Good and Bad

Just a quick note on something about which I have been thinking, rather than a full blog post.  It seems to me that some people like the simplicity of easily categorizing things into good and bad.  There are good chemicals and bad chemical.  Vitamin C is a good chemical; fluoride is apparently a bad chemical.  Selenium is apparently a good chemical in your multi-vitamin, but a bad chemical when the EPA tries to eliminate it from our water supply.

In reality the world is much more nuanced.  At high concentration naturally occurring fluoride in the water supply can have negative health effects.  At the concentrations in which it is added artificially to water supplies (700 ppb to 1.2 ppm); it's beneficial. Most chemotherapy drugs are really bad for you, but maybe they are better than cancer.  Pesticides are very dangerous compounds, but mosquitoes can be deadly.  Carbon (see Carbon: Poison in Our Food ) can be toxic as hydrogen cyanide, a nutrient such as a carbohydrate, a fuel like methane, or a greenhouse gas like methane and carbon dioxide.  Ozone in the troposphere is pollution, a result of photochemical smog. Ozone in the stratosphere protects us from UV radiation.

I suspect it is tempting to do the same with people.  There is a school of thought that people can be easily categorized as good or bad.  Good people are like us; they believe what we do; we can trust them; they would never hurt a fly.  People who do bad things must be unlike us.  We search for reasons to categorize them as unlike us, rather than recognizing that but for the good choices we happen to have made, we could be those people.  I suspect that this way of looking at the world is pernicious.  It isolates us from the understanding that our choices have consequences, and that we ourselves have to be ever alert that we do not become what we despise.

Carbon: Poison In Our Food

Learn about the new hazard THEY are putting in our food!!!

You will never guess what they are putting in our food.  Even organic locally grown food contains this poison!!!

Consider the Facts about Carbon:

1. Carbon is a principal component of the deadly nerve gas sarin.
2. In the history of chemical warfare, more people have died from phosgene gas than any other chemical agent used on the battlefield.  Phosgene contains carbon.
3. Deadly hydrogen cyanide gas contains carbon.
4. 100% of biological tissue from cancer patients contains carbon.
5. Carbon compounds are implicated in climate change.
6. Every human disease ever known can be associated with carbon!!!!
7. The Nazis ate food with carbon in it.

Tell Monsanto, Big Pharma, and Big Farm A that you do not want carbon in your food.  Join the movement to insist that our food producers start growing natural food without this toxic poison!

Stop Poisoning Your Body Today!

The President's Porter

In a previous post, I described the last batch of beer I made. It's time to start a new batch. As the Whitehouse recently released their recipe for a honey porter, I thought I start there. I also changed some of my methodology to correct some of the problems I encountered in my last batch.

The recipe I used is based upon the Whitehouse recipe. My local brew store was out of Nottingham yeast; so I am used Windsor yeast. I used a local organic honey instead of Whitehouse honey. I used 9.6 HBU of bittering hops instead og 10 HBU, and 1 oz. or aromatic hops instead of 1/2 oz., because the quantities are more convenient, and a little more aromatic hops never hurt anyone. I  used diammonium phosphate as a yeast nutrient, and gypsum for flavor. Also, I will use a process that is somewhat modified from the Whitehouse process that I will describe here. 

Amateur Summer Amber

I've brewed beer a few times, but I have not done so in quite some time. In the past, I have not kept very detailed notes about the beer I've made. This time I decided to do so, and as long as I was keeping notes, I thought it would be fun to blog about it.

I am far from an expert when it comes to brewing; so I decided to keep it simple by brewing a pure extract beer. I did create my own recipe, but it is very similar to recipes in a couple of my references below.

The Laws of Thermodynamics

If one looks around the Internet, he or she can find a multitude of pages that state the laws of thermodynamics; so why add one more?  I've been writing a lot of posts on thermodynamics, but nowhere have I given a concise statement of the laws; also, I am not always happy with how the laws are described.  So this post is my contribution.

The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics

The zeroth law states:

If two bodies are in thermal equilibrium with a third body, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that it is impossible to reach absolute zero in a finite number of steps. A shortcut way to remember the law is "you cannot leave the game."  An alternate shortcut to remember the law is "let's keep score" which is based on the fact that the third law provides the foundation for thermodynamic temperature scales.

Time's Arrow

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled The Second Law, Microscopic Reversibility, and Small Systems. The previous post is essential to understanding this post.

Why does time move forward instead of backward? In the spatial dimensions, one can move left or right, up or down, backward, or forward.

Time, on the other hand, has a preferred direction. Why is that so? The underlying physics does not seem to have a preferred direction, but time does.

The Second Law, Microscopic Reversibility, and Small Systems

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled The Second Law, Radiative Transfer, and Global Warming.

On a small scale, individual physical events are reversible; yet on a macroscopic scale, it is not so.  I used to find that confusing.  I'd like to try to cut through some of the confusion.  In so doing, the underlying mechanism of the second law may become clearer.

Figure Source (Monopoly by Hasbro).

Petagrams of Carbon

Sometimes carbon dioxide is referenced in units of ppm, and sometimes it is referenced in petagrams of carbon.  What are the meanings of these units and how does one convert between them?

In a previous post I explained how to convert to and from units of ppm.  The current post explains the units petagrams of carbon, and how to convert from ppm to petagrams of carbon.

The Second Law, Radiative Transfer, and Global Warming

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled Spontaneous Change and Equilibrium.

Does global warming violate the second law of thermodynamics?  Such a claim may seem strange.  The idea that the vast majority of physical scientists would subscribe to an idea that somehow violates a fundamental law of thermodynamics on its face seems odd.  Yet, such a claim is often made by people calling the science behind global warming into question.

Spontaneous Change and Equilibrium

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled Free Energy.

Diamond turns spontaneously into graphite; yet we may have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to see such a change.  Hydrocarbons are spontaneously oxidized into carbon dioxide and water; yet gasoline requires a source of heat before it burns.

Free Energy

This post is part of a series,Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled Entropy as Religious, Spiritual or Self-Help Metaphor.

You cannot get something for nothing, and the term "free energy" does not mean energy that has no cost.  Rather it refers to energy that is available to do something useful.  The use of the word "free" is in the sense of "liberated."  Free energy is energy that can be liberated to do something useful.

We know that the second law places limitations on how much energy can be used to do useful work.  In most situations, some of the energy must be dissipated as heat that cannot be used to do something useful.  The portion of the energy that can do something useful is the free energy.

At constant volume, the free energy is the Helmholtz Free Energy, given the variable A.

Enthalpy

This post continues a tangent  from my series on the second law of thermodynamics.  It discusses another quantity in thermodynamics, but it is necessary before I can get to the next post in the series, which is on free energy.

This post discusses the term enthalpy.

At constant pressure the change in enthalpy is the heat transferred to a system.

      ΔH = q  at constant pressure.

Heat is not a state function, but enthalpy is.

Second Law Poll

The purpose of this post is to document the final results of a poll on the site.  I do not intend to comment on the results until I conclude my series on the second law of thermodynamics.  It is worth noting at this point that there is no clear consensus on the correct answer from respondents.

 I think that this fact is reflective of the state of confusion that exists in public discourse regarding the second law of thermodynamics.

The poll asked the respondents to pick an option to complete the statement:  "The second law of thermodynamics states:"

The option were:

• The disorder of the universe must increase.
• You can't win.
• The entropy of an isolated system must stay the same or increase.
• The entropy of a closed system must stay the same or increase.
• Heat cannot be transferred from a cold body to a hot body.
• The entropy of the world must increase.
• Let's keep score.

The results are shown in the following figure with truncated responses:

The First Law of Thermodynamics

I need to take a tangent from my series on the second law of thermodynamics and discuss the first law of thermodynamics. 

Heat is not a conserved quantity.  Work is not a conserved quantity, but the sum of heat and work is a conserved quantity. The first law is related to the law of conservation of energy; in fact it is one case of that law.

Partition Functions

This post is part of a series,Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled Fluctuations.

In previous posts it was shown that entropy is related to the the number of ways that a system can arrange itself subject to constraints such as constant energy.

The previous post on fluctuations showed that for very large numbers that fluctuation from the most probable distribution, are insignificant.  Most of the distribution is contained within the square root of N of the most probable result.

Carbon Dioxide Poll

A recently closed poll on this blog posed the following question.  "The bending mode of carbon dioxide is:" Respondents were to respond with the best answer.  Here were the choices:

• A Hoax
• Not Dipole Allowed
• Degenerate
• A Blackbody
• The reason the sky is blue
• Even though I understand Global Warming, I don't know
• I don't know

I should point out that the answer to the question can be found in a post on this blog. The results of the poll are shown here:

Entropy and Statistical Thermodynamics

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled The Second Law and Swamp Coolers.

A previous post discusses the macroscopic thermodynamic definition of entropy, but there is another, statistical way of describing entropy.  Consider an isolated macroscopic system of interacting molecules.  Without knowing much about what is going on with the individual molecules, it is possible to measure macroscopic thermodynamic properties such as the pressure, the temperature etc.

                                                                                         (Figure Source)

Consider that the system is isolated; so that the total energy of the entire system of molecules is a constant.  Energy is free to move from one molecule to another, and each molecule has multiple electronic, vibrational, rotational, and translational energy states that it could be in.  There are many distinguishable ways that the system could be arranged to achieve the this energy.

Heat Can Be Transferred From a Cold Body to a Hot Body: The Air Conditioner

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled The Hydrogen Economy.

As of 10/26/2010, a survey on this site shows that 25% (Final result 21%) of the respondents thus far think that the second law of thermodynamics says that heat cannot be transferred from a cold body to a hot body.

Not only are these people mistaken, but they are also ignoring their own common experience of the world.

It is possible to transfer heat from a cold reservoir to a hot reservoir! 

The Hydrogen Economy

This post is part of a series, Nonsense and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The previous post is entitled Perpetual Motion.

The media often perpetuate the idea that the so-called hydrogen economy is the solution to all of our energy needs.  Hydrogen is abundant everywhere; in fact there are oceans full of hydrogen in the form of water, just waiting to be extracted, oxidized and used as an endless source of energy, right?