The ocean is the source of all life.

When I say “all” life I include humans and human civilization. Lots of folks think human technology is somehow beyond nature, unfettered by the constraints of biology. Listen—if you can keep from retching—to our TechBro Overlords talk about themselves and their view of humanity’s future. They are not constrained by reality. They think that they will carry on even if the Earth is a smoldering wasteland.

Physics sets the stage for a bio-chemical miracle: sunlight hits the planet, nicely filtered by the atmosphere. Phytoplankton then do that thing we all learned about in science class: photosynthesis.

This enormous collection of diverse marine micro-organisms is the base of the oceanic food web. All marine life depends on them.

Phytoplankton are the most important thing in the world. Really. If the oceans die, we die. All of us. We can’t replace the oxygen they create, we can’t cycle the carbon on the scale they can, and we can’t feed the fish. And since the fish feed us we are doomed if the phytoplankton have a bad decade or two.

We know more about Mars than we do about the oceans. That’s a catastrophic mis-allocation of resources!

Let’s put our AI geniuses to work on ecology and environmental sciences. On oceanography and marine biology. On sustainable fishing and aquaculture. Let’s get these geeks outside!

Our tech has turned us all inward and made us all practicing narcissists. AI promises more of the same. The hunger for bigger, better, faster, newer, trendier, etc., will never be satisfied. And now we are so desperate that we are turning on our Mother:

There are enough minerals in the waste piles and waste streams of terrestrial mines to supply our needs. But that sort of work isn’t glamorous. Robots patrolling the seafloor is sci-fi stuff and people love that shit.

Seafloor mining is good way for companies to be out of sight and to hide their messes. Very few folks will ever have access to these places! Terrestrial mining at least has oversight. There’s at least a chance of good environmental practices. We don’t need to mine the ocean bottoms. The opportunity to damage the most important ecosystems on earth should give us pause.

The oceans are the Mother of us all. We should love our Mother, not tear apart her innards.

The global market for iron (in the form of refined iron oxide ore) is about 2.6 billion metric tons.

Iron is pretty important: we need it to make steel, one of the literal “pillars” of our modern world.

It turns out that scandium is important, too. The scale is different, though. A LOT different:

The US Geological Survey estimated global consumption of scandium oxide in 2025 at sixty metric tons, representing almost a 50 percent increase from the year earlier. Even after that jump, scandium remains an extraordinarily small market by global commodity standards. When added to aluminum in concentrations of less than one percent, scandium significantly improves strength, corrosion resistance, and weldability without imposing major weight penalties. For aerospace manufacturers that work to increased range, payload, fuel efficiency, and structural endurance to maximum degrees, those gains are essential.

Seems our fancy new F-35 fighters are built using these alloys.

Sixty tonnes (one metric ton or tonne is 1000 kg) of scandium is 60,000 kg. With a density of 3860 kg/m³ such stuff would occupy about 15.5 cubic meters. That’s a cube with about eight foot sides. All the world’s supply could be contained in one warehouse!

Scandium and yttrium (#39) are usually grouped with the f-block lanthanoids (rare earths, #57-71) despite being in the main group of d-block transition metals:

I read a lot of books. Novels, mostly, but lots and lots of books in general. It’s probably the one thing I’m really good at—reading books!

All that’s to say only a few of the books actually stand out. Are, in the literal sense, exceptional.

I don’t want to give away too much or tell too much about this novel. It should be experienced. It’s not for the faint of heart as it is set in WWII on the Eastern Front.

The protagonists—four teenagers, strangers to each other—are caught in the chaos and flee to the wilderness, hoping just to survive. Instead they make an astonishing discovery that binds them together in ways they never imagined.

Ray Nayler’s Palaces of the Crow is an exceptionally good novel. Go get it and read it.

p.s. We like to get our books from Ziesings. Support local and independent booksellers!

There’s a company out there with a plastic recycling scheme that looks pretty interesting. They are called Denovia and they seem to be based in Canada.

I cut-and-pasted that from their corporate website.

This is great stuff. I’m all over it. This is what I want to read about!

Here’s my problem: I can’t find out anything about it. Every site I go to just repeats the same stuff you can find on the corporate website.

Does the tech really work? Does it scale?

I don’t know. I hope so. If it does really work as adverstised we should be hearing a lot more about it.

One of the distressing elements of being a fiction fan is the over-emphasis on genre. Some novels are fantasy, some sci-fi, some horror, and then there are the mysteries and crime stories, not to mention romances and westerns. I’m sure I’ve left out a few.

Some novels transcend genre by being “literary.” They can use horror and SF elements, for example, but not be lumped in with Dean Koontz and Stephen Baxter. Then there’s my favorite category: slipstream. This is “mainstream” fiction (that is, no elves or space ships) that bends the rules. It’s OK to have ghosts. Or ESP. Or immortality. Something that a “realistic” novel would not include. I remember when they called Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ work “magical realism.” Were literary types just being cute with that silly oxymoron?

That’s why it is nice to have a book that is genuinely terrifying but would not be classified as a horror novel. A book loaded with futuristic tropes and a huge helping of sword-and-sorcery but would not be found on either shelf. The Franchise is a bit of a thriller, with some scary, leftover Defense Department tech serving as the MacGuffin. Our protagonists ultimately wind up in a deadly struggle over its possession.

Cleverly constructed and with a thoughtful and challenging ending, The Franchise is one of the best books of the year. Thomas Elrod’s debut is a dark look at our entertainment industry and its grotesque commercialization of the creative impulse. It gets you thinking about the nature of work and art in a high-tech world and the role they may play in an all-to-near future. You should put it on your reading list.

We are all familiar with bismuth subsalicylate (C₇H₅BiO₄) and perhaps have used it medicinally:

I find the stuff to be most efficacious—nothing defeats diarrhea like Pepto!

Bismuth (#83) is right next to lead on the periodic table. Around here people like to shoot ducks. In California you can’t shoot ducks (or geese) with lead shot anymore. So, hunters now use bismuth. More precisely, they use shot made from a bismuth-tin alloy.

Bismuth was known to the ancients but was often confused with tin. It can be found in nature in its native metallic form. For a heavy metal it is not very toxic and thus bismuth and its alloys are increasingly substituted for lead products. It is similar to both arsenic (As, #33) and antimony (Sb, #51) which are in the same group (column) on the periodic table but again it is less toxic than either.

Worldwide bismuth is mostly obtained as a by-product from the refining of copper and lead. Annual production is probably less than 20,000 metric tons.

Stephen Diehl put into words my own feelings about social media:

To pretend these digital platforms are benign tools is a delusion of the highest order. Waking up and mainlining Instagram is the neurological equivalent of gargling battery acid. It is a firehose of curated perfection and performative outrage aimed directly at your still-dreaming brain, a jolt of psychic poison before you’ve even had your morning lattte. These platforms are not social clubs; they are unregulated neurochemical casinos. Your brain is the mark, and the house has rigged every game. The variable reward schedules of likes and push notifications are not just cute features; they are a weaponized form of dopamine manipulation, turning your phone into a slot machine that pays out in fleeting hits of social validation while systematically dismantling your ability to concentrate on anything for longer than a TikTok video.

He thinks we have no choice but to opt out. Like me, he blogs. But as he points out, a blog post is fixed. It has a beginning and an end. It is (we like to think) written by a thoughtful, sincere human sharing their musings on life. Diehl favors a static website, as do I.

I particularly share his final sentiment:

Opting out is not about rejecting the future; it is about reclaiming the present. It is the realization that the most valuable thing you own is your attention, and you have decided to stop giving it away for free.

You should read the whole thing. It’s not very long and he makes a better case than I do.

It is about reclaiming the present.

The current regime cancelled four billion dollars worth of wind energy projects here in the USA. This involved about a half dozen international companies. Those same companies were then paid four billion dollars to develop new American oil and gas projects.

These companies did not abandon wind technology. They continue to build wind energy projects in other countries.

The United States is abandoning wind technology. That’s a policy decision. The current regime hates all non-fossil fuel forms of energy. (Except nuclear.)

This of course is quite stupid. Wind energy is not a panacea, but it’s an important and useful piece of the global energy puzzle. When you give up on a technology, the human capital goes away as well. It’s not just nuts and bolts. You have to have a knowledge base, a skilled workforce, education and training opportunities, all that stuff that goes along with the steel and the wire and the concrete.

People who build wind turbines can build a lot of other stuff like pipelines and sewage plants and solar farms. Those are people to hold on to, not chase away.

Natural gas accounts for about forty percent of the power generation in the US. Increasing that amount will not lower the cost or increase “energy dominance” (whatever the hell that is). No, it will simply make our economy more dependent on one input. Natural gas is cheap now but that’s no guarantee it will be cheap in the future. Price volatility is a baked-in feature of commodities and fossil fuels!

The choking of the Strait of Hormuz showed all of us how changes in single inputs (crude oil, ammonia) can disrupt the entire market. The path to energy resiliency demands variety. The economy is open to alternatives and we should help them flourish, not go after them Soviet-style.

Technetium (Te) means “artificial” and that’s because we humans have to make it. And we do. The stuff is extracted from the spent fuel rods used in nuclear power plants. As you can imagine it is a significant component of nuclear waste and its long half-life, high fission yield, and environmental mobility make it of particular concern.

Technetium is natural in the sense that it can exist in nature. It is a daughter product of uranium decay. But it is exceedingly rare as its half-life of 4+ million years is dwarfed by the earth’s 4+ BILLION year age. Any technetium in the early earth environment would have decayed and transmuted by now. All technetium isotopes are radioactive.

Te-99 is of great importance in medicine. It is used in numerous imaging procedures and diagnostic tests. World production is probably less than 100 tonnes. (A little bit goes a long way in nuclear medicine.) One of the nastier by-products of the nuclear industry turns out to be one of the most helpful to humankind. That certainly illustrates the “double-edged sword” nature of technology!

If there’s one thing everyone knows about now it is the notion of a “choke point” or geographic bottleneck. Our cruel and stupid war with Iran has brought the Strait of Hormuz into everyone’s daily vocabulary.

There are several places in the world where a determined actor could concentrate a military force and disrupt regional economies and global trade. Here are a few naval opportunities:

Choke points exist on land as well. Perhaps the most famous is the pass at Thermopylae and its role in the Greek-Persian wars of antiquity. (Ignore all that stuff about Spartans and Leonidas and “The 300” as that’s just a side story.) The famed Khyber Pass in the Hindu Kush between Afghanistan and Pakistan also figures prominently in military history.

But we live in an era of global shipping and maritime choke points are the real players. (Take a look at the Ukraine-Russia war if you want to see the effectiveness of ground armies in the drone-combat era.)

Choke points can be “closed” simply by the threat of attack. Iran cannot possibly interdict all the shipping in the Strait so they attack a few vessels here and there and that is mostly enough to discourage the rest. The modern, well-armed US Navy cannot “open” the Strait as the effort it would take to escort vessels would be too costly in munitions and materiél (and put sailors at risk).

Even a small-time outfit like the Houthis can threaten global trade by shooting at ships passing through the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb between Africa and Arabia at the southern end of the Red Sea (see #6 above). They aren’t even a real country and yet they can command the attention of global movers-and-shakers.

The US Navy was founded on the principle of freedom of the seas. Literally. Our navy was created to protect merchant ships! We got around to fighting other navies later. The current regime seems not to give a shit about the vital freedom of navigation that has made our global economy possible. They seem to think an insular, command-type economy will be better, despite all current and historical evidence to the contrary.

One of the consequences of global warming is the opening of the northern sea lanes in the Arctic. The ice cover is shrinking and new year-round routes are emerging. The Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia will become increasingly important, as will the GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-UK) Gap. This is the passage between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic (where the Faroe Islands lie) and includes the Denmark Strait separating Iceland and Greenland.