Tom Womack

When you read this meme, take a photo of your desk and post it to your journal.

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The United Russia party apparently secured a 99% majority in Chechnya, on a 99% turnout.

The Putinjugend are holding a victory rally in Moscow as I type.

It appears that the secrecy of the ballot was not universally respected; for example 'those voting for United Russia were entered into a prize lottery in the city of St Petersburg'. One wonders how they could tell.

It's always instructive to compare Russian and Chinese propaganda. At the moment, Chinese propaganda is filled with apologetic remarks about monetary policy and the need for action on climate change, and the occasional panda. The Russians seem not to bother with propaganda, the state of affairs is presented unapologetically by former KGBniks, with a very strong 'what are you going to do about it?' tone.

Modest-proposal mode: lift immigration restrictions against Russians, so at least they can get out. Get Ukraine into the EU as soon as can be arranged. Build nuclear power plants, fund ITER, insulate, conserve; and long for the day that we can tell the Russian government, as the Saudi despots, that they are welcome to drink their oil and breathe their natural gas, for we their former addicts have no need for it. In what-if mode, wish that Yeltsin had blasted the KGB to ash as thoroughly as the Stasi and Czech StB were dismantled.

In other news, Livejournal has been bought by СУП, 'an international online media company with established partnerships with businesses across the globe. It was founded in the summer of 2006 by an international management team with Russian seed capital'.

This is a classic example of a story the reporting of which is itself the problem. The data has been lost; with reasonably high probability it's been lost to people unable to do anything with it, in which case nothing has actually happened. If it is lost to people able to do things with it, it increases the background risk of identity theft, but there is nothing whatsoever that any given individual can do given this information - it's even less useful than the 'avian flu exists; refrain from handling dead wild birds if at all possible' news items of the start of the year. The useful mitigation has to be done at the level of large-scale identity users, essentially the banks.

But the information has been presented in a way that clearly has worried people; and to worry twenty-five million people about something which ought to be giving sleepless nights to two dozen teams in the back offices of major banks doesn't seem a publicly valuable act ... raising blood-pressures by on average one quarter-micron of mercury will statistically cause some number of heart attacks, which will statistically cause some number of deaths that would be considered front-page, questions-in-the-House bad news if caused by men with knives.

I'm not sure this particular large data-leak can't be spun as a strong argument for ID cards. It means that it can be argued that bad-guys-unspecified have the NI numbers, dates of birth and bank information for near enough everybody, at which point any organisation prepared to let somebody do something to my detriment given only my NI number, date of birth and bank information is presumptively negligent.

I don't think this troubles me too much - I am fairly happy to open bank accounts by appearing in person with a cheque, a passport and a gas bill - but it's clearly troublesome for people for whom getting to the bank is hard, or for whom the cost of getting a passport is significant.

There's certainly an argument that I can imagine being made, of the shape 'previous proof-of-identity systems which we believed adequate are compromised; requiring time-consuming authentication processes from everybody is expensive; what we need to do is to move to some other method of authentication, for example these beautiful high-tech public-key-authentication-on-secure-processor ID-cards what the selfless people at EDS have prepared for us'.

I've just listened to Woody Guthrie's Grand Coulee Dam three times, because there's nothing in my collection quite like it.

Among my readers are some vastly better-listened than I. Can you suggest similar eulogies to reinforced concrete and thirty-foot turbines? I suppose Leslie Fish's Hope Eyrie is something of the same kind of thing.

[screen-capped rather than linked]

news.bbc



finance.yahoo.com



I don't think wide stock-market indices are supposed to wiggle with that sort of frequency; I assume it's a Bug at FTSE, since the charts from the BBC and Yahoo are essentially identical, but someone in London must be running around like a headless chicken trying to sort this out.

Last week, I was at the PSDI conference in Autrans, a small farming town in the mountains near (ten kilometres as the crow flies, forty-five minutes and €80 as the road winds and the taxi drives) Grenoble.


It was French, so the food was copious - hot chocolate and croissants for breakfast, four-course lunches to go with the four-course dinners, and no table at any stage without its bottle of wine of each colour. Cuisse de oie as the main course for lunch one day, terrine de foie gras served with a glass of Sauternes as the starter for dinner the next, and plenty of time to enjoy the selection of local cheeses before dessert turns up.

The normal conference attractions: insanely complicated slides (this one coming from a talk in which a large and serious team at Novartis discovered that three techniques for telling whether your drug-like molecule has linked to your protein gave completely different results)



a cultural visit (the expressions on the faces of a large number of microbiologists as they watch a team of assistant cheese-makers without gloves carefully rubbing mould fibres off a huge pile of cheeses are well worth the imagining)



and a site visit to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, with trips down to see the marvellous contraptions which are beam-lines



On the left is a device for spectroscopy on mounted crystals; the hedgehog of beam-launching telescopes is fed by optic fibres from a collection of large lasers mounted on the next bench, the microscope at the top is attached to a box full of diffraction gratings to analyse the light that comes out, and the thin metal tube on the right blows liquid nitrogen at the whole thing to keep it cold.

On the right is a 'mini-kappa', a device for twiddling crystals so that they are lined up in a desirable way, so that you can observe things the small differences between which are critically important to phasing the data at the same time, rather than one at the start of the experiment and one after the crystal has been blasted with X-rays for half an hour. After half an hour of X-ray exposure the crystal will usually explode as it warms up - the X-rays make carboxylic acid groups fall off and turn into high-pressure carbon dioxide inside the crystal.

I got a couple of hours in Grenoble proper, on a rather grey day. The city spreads out over a flat bit at the intersection of two rivers, with a comprehensively fortified mountain starting on the right bank of the Isère. I took the cable-car up to the fortress and walked down, with excellent panoramic views of Grenoble laid out below me, starting just as my camera broke down.



Next year's will be in England; hosted by Glaxo, and probably in the neighbourhood of Stevenage. I'm not sure how the cultural visit, or indeed the food, will compare.

I've started watching more DVDs, thanks to Blockbuster and to having Ben in the house of evenings; mostly things that I remember being vaguely entertaining as cinema trailers but never got round to seeing on the big screen.

Are there any films that end with the massive intervention of legitimate authority? After Hot Fuzz and Mr and Mrs Smith, I would be very refreshed to see something where the police exist, are summoned to scenes of inordinate mayhem, and don't give up until the perpetrator is caught; where Secret Society A and Secret Society B clash in Los Angeles and both end up trapped in road-blocked streets and detained by the LAPD; or where the characters engaged in diabolism end up encountering the wrath of God and transformed to pillars of salt.

I suppose Good Omens comes close to the last.

This may be like my main complaint with Grand Theft Auto, which is that the police give up too readily; repeatedly shooting policemen gets you the attention of the army, but this is an opportunity to rampage in a stolen tank rather than the certainty of long-range-rifle-borne instantaneous death.

It's probably difficult to write an engaging script which features the arrest, trial and detention of the hero, and 'shot by the SWAT team' is a somewhat sudden conclusion. But I'd just for once like to see something where the firing of a single shot is a major life-changing event.

I discovered today that I need to represent the company I work for at a conference in Grenoble in two week's time.

Writing a half-hour presentation about fitting molecular models into X-ray-derived difference density will be a bit of work, but at least getting to Grenoble ought not to be a problem; it's famously a TGV destination, I have all of Sunday to get there (conference starts at 8pm Sunday; this being France it starts with an enormous buffet meal), and all of Wednesday afternoon to get back (conference ends noon Wednesday).

The latest Paris-London Eurostar with seats leaves before the latest Grenoble-Paris train with seats gets to Paris. Easyjet in theory flies to Grenoble, but all its flights are sold out. Easyjet's one daily flight from Lyon leaves too early. BA has (expensive) flights at good times, but there's no train from Grenoble on the Wednesday afternoon to get to Lyon in time to catch the BA flight, even though the Lyon TGV station and airport are conveniently colocated.

I have ended up by throwing up my hands and asking the travel-agent who sorted out my trip to Turkey what she can do.

PS: Miraculous and entirely unexpected resolution by vicarage

A Greenpeace article

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/greenpeace-shuts-down-coal-fired-power-station-20071008

includes the line 'And it will only be 45 per cent efficient, in an age when power stations can reach 95 per cent efficiency'.

This is a coal-fired power station, so 45% efficiency in converting thermal to electrical energy is I think extremely good.

95% thermal efficiency implies, by the Carnot equation, that the heater is twenty times hotter in Kelvin than the heatsink and that there are no other thermal losses in the system. With a heatsink laid on an infinite icefield at zero centigrade, the heater has only to be hot enough to boil tungsten. I was unaware that gas-cored fission reactors were either in production, or this enthusiastically endorsed by Greenpeace.

While idly looking for information about NASA's new class of nuclear power source for space missions, I came across something I've been looking for for ages: studies of the analogues of high-strength steels made using elements further down the periodic table. Whilst rhenium is readily purchased on ebay, the furnace requirements are unfortunately rather exacting for doing this work in one's back garden.

http://sakimori.nims.go.jp/documents/990225b.html was the first one; the interesting bit of data is figure 1. MarM247, sitting there quite a long way under the red iridium-based lines, is a current best-available turbine-blade alloy.

http://sakimori.nims.go.jp/documents/001113a.html investigates four-element alloys, though the character-set information has been slightly mangled; http://nippon.zaidan.info/seikabutsu/2003/00916/pdf/igtc2003tokyo_ks2.pdf is a large but interesting overview article.

OK, there are some small pricing issues associated with making the blades for jet engine or power station turbines out of materials slightly more costly than platinum, but the design and machining costs are themselves large enough that even that class of material cost is not insuperable, particularly since a 500MW turbine produces electricity with a retail value of about a hundred thousand pounds per hour of operation and consumes, at the 33% thermal efficiency of Drax, 1200 tonsworth of CO2-emission permits which at one point cost 30 euros the tonsworth: that iridium is twice as dense as lead does make things a bit awkward, but increasing thermal efficiency significantly, so substantially reducing the weight of CO2-emission permits that you are burning an hour, might well be enough to break even.

What surprises me slightly is that all this research is in Japan, whilst if asked to name four jet engine manufacturers I'd list Rolls-Royce, General Electric, Pratt and Whitney, and then confess myself lost and try to Google up who Sukhoi and MIG's suppliers are. I suppose there are quite a lot of power stations in Japan, mostly built by Japanese companies, and that this has built up expertise such that the turbines in power stations worldwide may well be bought from Hitachi.