leverage there.

Those of you who don't actually care that much about CO2 emissions or global warming can stop here.

The report ranks the 8 richest countries in terms of their "past, present, and future climate performance". Here I've listed their overall ranking, along with WWF/Allianz' calculation of their emissions per capita and per million dollars of GDP.

1. Germany (12 tons/capita/year, 384 tons/M$ GDP)
2. United Kingdom (11 tons/capita/year, 334 tons/M$ GDP)
3. France (9 tons/capita/year, 276 tons/M$ GDP)
4. Italy (9 tons/capita/year, 328 tons/M$ GDP)
5. Japan (12 tons/capita/year, 367 tons/M$ GDP)
6. Russia (16 tons/capita/year, 1140 tons/M$ GDP)
7. United States (25 tons/capita/year, 567 tons/M$ GDP)
8. Canada (24 tons/capita/year, 668 tons/M$ GDP)

France got dinged because they have not improved emissions much since 1990 (they'd already built most of their nuclear fleet by then). I notice they also got dinged for not having strong mandatory targets imposed on utilities to promote energy efficiency. The report fails to note that in France, saving electricity doesn't significantly reduce CO2 emissions, so there is no need for such mandatory targets.

The report completely failed to note that France is building new nuclear power plants on its borders to export more CO2-free power. Not only is this action going to cause more improvement in Germany's CO2 output than Germany's own utility policies, but it is also going to be profitable, which means that France is going to be able to do it AGAIN in a few years. Germany, on the other hand, is busy bankrupting itself with huge feed-in tariffs, and is already switching from expensive, imported aranthracite coal to cheaper domestic brown coal which emits more CO2 and other pollutants.

The United States clearly needs to clean up its act. Which country should we model our environmental policies after?

Germany: 51% of German electricity comes from coal-fired powerplants. They are building or planning another 26. These will add 23 gigawatts of production. Germany will be forced close its coal mines in 34 years when it runs out of coal, at which point their coal imports will peak until they will switch to imported Russian methane. Germany also produces 4.4 gigawatts from wind turbines. There is a lot of talk about wind turbines but the power comes and will come from coal.

France: France closed its last coal mine in 2004. 4% of its electricity comes from coal. 78% of France's electricity comes from nuclear, and produces no CO2. Most of the rest (11%) comes from hydro, and produces no CO2. France exports 18% of it's electric production, and most of that (5.9 gigawatts, more than $2 billion a year) is sold to Italy, which is one reason why Italy's CO2 outputs are low.

Bottom line: WWF/Allianz fudged the numbers to support a policy goal. That's wrong, and we're stopping our contributions until they fix it.

It's a shame, by the way. I liked some of the other stuff they were doing.

Why New Nuclear

Senator Alexander Lamar has a white paper which well summarizes how I feel about our desperate energy situation, and lays out a plan for how to fix it:

Blueprint for 100 New Nuclear Reactors in 20 Years

It does have a thought which was new to me, however: Russia, China and India, as well as a host of other countries, have already built out a fair bit of coal, and are beginning a large build of nuclear. If their nuclear build fails, they will fall back on coal, and nothing the US does will change the course of global warming. If their nuclear build succeeds and surpasses us, they will cement their existing lead in the next major source of energy, and they will end up owning the base of our entire economy.

And this base is enormous. The US GDP was almost $14 trillion in 2007. Generation of electricity, at about $40/MWh, was $170 billion that year. But that electricity sold for $90/MWh, for a total of $373 billion. Electricity sales are 2.7% of our entire economy.

And consider industries that are part of that industrial base. In 2007, the United States used 4.1% of our electricity (170 million of the 4156 million MWh) to smelt 23 billion pounds of aluminum. That aluminum sold for $26 billion. The aluminum smelters probably spent around $40/MWh for that electricity, so the juice was 26% of their cost of goods sold. Since aluminum is an easily transported global commodity, their profit margins are thin and small changes in their costs can lead to large changes in who makes the aluminum.

We need to own our energy supplies. We need our own large forge to build the reactor pressure vessels (right now we depend on Japan). We need American companies to build, own, and operate these reactors. And we need it now.

What we really need is to stop the Waxman-Markey cap&trade bill, and adopt Alexander Lamar's plan instead. Write your congressman.

My Response to the New York Times

Here's a link to the New York Times article "Combative Start to Senate Climate Hearings".

And, here's my response:

I’m a Californian, I vote, and I want more nukes in my state. I’m fed up with the high cost of electricity. I’m pissed off that we switched from making plastics with our natural gas to making electricity — and shipped our plastics industry to China. That’s not environmentalism, it’s offshoring, as a direct result of public policy that my representatives voted in.

My power company is not incented to make good decisions about the power mix: when natural gas prices rise, they pass along the cost. When they look at natural gas they see a lower capital cost, and so they get the same return on less capital. Fine for them, but we get stuck with power prices that whipsaw our producers out of business. Ever noticed how inflation is quoted without the volatile food and energy component? We chose to make our energy prices volatile!

What we need right now are projects like the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams: big, expensive government-funded projects that get lots of people working in well-paying jobs and deliver locked-in low priced power for a century or more. Nuclear plants are way better than hydro plants since they don’t kill fish (or anything else, for that matter).

I want to vote for a future in which energy prices are not volatile, and where the aluminum smelters and plastic plants come back to where we can regulate them and work in them. But I seem to be stuck between a choice between Green folks, who want to build temporary windmills which will kill our economy, and Conservatives who want to stick with imported fuels, which will kill our economy. Give me a third choice!

Fastest Freestyle Ever

The men's 400 meter freestyle relay at the Beijing olympics was amazing. The French team absolutely crushed the world record time, and the Americans squeaked past them. Right up until the last 50 meters, the French were in front.

Don't talk to me about Michael Phelps, the second-slowest guy on our team. Let's talk about Jason Lezak. Jason gets in the water at 2:38. (Watch the video here.) Look at his stroke compared to France's Bernard Alain. He looks pretty similar (to my untrained eye). And he turns in a time on that first 50m that is pretty similar: 21.50 versus Bernard's 21.27.

And then, after that last flip turn, Jason Lezak swims the next 50 meters in 24.52 seconds. Which sounds slow compared to those first 50 meters, but it's so fast compared to everyone else that he was one of only 3 guys in that race to swim in less than 47 seconds... and he beat the other two guys (both French) by 0.57 and 0.67 seconds. That's HUGE. He nearly did it in less than 46 seconds.

Watching back in August, it was immediately apparent to me that Jason changed his stroke after his flip turn. This morning I looked up the video on the internet, and it raises more questions than it answers.

First, Jason takes 34 strokes to Bernard's 42. It's not like Bernard is some short French dude -- at 6'5", the guy is actually an inch taller than Jason. Discounting the 7 meters that both guys got off their kick at the end, Jason managed to go 49.8 inches on each stroke, vs the paltry 40.3 that Bernard manages. And, since Jason is going faster, he's got more drag and so his hands should be slipping back more. Where did he come up with an extra nine inches?

For those last 34 strokes, Jason's form appears to go to hell. His timing is no longer even -- the delay after throwing his left arm forward is less than the delay after his right. Worse still, the change in timing has his left hand grabbing the air that he's blowing out, which has to be terrible for maximizing the purchase on the water the whole way back. Compare to Bernard, who efficiently vents smaller bursts of air under the left portion of his body while his left arm is airborne.

Notice something else that Jason is doing. He's ducking his head down after he takes a breath. And watch his right shoulder roll. When Jason pulls back with his right hand, he launches a portion of his torso up, over the water, and then when he pulls back with his left hand he is porpoising the right half of his body over that water.

Has Jason incorporated some of the body motion of the butterfly into his freestyle?

Another insulated pool

Back when I posted about the insulated in-ground pool that I'm building, I asked if anyone else is building such a pool. I've received a few answers:

• One reader in Melbourne is building such a pool.
• Several have been built in the United States, but only one of the ones I've heard of is residential. The rest are all commercial facilities.
• Insulated pools are standard when the pool sits on top of a parking structure. Apparently installations like these are simply impossible to heat if the pool is not insulated, and there are structural isolation benefits as well.

Up until now, though, no pictures! Thankfully, the reader from Melbourne has recently written in to share a few pictures of his insulated pool. Here's the standard picture of the dig:

The pool is 46 feet long, which is exactly the same length as mine. His is skinnier (10 feet wide) and more shallow (max 6 feet), which is appropriate for a lap pool. Below, it looks like they are installing an in-floor cleaning system. Very nice.

Below is a pic of the insulation going in. He is using Dow Highload 100, sold there as Dow HD300, in the same thickness that I used (2 inch). He says:

The insulation I'm using is Dow HD300 in 50mm boards. This product is made for insulating under coolroom floors with trucks driving on top, and is overkill given its compressive strength specs of 2% compression (1mm) after 20 years of 250 kPa or around 25 tons per sq meter. However, the pool contractor and engineers had never seen pool insulation done before and through an abundance of caution over-specified for the highest compressive strength product they could find to be sure it wasn't going to settle. With the loads from this pool of only around 2 tons per square meter, we have more than an order of magnitude margin of safety. In the end, the cost differential between this and lesser rated products was so small that in the interests of getting the pool contractor comfortable with signing off we went with the HD300.

The contractors didn't glue the boards to the soil with foam, instead they used the rather unsubtle method of nailing it through with steel rod. I had two concerns about this:

• This will mean there's some heat conduction losses through the steel rod from the soil to the concrete, though the total surface area of steel in contract with the cement shell would still be minimal so this probably isn't a big deal.
• A risk of the rod eventually rusting and applying pressure to the concrete shell, but the foam will (I hope) compress enough to accommodate any rust expansion and prevent concrete spalling off the shell were this ever an issue.

The upside is at least I don't have to worry about the compression issues for the expanded foam glue you'd used and hence avoids the risk you mention in your blog that this may place extra strain on the shell as it settled, and from the photos it seems the contractors have got a good solid base without the rocking problems you'd mentioned.

The steel rod seems like a good idea. I tried to find an equivalent product here and failed, which is why I ended up with the polyurethane foam. One other contractor I've talked with in the U.S. also used foam, but I neglected to ask him if he chose not to use steel nails for some reason.

Here in California we use Dobies to seperate the rebar from the ground/insulation. Dobies are simple 3" x 3" x 3" concrete cubes with a wire in them. Check out the much snazzier looking rebar spacers they use in Australia. The wall does not appear to have a bond beam at the top, but instead is pretty thick the whole way up.

Insulating the piping has been a major effort on my project. It's not clear in these pictures if this pool's piping is insulated.

Gunite going in:

His pool is in basically the same condition as mine right now. Note the clever combination of bench seat and stairs at the right hand side of the pool. Very nice. The pool looks deeper than it is because the lot slopes up to the left, and the left hand side of the pool is a retaining wall (raised bond beam).

It's a nice looking project, and I'm very curious to see how it turns out. Thanks a lot, Melbourne!

A professional look at The Day After

Here is a set of essays on the calculus of nuclear war, written by someone who used to plan nuclear war.  They are short, funny in places, reassuring in places, and generally scary.

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_101.html

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_102.html

http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_103.html

Of course, no mention of nuclear weapons is complete without directing readers to the Nuclear Weapons Archive, by Carey Sublette.  I remember first reading the FAQ in 1996 or so, and being astounded.  It changed the way I thought about The Bomb.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/

It's the physics bit that got me.  I had previously though of fusion bombs as being somewhat like the Sun, only, here.  But it turns out that fusion in the Sun proceeds along quite slowly, at comparatively low temperatures and pressures.  Fusion bombs operate at much higher pressures and temperatures than stars do, and (obviously) on much shorter timescales.  It turns out to be almost completely different physics.

For some reason that really bothers me.  The notion that we use physics that can't even be observed anywhere in the natural world seems odd.  Perhaps I'm succumbing to nuclear hocus pocus, since I can't think of anywhere in the natural world that we can observe hydrocarbon-oxygen combustion at dozens of atmospheres of pressure, and yet our cars and airplanes do that all the time.

You are so beautiful, Kathleen

Reynolds number

It looks like one of the problems with the fountain is that I'm pushing slightly too much water through the flow straightener.

At very low velocities, flow through a pipe is laminar.  I wanted laminar flow in the flow straightener because laminar flow has no turbulence which can then break up the output jet.  It turns out that the flow velocity in the pipe has to be incredibly slow, and it turns out that I managed to design my fountain to be right in the transition region between turbulent and laminar flow.

Here is the Engineering Toolbox link on Reynold's numbers.

At full flow, I'm pushing about 180 gallons/minute through 16 of those flow straighteners.  Each has an internal diameter of 15.3 cm, so that the flow rate is 3.85 cm/sec.  Plug that into the handy calculator (the one using kinematic viscosity) and you get a Reynold's number of 5213.  That's turbulent flow.

At the flow tested in January (which worked properly), I was going up about 33 inches instead of 65 inches, so my jet velocity was 71% of full flow now.  Also, the cross section of the jets was .41 inches instead of 0.5 inches as it is now, so that the velocity inside the flow straightener was 48% of what it is now.  Plug 1.84 cm/s into that Reynold's number calculator and I get... 2491.  That's transient flow, but quite close to the 2300 needed for laminar flow.

If this is really the only problem with the fountain, then I ought to be able to slow down the flow enough to get the Reynold's number down to something around 2300, and see laminar flow at the output.  How slow?  To get half as much flow, the jet velocity is halved, and the arc height goes to 1/4 of what it is now, or 16.5 inches.  In fact, at that velocity, I do indeed get laminar flow:

Note that the impact here is on the first step into the hot tub, which is a little lower than the nominal water surface, and the arc is about 20 inches above the nozzle rather than 16.

The jet is well behaved until it gets to the top of the arc, where the bottom of the jet interferes with the top of the jet, and the result is that is spreads out laterally. That lateral spread then turns into an oscillation in the flow until it hits the step.

Anya demonstrates that the jet is 18 inches above the bond beam, or about 20 inches above the nozzle.

At this point the default setting for the fountain is to throttle back to 40 inches throw height, which clears the occupants of the hot tub and isn't too noisy.

If we wanted to get the tall jets to behave properly, it appears we'd need to cut the flow rate approximately in half, which means we'd have to reduce the jet diameter to 0.350 inches instead of 0.500 as it is now (so the finished hole diameter would be 0.440 inches).  That means I'd have to pull the stainless steel nozzles (recall they are epoxied into the PVC heads right now), get new nozzle made (probably $300), and epoxy them back in.  That all sounds possible, and certainly cheap enough, and probably can be done fast enough given that it's going to take 5 weeks to get the tile delivered.

However, there's a good chance I'd just destroy the PVC heads in the process, and there is also a good chance I'd get the nozzles glued back in crooked.  I don't think we're going to try.

We're getting more comfortable with how it looks.

Camera Guy at work

One of the nice things about working here is that when we need stuff, we get it.

Fountain test

Belle, non?  (1/80 sec exposure)

Non. (1/4000 sec exposure)

Here it is with Martha for a sense of scale:

First, what went right?

• The geometry is right.  In this spreadsheet, I calculated the height of the fountain (69.4 inches, was actually 65.5 inches), and how far it would throw the water, and where the jets would come down into the hot tub.  Although some of the jets land about 5 inches off where I expected, and two jets collide in midair just before they hit the water, the geometry is about as good as can be expected, and fulfills my goals, which were:
  • It should be possible to walk between the rising jets without being hit by them.
  • It should be possible to sit in the hot tub without being hit by the jets.
  • It should be possible for a child to stand in the middle of the hot tub and have the jets come down all around, without actually hitting the child.
• All the jets rise to the same altitude, within about half an inch or less, which means the balanced binary tree distribution system with the shorted end terminals worked.
• The pump-side pressure stack does not overflow.
• The pumps don't cavitate.  They are incredibly quiet.  You cannot hear them unless you walk over to the pump vault and stand on top of it.  Once the lid is installed on the pump vault, I doubt you will hear the pumps even when you are on top of it.

However, the jets are not laminar.  Gloppy blobs of water fall into the water and make a dull roar instead of the quiet sizzle that I had wanted.  There is enough splashing from the jets entering the water that you wouldn't want that a few inches from your face.  The kids love it, of course, because it's loud, fast, and wet, but it's not so great for the adults.

I'm pretty bummed.  What happened?

The individual jets were flow tested in January, and this is what they looked like then:

As you can see, the jets were smooth, and landed smoothly and quietly, back in January.  Now Martha jokes that if we move the back yard table to the farthest corner of the yard, we can still have a nice conversation.

I'm not entirely sure why there is a difference.  Here are possibilities, ranked by my guess of most to least likely.

• In January, the heads had no lateral ports in them.  In this latest trial, there are two ports in each head, connecting each to the heads on either side.  These ports keep the pressure even across all the jets, which makes them shoot to the same altitude.  But these ports may also be causing the water to tumble slightly as it passes the edges, and that turbulence may be causing the breakup that I'm seeing.
• In January, the heads were surrounded by nothing, and so small amounts of water on top of the heads ran down the sides, away from the jets.  Now, the heads sit inside recesses in the gunite.  Each head has a small pool of water in it that terminates at the jet.  The water in this pool greatly disturbs the jet during startup, but it gets cleared in two or three seconds and then I don't think there is any more water recirculating through that pool and into the jet.
• In the January trial, I had an open-topped pressure stack between the pump and the jets.  In the production version, I have a stack after the pump, but it's not quite the same.  In this one, the water from the pumps goes to a Tee.  In one direction, the water heads for the jets, and in the other direction, the water heads for the stack.  It's possible this alternate arrangement works less well.
• This test has a closed air volume right before the jet, which was intended to be an additional flow smoothing device.  The January arrangement used open-topped pressure stacks either right before each flow straightener, or right after the pump, and both worked well.  The closed air volume is known not to work as well (since the pressure changes more with a small surge in water).  Also, since the current arrangement has two capacitors with an inductor between, it's possible that there is oscillating pressure being stored between the two capacitors.
• The nozzle holes are 0.590 inches, rather than the 0.500 inch holes that I tested in January.  This makes the jet diameters about 0.500 inches, which is necessary for all 200 gallons/minute to flow.  As a result of the larger jet and the larger jet velocity, the flow through the flow straightener is perhaps twice as fast as it was in January.  It would be great if this were the problem, since I can reduce the flow later when I have that plumbing finished.
• In January, the pump had air in the lint basket bowl, and the pump could be heard continually injesting air.  Now the pumps have no air in their lint basket bowls.  I would expect this to make things better now, but I thought I'd list it because it is a difference.

I also have two unexpected observations which may be a clue to a solution if I can figure it out:

The ports in the sides of the fountain heads are connected via riser pipes to a plenum that is fed from a pipe that will ordinarily lead to a blocked valve.  This valve is used when the fountain is off to backflush the flow straighteners.  However, that plumbing is not yet finished, and so the pipe currently leads to many other pipes that are currently filled with air.  There is also a hose bib and a pressure gauge connected to those pipes (this is how we did the pressure test).  I have calculated that the static pressure at the top of those fountain heads is about 3 psi above ambient, and so I expected the plenum to be pressurized at 3 psi.

But that's not what the gauge says.  The gauge shows zero pressure (I don't have any gauges that show negative pressures).  If I open the hose bib while the fountain is running, then cover the opening with my finger, I feel a little pull.  It's very feeble, but it's there.  WTF?

The flow in the head is moving at 1.6 inches/second, and I calculate a dynamic pressure of 0.85 Pascals, or 0.00012 psi.  That isn't diddly compared to 3 psi pushing out.

[Update: Mystery retired: it turns out that the pipe connected to the top manifold is capped off right now, and those other pipes are just not connected to the fountain.  I can't explain why I was thinking that there was a small pull of air, but it certainly wasn't measureable.]

The second unexpected thing happened the first time I started up two of the three fountain pumps.  All three pumps are in parallel.  I had difficulty taking the lid off the third pump's lint basket bowl, so I had left that bowl filled with air, and just started the other two (which were properly filled with water).  I expected the first two pumps to push water backwards through the third pump, flushing the air into the intakes of the first two, where it would be blown into the fountain or otherwise ejected from the system.

Nope.  There was no noticeable flow through that third pump.  Later, I pulled that lid off and removed the air.  When I ran just two pumps again, the third pump did have flow going backwards, and in fact the impeller was turning backwards at perhaps half the RPM of the two powered pumps.

It's not clear to me how the air can block a >3 psi pressure drop.  The total drop from the top of the pump to the bottom of any associated piping is perhaps two feet, which would account for a 1 psi drop block, but not 3.

I suspect that the solution to these mysteries, especially the first, will tell me something about the fountain behavior.

Relative safety of stairs and swimming pools

[Post updated: A friend called BS on my previous estimate of the number of houses falling into the CPSC's "Stairs, Ramps, Landings, Floors" category, so I've fixed that. The change affects the magnitude but not the polarity of the bottom line.]

As we're finishing up our swimming pool, my wife and mother-in-law and I were naturally led in a recent dinner conversation to consider whether the pool is dangerous. This is, of course, an ill-posed question.

So I changed the discussion to which of the stairs or pool was more dangerous. The stairs typify a common threat which which everyone is familiar. The pool typifies a threat for which there is plenty of hype.

I was able to remember the gist but not the exact numbers in my previous blog post on this subject. Now see, there's the value of my blog (I knew it was going to pay off someday!) -- I have a nicely written set of notes available online to which to refer. Sadly, I had not completely anticipated my mother-in-law's argument, so here's an update:

There are 8.6 million swimming pools in the United States, and 116 million homes. If we make an approximation that all those swimming pools are residential, 5322 deaths/year for 8.6 million residential pools is 62 deaths/year per 100,000 houses with swimming pools.

I'll assume that essentially all houses have stairs, ramps, landings, or [more than one] floor. That means the 202,104 deaths/year for 116 million homes equates to 174 deaths/year per 100,000 houses.

Since we have both a pool and staircases, my best estimate is that our stairs are 2.8 times more likely to kill someone than our pool.

The difference may be substantially larger. Our pool will have modern safety features like an automatic safety cover, parallel separated drains, and a properly engineered diving envelope for the diving board, along with a raised-periphery design that makes snapping your neck on the bottom at least very awkward.

Our stairs, on the other hand, are very much like stairs everywhere, and thus should be about as risky. I suspect that a disproportionate number of "Stairs, Ramps, Landings, Floors" fatalities are concentrated in the portion of houses with actual staircases, and so my estimate above understates our staircase risk. The two most used of our three staircases have turns part-way down, which I think makes them marginally safer since you are less likely to fall all the way down the flight, but I doubt that affects the polarity of my argument.

Bottom line: no, I'm not worried about the safety of my kids around the pool, but I have gotten noticeably more nervous about the stairs since running these numbers.

Laminar Fun Group

If anyone reading this is looking for help building a laminar flow fountain, let me know.  I now have a business: Laminar Fun Group.  Reach me at laminarfun@mcclatchie.com.

Too Big Has Failed

I've been wrestling with writing a blog post on how I think we should fix the financial mess.  Happily, it turns out that Thomas Hoenig has written it for me.  Whew!

Mr. Hoenig points out a basic problem we have now:

If an institution's management has failed the test of the marketplace, these managers should be replaced.  They should not be given public funds and then micro-managed, as we are now doing under TARP, with a set of political strings attached.

He reviews past financial crises and the mechanisms used to successfully deal with them:

financial crises continue to occur for the same reasons as always -- over-optimism, excessive debt and leverage ratios, and misguided incentives and perspectives -- and our solutions must continue to address these basic problems.

Then he points out flaws in the existing TARP mechanisms, that can be fixed by using the procedures that were used before.  That is, establish a simple metric for declaring a financial institution insolvent, fire the management of insolvent institutions, bring in new management, allocate losses to shareholders first, and then to unsecured lienholders, and take out all or a portion of the bad assets for seperate disposal.  This isn't new thinking; Mr. Hoenig is just saying we should do it now even though the failing institutions include the largest US banks (you know who you are, Citibank!)

Finally, he looks forward to avoiding our current problems in the future:

One other point in resolving "too big to fail" institutions is that public authorities should take care not to worsten our exposure to such institutions going forward.  In fact, for failed institutions that have proved too big or too complex to manage well, steps must be taken to break up their operations and sell them off in more manageable pieces.  We must also look for other ways to limit the creation and growth of firms that might be considered "too big to fail".

The underlying problem is that when a single entity or network grows to become vital to taxpayer interests, that entity achieves a claim on taxpayer resources.  Firms should have to pay for such a claim.  Many will find it cheaper to break themselves up.  Identification of networks vital to taxpayer interests is an extension of existing antitrust laws.

Mr. Hoenig is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Financial Times opinion piece:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/46e2f784-380b-11de-9211-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

Fed White Paper

http://www.kc.frb.org/speechbio/hoenigpdf/omaha.03.06.09.pdf

Let me add one thing:

One problem any kind of government takeover and cleanup of a failing bank incurs is that the new entity is unnaturally "clean" compared to the non-failing banks with which it competes.  Folks like Warren Buffet complain that they are penalized for having played well.

First, the complaint isn't entirely true.  As long as the shareholders of the failed institutions get wiped out, the shareholders of non-failing institutions do better in comparison, and so to the extent that shareholders guide bank operations in the future, they will tend to guide away from failure.

The complaint is true, however, for the individuals at the failing banks.  Folks working at Citibank and AIG have made more money than folks working at less spectacular non-failing banks, and they've kept their undeserved gains.  I think we need a better system for aligning the interests of bank shareholders and those who work at banks.  It's not enough to give the folks working at the banks options or shares, because shareholders do not have enough power right now.

Gunite is in

Kathleen is spraying water on the gunite, Anya is directing, while Ava looks on. We're supposed to keep the gunite wet for the next two weeks.

I stayed home for the day to watch the crew shoot the gunite. We used Aqua Gunite (here is their web site), on the recommendation of our consulting engineer Charlie Adams. I found a listing for them here. It's listed as a two-person company, which I suppose would be Jose Aguayo and Sergio Garcia. For a two-person company this place has a lot of assets: at one point I saw three and my neighbor reports five trucks lined up to deliver the sand/cement mix. Those trucks had Aqua Gunite logos and Charlie tells me they cost $260k each. They also had what my friend Wes Grass reports to be the largest air compressor he's even seen (it was all of a large truck). Maybe the company is owned by those two guys.

They got here at 7:30AM and had the gunite going by maybe 8:00AM. That gun was shooting almost continuously until something like 5:45PM, and it took them another 30 minutes after that to finish up. We used almost five truckloads of gunite (our pool is 46 feet by 18 feet, and has a big cover vault at one end). Sergio, the foreman, told me that was 78 to 80 cubic yards of gunite, but I can't see how that's possible:

• The shell surface area is 2015 square feet that average around 8.5 inches thick (53 yards^3).
• We have about 38 feet of internal dam walls that are about a foot thick and average 4 feet tall (5.6 yards^3).
  
• There is maybe 3 cubic yards of gunite in the steps and two pedestals.
• We have a gusset which holds up the diving board that is 2 feet by 2 feet by 6 feet, so that's another yard.
• 10% rebound would be another 6 yards, which is consistent with what I observed getting dumped and hauled away.
• Total: 68 cubic yards.

Those trucks were claimed to hold 15 cubic yards, but they just did not look big enough. Maybe that's the volume of the containers, which they perhaps don't usually fill completely. For comparison, a 10-wheeler holds 10 cubic yards.

The cement and sand is mixed in the truck right before delivery, and the water is only added in the nozzle at the end. As a result, they don't have the usual concrete problem of having to order exactly the right amount of mix. Instead, they have the problem of disposing of "rebound", which is the portion of the stream that does not stick when it hits the wall. Sergio says they usually have 7 to 10% rebound. Aqua Gunite carefully arranges not to have the capability to offhaul the rebound -- they want to dispose of it somewhere on site. We had a nice big hole in which to dump 2 or 3 cubic yards, but after that we piled it up on what used to be our lawn and had some other folks cart it off for recycling the next day. In retrospect it probably would have been a good idea to negotiate this ahead of time with Jose.

It doesn't much matter, we had a fixed-price contract: $13145, $733 of which was for using thicker masonite so that we wouldn't have to strip the forms to make the form edge straight. This last bit is an artifact of our having a bond beam raised 15 inches out of the ground -- the sides have to be straight so that the masons can lay the siding stone properly.

One of the first things Sergio decided when he got here is that we didn't have enough rebar in the cover vault dam wall. The wall is 12 inches thick, and had just a single curtain of #3 rebar on 12 inch centers on the water side, plus four #4 rebar at the top. Sergio added another curtain of #3 rebar on 12 inch centers on the vault side. One nice side effect is that this will make the vault floor even more resistant to cracking from the applied torque should the gravel under the pool settle and leave the pool hanging on the soil under the cover vault.

Here's the top of the gusset that holds up the diving board. You can see the four two-foot bolts that actually go up to the diving board base. In retrospect, I should have had the gusset rebar tied into the vault wall rebar better, as that would help transmit loads between the two.

So now we wait four weeks for the gunite to harden, and shrink, and maybe crack, while we race to get the plumbing, electrical, and solar installations finished, and get the trenches closed up and filled in preparation for the new landscaping. In the meantime, the maintenance crew is keeping the shell wet.

Ready for gunite

We passed our plumbing inspection, so we're ready for gunite. This has been the eighth weekend in a row that I've worked both days on the pool plumbing. Virtually all of that work has been on the hot tub. (Earlier I was working on plumbing too, but I was machining bits and it didn't feel as much like plumbing.)

Picture right is David Kanter, by the way, who was generous enough to come down last weekend and sweat in the 100 degree noontime sun to lay gravel in the trenches around the pool. This is us right before cutting those 3" pipes to make the main drains. Thanks, Dave!

I like this picture because it gives a sense of the scale of this thing. Granted, it will be a smaller hole once 6 to 15 inches of gunite have gone into the sides, and 10 inches has gone into the bottom. But it will still be big enough that, standing on the bottom with no water to buoy you, you will not be able to jump up and touch a string suspended across the waterline. It's significantly deeper than most rooms are tall.

After looking at this thing, the inspector asked me to double the rebar in the hot tub because of all the plumbing. Done in two hours, and the pic is below. [Update, years later: damn good thing the inspector caught this.  The spa dam wall has developed a small circumferential crack. Because the inner layer of gunite has it's own reinforcing, this is not a big problem, but in retrospect I should have inserted rebar that stitched the inside curtain to the outside curtain.]

We tested a fair bit of this hot tub plumbing to 30 psi, and I was amazed that it held. Most of my flexPVC is tested now, and not a single leak.

Unfortunately, the Valterra 4 inch gate valve on the suction side of the fountain pumps leaks. This is an expensive part, and after talking with the manufacturer it seems that it was never going to work right. Finding an alternative is going to be very expensive. If any reader happens to know of a 4 inch valve made of something compatible with ozone (stainless steel, especially 316, and PVC are the big ones) which won't rust and leave stains on my plaster, and which doesn't have a huge flange... please pass along the info. Oh, and it should take 30 psi of internal pressure without leaking. It doesn't have to take 30 psi across the ports when closed, but 3 would be good.

[Update: I've ordered a 4 inch Spears PVC ball valve. It's a very nice valve, very, very easy to turn, but it was crazy expensive: $670. Including the cost of the built-to-fail Valterra gate valve and installation and rip-out of that, this one item has cost $1000. This could have been done more cost-effectively.]

It is now conceivable that we could have the pool open by June 5 (Anya's birthday), but I don't think it's going to happen. Every other aspect of this pool has taken much longer than expected, so I assume that it will be hard to just finish the plumbing over the next four weekends, let alone get the tile, plaster, cover, coping, electrical, solar panels, diving board, rock facing, patio, drainage, lighting, planting, and sprinklers done.

Chickens

I'm amazed by our hens' abilities to eat.

I weigh 215 pounds, and eat something like 2700 calories a day, including about 150 grams of protein. So, about 22% of my calories are protein. Those are rough guesses, not measurements.

Our hens each lay one egg a day, with around 6 grams of protein. I'm going to guess that they must eat 24 grams of protein to deliver those 6 grams, and also run around the yard and make lots of feathers. 24 grams is about 1/6 of what I eat.

The hens eat grass, cornmeal, random bugs that they find, and snails. (Martha has found no snails at all in the last year in the back yard, but clears 10-20 every week from the front.) I don't think their diet is particularly higher in protein than mine. In particular, their cornmeal is almost identical. So, each hen must each 1/6 of the calories I eat.

These animals weigh 5 pounds! (Anya just weighed them.) Per pound, they eat seven times as much as I do. Since I spend at least an hour a day eating, it's no wonder that those hens spend every waking minute pecking at something.

National Organization for Marriage

I left a note on the National Organization for Marriage blog that I wrote carefully, in response to their ad.  Here it is:

One of the big problems I see is that when kids are taught that it’s okay for other people to marry anyone they want, they naturally apply that same logic to themselves. So teaching tolerance can end up advocating homosexuality. The big message of this ad is that gays aren’t just asking for tolerance any more, but instead want to evangelize their lifestyle in a (manditory) public venue.

I think the really scary thing happening in school is that we don’t have full control over the values that our kids develop. Some of them, exposed to a message of tolerance, are going to go past that tolerance and experiment with a homosexual lifestyle, against the wishes of their parents. It’s plenty hard just teaching kids the basics, like a sense of justice and fair play. State mandated messages in school open a can of worms that would probably be easier to deal with a few years later when the kids are adults and have their value systems more fully formed.

If we’re going to be teaching tolerance to the children of people of some faiths, who believe that homosexuality is an abomination, then we need to get the message in school clear that, while homosexuality should be tolerated and is part of the “normal” spectrum of human behavior in the larger world, it is NOT acceptable and NOT normal if you are going to be a member of these faiths. Then at least the kids can wrestle directly with the issue that their parent’s faith requires a stricter set of behavior than society at large does. That leads to questions of faith which can then be directed to a priest, elder, etc.

Theodore,

About the marriage license thing: you are part of many groups. Some large, like your state, which grants marriage licenses. Some less inclusive, like your faith. The norms of the more inclusive groups have to be broader. That’s why your faith can say no to homosexuality while your state may say okay. Since lots of people get married in a church, they tend to think of marriage as being something granted by the church. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. As my pastor pointed out, I was legally married to my wife BEFORE we got to church, just by the process of getting a marriage license.

Lighten up about the imprimatur of your approval. If people want to know how you feel about homosexuality they’ll look to your faith before they look to your state, and that’ll be clear enough.

Fountain update: flexPVC limitations

My dad came down today, and we got a lot done.

2.5 of the 3 lower manifolds are now complete, and the fountain plumbing is now good enough for the pool rebar to be installed. This is great news because it means I am nearly released from the critical path and we can go from having one amateur working two days a week to maybe three or four professionals working 5 days a week. I expect a speedup of at least 7 times!

The bottom manifolds are made of flexible PVC pipe. This stuff is made with two different plastic formulations coextruded. The first is rigid white PVC, just like regular pipes are made of, which is formed into a spiral. The seconds is flexible PVC (with Phthalate mixed in for flexibility), which fills the gaps between the coils. This stuff is a little tricky to work with.

The first problem is that the pipe arrives in coils. By the time you get it, the stuff has achieved something of a permanent bend. I was able to take most of this out by unwinding the stuff down the middle of the pool, where it got hot in the sun for a week.

I have not determined a good way to cut the flexPVC. I'm using my miter saw to cut my pipe, because it makes such nice clear burr-free cuts on the regular PVC pipe. On the flexible stuff it leaves a hot, smoking cut with lots of burrs that I clean up with a knife. The Phthalate is particularly annoying, because our chickens love to eat the PVC chips from the saw, and we eat the chicken eggs, and phthalate is bad stuff. So, the chickens are cooped up on days when I'm cutting flexPVC, and I vacuum up everything afterwards.

We're also having difficulty just measuring the stuff. Somehow we're making lot of mistakes where we measure, cut, and then find that it's not the right length. I think the basic issue is that we're trying to measure curved paths with a tape measure.

Joints are a little scary with the flexPVC pipe. I had a professional plumber recommend that we encase every flexible PVC pipe joint in concrete. Now that I've done a bunch, I agree. If there is any bending load on the joint when it's made, the pipe sits in the socket at an angle, and in a few of those joints I can feel that the PVC glue has not completely filled the space between pipe and socket. I made most of the joints with no load while it was curing, and let them sit for at least a day before putting load on them. Those joints I'm quite comfortable with.

Dad points out that if I have a few leakers, the leak rate will be very low due to the concrete barrier and very low pressure in the system (3-6 psi). The plan is to pressure test before gunite, but that is going to be hard to pull off. I'm concerned I'm going to have leaks in the plastic membrane which collects the water, and this will hide any leaks in the piping.

Quick post: Credit Crisis Explained

Great 10 minute animation explaining the credit crisis:

http://vimeo.com/3261363

Zubrin's Plan

Energy plans are like ..., well, everybody's got one.  Today I'll be looking at Zubrin's plan, as presented by Anne Korin.  Check out her youtube presentation.

Anne likes Robert Zubrin's plan of making lots of ethanol from corn or sugar, and using that instead of oil to run our cars.  Digging below the surface, the bottom line is that in 2008 we used 42% of our corn crop to reduce oil imports by 3.7%.  So, we aren't going to replace a substantial amount of oil imports this way.  But Anne didn't get into that aspect.

Anne's politics are certainly different than mine.  She likes to talk about having little or no government, and letting the free market work.  At the same time, the present crisis is so very bad, and OPEC is removing freedom from the oil market, so she says we need the government to fix it.  Okay, so she's libertarian except when things are bad.  A governing system that only works in good cases doesn't sound very robust to me, but that's not really the point of this blog post.

Another issue I have with her otherwise excellent presentation is that I don't follow how OPEC, which controls about half of the oil supply, can remove freedom from the market.  You can read a detailed analysis at WTRG Economics which suggests that OPEC does not have even rough pricing control.

But I think this is just her ideology, and I don't care about that so much.  What is more interesting is her presentation of Zubrin's plan (unattributed) for fixing our balance of trade / economic insecurity problem.

The basic idea in the Zubrin plan is to mandate that all cars sold in the US accept both alcohol and gasoline fuels.  This change can be applied to all cars sold within a couple of years because it does not require large changes by auto manufacturers (contrast with hybrids, or plug-in hybrids, which have a much longer and more expensive adoption curve).  Having made that change, within a few years a substantial number of consumers will be able to use high-alcohol-content fuels..  When alcohol is cheaper than gas, gas stations will offer alcohol, and so consumers will have an economic alternative to gasoline.

We can make alcohol from corn or coal, or we can import alcohol fuel.  There are a lot of hazy details: corn-ethanol may be soaking up so much corn that we're starving people to death worldwide, corn may be crowding out the use of land for food, and it may be impossible to grow enough corn to matter.

The flex-fuel vehicle part sounds really good.  There are a few other details which sound really good to me as well:

• Eliminate the tax on imported ethanol, so that it competes with imported oil (which has no tax).
• Eliminate the tax on imported sugar.  Sugar cane is supposed to be a better feedstock for ethanol production than corn.

In the presentation above, one of the audience members asks if ethanol from corn replaces more oil than it consumes.  Anne says yes, and it appears she is right.  Here's a study of corn-ethanol production efficiency:

• Each BTU of corn-ethanol produced in the U.S. requires an average of 0.14 BTU of gasoline, diesel and fuel oil.
• This factor does not support the conclusion at the top of the study, that each gallon of ethanol displaces 7 gallons of imported oil.
• Correcting for the energy density of ethanol and gasoline, each gallon of ethanol produced domestically displaces 0.57 gallons of imported gasoline.
• The U.S. produced 13 billion gallons of ethanol in 2008, which displaced 7.36 billion gallons of gasoline, and reduced oil imports by 167 million barrels.  We imported 4.39 billion barrels over the same period, so the oil imports reduction was 3.7%.
• The U.S. used 5.1 billion bushels of corn in 2008 to make that ethanol, which was 42% of the total of 12.3 billion bushels grown that year.

Bottom line: we aren't going to displace more than, say, 10% of our oil imports in the future by using corn ethanol.  There just isn't enough corn.

The reason the question gets asked is that there is a different issue: does making corn ethanol yield more fuel energy than fossil fuel energy used?  The answer here is: it's close.  When you make ethanol, you make electricity along with it.  When you add in the energy value of the coproducts, a little more energy comes out than fossil fuel energy went in (this energy was supplied by the sun).

So, the right way to think of ethanol production is as a coal-to-liquids system.  It has the consequence of increasing the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted for a given amount of energy delivered to the automobile.