Oh, sure, there’s been a lot of whining from the usual suspects about how [...]]]> If you paid attention to the internet at all yesterday, you probably saw people complaining about the proposed US bills SOPA and PIPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act are designed to help content creators fight piracy.

Oh, sure, there’s been a lot of whining from the usual suspects about how it will stifle free speech and be used as a club by the entertainment industry. Sure, the bills are worded so broadly that they could be used for all kinds of nasty things. And perhaps content creators from Hollywood editors to authors have said that SOPA and PIPA are like fighting piracy by burning all of your boats.

That’s all balderdash, as my Disasterpiece Theatre co-hosts and I are here to show you. While you were doing silly protests and calling congresspersons and writing letters, we recorded an episode that demonstrated how SOPA and PIPA have no effect on content creators.

So there.

Charles Stevens, an inventor and entrepreneur, recently revealed that his Massachusetts-based R&D firm, Laser Power Systems (LPS), is working on a turbine/electric generator system that is powered by “an accelerator-driven thorium-based laser.” The thorium [...]]]> While I was away at Dragon*Con, stories about a possible thorium-powered car popped up in the news. From the write-up at Txchnologist:

Charles Stevens, an inventor and entrepreneur, recently revealed that his Massachusetts-based R&D firm, Laser Power Systems (LPS), is working on a turbine/electric generator system that is powered by “an accelerator-driven thorium-based laser.” The thorium laser does not produce a beam of coherent light like conventional lasers, but instead merely heats up and gives off energy.

There’s a whole lot of science word salad in that paragraph — what does it even mean to have a laser that isn’t actually lasing and producing coherent light? So let’s detangle it and see if the proposed thorium-powered car makes sense.

The first thing to know is that there’s been a lot of work done on using thorium for fuel in a nuclear reactor. Thorium-232, the kind you dig up out of the ground, is only weakly radioactive and won’t undergo fission by itself. What you can do, however, is bombard it with slow neutrons from uranium or plutonium. That turns thorium into uranium-233, which is fissile and can be used in a nuclear power plant. That means you can use thorium as breeder fuel to produce the fissionable material you really want.

Thorium has several benefits over uranium-235, the usual nuclear reactor fuel. For one, thorium ore is about three or four times as prevalent in the Earth’s crust as uranium ore. For another, you can use all of the thorium you mine. Only 0.7% of uranium is ²³⁵U. The rest of it is ²³⁸U, which isn’t useful for nuclear reactors. That makes thorium far more abundant for nuclear power purposes.

There are downsides, of course. As the World Nuclear Associate fact page dryly puts it, “Despite the thorium fuel cycle having a number of attractive features, development has always run into difficulties.” There aren’t any commercial thorium reactors yet.

However, if you read carefully what Charles Stevens is saying, he’s not claiming to be using thorium in a nuclear reactor. The WardsAuto article on Stevens states, “Stevens agrees, emphasizing his system is ‘sub-critical,’ which means no self-sustaining nuclear reaction within the thorium creating significant amounts of radioactivity.” So what is he doing?

Unfortunately his two websites currently have very little information. To find out more we have to look at the 2009 version of his webpage and exerpts from that same page. Back then he talked about laser-driven cars in which a “Hybrid Solid state Free Electron laser” heats up thorium, which releases even more heat to turn water into steam and drive a turbine. Also an accelerator may be involved. And according to what he told WardsAuto, “1 gm of thorium equals the energy of 7,500 gallons (28,391 L) of gasoline Stevens says. So, using just 8 gm of thorium in a car should mean it would never need refueling.”

Right, let’s try and make sense of this, starting with one gram of thorium equaling the energy of 7,500 gallons of gas. This a question of energy density: how much energy can you extract from a given amount of fuel?

I have no clue what process Stevens is claiming to use that lets you bombard thorium with a laser and get energy out, especially since he said it’s sub-critical and thus not a nuclear fission reaction. Instead I’ll pretend he is doing nuclear fission, since that’s one of the more energy-productive reactions we can do and will set a good estimated upper bound on how much energy Stevens could extract from thorium. I’ll also assume ²³⁵U fission, since we don’t have a thorium reactor yet.

Uranium in a reactor produces about 20 terajoules of energy per kilogram. For comparison, gasoline gives you about 48 megajoules per kilogram. That means uranium gives us about 425,000 more power per kilogram than gas. Let’s assume thorium will give us roughly the same ratio. That means one gram of thorium would be like 425 kg of gas. Gas has a density of about 2.7 kg per US gallon, so that 425 kg of gas is equivalent to 156 gallons.

That’s way short of Stevens’s claim of 1 gm of thorium being equivalent to 7,500 gallons of gas. For that to be true, his laser-induced power output has to be fifty times more energy efficient than nuclear fission. That is an extraordinary claim, to put it mildly, and he’s offered no proof and precious few details.

Looking through his other claims, it sounds as if he glued together actual science together as if making a collage for kindergarten, regardless of whether the results made sense or not. You could in theory make an actual thorium laser, though that’s not what he’s doing. You can use a particle accelerator to drive a nuclear reaction by knocking neutrons out of other particles, though again that’s not what Stevens is doing despite him adding “accelerator-driven” to the description of his process. You can even induce nuclear reactions using super-powerful lasers, but Stevens says he’s not inducing fission.

So to sum up: Stevens isn’t claiming to have made a nuclear-powered car. He’s claiming to have made a steam-powered car where the steam is heated up when he shines a laser on thorium. I don’t know of any physical process that would let you get more heat energy out of the thorium than you’d spend on making the laser go. For his process to be so awesome that it would power a car for some 200,000 miles on a single gram of thorium, he’d have had to come up with something that’s fifty times more powerful than a nuclear reactor. And he hasn’t released any papers, only press releases. That’s 3 out of 3 red flags for the research not being real.

Sorry, world. If we’re going to have a laser-powered car, it sounds like this isn’t it.

That utter silliness is being peddled in an article by Kimberly Sayer-Giles. The article prominently quotes Dr. Juli Slattery, the Family Psychologist for Focus on the Family. Focus on the Family is James Dobson’s organization [...]]]> Did you know that reading romance novels can be as addictive as pornography? And that reading romance novels can destroy marriages?

That utter silliness is being peddled in an article by Kimberly Sayer-Giles. The article prominently quotes Dr. Juli Slattery, the Family Psychologist for Focus on the Family. Focus on the Family is James Dobson’s organization fighting for “traditional marriages,” which evidently are under attack not only from gays but also from romance novels.

The romance novel weblog SBTB has a good takedown of the article as a whole, but I was fascinated by the article’s use of science.

“There is a neurochemical element with men and visual porn, but an emotional element with women and these novels,” [Dr. Slattery] wrote.

Men are very visual, and viewing pornography produces a euphoric drug in the body. This drug is the reason pornography becomes addictive. When the natural high wears off, a man will crash and feel depressed (as happens with any drug) and crave another hit.

Women are more stimulated by romance than sex, so when they read romantic stories (and they don’t have to be explicit to work) they can experience the same addicting chemical release as men do…..

Pornography addiction counselor Vickie Burress said reading romance novels or viewing pornography may eventually lead to an affair for some women.

“Women involved in pornography have a hard time keeping their family together,” she said.

That’s a whole bunch of bad logic spackled over with a thin, cracking patina of terrible science. This is like equating sex and chocolate. Having sex releases endorphins, a euphoric drug in the body. Eating chocolate can also release endorphins. People who have affairs, some of whom eat chocolate, may ruin their marriage. The implication is clear: eating chocolate will make it hard to keep your marriage together.

I eagerly await the next article from Kimberly Sayer-Giles equating romance novels and snuff films.

As you might imagine, his comments have raised hackles in the adventure game community. Some of that is a reaction to [...]]]> Jonathan Blow’s new game The Witness is going to modernize adventure games. The creator of the hit indie platformer Braid claims that his new game will avoid what killed off adventure games in the 1990s.

As you might imagine, his comments have raised hackles in the adventure game community. Some of that is a reaction to a perceived outsider riding in and saying, “I know what you lot have been doing wrong all of these years!” as if he were starring in Dances With Adventure Games. My negative reaction, though, comes from Jonathan’s apparent lack of information about what’s happened to adventure games since the 1990s.

He starts out promisingly enough, talking about how video game design has gotten better as time has passed.

If you go to conferences, designers are always talking about how they’re doing things and how to make games more fun. And that’s true, it’s pretty obvious. If you go back, get an emulator and play some games from the eighties on home computers, they’re kinda unplayable. You know, people say, “Games were just as good then as they are now.” It’s just not true. Things are way better design-wise.

Where he goes off the rails is when he then turns his eye to adventure games.

[Streamlining gameplay] happened to all the genres, but it never quite happened in adventure games. The core gameplay of a racing game, for example, has been refined. It’s way more interesting than Pole Position was in the arcade, you know. Much more sophisticated. A first person shooter is a lot about knowing what’s happening on the map. Especially if it’s multiplayer, like, who is where? And all this stuff. It’s been iterated and refined.

Adventure games are still what they used to be. And what the core gameplay actually is, is very different from what the designer intends. The designer wants it to be, “It’s going to be cool puzzle solving. There’s going to be a story and stuff.” But really what’s actually going through the players head in adventure games is, “I don’t know if I should be clicking on this thing” or “I don’t know if this is a puzzle” or “I don’t know if I need an item to solve this that I don’t have yet, or if I’m just not thinking.”

Adventure games are all confusion. If it’s text, it’s “Why doesn’t the parser understand me still?” So the core gameplay of adventure games is actually fumbling through something, right? And that’s true with modern [versions]. All the episodic stuff that’s coming out. And there’s a whole community that makes modern interactive fiction games and all this stuff. And it’s true for all these games.

Gameplay in adventure games can certainly be improved, but it’s not all confusion. Adventures aren’t what they were in the 1990s. Jonathan claims passing familiarity with the modern interactive fiction community, and yet has missed how it’s been addressing this confusion. Games like Blue Lacuna and Aotearoa use keyword highlighting to make it more obvious what you can interact with. Ones like Lost Pig and Violet respond to a tremendous number of commands to make it less likely that a player will type commands that the game doesn’t understand. We’ve got better help for learning the command pattern a parser expects, Emily Short and others deconstructing the parser and whether or not it’s necessary for interactive fiction, and Aaron Reed researching how to make the parser more user-friendly.

These are not obscure, hard-to-find developments. Blue Lacuna has shown up on everything from G4 TV to Gamasutra. Violet and Lost Pig were on JayIsGames and PlayThisThing and are often cited as games newcomers should play. Aotearoa won this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition. Emily Short is one of the two best-known names in all of interactive fiction.

Meanwhile, in graphic adventure games, you’ve got Telltale Games refining what can be done with episodic graphic adventures and Dave Gilbert at Wadjet Eye Games exploring what can be done with adventures intended for casual game players.

But what gets Jonathan excited? Riffing on Myst, especially the idea of a player with amnesia.

PC Gamer: That’s presumably why Myst is an inspiration?

Jonathan Blow: It’s a classic video game trope. I mean, you start the game. You don’t exactly know who you are –

PC Gamer: Or you’ve got amnesia.

Jonathan Blow: Yeah, or you have amnesia or whatever! And then through the course of the game you find out who you are. Like, BioShock did that. Tons of games do that. This game does it but in a very self-conscious, self-referential kind of way.

So the most over-used adventure game trope, the one so prevalent that it’s the name of a 1986 text adventure written by someone who wasn’t familiar with adventure games, is what gets Jonathan excited?

When I entered physics graduate school, I had big plans. I was going to learn a little physics, but not too much, because that way I could see clearly what others had missed about physics and then perform world-changing research. Later I realized how cutely naive I’d been. Outsiders to a field can make original contributions, but more often they end up going over old ground and repeating past mistakes.

Look: you don’t have to be full to the brim with adventure game knowledge to want to design one, or to take elements of their gameplay and use them in other games. But if you’re going to claim to be fixing what’s broken with the genre, it’s best to know what the genre’s been up to since you solved Myst.

Let’s further say that you want to illustrate how the members of your business’s management team must work together. You decide to use a picture of gears to show how the team interlocks and turns as one.

You go to iStockPhoto and grab this picture:

(source)

If you [...]]]> Let’s say that you’re making a PowerPoint presentation on improving businesses.

Let’s further say that you want to illustrate how the members of your business’s management team must work together. You decide to use a picture of gears to show how the team interlocks and turns as one.

You go to iStockPhoto and grab this picture:

(source)

If you then show this presentation to a bunch of scientists and engineers, don’t be surprised if they point out that these gears won’t turn.

iStockPhoto has a lot of other gears that you can choose from. Please don’t pick the photo that looks like it belongs on There, I Fixed It.

Ryssdal: [Y]ou call it “approachable” at one point in this book. And I’m going to quote a friend of yours, you got an exchange from her at one point. Mr. Obama had been seen in a sort [...]]]> Yesterday, Marketplace ran a fascinating report talking to author Kate Betts about how the White House is influencing fashion.

Ryssdal: [Y]ou call it “approachable” at one point in this book. And I’m going to quote a friend of yours, you got an exchange from her at one point. Mr. Obama had been seen in a sort of informal jacket or something, and this friend of yours wrote to you and said, “You know what, I don’t want my Presidents to be approachable.”

Betts: Well, that’s interesting because the President has such an historic place, obviously, in this country….

Ryssdal: Do you see that being reflected in fashion trends and in style trends?

Betts: Oh absolutely. His use of color, the way he wears such beautiful colors so easily. Designers for spring have completely embraced that idea and you see color all over the runways….

Ryssdal: There are those that will listen to this interview and hear that it’s about style and fashion and clothes and kind of dismiss it as not substantive.

Betts: For some reason in this country there is this notion that style and substance should occupy two separate planets, really. And I think that actually Barack Obama is proof — living proof — that you can be stylish and substantive and you don’t have to make excuses for one or the other.

Oh, silly me, I got that wrong — the entire interview was about Michelle Obama. I should have realized, given how much discussion of First Ladies revolves around their sartorial choices. Next time I’ll remember that articles about Presidents are about what they’re doing and articles about First Ladies are about what they’re wearing.

In the version I read long ago, gluons weren’t even mentioned — the tract merely claimed that no one [...]]]> I’m often amused by the things science evidently can’t explain. The Chick Tract Big Daddy, nominally about evolution, claims that science can’t explain why an atom’s nucleus holds together even though it’s packed full of positively-charged particles.

In the version I read long ago, gluons weren’t even mentioned — the tract merely claimed that no one knew why atoms held together. At the time I murmured, “the strong nuclear force?” At some point Chick updated it to refute quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong nuclear force that holds atoms’ nucleii together, by saying “Nuh uh!”

That’s semi-defensible: QCD is a deep subject, an area of physics that you really only run into if you specialize in physics in school. More puzzling is that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t know how tides work.

O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can explain why the tide goes in –

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O’REILLY: See, the water — the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.

In sixth grade my science class focused on Earth science. One of the topics was tides, where I learned that the Moon and Sun’s gravity pulled our oceans around, causing tides. I also learned that the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, meaning that the same side of the moon always faces the earth. That should give a hint that things orbiting around each other has something to do with tides.

Let me present some new information to counterbalance ignorance: did you know that eventually the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon? Just like the Earth now stays at a fixed location relative to the Moon, the Moon will stay at a fixed location above the Earth. As a side effect, the Earth’s rotation relative to the Sun will slow, and the Moon will move further away from the Earth. As an exercise for the reader, can you explain why this is happening? Bonus points if you can predict how long a day on Earth will then be.

Oh, and here’s the full video featuring Bill O’Reilly:

I am willing to accept the authority of science on [...]]]> Al Mohler is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s very concerned about evolution, calling it one of the biggest challenges to Christianity. He knows evolution isn’t true, though, because his God is the author of one of the biggest lies ever: the Earth.

I am willing to accept the authority of science on any number of issues. I am fundamentally agnostic about a host of other scientific concerns — but not where the fundamental truth of the Gospel and the clear teachings of the Bible are at stake.

As I have stated repeatedly, I accept without hesitation the fact that the world indeed looks old. Armed with naturalistic assumptions, I would almost assuredly come to the same conclusions as BioLogos and the evolutionary establishment, or I would at least find evolutionary arguments credible. But the most basic issue is, and has always been, that of worldview and basic presuppositions. The entire intellectual enterprise of evolution is based on naturalistic assumptions, and I do not share those presuppositions. Indeed, the entire enterprise of Christianity is based on supernaturalistic, rather than merely naturalistic, assumptions. There is absolutely no reason that a Christian theologian should accept the uniformitarian assumptions of evolution.

Pause for a second and let that sink in. Al Mohler is explicitly saying that all of the physical evidence points to an Earth much older than however many thousands of years he and Bishop Usher have decided on. He concedes that point, because in the end, God can overrule natural laws, and has done so to manufacture fake fossils and to fiddle with natural processes like radioactive decay.

Think through what this means. In Al Mohler’s view, you can’t trust your lying eyes. The Earth looks old not because it is old, but because God made it look old. God is lying to you, obfuscating the truth as much as possible because…well, that’s really the question.

This portrayal of God is an interesting one. Al Mohler’s God is always testing you, telling you falsehoods to see if you’ll be able to sort them from the truth. The act that Al Mohler is so concerned about, God’s creation of the Earth, was an act of lying. Al Mohler’s God is a lying liar who seeks to mislead you.

I’ve seen this behavior is described in the Bible. Strangely enough, it’s not behavior that the Bible condones or normally associates with God. If you asked Al Mohler if his God is a liar, he’d undoubtedly say no. How strange, then,  that Al Mohler’s worldview requires a God who lies.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the whitewashed casting and how it undermined the setting [...]]]> Last night, before combining The Last Airbender with Rifftrax, I made the mistake of watching it without the sarcastic commentary. Surprise! It truly earned its 6% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I was fascinated, though, with why it’s so eye-bleedingly bad.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the whitewashed casting and how it undermined the setting established by the original Nickelodeon series. I will admit that I was taken aback by seeing a Fire Nation represented by actors of Indian, Maori, and Iranian descent, not to mention a notionally Inuit group of people represented by two very white actors. But leaving aside that giant misstep, the movie did a terrible job of condensing the original source material into a movie, in large part because it’s focused on the wrong thing.

The movie is based on the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a cartoon on Nickelodeon. That series’ first season was over ten hours long. The movie runs a little over an hour and a half, yet attempts to fit all of the first season’s major plot points into that time.

The result? A whole lot of stuff happens, a giant brownie of plot with dollops of exposition ice cream and topped with a glaze of voice-overs, but there’s little meaning to the action. To fit in all of the story, they had to dispense with character development.

In the series, the main characters have time to grow and become fully-realized people. Aang comes to terms with being the Avatar; Katara learns to trust in her strength; Zuko learns who he is and what he truly values. This is the series’ core, the real story being told. In the movie they’re ciphers, blown about by the winds of plot. The Last Airbender doesn’t even bother with common movie shorthand to signpost character growth, and skips any real banter and character interaction for poorly-staged and ill-paced action sequences.

For my day job I write proposals and put presentations together to teach people about my company’s technology. A big part of my job is deciding what story I’m telling, and to whom, and what the most critical parts of that story are. Because of that I’ve gotten better at recognizing when a story is about more than the specific events of its plot. In focusing on cramming ten pounds of plot into a two-pound bag, Shyamalan lost sight of what Avatar was truly about.