randform

Recently I was –here on randform– recalling some of my pictures of a trip to Oxford. Here some more pictures from a previous trip.

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Just a quick link to a happy mutant controller fun at createdigitalmusic.

For those who haven’t noticed. There is currently a discussion about melting permafrost on Azimuth. If frozen soil is melted then usually greenhouse gases are going to be emitted. So in this context (comment on Azimuth) I was raising again the question to which extend the melting of permafrost could not only lead to more CO2 in the air but also induce a reagression of O2 (which may e.g. be due to a sudden expansion of aerobic organisms)*. If someone knows more about this then please comment here or on Azimuth.

*I am not sure, but I think such a mechanism may have led to the abort of a simulation for studying the colonization of Mars.

This post is somewhat a brief follow-up post to the last post which mentioned a math conference/workshop. For those who are interested (sponsors, investors etc…. :) ) in the issue of academic jobs and mathematics: there is currently a discussion about math job opffers at the mathematics blog “n-category cafe”.

->related randform post

Some recycled pictures from Oxford, England where I was on a conference last year. Since I had not much time and only my little camera with me, they are a bit random and fuzzy. However they still give some impressions so I decided to post them here.

The image of the women’s room in the youth hostel (see below) may look more uncomfortable than it actually was. That is luckily all the six women in the room were attending the conference and all of them were very considerate people that is the partying teenager stayed out of the room and thus we all had more or less rather quiet nights.

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“HirniKoppic”, Copic Markers on paper, by artist “nettwürg” on the occasion of the rumors about the possibility of closing the Medizinhistorisches Museum (Berlin Medical Historical Museum) of the Charité.

Using Digital Holographic Microscopy (DHM) researchers of EPFL gathered quite some interesting images from inside the brain:

->Holograms Reveal Brain’s Inner Workings.

When do we get to see brain images from image imaginations? and when can others recognize these?

Last week we did a short trip to the Island of Rügen in the baltic, which is amongst others famous for its stunningly beautiful Chalk Cliffs in the Jasmund National Park, including the Königstuhl (king’s chair). You may know the well-known picture Chalk Cliffs on Rügen by C.D. Friedrich.

update 15.08.11: Warning: especially after that recent rain the chalk cliffs can break. On Saturday evening there was an amount of ca. 30.000 cubic meters of chalk gliding. The Jasmund park authorities thus currently recommend not to stroll in their vicinity. According to the article the sea level has been rising by 28 cm in the last 200 ys. so that the hillside toe vanished. This leaves the chalk without any protection against the baltic.

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Hiroshima nowadays

For commemorating the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki two links to recent comments, which I left on the blog Azimuth. One link is to a comment to the new scientist article article “The carbon cost of Germany’s nuclear ‘Nein danke!’ ” where I try to explain why the authors arguments that Germany’s renunciation of commercial nuclear power generation leads to more carbon output are flawed.

A second comment is related to the Manhattan project itself but also to the dangers of biotechnology.

For those who were interested in the discussion about the travelling wave reactor (TWR). According to the Technology review article: Advanced Reactor Gets Closer to Reality the reactor concept of the TWR had been changed completely:

In the new design, the reactions all take place near the reactor’s center instead of starting at one end and moving to the other. To start, uranium 235 fuel rods are arranged in the center of the reactor. Surrounding these rods are ones made up of uranium 238. As the nuclear reactions proceed, the uranium 238 rods closest to the core are the first to be converted into plutonium, which is then used up in fission reactions that produce yet more plutonium in nearby fuel rods. As the innermost fuel rods are used up, they’re taken out of the center using a remote-controlled mechanical device and moved to the periphery of the reactor. The remaining uranium 238 rods—including those that were close enough to the center that some of the uranium has been converted to plutonium—are then shuffled toward the center to take the place of the spent fuel.

(remark: my comment on Azimuth to the previous concept may give some hints why they may have wanted to change their reactor design)

The new design sounds to me less futuristic and to be more like a “conventional” breeder running in burner mode (that is you fill an inside (a “core”) with fissile material breed the fertile material around it (in a “blanket”) into fissile material). The original idea of guiding the nuclear reaction through a cylinder (which I found futuristic) seems thus to had been given up.

Concerning the new concept: I might believe that the nuclear reaction may travel a bit through the blanket in fact I could imagine that this is partially happening already in “conventional” breeders. In particular I wonder wether there weren’t already some experiments on how thick a blanket could be for sustaining a reaction (maybe even in some russian journals of the 70s). But apart from this concept – it is not clear to me how much actinides are left in the fuel rods that are taken out (like in a integral fast reactor these rods are usually supposed to be put to reprocessing) – this concerns the possible waste. Moreover the problem of a sodium leakage (see e.g. the talk slides ) and the other problems mentioned in the Tech Review article and that of similar breeders are still there.

Meanwhile you can listen and see here, how things are going if something goes wrong with nuclear technology:

(via boingboing)

some radiaton readings in Japan

The Theseus program is a german research project (sofar funded for five years). It is kind of a bit on the side of the already mentioned Quaero project. Theseus is amongst others concerned with the development of aspects of the semantic web. Moreover it is especially concerned with technology in connection to business applications and services. So for example companies like antibodies-online may look out for unified descriptions of their products* etc. The Theseus project hosts the socalled TEXO lab, which offers now a prize for an app written in USDL (which seems to be some variant of WSDL, i.e. a metalanguage, which describes entities of web services). The website of the prize is in german, but thanks to google-translate (which still works for this site) one can get an easy translate of the site. This may enhance the global competition for a posh enterprise app.

*as a side remark: eventually this could also be useful for flutracking