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I hate flow-restricted faucets. I can adjust the faucet myself, thanks, and sometimes I want that pot or bucket to fill up as quickly as possible, please.

But you can’t buy unrestricted aerators anymore. Federal law mandates that you can’t draw more than 2.2 gallons/minute from your tap.

My old kitchen sink aerator got clogged awhile back, and I couldn’t clean it out, so I had to buy a new one, and just tolerate the restricted flow. Then it got clogged, and I took it apart to clean it:

Restricted flow aerator completely disassembled.

Here’s a close up of the key parts:

Aerator core parts. Flow restrictor plate on the right.

That flat plate on the right, with the hole in the middle? That’s the flow restricter. All the water must flow through that hole.

Turns out, the aerator works just fine without it. I had thought it was glued in place, but it only snaps in; a small hemostat or needle nose pliers will yank it out presto-change-o.

Take that, bureaucratic scum!

[That part in the middle is the mixer, the thing that does the actual aeration. It goes in pin-down, as shown in the first picture.]

Today is NASA’s fiftieth birthday.

The “baby step” shown here is actually pre-NASA; it’s the first launch from Cape Canaveral in 1950.

V2 Rocket with a WAC Corporal second stage launches at Cape Canaveral with a small crew of observers in the foreground

[via Astronomy Picture of the Day]

RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags are little paper stickers with circuitry hidden inside that can broadcast identification data when probed with the appropriate radio signal. They’re cheap- close-to-free, yet each one has a unique number, and that number is large enough that essentially every thing in the universe can have its own tag. They’re extremely useful for things like warehouse inventory, where radio transponders can continuously query the entire contents, and track the location of each and every pallet, carton, and box on the shelves.

I have one on the windshield of my car; it automatically debits my account when I go through local tollbooths. Passports have them.

Credit card companies are starting to put them into what they call “contactless cards”. The day is coming when you walk into the grocery story, stuff things into a bag or into your pockets, and walk away without going through checkout.

There are even implantable versions that can be placed under the skin. Currently, these are used for pet identification, but there’s no reason why they can’t be used on humans.

Problem: it turns out that it’s fairly easy to spoof existing RFID systems, including those being used for critical applications such as passports and, well, credit cards.

The brilliant Discovery Channel science education show Mythbusters was planning to do an episode on testing ways to spoof RFID cards. They’ve done this before with things like radar detectors and alcohol breath testers.

However, The Powers That Be turned out to be a bit touchier about RFID:

Link.

Adam Savage, one of the show’s co-hosts, explains what happened when they tried to contact Texas Instruments, a major manufacturer of RFID tags and readers, while doing research for the show:

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.

If the system is that weak, I don’t want it anywhere my bank account, my security, my health care, or my anonymity. RFID is scary enough on it’s own, but this response shows that those pushing RFID know that it is bogus, and want to keep that quiet, rather than fixing the problems before chipping the whole world.

Let’s be clear: the plan is to make RFID mandatory, in driver’s licences and other forms of official ID. “Show us your papers” becomes obsolete if you can’t hide your papers, if they’re actually planted under your skin, and it gets worse if somebody can claim to be you by showing your “papers” in places  you’ve never been.

Very, very scary.

Via Slashdot.

From Consumerist, how to get everything about a credit card, while it’s in someone’s pocket, using a reader bought for $8 over eBay. This requires basically patting the victim’s wallet with the reader — but this is essentially electronic pickpocketing, and it’s not hard to extend the range of the reader.

The RFID Buzz blog goes into my daily feed so I can keep up.

Retired engineer Steven Den Beste reprints a valuable checklist for plausible alternative energy sources:

…For too many people “alternate energy” is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations — and it’s not that easy.

In order for “alternate energy” to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can’t scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

Den Beste garnered a few good comments on that post (and quite a bit of attention elsewhere), but the best comments I’ve seen that answer some of the objections to this list are over here.

Of course, you should read Neo-Neocon’s article concerning T. Boone Pickens’ wind power project that SDB linked to, and SDB’s original detailed 2002 essay, which ought to be required reading for anyone discussing this topic.

And the 2002 essay links to SDB’s discussion of scale here:

My dad was an electrical engineer and he worked on power generation. (He spent most of his career on the hydro projects on the Columbia river.) He lived in an entirely different world than I did, a world where units like kilofarads and kilohenries were actually useful. That’s the kind of numbers you see when you’re describing long distance transmission lines. In my world, a microfarad is huge. In his world, a farad was tiny. (If you don’t know what that means, just let it pass.)

You’ve got to start thinking really, really big.

Anything which, when fully deployed, generates less than ten gigawatts average (10¹⁰ joules per second) is useless for our purposes in terms of actually making a meaningful contribution to the total amount of energy we consume.

SDB then goes on to discuss some of the more esoteric proposals for obtaining energy. It is a very depressing essay, because the scale is…bigger than most people can fit in their heads, the problems are hard, the cost is astronomical.

Steven’s preferred solution is coal, because it works and we’ve got plenty.

Still, burning carbon is stupid–it’s filthy, there is only a limited supply, it’s going to become increasingly expensive, and we need the chemical feed stock. (In my mind global warming is still very much, heh heh heh, up in the air, but I tend to discount it. We humans are simply not that significant on a planetary scale. See Copernicus and Darwin.) Simple conservation will not work for long — most of our energy systems are already extremely efficient, and “cutting back” to any significant degree would involve essentially rebuilding our society from the ground up.  Most likely, we wouldn’t like the results very much.

(Al Gore’s proposal to completely wean ourselves off carbon fuels in…am I remembering this right? Ten years? — yup, ten years, is simply stupid, particularly since I doubt nukes are even on the table in his plan.)

Everything we can do has at least a ten year lead time. First we need to open our domestic oil to drilling, including offshore and ANWR, so we can at least start to be somewhat self-sufficient. Start planning the nukes now.  There are several reasonable designs, but it will probably take at least five years to build pilot plants and choose two or three that can be standardized to reduce cost and increase competency. We also need to start pressing on fusion — not even uranium will last forever, and we don’t have good local sources, anyway. (Nearest is Canada, if I’m not mistaken.) However, fusion will involve new physics as well as fabulous engineering, and I note Steven’s response is, “Wake me when it works.”

Not that we should give up on trying make cheap solar cells and the like, but there’s a fundamental limit on how much energy comes down from the sun in a given day, and all of those solutions require an infrastructure with a huge surface area (see SDB #3).

Irena Sendler passed away at 8AM (Warsaw time) on May 12th, in Warsaw, Poland at the age of 98…. Irena was one of 180 others to be nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace prize. In the height of irony, the award that year went to a man who has done nothing for peace, but instead threw the world into chaos and fear, while enriching his bank account - Al Gore.

Read the whole article, and honor someone who could have re-sanctified a prize that has never been washed clean of the blood from Yasser Arafat’s hands.

Originally, though, “The Cold Equations” comes from Tom Godwin’s notorious science fiction short story about orbital mechanics forcing a space craft pilot and a stowaway to make some hard choices. Wiki entry here, but beware, almost any discussion you find will necessarily involve spoilers. Let it be said that there’s some deep resonance with the current problem at hand: “Good physics, bad engineering.”

Ooh, here it is in full. It’s one of this collection of the stories that built the Golden Age of SF.

Bad Astronomy points theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking very rightly ripping British politicians for eviscerating the science budget. It’s a great article, well worth reading, but Hawking doesn’t get the good quote. That comes at the end of the article, and is from Brian Cox, of the Large Hadron Collider project:

The notion that scientists will make a more valuable contribution to the economic and social wellbeing of the world if their research is closely directed by politicians is the most astonishing piece of nonsense I have had the misfortune to come across in a long time.

["Very Scientific"?]

John Walker at Fourmilog (which, by the way, has one of the best mottos I’ve seen: “None dare call it reason”. That right there gets it a place on my blogroll) reviews James Dewar’s To the End of the Solar System, a history of the nuclear rocket engine program. The engineering details are daunting:

Consider: a modern civil nuclear reactor generates about a gigawatt, and is a massive structure enclosed in a huge containment building with thick radiation shielding. It operates at a temperature of around 300° C, heating pressurised water. The nuclear rocket engine, by comparison, might generate up to five gigawatts of thermal power, with a core operating around 2000° C (compared to the 1132° C melting point of its uranium fuel), in a volume comparable to a 55 gallon drum.

The payoff, however, would have been huge, up to and including the possible survival of the human race:

…What if it worked? Well, that would throw open the door to the solar system. Instead of absurd, multi-hundred-billion dollar Mars programs that land a few civil servant spacemen for footprints, photos, and a few rocks returned, you’d end up, for an ongoing budget comparable to that of today’s grotesque NASA jobs program, with colonies on the Moon and Mars working their way toward self-sufficiency, regular exploration of the outer planets and moons with mission durations of years, not decades, and the ability to permanently expand the human presence off this planet and simultaneously defend the planet and its biosphere against the kind of Really Bad Day that did in the dinosaurs (and a heck of a lot of other species nobody ever seems to mention).

Daunting those problems may have been, but they were within the grasp of the engineering gods of the time (late 50’s through early 70’s–which implies a great deal of the work was done on slide rules.)

What killed the project?
Goals were redefined, milestones changed, management shaken up and reorganised, all at the behest of politicians, yet through it all virtually every single technical goal was achieved on time and often well ahead of schedule. Indeed, when the ball finally bounced out of bounds and the 8000 person staff was laid off, dispersing forever their knowledge of the “black art” of fuel element, thermal, and neutronic design constraints for such an extreme reactor, it was not because the project was judged infeasible, but the opposite. The green eyeshade brigade considered the project too likely to succeed, and feared the funding requests for the missions which this breakthrough technological capability would enable. And so ended the possibility of human migration into the solar system for my generation. So it goes. When the rock comes down, the few transient survivors off-planet will perhaps recall their names; they are documented here.

[Bold mine.]

Read the whole, sadly enraging thing.

Now, tell me again, people: exactly why do you want these same elected gangsters and backroom thugs to run your health care?

Not, mind, that the market is perfect. Walker also details why he’s imposed the vendor death penalty on Hewlett-Packard.

For those of you who do not consider technical catalogs to be suitable bathroom and bedroom reading, here’s the skinny on the old H-P:

As a larval nerd, there were two technology companies I held in the highest esteem: Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard. Tektronix seemed to have a bit more flair: they hailed from the curiously named Beaverton in Oregon, and you’d often find something funny in the complete schematics they shipped with their oscilloscopes, such as the drive circuit for the lower gun of a dual-beam scope being replicated by a bow-legged cowboy labeled “top gun”. But H-P had real class; they printed a hardcover product catalogue, and flipping through it you found not just oscilloscopes, signal generators, and the like, but exotica like rubidium atomic clocks. Not that you were going to buy one, to be sure, but wasn’t it cool to know you could, given the budget, and that this company provided you the same specifications for the product they did to customers like the National Bureau of Standards who actually bought such gear?

Oh, yes: I’ve spent many happy hours flipping through both the H-P and the Tektronix catalogs. The Fisher Chemical catalogs are also a blast.

However, H-P, or at least their consumer division, has gone off the rails, apparently programming their printers to fail at preset times in order to force you to buy new ones, and leaving out critical parts which must be bought separately at hugely inflated prices. In this case, H-P sells you a memory module, which ought to cost less than twenty bucks, for $600, almost twice as much as the printer itself.

All’s well that ends well, though:

It’s amazing how turning one’s back upon vendors who betray you can streamline the procurement process for replacement products….

Hewlett-Packard? I turn my back on you, snuff the candle, and walk away in disgust.

Quite so, and that’s the difference between the market and the government: You can fire a bad vendor, but the government can fire a successful program–and there’s not a God. Damned. Thing. you can do about it.

Via Billy Beck.

Another piccie from Michelle.

The picture links to one of the many, many articles sneering at the report of the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology on “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants”, which declares that plants have rights, too, honest they do, really, and we cruel brutal humans should be nicer to them, pretty please with a cher–um, pretty please.

I love Malkin’s filename for this pic: “massey-fergucide”.

[I should note that Malkin's satirical pictures are just eye-catches on her main-page sidebar link and do not appear in the articles themselves; since the sidebar changes frequently, you may not see the pictures at the links.]

The orangutans are stepping up the evolutionary ladder:

From The Daily Mail, via The Drawn Cutlass, via Ace of Spades.

This chap is not using very good form–the article describes him as “flailing” with his stick, not jabbing or throwing it lengthwise–but it’s clear he’s on right path. Another 50 thousand years or so, and we’re going to have some serious competition.

(I’ll note that the Mail has a rather sensationalistic editorial policy, but the picture seems legit.)

“Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?”

Christina Hoff Sommers in The American:

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex…be denied the benefits of…any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Harvard’s legendary Math 55 class does not look like America. The class roster at semester’s end? ‘45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.’

While Title IX has been effective in promoting women’s participation in sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title IX to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of fund­ing, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Although there are many factors affecting the evolution of men’s and women’s college sports, there is no question that Title IX has led to men’s participation being calibrated to the level of women’s interest. That kind of cal­ibration could devastate academic science.
…
Departments of physics, math, chemis­try, engineering, and computer science have remained traditional, rigorous, competitive, relatively meritocratic, and under the control of no-nonsense professors dedicated to objec­tive standards. All that may be about to change.

[Emphasis mine.]

According to Sommers, the movement seems based on self-serving research performed by aggrieved parties.

Oh, I just love this:

MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT.

“It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.”

Women find it repulsive? Isn’t that, in and of itself, a statement that women are indeed different than men?

Via Glenn Reynolds.

Shamus at TwentySided has put up utterly absurd claims that his website

encourages safe, effective weight loss after only a few visits. This is due to secret, proprietary methods of designing site layout that stimulates neuron… activators in the upper… lumbar that… enhances your Circadian Rhythm and optimizes your metabolism via your browser cache.

But then, to avoid the embarrassment of having these claims exposed for the bit-bucket scrapings they are, he demands

that all websites stop linking to this post, as you are infringing on my right to not be made fun of when making an ass of myself. It is forbidden to link to this post and if you do so I will be forced to take legal action within 48 hours of my lawyer sobering up after I bail him out of the drunk tank. Again.

Why go through all this? He wants to be famous, of course, just like all the other idiot fucktards who make asses of themselves on the innerweb…tubes…dumptruck…highway…thingie…You know, like these dweebs over at buyfirepowerpill.com who have some kind of pill you drop in your fuel, and who have been exposed by Dan over at How to Spot a Psychopath (aka DansData), and now want him to stop linking to them. Demanding that people stop linking to you is, of course, the absolute best way to get everybody to link to you.

By the way, Dan’s site is fabulous, exposing many scams, such as the Kinoki “detoxification” foot pads, but also giving positive reviews of cool stuff that actually works, such as LED dome lights and a cheap home endoscope.

Go to Dan, read all his Firepowerpill posts, and savor his many scam exposures and product reviews.

[Update 29 Feb 07]
On the 19th, Dan posted the following update, which you’ll have to scroll down to, since Dan apparently doesn’t do permalinks on his front page.

Someone from the colourful fuel-additive company Firepower has ordered Blogsome, who host my blog, to force me to cease linking to the PDF file of their “evidence” which their Australian CEO sent to me.

When he sent it to me, he similarly ordered me to make it available for download

Go to Dan’s for the relevant linkage.

I join the many sites who are mirroring The Pill’s promotional flyer:
Firepower Pill Flyer (Zipped PDF, 1.8 MB)

Dan notes that this is an instance of the Streisand Effect.