When I watch a sporting event on TV I have to remind myself that I’m not watching a sporting event. I’m watching a television program about a sporting event. It’s not the same thing.

The Super Bowl is the obvious example. I was interested in yesterday’s game, and it was a compelling contest, but it was a small part of the broadcast. For some time now people have shown more interest in the commercials than the result of the game, for example. And the halftime shows often generate more excitement or controversy.

Modern TV is as immersive as cinema and sufficiently convincing that we forget it is manufactured. TV presents a particular, organized view of things, something scripted and controlled. The outcomes in the game are still subject to chance (I don’t believe NFL games are rigged!) but the TV show is prepared for that.

There has always been this layer between the event (the game on the field) and the TV show (the experience of the viewer). Now it is more sophisticated. The technology is better, certainly. And the show-makers now have decades of practice (and audience feedback) to more expertly craft their products. The modern filter provided by our media makes the event seem more real and gives us the illusion of greater involvement. But it requires a more elaborate system to come between us and the thing and thus makes it even more remote.

Watching sports on TV always makes me think of a phrase I learned in school (attributed to Alfred Korzybski): “the map is not the territory.” And that remark always makes me think of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images:

The translation is “this is not a pipe.”

Now let’s get on with some TV shows about baseball games!

Magnesium is an essential nutrient for plants and animals. Plants need chlorophyll to photosynthesize, and chlorophyll molecules contain magnesium ions. ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the energy molecule, binds to magnesium in order to get its work done. Hundreds of enzymes that are necessary to metabolism need magnesium to function. In the human body most of the magnesium is stored in the bones. Magnesium deficiency shows itself in a myriad of ways, reflecting its crucial role in so many processes.

For that alone we should know something of magnesium. The highest dietary sources are leafy greens, beans, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Magnesium is in fact found in almost all the food we eat and so deficiencies are rare in well-fed places.

And then there’s mag wheels:

That was a big thing in the 70s—outfitting your car with “mag wheels.” They were originally made from magnesium but they are mostly aluminum now. Magnesium is lighter than aluminum but it corrodes more readily and is more flammable. The image above is from an F1 site. True “mag” wheels are expensive.

Magnesium alloys are ubiquitous. There is hardly a place where they can’t be found. The world produced one million tonnes of magnesium metal in 2022, mostly from magnesite and dolomite ores. Magnesium compounds are also extracted from seawater. One million tonnes does not seem like much when compared to the annual production of copper (~20 million tonnes), chromium (~40 million), and aluminum (~70 million) but it’s still a heaping pile of stuff.

In the lab you could get strips of magnesium to ignite and they produced an intensely bright white flame. The old flash bulbs of yesteryear had magnesium in them.

A guy named Scott Dewing writes a technology column (Inside the Box) for the Jefferson Journal. In the latest issue he talked about Artificial Intelligence* (“AI Gets Personal”). He’s not optimistic, or rather, he’s not optimistic about current versions of the technology and sees this for our future:

. . . the universe will descend into a morass of machine-generated content that will self-optimize until genuine human creativity is obliterated and all art becomes a bland panoply of monotonous mediocrity.

It’s hard to state it more plainly and it’s hard to argue with! A capitalist system will always seek to optimize profit, and any new technology will ultimately survive only if it makes money. AI is very expensive. It’s going to have to pay for itself at some point. Absorbing all of human knowledge into a gigantic silicon Cuisinart and then spitting it out as personal “knowledge smoothies” for everyone on the planet ain’t gonna be cheap. And it may not be what is best for us. See above quote.

In the article Mr. Dewing expounds a notion of a more “personal” AI. That is, the current “generative” AI should exist to complement us, to enhance our work, and not to replace us. In fact, it ought to help us be better people. As Dewing says “generative AI learns about the world while personal AI learns about you.”

Indeed. All our inventions ought to help us. And if our gadgets don’t help us be better people, maybe we ought to stop making them.

*Artificial Intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent. But the term “AI” is what we’ve got so we are stuck with it.

I’m starting to feel like Noah. The National Weather Service tells me this:

A half-inch of rain is a lot! The NWS has a collection of videos that give you a feeling for different rates of rainfall. Take a look.

Our little burg has its own funny little climate. But if I had to say what the climate is closest to I would say “high desert.” We get rain and snow, but only intermittently. The rain lets up in May and doesn’t return until November. Except for summer thundershowers, of course. The snow comes in December and quits in April. We average about foot of snow and about two feet of rain per year. It’s hot and very dry in the summer and it’s cold and dry in the winter.

But at this moment I’m in the midst of a deluge. It’s a biblical amount of rain, man. The snow is being washed away here in town but it is still clinging stubbornly to the hillsides.

We need the water, naturally. Well, we need the snowpack, to be precise. So let’s hope it is cold enough in the high places for this stuff to pile up. All I see out my window is runoff. And puddles. And my rain gutters clogged with melting snow!

Stay dry, my friends.

The lanthanoids, or rare-earth elements, are essential to the modern world. We interact with these substances but we don’t know them. We know about copper pipes and iron railings and aluminum cans and stuff like that, but the little bits and pieces of our high-tech world are mostly invisible to us. Nonetheless there is a growing global demand for elements 57 through 71.

Neodymium (Nd, #60) is a little different as most of us have heard of neodymium magnets. These were discovered in the 1980s at a couple of corporate labs and are currently the strongest commercially-available magnets. The alloy is a combination of neodymium, iron, and boron and is called NIB or Neo or NdFeB (the formula is Nd₂Fe₁₄B).

They are used in computer hard drives and electric motors and countless other places. You’ve seen them around because they can be purchased for home use:

You have to be careful with those things. Two NIB magnets will snap together suddenly and with a lot of force and good luck getting them apart! If you stick something to the fridge you can expect it to stay in place.

Next up: Magnesium (Mg), #12

So I was checking out the Northern California and Southern Oregon Offshore Wind Transmission Study (vol. 1) and I found some interesting bits. Here’s one:

The northern Coast of California and the southern coast of Oregon have some of the best wind resources in the United States, and development of these resources can contribute to meeting the clean energy goals of California, Oregon, and other western states.

Yay for us! But there’s more:

Because the existing transmission grid infrastructure that serves these coastal regions is limited in capacity, major investments in new transmission grid infrastructure will be needed.

There’s always a catch. You have to get the electricity that the turbines generate off-shore to facilities on-shore. And once there the power has to be distributed to the grid. That’s going to take new transmission lines of the 500-kv size. They look like this:

We all know what it is like to travel to and from the Southern Oregon or Northern California coasts—mountains, rivers, canyons, and winding roads. New transmission lines there won’t have the wide-open spaces of the Western deserts like the photo above. It will be a more challenging undertaking. Speaking of that, here’s another bit:

We note that some of the necessary technologies for large-scale development of floating OSW power are neither fully developed nor commercially available at this time.

Well, then. Infrastructure is do-able. It will take a while (more on that later) but the primary technology is not ready. Yet. We all know that wind turbines work. And they work on land and on sea. Offshore wind power is big stuff in the UK, for example. They have developments in the North Sea that can deliver at a gigawatt scale. Unfortunately in the Northern California and Southern Oregon offshore regions slated for wind development the continental shelf plunges rapidly away from the shore. The water is too deep and thus you need floating platforms. That tech is still experimental.

To sum up:

The development of tens of gigawatts of floating OSW power generation on the West Coast will not occur quickly; a successful effort would take decades, and the associated transmission upgrades would also take place over decades.

All complex problems will require complex solutions. I found this material and related stuff at the Schatz Energy Research Center at Cal Poly Humboldt.

The Greeks called it “water-silver” or ΰδραργυρος which the Romans converted to hydrargyrum and thus the source of its symbol, Hg.

Mercury, or quicksilver, is weird stuff. It’s a liquid at room temperature, the only such metal with that property. The only other element that is a liquid at room temperature is the non-metal halogen Bromine (Br, #35) . Its lighter sister elements Fluorine (Fl, #9) and Chlorine (Cl, #17) are gases while the heavier Iodine (I, #53) is a solid.

Mercury was of course known to ancient peoples. The Almadén Mine in Spain is at least 2500 years old and mercury was part of Chinese medicine for at least a thousand years before that. There’s evidence of long-ago mercury and cinnabar (mercury sulfide, HgS, the chief ore) use in the New World as well. Here’s cinnabar:

Cinnabar was mined extensively in California. Gold and silver readily combine with mercury to form amalgams and so it is used to extract these metals from their ores. Mercury can be quite a significant toxin and you can imagine the exposures these early miners were subjected too. I had a chance to tour a modern, open-pit gold mine (McLaughline Mine in Lake County) many years ago. Mercury was a major by-product. Mercury does not react with iron and so it is stored in iron flasks. These are standardized to hold 76 pounds of the liquid and that is the international unit by which mercury is bought and sold.

In our day we’ve been warned about mercury contamination of seafood. Industrial waste dumped into our waterways ultimately finds its way to the ocean and into the fatty tissues of fish. This is a serious concern for people who depend on a fish and shellfish diet. The infamous Minamata Bay poisoning in the 1950s that decimated Japanese fishing communities was due to methlymercury, a particularly nasty organo-mercury compound. It wasn’t until several years had passed that the source of the contamination was pinned down—a nearby chemical plant run by Chisso Corporation.

It is possible for a metal to exist in different compounds that have entirely different metabolic effects! Tin is a good example. The metal and its oxides are non-toxic but the stannanes, organo-tin compounds, are quite poisonous.

Most mercury pollution is due to the burning of coal in power plants. In fact, we get more radioactive material dumped into our atmosphere from coal-burning than we do from all the nuclear plants and nuclear facilities in the world combined. Coal is a critical fuel for electricity generation but it comes with an enormous environmental cost.

Many of the uses of mercury compounds, like batteries and fluorescent lights, are being phased out. I still have a mercury thermometer but you don’t see them much any more. The main industrial use these days is as a catalyst for processes like making polyvinyl chlorides (PVCs). About 40 million tons of PVCs are made each year which is the third-most of any plastic polymer. Polyethylene (100 million tons) and polypropylene (80 million tons) are the leaders.

Mercury compounds have been used in various medicinal formulations for millenia. Some of those practices have been thankfully discontinued as they were of dubious value and most likely harmful. Preparations containing micro-doses of mercuric substances have a longer history, especially in Asia, and some of these treatments are still used and have garnered modern medical interest. As Paracelsus famously quipped “it’s the dose that makes the poison.” Funny thing, a mercury preservative (thimerosal) is used in many vaccines at a rate of about 0.003 to 0.01%. For the larger number, that’s 25 micrograms of mercury per 0.5 milliliter dose. Thimerosal is a big sticking point for the celebrity-fueled anti-vaxx crowd. I suppose it’s OK to chase after “traditional” and “holistic” Chinese cures that contain mercury but god forbid you put it in our vaccines!

Mercury is the god of commerce and financial gain. Partridge says that his name comes from mercor (-ari, -atus) the Latin verb meaning “to trade.” He is also the god of thieves and tricksters. Does anyone else find it interesting that merchants and liars are grouped together? Maybe the Romans were on to something.

I used to tell my students that science was the search for truth, not Truth.

Truth, the one with a capital-T, is the bailiwick of philosophers, theologians, and mystics.

I think what I really meant by lower-case-t truth was things that are true. Things that are true are things that work regardless of your belief system. If we drop you on your head from a height there will be a poor outcome for you. That’s one of those true things. People could still argue the point of course. But when the time comes to test things out they won’t be found.

It’s really hard to sort out true things. Think about how hard it is to sort out medical claims. I know we’ve all done research on the internet about some health topic. Right away we find too many sites, too many papers, too many competing claims, and too many voices screaming for our attention.

So, what to do?

I found a bit of good advice from John Mandrola (via Andrew Gelman).

The most important priors when it comes to medical claims are simple: most things don’t work. Most simple answer answers are wrong. Humans are complex. Diseases are complex. Single causes of complex diseases like cancer should be approached with great skepticism.

In statistics a “prior” is a probability distribution that you assume to be true before collecting any evidence. That’s fine for scientists, but for the rest of us we can just say that a “prior” is stuff we already know.

Most things don’t work is an excellent rule-of-thumb. It’s tough to follow because we really really really want some things to be true. And it’s hard to let go of biases. Being a skeptic does not mean being a cynic, but it does mean, in Mandrola’s words, that you should “hold pessimistic priors.” He also says “know that stuff that really works is usually obvious.”

In the end, it’s all about accepting uncertainty. The big, important questions have fuzzy answers. Life is not a multiple choice test—it’s closer to an endless series of essays! Since there’s no one correcting your grammar or giving you a grade all we have to produce are rough drafts. Pencils and erasers are allowed and cross-outs are encouraged. And there’s plenty of fresh paper when you run out.

We have a lifespan. That is, we are biological creatures and thus will eventually age and die. We only get so many years to live.

Apparently lots of folks don’t like that notion. This is America after all and we believe in more. We want bigger and better. Life, or lifespan, is just another commodity. It can be improved upon, just like a car or a computer. Lowe’s tells us to never stop improving and by golly that’s just what we are going to do!

I want to be healthy as I age. So I try to exercise, eat right, get a good night’s sleep, blah-blah-blah. I have no illusion that this will help me live LONGER. But I think I will live BETTER. It’s about the QUALITY of my remaining years, not the QUANTITY.

But this is America. We measure quantities. How much is your net worth? What is your IQ? How many miles did you run this week? These are easy questions with easy answers. Hard questions like “are you happy?” or “am I a good person?” require thought, and self-study. There are no easy answers when thinking about personal qualities, or character, or moral dilemmas. How do you measure a life?

Some scientists these days are getting as bad as the celebrity jock/Hollywood star-types who want to help us with our fitness and our nutrition. These people promote all sorts of health-enhancing, anti-aging bullshit. At this point there’s not much difference between Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop, or Tom Brady and his Method, or Harvard geneticist David Sinclair and his bestseller Lifespan.

All of them are preying on our fear of getting old.

It’s easy to dismiss Tom Brady and Gwyneth Paltrow because they are just famous rich folks and famous rich folks say and do a lot of stupid shit. But when a Harvard scientist jumps in things get more serious.

Unfortunately scientists can be just as full of it as anyone else! They are people, too. And science, as a career, does not generally lead to wealth and fame. That’s why TED talks and bestsellers are important to some scientists—it is usually their only shot at those two pillars of American Greatness (wealth and fame).

Go to any so-called “wellness” site and you’ll see a lot of pseudo-scientific babble surrounding the products. There’s a lot of hand-waving about “research-backed findings” and “new science” and other stuff trying to get you to believe that their stuff is “proven” to work. It’s all hokum. And when real scientists jump into the fray the gobbledygook gets even worse.

Check out Quicksilver Scientific. Their head guy (Dr. Shade!) looks like a legit chemist. He’s done work on mercury speciation (analysis of the different compounds of mercury and how they manifest themselves in the enviroment and in our bodies) and I’ve no doubt he knows quite a bit about metal toxicity.

But Quicksilver is not a health clinic or a research lab. It is a BUSINESS and they make money by selling chemical products. Longevity supplements are there, of course. My personal favorite—detox—is also well-represented. The whole detox thing is so silly. If you lack a liver and kidneys you ought to be concerned, but for those of us fortunate to have those working organs we can let our bodies do their natural detox thing and not waste money on nonsense treatments.

Now before some attorney sends this blog a Cease & Desist order, I’m not saying Quicksilver is quackery. But I will say it sure looks like quackery and sure sounds like quackery. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)

The supplement industry is big, reportedly worth $164 billion in 2022. That’s about the same amount of money we spent last year on credit card fees and interest.

Science has helped make our lives better and I suspect the scientific enterprise will continue to do so into the future. We will learn a lot more about health, nutrition, disease, aging, etc. etc. But people will continue to suffer from FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). People will still get conned by slick salesmen. People will continue to search for the elusive Fountain of Youth.

There isn’t one. Take care of your body the best you can. But take care of the heart and soul as well. The things that matter in life can’t be put on a graph and they don’t come out of test tubes. If you want a detox, detox your mind! Stop listening to quacks. All they offer is quicksilver, something shiny but slippery, and ultimately poisonous. You aren’t missing out.

Manganese is a trace mineral and is essential to human nutrition. It is critical to steel-making and aluminum production, and found in both fertilizers and alkaline batteries. That’s just some of the many uses of element number 25. The economic importance of manganese nearly rivals its biological one.

Manganese compounds are colorful. If you spent some time in a chemistry lab you may remember the deep ruby color of potassium permanganate (KMnO₄) and its pinkish solutions. In 2009 a professor at Oregon State and his graduate students stumbled on a new manganese compound—YInMn (Yttrium, Indium, Manganese)—that was a spectacular blue color. “Oregon Blue” was the first new pigment discovered in decades. Check it out:

Manganese is found in the so-called ferromanganese or polymetallic nodules that litter part of the ocean floor. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has found nodules in both the deep, abyssal plains as well as on seamounts. The resource potential from these nodules is enormous.

Here’s a crab on top of nodule field in the Gosnold Seamount, an extinct submarine volcano in the North Atlantic off the New England coast:

These days we talk about mining the sea floor. The track record of terrestrial mining is pretty damn poor. Sure, we have a lot of cool stuff, but we made a hell of a lot of ugly messes in order to get it. I think we’ve got a lot to learn about the “final frontier” (no, it’s not space) before we go in and muck it all up.