For my 28657th post on DU, which paper should I discuss from today's readings? Can't decide...

[NNadir]

I have this bizarre emotional attachment to the Fibonacci numbers for reasons I really can't explain. It goes back probably when I was a kid and was teaching myself a now extinct programming language, Pascal, using a commercial DOS based program called "Turbo Pascal." The training book - they used to have books in those days as opposed to on line tutorials - had an exercise to generate the Fibonacci numbers and calculate an approach to approximating the Golden ratio.

There is nothing less arbitrary about choosing a Fibonacci number as a milestone than choosing a power of ten as a milestone, since the choice of base 10, based one would guess on the enumeration of fingers on human beings, is arbitrary. Base 12 would have been better since it has more prime and non prime factors than 10. (If I could be a kid again, I'd spend my mornings doing number theory as opposed to watching cartoons, since I ended up living in a cartoonish world.)

Today's reading is in a back issue of a journal through which I always try to find time to go through, Energy and Fuels.

I haven't gone read fully either of the papers from which I must choose, but as I always drill down in a paper when I write about them, I'm in a kid in a candy shop setting about which paper with which I should spend time.

The choices:

Interfacial Tension Measured at Nitrogen–Liquid and Liquid–Liquid Interfaces Using Model Microemulsions at High-Pressure and High-Temperature Conditions (Zlata Grenoble and Siwar Trabelsi Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (16), 13055-13064)

...or...

Thought Experiment on Using Renewable Electricity to Provide Transportation Services Ryan P. Lively and Matthew J. Realff Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (16), 13281-13290

There has to be something marvelous about reading a paper written by someone named "Zlata," but reading a paper by someone named "Lively" isn't necessarily less fun.

It's too bad I didn't grow up with more focus on fluid dynamics; I feel a hole in my education there, and surface tension is a cool phenomenon which has certain application in the boiling in immiscible fluids. At my job, not so long ago I looked into instrumentation for the determination of surface tension in a formulation, but I never came across high pressure and high temperature instrumentation for surface tension, certainly a more important subject if we are to address climate change.

On the other hand, I always like it when people look in a more practical sense at the so called "green car" fantasy, particularly when it involves so called "renewable energy," both of which I habitually mock. I expect it might be a fun read into which I might dig deeper.

I'm sure my posts are often obscure and unreadable, but if anyone has an opinion, I'll decide accordingly.

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	Interfacial Tension Measured at Nitrogen-Liquid and Liquid-Liquid Interfaces Using Model Microemulsions at High-Pressure and High-Temperature Conditions
	1 (50%)
	Thought Experiment on Using Renewable Electricity to Provide Transportation Services
	1 (50%)
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[Alliepoo]

1. It's a good day to be Lively!!

[wyn borkins]

2. I Appreciate Your Postings, NNadir

And I readily admit my failure to understand them; however, I find them compelling enough to wade-through, research, and try to comprehend. Thank you for your science(y) postings...

[hunter]

3. So, are you going for subtlety or looking to smack people around with a clue stick, cartoon style?

Clearly, the Interfacial Tension article may have a greater impact on our energy choices than cartoon wind turbines... for better or worse.

I like Pascal. It still lives...

https://www.freepascal.org/

So far as I recall the original Turbo Pascals are free for anyone to use these days. I've got some old Turbo Pascal stuff that works in DOSBox.

[NNadir]

4. You're right about the interfacial tension only if I'm right about clean energy.

It's certainly a highly esoteric consideration, very esoteric I think. I will not live to see them realized, but happily I can hand them off to someone who will be - still a long shot - in a position to see them realized. I have spent ten years occasionally drifting into reflections on the physics of bubbles.

I will not live to produce my 48368th post on DU, a few more than 17,711 posts from now, the next Fibonacci number, but unsurprisingly in the time that I am approaching my 28657th post on DU, the vote went for so called "renewable energy" and transportation.

Unrealistic fantasies die hard.

In preparing a post on the subject, I went back to look at an old post here, this one A Detailed Thermodynamic Accounting of a Route to Obtaining World Motor Fuels from Solar and Wind.

It appears that the graphic links in that post are broken, so I'd like to fix them. It also appears, when I went back to look at the graphics objects, which I have not yet restored, that the two paper series on which the post was based needed correction. Those two papers were written by Germans, which is unsurprising, since they are helping to kill the planet while they engage in these fantasies.

As for Pascal, I'm not sure I'd still remember how to program in it; although I used it a lot when I was kid: Doing so led me to several promotions in my jobs, so I'm fond of the memory of that program. The kids today use Matlab and Python and make jokes about Mathematica.

A fun memory for me was that in the beginning I actually believed that there was a real person named Frank Borland. It was my introduction to scientific marketing, with which I am now very familiar, since I sometimes work on making recommendations on what commercial software and scientific instruments to buy. I am astounded how silly some marketing, even in high end scientific instruments, is.

Of course, the "green car" and "renewable energy will save us" rhetoric is entirely marketing. The results of reality, as opposed to marketing - nearly half a century of it - are in:

Week beginning on January 30, 2022: 419.19 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 416.89 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 393.28 ppm
Last updated: February 6, 2022

Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (Accessed 02/06/22)