Thinking Space

As a kid I enjoyed reading Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, but even then felt a certain revulsion at some of his antics. I was never big into swinging cats.

I get great satisfaction from doing things well, sometimes even too well, hyper-well, better-than-necessary. This has to be one of my raisons d’être. Because of that I can also feel frustrated if circumstances prevent me from doing my job well. To a certain extent I have adapted to the exigencies of reality; I realise I have an inclination towards certain types of work and a disinterest in certain other types: I call on willpower. In relation to things that interest me I like bringing together diverse threads and teasing out linkages in a painstaking (but it is not pain) way. I came across an article recently that suggested confined spaces favoured concentration on detail. Mind you, I love open spaces. Perhaps the open spaces provide the inspiration and confined spaces allow for ideas to be refined and distilled.

I moved into a new office yesterday and so, naturally, I have been thinking about the type of workspace I would ideally like. People are not all the same and it is not good to put them into boxes, metaphorically. There is no single answer to the question of the ideal workspace for, for instance, an academic in the field of Mechanical Engineering who is involved in third and fourth level engineering education and is engaged in research.

Some of the practicalities are: being close to lecture rooms, laboratories and the library, being accessible to students and colleagues and being close to the areas through which many people transit and where it is possible to bump into people or interact with them.

There is a need for a place to hang up one's waterproof clothing, this being Ireland where it sometimes rains. The various accoutrements don’t stop there either. I didn’t think I was a hoarder, but was a little shocked yesterday when I found I had hived away a fair collection of sparkling clean, empty plastic water bottles. It is shocking too that for the drinking of modest quantities of water these precision objects had to be created—creating employment and work for machinery and need for ‘channels’ of distribution. Do you see what I mean about linking diverse things together in my head?

If the ceiling is no lower than the height I can touch, that is fine. Having natural light through a window is a blessing. My new office is more than adequate and is fully in keeping with my recent decrease in status: from being a full-time administrator who did research as a hobby to being in the highest career-grade in my institute as a full-time academic. This office is in a very central location and I am delighted with that. In this institute it is rare for academics to have single-occupancy offices. While I am far from being extrovert, I need contact with others. I need to see them, hear them and interact with them, but I find that for concentrated work I really appreciate a single-occupancy office. Likewise, I appreciate my own office if I am having a one-to-one meeting or am talking to someone over the phone.

As I moved into my new office I was deeply disappointed for one single reason. There is a continuous low-pitched noise coming from a duct and fan (the duct is within the suspended ceiling of the office). The sound measures about 35 level-equalised decibels (A-weighted), which is not loud by noise standards. The spectrum seems to be broad and level, especially at the lower frequencies right down to 16 hertz. I experience the sound as a rumbling that varies slightly in intensity and pitch, much like the wind, but deeper—there is maybe a hint of the Australian didgeridoo to it, but more tummy-rumbling and not pleasant. The buildings department had taken steps to abate the noise and my feeling of deep disappointment yesterday was because I felt the abatement had not been enough for my needs. It has been suggested to me that this level of background noise is not unreasonable, but a formal assessment will be carried out. I have flagged my concerns on health and safety grounds.

It is too soon to say how this situation will be resolved. The noise is at a low level and is well below the levels of intermittent ambient background noise, such as students in the corridor outside or my laser printer when it is operating. As it is, I have some tinnitus in my left ear that I successfully ignore most of the time, but, as I work here at my desk, I find the rumble-rumble to be rather too much for comfort. I intend to do some research myself to see if there might yet be a technical solution that has not been tried. I like this office and, apart from the duct noise, I am very unlikely to get a better one.

My own view is that I am not averse to normal background noise—but maybe I’m just spoilt, as I have an excellent environment at home where I enjoy working. Would you believe that I wrote this, in the rumbling noise, right through lunchtime without realising it? It is now 2:20 p.m.!

DAB - 30 Years of Engineering Progress

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) became available where I live yesterday. I had given my wife a present of a Bush CDAB5R DAB stereo radio for Christmas in the knowledge that DAB radio transmissions were due to become available. This replaced a Waltham W152 mono transistor radio (FM, MW and LW), which was about thirty years old. The Waltham was a low-cost radio when I bought it and was not of high specification for the time. However, it served without fail and there was never any justification for replacing it as the counter-top radio in the kitchen.

Engineers should be rightly proud of the progress that has been made in radio in thirty years. A single radio station can now be transmitted and received at high quality while using up only a very tiny fraction of the capacity of the airwaves. However, when I experience a product such as the Bush I am not proud to be an engineer. I find the sound quality very tinny and, in fact, there is a buzz at certain pitches in speech and music that irritates me. The radio has a small backlit display for the station name and other broadcast information. This has disappointed me because the text is blurred and difficult-to-read for my 56 year-old eyes, especially moving text on the second row.

The Waltham radio was self-contained and mains-powered, with its transformer inside the casing. The Bush radio has an awkward and heavy transformer plug. It is rated as 230-240v 90ma input for 9v 600ma output, which means that it is very inefficient. Furthermore, it is wasteful of energy if left plugged-in to a live socket.

On the web today I learned that DAB is not forward-compatible with DAB+, which is more efficient and may supersede it, so the Bush is unlikely to serve for as long as the Waltham. Thankfully!

Cheating and the Importance of Not Condoning It

Life is a game! Games are part of life! Soccer is only a game and I'm not a big enthusiast, but I enjoy watching it from time to time. Like many, I feel bothered by Thierry Henri's hand ball incident in the Ireland versus France match. All the world saw that the referee and officials made a wrong decision and that France's win depended on cheating. I don't in any way blame Thierry Henri. In the heat of the moment he reacted instinctively. All the players in the match were highly fired-up and that is normal in sport. I, like so many others, am bothered because FIFA has effectively condoned cheating as a means of winning football matches. The implication is that if the cheating is not detected by the referee and the officials at the time it occurs, then it is perfectly acceptable to win on that basis. The message is cheat! go ahead, it's a valid tactic and you might get away with it. What is more, there is huge money involved in international football and the incentives to cheat in all sorts of ways are huge. Of course the rule book supports the FIFA decision, when read selectively! In any set of rules there is a hierarchy of principles, but which principle is the primary one? Is it the principle of fair play? If FIFA's highest principles were applied to athletics then athletes who were found to have cheated retrospectively through using drugs would not be deprived of their medals. Effectively they would be congratulated for having gotten away with it!

Sport is only sport, but attitudes are attitudes. And attitudes do not recognise any barriers between the games that constitute life. Terrorism is cheating. Genocide is cheating. Extracting confessions from suspects by torture is cheating. Misleading shareholders and abusing company directorships or chairmanships in order to make personal gains are cheating. Political corruption is cheating. When it comes to it, the only defenses we have against all of these things are our attitudes, our sense of right and wrong.

Microsoft's Equation Editor: the good and the glitches

I had problems over the last few days, which turned out to be because of glitches in Microsoft Equation Editor within Word 2007. Lecture notes I had written suddenly lost whole sections or when I pasted in good parts of a document that had got messed-up into a new document the formatting of the new document instantly got messed-up. That was very frustrating, as I was under pressure to have my lecture notes prepared.

I was wondering if viruses were at work. I contacted our IT people and they promised to investigate. I took the usual precautions of backing up my computer.

Microsoft doesn't publish the features of Equation Editor, it seems. The fashion now is that one has to go to the web to find the help one needs. A while ago I found excellent information on Equation Editor at the University of Waterloo (http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/ec/equations/equation2007.html). One of the features of Equation Editor is that Shift+Enter can be used to insert a group of equations, which can be aligned together on specified characters. This is an important and necessary TeX- or LATeX-type feature. I was glad to find it.

Once I find a feature I use it to its full potential. The lines of the grouped equations were too close together so I used Shift+Enter to space them out. It seems this was what triggered the glitch: beware! I have now found that by going into draft mode in Word I can see the 'disappeared' text. By displaying formatting marks I can see and then remove the Shift+Enter symbols where I used them for line spacing. This seems to restore the document: as I write it is too soon to say for sure that I have beaten the problem.

It seems Microsoft has incorporated much of TeX into Equation Editor now. This is very welcome for me. It is moving towards enabling fluent entry of mathematical equations from the keyboard and yet having full WYSIWIG. That is great! For example, typing \times puts in a multiplication sign or the Greek letters can be input as \alpha or \Alpha, according to case.

The Very Basics of Sustainability - an Alternative Viewpoint

When I actually calculated what the land and sea areas of the Earth have been and might be in the future and when I considered the amount of time it takes for the sea level to change (even with our current high usage of energy and fossil fuels), I had a better perspective on the issue. It is a far more serious matter that, for example, in my lifetime the population of the Earth has more than doubled and a large fraction of the population has living standards that would generally be considered unacceptable.

My keynote address (there were several keynote addresses on each day of the conference) at the 3rd International Conference on Sustainable Energy & Environmental Protection was well received on Friday 15th August. I was delighted to have a truly international audience that included some very highly respected experts in the field. On the previous day there had been a round table discussion in which I participated and that too had been a very stimulating experience for me. None of us have all the answers to the challenges we face in the area of sustainability.

The biosphere is thinner than the skin of a radish or an apple in proportional terms.

Using-up non-renewable energy resources is an issue, but using-up chemical elements that exist in concentrated form and dispersing them minutely within the environment is, at least, as important an issue.

I believe it is important to allow and encourage debate about all the options that are available to humankind. Globally concerted action, respecting and involving all stakeholders, is required to address the challenges.

My slide presentation is available in the Dublin Institute of Technology's ARROW archive at the web page link below. The file size is 41 MB because it contains a total of about 43 minutes of audio for the 62 slides, so it may be slow to download in a browser window (6 minutes with my home broadband connection). In due course I hope to have a paper based on the presentation published in a journal.
http://arrow.dit.ie/engschmecoth/7/

The original conference paper is also available in the DIT ARROW archive at the web page link below.
http://arrow.dit.ie/engschmecoth/8/

Sustainable Energy, Environmental Protection and the Nuclear Energy Question

A conference entitled Sustainable Energy and Environmental Protection takes place from tomorrow, 12th August, 2009, at Dublin City University and I am putting the final touches to my presentation, which I will deliver on Friday 14th August. My presentation is entitled ‘The Very Basics of Sustainability—an Alternative Viewpoint’. I am in favour of continuing to evaluate all of the options that are available to humankind. I favour allowing the best technologies to win out in the marketplace, but subject to global coordination and regulation that would ensure safety and would prevent exploitation of the common environment by some in a way that would be unfair to others who share the environment.

Whether or not nuclear power should be exploited is an emotive issue for those who oppose it in Ireland and many other places. However, there are no easy answers in addressing the ongoing needs of humanity and it is my belief that nuclear power must be considered and must be permitted, but subject to the necessary levels of regulation and monitoring so as to ensure that the rights of all members of the human population are protected.

In 2008 I was very taken aback by a leakage that occurred at a nuclear power plant in France and I wrote an article, which I sent to an Irish newspaper. The item was not taken up by the paper and I let the matter drop. I have included the article below, exactly as I wrote it.

The Nuclear Power Question
Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to the notion of nuclear power. As a Mechanical Engineer who has specialised in the topic of energy use I appreciate the problems that we, humankind, face on planet Earth at this time. There are no easy answers. I’m not sure that I know what the right questions are, but I would be very uneasy with the thought that any question should be taboo. In my opinion the nuclear power question should not be taboo in Ireland. In France, a country just across the water from us, nuclear power is very much a reality. Around the globe, nuclear power is a reality.

Imagine the following first sentence introducing an article on page 4 of a local Irish newspaper, under the theme ‘Society’ and with a label (not the headline) “The event of the day”: “Yesterday afternoon a curt statement from the Prefectures of Drôme and Vaucluse indicated that a nuclear incident had occurred on the site of Tricastin the previous night.” For the prefectures you could imagine any Irish county council, for example Kildare County Council, and for Tricastin you could imagine Newbridge (my own town) and its surrounding areas. I was on holidays in France and read such an article in Midi Libre on 9th July, 2008.

It seems that water containing dissolved uranium was released into the environment. From the subsequent reports I heard on the radio and read in the papers it appears there was a leak of water containing dissolved uranium and that the secondary containment that had been designed to catch any such leak was itself in poor repair at the time so the uranium-bearing water escaped. It also appears from the reports that there was a significant delay of some hours between awareness of the occurrence and the notification of the authorities by those responsible for the plant.

It could be that humankind has a so-called dodo mentality: an inability to recognise and evaluate threats to survival that could be avoided by learning from experience and adapting behaviour. We may not be sufficiently intelligent to avoid becoming extinct. The information I have picked up from the media in relation to this nuclear incident has left me astonished. It seems to me that the probability of this incident occurring was relatively high and to me that is unacceptable. This seems to suggest that the dodo mentality does in fact exist (and here I am referring to all of humankind, not just one country that happened to provide this particular recent example). From what I have been able to make out, the incident was not in itself a highly dangerous one. Over quite a short period of time the water that escaped would be diluted and all of the dissolved uranium should be dissipated, reaching concentration levels that are normal in the environment.

My concern is: how can technologically advanced countries tolerate such apparently low standards in relation to something so important? Vigilance and standards in the nuclear industry need to be extremely high. Enforcement must be sufficient to ensure that all risks are maintained below defined levels. Lack of sufficient funds to maintain an installation properly, cutbacks to maximise profitability or simply bad management should not be capable of being a cause of a heightened risk developing or subsisting. To whom does the monitoring authority answer? In relation to the most serious potential nuclear risks there are no frontiers, in the sense of barriers, on Earth. An empowered and fully representative world authority on energy use and its impact is needed. It will not be realised in the short term. However, the time window available for addressing such matters is quite short. I just hope we are not, collectively, dodos.

Ireland’s Non-participation in CERN as a Member State

On Saturday 1st August, 2009, I visited CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, near Geneva http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/About-en.html. I looked down, in awe, into the Large Hadron Collider http://lhc-milestones.web.cern.ch/LHC-Milestones/year2008-en.html.

There was a vibrancy there. The Large Hadron Collider project is a huge collaborative scientific undertaking. It is seeking new knowledge and understanding in a non-political and open way and it is a stimulus for science, engineering, industry and learning. I believe CERN is working for the good of humankind and for peace, cooperation, and collaboration. That is not to say that it is easy; for whenever people work together, or try to, there are tensions and difficulties. However, working together, collaborating, and sharing ideas and insights is still a far better option than not working together, not communicating, not engaging, being antagonistic or, in the extreme, engaging in war.

It is a great shame that Ireland is not a member state of CERN. It is an injustice to its young people and especially its young scientists and engineers. It risks leaving Irish high-technology industry somewhat out-of-the-loop. In fact, in my view, for so long as Ireland does not participate as a member in this huge collaborative effort of its neighbours and contributors from around the world, its claim to be a scientifically advanced country rings somewhat hollow. A scientifically advanced country, by definition, engages actively in the most advanced and most fundamental and most important science. In my view it is not sufficient to rely on the European Commission’s participation as an observer.

In engineering generally and particularly in an ongoing project such as the construction, operation and maintenance of a huge, leading-edge, experimental facility, such as that at CERN, safety must be of the highest priority. I’m sure it is. If a significant accident were to occur it would not be right for Ireland to point a finger at its neighbours who are engaged in the endeavour. Ireland, in common with humanity generally, is already benefiting from advances made at CERN, for instance: in the areas of computing, medical imaging and the destruction of internal cancerous tumors.

On the planet Earth the stakes are high. Humanity may make itself extinct through its actions or through inaction where actions are required. There are those who fear nuclear energy and nuclear research. I believe they are wrong to use this fear as a justification for rejecting nuclear research or nuclear energy and they are especially wrong to use it as justification for not continuing to develop our understanding of nature at the most fundamental level.

There are those who would leave us in the dark about, for instance, ‘dark matter’ and the structure and forces of the universe—of course, there is no malice involved. On the other hand scientists, and those who are truly fascinated by nature, like children, are burning with curiosity and are yearning to understand more deeply nature’s glory which, as Albert Einstein pointed out, is inherently understandable. Of course scientists must be responsible: they must accept and honour the responsibilities they carry.

CERN is an inspiring, collaborative and hugely creative attempt to explore the atoms (smallest or indivisible parts) of what we call atoms, the atoms of forces, the atoms of space and the atoms of time. These things are being understood and revealed and they have a glorious beauty, symmetry and an amazing underlying simplicity. The understanding gained spills out into human endeavour and provides deep insights that allow us to deal with our human and societal issues. In fact, by working together to understand nature, to respect it and to be in harmony with it, we are being true to our own human nature.

There are valid reasons to be fearful in many different areas of human, societal and environmental development, but neither nuclear research nor nuclear energy are in themselves risks to humanity; neither is particle physics. Humankind already has sufficient knowledge, of many different types, to destroy itself. A more important question, perhaps, is whether it has sufficient knowledge and collective intelligence to save itself from destruction.

In my view, the appropriate response to fears for humanity or the environment is a proactive one and a participatory one. I believe in being open to considering all options, while advocating due diligence and caution. Humankind has many problems to solve and I believe the work at CERN is making a major contribution to solving them.

This is an important debate. Dr. Cormac O’Raifeartaigh of Waterford Institute of Technology has a blog on this: http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/ireland-cern-and-the-lhc/