Shout out to my fellow spectroscopists. LIBS is awesome. Like, check out the ChemCam. The ChemCam is a laser that shoots rocks on Mars to analyze their composition using LIBS.

As the story goes, Roger Wiens, one of the scientists on the team that made the ChemCam, had a bumper sticker that read “My other car shoots rocks on Mars.” A great teachnique - who wouldn’t want to own it?

What a great game. It made me imagine what it would be like to travel such a wonderfully large universe.

“Why yes, I’d be happy to. I’m a professional tall person.”

Did the SA article come out before or after the article above? Because the JWST has been creating problems for lambda CDM. Take, for example, this Quanta Magazine article. The purport of the article is that, even though the data from the JWST seems to contradict ΛCDM, it really doesn’t, if we just apply post-hoc modifications.

Why are the galaxies so bright at very high red shifts? Oh, the initial mass function was higher. Or it was super efficient star formation. Or the density of dark matter was higher in the early universe. Or the density of dark energy was higher, so the universe actually wasn’t that young after all. Or a linear combination of these things, and maybe a few others, that we can fit to the data. You don’t reconsider old theories in the light of new data, just apply more terms so that the old theory matches the new data.

For me, if the data starts to deviate from my model, it probably means that I need a different model

To which McGaugh et al. had this delicious reply:

One does not simply turn all the available baryons into stars.

You might consider reading Accelerated Structure Formation: The Early Emergence of Massive Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies. The paper is absolutely wonderful. The main thesis of the paper is, “Wow, the James Webb Telescope sure has been finding some remarkably mature galaxies for the early universe. Maybe we should consider the possibility that the models we use to predict galaxy formation, specifically lambda CDM, are incorrect and Non-Physical.”

The author states the difficulty in the conclusion:

Despite the predictive successes of MOND, we do not yet know how to construct a cosmology based on it. In contrast, ΛCDM provides a good fit to a wide range of cosmological observables but does not provide a satisfactory explanation of the many phenomena that were predicted by MOND, nor is it clear that it can do so. We find ourselves caught between two very different theories that seem irreconcilable despite applying to closely related yet incommensurate lines of evidence.

The complaints about the early maturation of galaxies seen by the JWST was widely reported. My favorite line from that article:

“Maybe in the early universe, galaxies were better at turning gas into stars,” Chworowsky said.

Sure, it’s not that our theories of cosmology are incorrect; things like star formation were just different back in the early universe. I guess you just had to be there.

The magnitude of the problem can be challenging to comprehend. There is about 1 Ttonne CO₂ to mitigate, which, at $100 per tonne, would cost $100 trillion USD to fully sequester. Throwing billions of dollars at it would not even start to make the smallest measurable dent in the problem at any scale whatsoever.

However, if the current rate of annual solar panel adoption continues at 26% for the next 18 years, then the global production of energy will be sufficient to pretty rapidly decarbonize the atmosphere at low cost, as the amount of solar energy will be triple that being produced globally from all sources at present.

Now, if that doesn’t happen, then another way to pay for decarbonizing is to bring about world peace and disarmament. The US annual defense budget is ~$800B. If the dividend from world peace was directed to climate mitigation, we could get rapid, dramatic reductions in CO₂ over the course of a century. And we would no longer have the threat of nuclear war looming over human civilization. I find that this idea is generally met with scepticism, but, unlike other government expenditures like healthcare and welfare, war is a highly discretionary expenditure that can be rendered unnecessary by some important people signing some papers.

This is a serious, expensive problem and the solutions, unfortunately, are going to need to be proportionally serious and expensive.

Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.

“Planting a billion hectares of trees won’t be easy,” he said. “It would require a massive undertaking. If we follow the paper’s recommendations, reforesting an area the size of the United States and Canada combined (1 to 2 billion hectares) could take between one and two thousand years, assuming we plant a million hectares a year and that each hectare contains at least 50 to 100 trees to create an appropriate treetop canopy cover.” (NASA)

This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.

This piece is just propaganda. One wonders what would be expected:

To date, it has received $281 million in taxpayer dollars via Department of Energy grants. According to the Department of Energy, it has stored more than 2.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide since 2011.

This would place the cost of sequestration at… $100 tonne, which is pretty much the price that everyone else has estimated for carbon capture and sequestration, as discussed in articles like this. How much was sequestration of 2.8 million tonnes of CO2 supposed to cost?

“Carbon capture project captures almost no carbon”. Really? Because 2.8 megatonnes doesn’t seem like “no carbon” to me. Was it that “it only caught 10% of the carbon produced on the site”? Well then, maybe it should have been $2.8B of taxpayer dollars to capture 28 MTCO₂. What would the headline have been then? “Carbon capture project costs taxpayer $2.8B for almost no carbon”?

I want the cost of sequestration to be lower just like anyone else, but doing nothing is a terrible strategy to learn how to reduce costs.

If you don’t want taxpayers to pay for it, change the laws and make the price of carbon emissions >$100 tonne. Then ADM will have to pay their own sequestration costs. If you don’t like sequestration because it’s expensive, then what’s the plan for decarbonizing the atmosphere and reducing global temperatures after emissions are zeroed out? If your plan for a carbon neutral world is “endure global warming for thousands of years until the carbon gets sequestered in soil”, that’s fine, but you can’t blame people for wanting to see things get cleared up on the order of decades.

This project was a success, insofar as it accomplished what it set out to accomplish as a publicly funded demonstration of the technology. The fact that the site emitted other carbon that wasn’t captured is irrelevant.

Area of sky obscured by the milky way.

Yeah, FreeCAD is great, but I can only think of one project that I’ve done where SolveSpace absolutely could not work for the geometry I needed and I had to rebuild it in FreeCAD. But that’s just a product of what I am building: simple things like brackets, knobs, and replacement lids mostly. I don’t need chamfers, drafts, lofts, etc. and I get what I need with minimum of time and effort using SolveSpace.

When I do need those features, complex geometries, or modification of pre-built step files, FreeCAD has never failed me.

No one mentioned SolveSpace, so… SolveSpace. Solvespace is a fully functional 3D parametric CAD solver in a free, cross-platform, open-source, portable, single self-contained executable 10 MB file.

I do a fair amount of hobby 3d printing and SolveSpace makes design and CAD stupid easy. The interface is perfectly laid out, the hotkeys are intuitive, and the capabilities make small-scale projects a breeze.

Now, the program has its limitations, but if I just want something quick and simple, there is nothing better.

Mineralization. There is a paper from Nature estimating a capacity of 10,000 - 100,000 Gt CO₂ for mineralizing CO₂. This is more than sufficient for the 1,000 - 2,000 Gt CO₂ that we will need to remove from the atmosphere once we reach zero emission. Needless to say, mineralization to a solid carbonate would remove the threat of fugitive emissions permanently.

People can complain about DAC as expensive etc., but it is the fastest way to bring down CO₂ once emissions have ceased. Without it, we will be stuck with the climate effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions - severe storms, erratic climate events - for hundreds of years. The fact that it is expensive just means that we will need to know what our target CO₂ level is and how how fast we want to get there.

Often, it’s said, “Just plant trees.” However, trees are not a sufficient solution for greenhouse gas reduction. A 2022 article in Environmental Research Letters predicts a “121 Gt C increase in carbon in forests over the course of this century.” That’s great, but it’s not enough to get GHG down to an ideal level. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t engage in sustainable agriculture and reforestation - we should, but we should not rely on it as a climate restoration strategy because it cannot deliver those kinds of GHG reductions.

That was what happened to our data on the “family computer”. My parents were not happy with me that day.

Is this it?

First, find a rock.

Because crystallography and solid state chemistry is the foundation of every modern convenience?

But it’s also beautiful. If they’ve never heard of Bravais-Friedel-Donnay-Harker, then you can’t really blame them for not knowing.

HCP FTW.

It’s also a cross-platform portable executable, so you can use it out of the box on almost any machine with an internet connection. Once you get the hotkey bindings down, it gets very easy to build simple designs. Unfortunately, it can choke on modest levels of complexity, but I most of my work is relatively simple, so Solvespace is a godsend.

I’d encourage you to think about these events as you would a physical injury. A physical injury can hurt for a long time and no amount of recognition or “processing” or “getting over it” can short-cut the all-too-slow healing that needs to take place. It’s no fun and there’s no way to just make it go away.

That said, you can do things that care for the injury while it is healing. I don’t know what these are for you, but for me, I needed to recognize that the people I was angry at were also instrumental in helping me advance.

For example, I had a string of terrible jobs with bad bosses, but that string of terrible jobs led me to someplace that I am very happy to work. Once I realized this, it started getting easier to recognize both that the way I was treated was wrong and that I was also glad that these people were essential to me get to where I am. Even so, it was a long process and physically painful. My anger towards these people did nothing to hurt them, but it was terrible on my health.

I’m sorry you had to experience these things, but I hope they eventually lead you to someplace better.