HAWAII FIVE-0 ON WAIKIKI BEACH

On deciding what to do today as I create my blog for the day I gaze to my right:

I see a rainbow over Pearl Harbor.  Then to my left:

There is Punchbowl, which is home to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.  You can only barely see a smudge, but about 15% from the left is the Diamond Head lookout, where you can get a spectacular view of Honolulu.  Here is a photo I took the first time I made that trek up, which was last year:

My apartment is just to the right on the horizon.  By the way, that beach, which you can hardly see, is Waikiki, hardly comparable to China Beach in Vietnam, which is 100 yards wide and stretches the equivalent of from Waikiki to Pearl Harbor and back.  Or something like that.  Of larger insult, most of the sand for a time came from Manhattan Beach, California, until local engineers found some sand just outside the beach itself and dredged it back to land.  Waikiki just finished a restoration.

However, all this relative beauty inspired me to continue my fantasy life.  I thought why not visit Waikiki Beach, for tonight there is a Hawaii Five-0 premiere on the beach.  For those who don't watch television, this is a CBS series on Monday nights.  In addition to all the stars, they will show what the nation will see tomorrow night.  Surely, you remember the original, which began 44 years ago.

Hear Darling Allison singing Waikiki, or a steel guitar version of the song by Andy Cummings, who composed the music in 1938 while visiting Lansing, Michigan on a cold and foggy night.    Then a hula at the Banyan Court of the Moana Hotel.  There is, too, "On the Beach at Waikiki":  an early 1915 version, with some vintage photos,  and even Lawrence Welk (1959).


This is from where Hawaii Calls emanated in the 1935 to 1975 period.  The host was Webley Edwards, who I somewhat got to know because in his final years he lived at the Maunalani Hospital, where Pearl worked for a while.

So I made a reservation to stay at this oldest hotel on the beach, now a Westin Surfrider, which is the first complex of buildings in the large photo above.  What a bargain, as I don't need to fly to Hawaii, for I'm already here.  Also above are the front of the hotel and the same Banyan Court today.  Then from the beach beyond those surfboards and below the view from my room:

I then walked over to the Hawaii Five-O premiere.  Turns out I'm not much of a paparazzi, for I only had the patience for a couple of photos and took the remainder from the TV in my room.  The crowd was large:

You can  barely see the screen to the right.  Grace Park and  Scott Caan were not there:

Alex O'Loughlin, Daniel Dae Kim and Taylor Wily:

Well, if you know anything about Hawaii Five-0, Steve McGarrett's mother, Doris, was supposed to be dead.  The initial program for Year Three on Monday night will be all about her.  She is played by Christine Lahti:

But the night is not over, yet.  Here is the sunset from the Moana:

I followed with dinner at the Beachhouse, mainly because I get 25% off.  First, the largest Caesar salad I've ever seen, enough for a table of four:

I actually ate the whole thing, and regretted ordering a one pound wagyu beef with Kahuku corn:

The meal was fabulous,  In Tokyo, this beef, in Mitsukoshi, a department store, can cost $300/pound:

While U.S. prime beef has around 7% marbled fat, in Japan, wagyu must be AT LEAST 25%.  The best part is that this fat is "good" for you, for the beef in this country is primarily monounsaturated.  That photo above is the best, from Matsuzaka, where the cow (only the female) is fed a secret diet, fed beer, rubbed with sake and listen to classical music.  This holy cow can cost almost $400,000.  However, a 593 pound blue fin tuna was sold this year at Tsukiji (fishmarket in Tokyo) for $1238/pound, or $736,000:

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Tropical Storm Miriam will ultimately become a Category 2 hurricane, weaken, and sway for Baha California in a week.   In the East Atlantic, Tropical Storm Nadine will move west and also become a hurricane, but will never get to the USA. In the West Pacific, though, is Super Typhoon Jelawatt, now at 150 MPH, but will further strengthen into a Category 5, and, as predicted the other day, if all goes well, should squeeze between Taiwan and Okinawa and head for Shanghai.  But most of these storms tend to veer north and lean towards South Korea. Too early to tell for sure.

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MASTER ARBITRAGE PARROTS

No one would be able to accurately determine what my blog today is all about from the title.  Second, I'll review two films I just saw, Arbitrage and The Master, but first:

This is Saturday, so let me start with parrots on my roof.  These are green-cheeked Amazons (Amazona viridigenalis).  The only reason they are here is because when Hurricane Iwa struck us in 1982, several pairs of this bird escaped from an Aiea home.  Now, they are almost a nuisance, as they do screech a lot, and I suspect, pick on my tomatoes and basil.  However, they are protected as an endangered species.

Both Arbitrage (Rotten Tomatoes audience acceptance of 76%) and The Master (RTAA 78%) are about extraordinary men with huge egos.  Richard Gere is a billionaire hedge fund magnate Robert Miller in the former, and a heel, but he is Richard Gere, and hard not to like.  Giving away the ending, which is somewhat of a surprise, is giving away the movie, so I won't.  However, my hints might be too revealing.  Gere is now 62, and is topped in white, even in real life.  He made his debut in 1977 (can you believe 37 years ago?) opposite Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.    Take this character, follow him through a successful adulthood, and you have him in the movie.  

While clearly unprincipled, you almost can't help but cheer for Miller because of extenuating circumstances.  I kept thinking, who is acting as his daughter Brooke (left), and by the end I figured out she is Brit Marling, that odd star of two alien movies, Another Earth and The Sound of My Voice.  The second one presents a strong case for external beings on Earth, for the logic is compelling, at least for this movie.  I have done work in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Susan Sarandon (right), as wife Ellen, does an excellent job as a weak wife who prevails at the end using Robert's primary modus operandus, bluffing with high confidence.  She looked good for someone who is 65.

Oh, one more thing, we might have found the next Columbo, or some latest version of one in Tim Roth as the inquiring detective.  This could become a TV series where crime investigations take the wrong turn and fail.  You need to see the movie to understand what I'm trying to say.

The whole point about this movie is that everyone, everyone, is in some way, dishonest and/or immoral, and almost always both.  Some more than others.  How to cope with this prevailing character failure is how to succeed in life, many times regretfully.

The Master is all of 137 minutes long, and takes you from the mid-40's through much of the 50's.  This could well have been the story of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology (but for reasons of a suit, not), fabulously played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman as The Master.  However, the focus was more on a pathological drifter suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who is now back to quasi-normality after his semi-professional prank about being nuts.  The director, Paul Thomas Anderson (not the quirky Wes) I think lost control of the script.  He is said to be a genius and has five Academy Award nominations, but....  According to Rotten Tomatoes, 87% of reviewers liked this film.  I did not, as did not the San Francisco Examiner.  The transitions were discordant and purpose empty, but performances good to excellent.  Frankly, I did not get it, very similar to my reaction to The Tree of Life, which I called "The Most Boring Movie I've Ever Seen."  The Master was pretty close, and I actually fell asleep a couple of times.

Well, aside from all that, what might there be to like?  The film score was spotty, but showed promise.  If only they had played more original songs of that period, maybe that would have been enough for me.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as usual, was scintillating, is actually beginning to resemble Orson Wells and sort of looks like L. Ron Hubbard (right).  Joaquin Phoenix was intense, but only okay.  If you like to gaze at naked women, then this is the film for you.  Why are they unclad?  Not sure.

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By the time you read this, Jelawat will be a typhoon.  Looks like this storm will now mostly miss Taiwan, squeeze through south of Naha, and, maybe head for the Shanghai area, which almost never gets threatened.  So, maybe South Korea again.

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LASER FUSION

This is Part 3 in my series on fusion.  My favorite option is laser fusion, probably because after gaining my PhD building a tunable laser before one could be purchased, I went on to become a faculty member of the University of Hawaii, spending my first summer assignment forty years ago at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as a staff member of the laser fusion team under Edward Teller.  LLNL is a science lab, where physicists dominated.  As an engineer, I was a second class citizen, for we were there to serve the masters.  Back in those days no one could yet envision what type of laser would be used for the ultimate commercial facility.  Four decades later, they still have no firm idea on this important detail.  

It can be said that our nation is covering ourselves by participating in the ITER magnetic confinement effort (see previous posting), while harboring hopes for the National Ignition Facility (NIF, above) at LLNL.  Here is the fusion budget:

It cost $3.5 billion to construct NIF, with 192 laser beams.  However, for fiscal year 2013, the project will receive only $84 million, $26 million less than last year.  In short, the Feds have warned LLNR, get net positive this coming year or face further cuts.  This is an important point I haven't yet mentioned:  NO FUSION TECHNOLOGY HAS YET ATTAINED NET POSITIVE ON PLANET EARTH.  This will become the first...if it succeeds.  Project staffers are hopeful that this epochal achievement will happen this (coming?) year.  When I last year predicted that the Higgs Boson would be found in August of this year, I also indicated that LLNL would succeed last month.  Let me adjust my wild guess by giving them until January 2013, thus beating ITER by about a dozen years.

What will NIF do?  It will zap a tritium droplet (1 mg, with a diameter less than human hair) for a few trillionths of a second.  The temperature created will exceed 100 million Kelvin (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) and density 100 billion times as we currently face on the surface of our planet.  You thought those ITER conditions were extreme?  Here, because crucial inertial confinement requirements must be made, the pressures are extraordinary.  This special environment has only previously been attained by the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago and the centers of exploding H-Bombs and stars.  Still, NIF does not have enough oomph to create a Black Hole.

I should add that there are several other countries advancing laser fusion development.  To be commissioned any day now is the French Megajoule near Bordeaux (left), about the same power, with 240 beams.  The Russian version is still a decade away, but will be at least 50% larger than the LLNL laser.  China, South Korea and Japan also have active programs.  I love the names picked:  Divine Light (China), Orion (U.K.) and Gekko (Japan).  

One more facet of laser fusion is that in some countries (you can guess which ones), the nuclear weapons potential of this Death Ray is obvious.  In our country, this now goes by the term, nuclear stockpile stewardship.  It is possible that the primary motivation of laser fusion might well still be related to military needs.  However, it might be fortunate that there is some defense component to laser fusion, for this support only advances the potential for the peaceful applications of fusion.  Plus:

For a good few years now, nuclear fusion has looked like offering a solution to the problem. For every 100 tonnes of coal we burn, fusion has the potential to deliver the same amount of energy, without any carbon dioxide emission, using a small bath of water and the lithium contained in a single laptop battery. Moreover, it would be inherently very safe and would not produce any significant radioactive waste. Lest there be any confusion, the science behind this way of harnessing the energy locked away inside the atomic nucleus is entirely different from that used in current nuclear fission reactors. It almost seems too good to be true … but it isn't.

Like ITER, NIF is just a step towards commercialization.  The next one will be a Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE, right) demonstration in the 2020's, firing 10-15 shots per second (NIF can only do 3 shots/day).  However, tritium is rare, not like deuterium, so LIFE will breed it's own tritium as part of the process.  The next step is expected to be 500 to 1000 MW commercial power plants by 2030.  While this is ridiculously optimistic, who knows, this is not impossible.

Let me end by editorializing on the budget of the U.S. Department of Energy.  Approximately $4 billion goes to energy R&D.  FISSION gets a little more than 41%, FUSION 21%, and the renewables 19%. However, energy is only 16% the budget of the USDOE.  Nuclear weapons dominate.  What is particularly depressing is that the Obama nuclear weapons budget, including inflation, is 15% higher than during the Reagan days while the Cold War was still on.  Finally:

There are two types of fusion: magnetic confinement (that donut or torus shaped machine, as being developed as ITER in France at a cost that is now expected to exceed $20 billion, just for the prototype), and inertial confinement, epitomized by laser experiments at our national laboratories. Both of these methods have undergone more than half a century of intensive research at a cost of more than $22.4 billion...and only in the USA. Look at it this way, we will spend three times more on the Stealth bomber just this coming year and this amount is only 72 days of the war in Afghanistan. Or, get this, $22.4 billion is one-fifth of Wall Street executive bonuses this past year!

This quote comes from one of my Huffington Post articles written just about a year ago:  Starpower for Humanity--heavy-ion fusion, the focus in Part 4 of my fusion series.  Are we, as a nation, taking Peak Oil and Global Warming seriously?  No.  The budget for WAR overwhelms.

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Tropical Storm Jelawat at 50 MPH seems to be headed straight for the Philippines at this point, but models predict a turn northward, increasing to at least a Category 3 typhoon by the middle of next week, skimming the northeast coast of the country, then a track towards Taiwan.

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FUSION: ITER

This is Part 2 of my series on FUSION:

ITER is pronounced "eater," and is mankind's best hope today for a monumental source of clean power.  When I first worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nearly forty years ago on laser fusion, they also had a couple of magnetic confinement projects, and I thought that was crazy, for what system and material could continuously for months maintain plasma at a hundred million degrees Kelvin, six times hotter than the core of the Sun.  I still think the odds of commercial success are infinitesimal, at least compared to laser and cold fusion, which themselves range from challenging to fictitious.

Anyway, what began as a $5 billion project with hope is now up to $20 billion with doubts.  The European Union, hosts at Cardarache, France, is responsible for 45.5% of all ITER costs, while the U.S, Japan, Russia, China, India and South Korea will each kick in 9.1%.  ITER (the Tokamak will be housed in what someday might be that orange building--no, this is just a rendering) will just prove that fusion is feasible, and this date has now been pushed up to 2025.  Then, a SERIES of follow-on efforts will need to be funded, at much higher costs, to ultimately commercialize this technology.  Very optimistically, 2050 has been suggested as a target date.  Why bother then, for China has already announced that same year to commercialize their 500 MW to 1 GW laser fusion power  plant, and the U.S. is ahead of them at this stage.

In many ways, the United Nations-like (which, in my experience, is administratively hopeless) configuration running  ITER is similar to the International Space Station (ISS), which, frighteningly enough, cost $150 billion.  Mind you, if you missed it, this is 750% more expensive than ITER.  It was President Ronald Reagan who proposed Space Station Freedom for $8.4 billion.  Then President Bill Clinton cancelled that version, but proposed this current international partnership  for $17.4 billion.  Factor of ten or so more expensive?  About right.  After a decade of operation, how many commercial products have made it to the marketplace?  None.  How many will in another ten years?  Probably none.  The similarity is that, like ISS, which is slowly being abandoned, every country, including the European Union, is also trying to escape from ITER, but can't find a politically expedient way to do this.

In case you were wondering, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the device at the French-Swiss border that found the Higgs Boson, has a price tag of $10 billion.  Will anything realistically useful derive from this facility?  No.  So, in many ways,  ITER is a kind of bargain.  For only $20 billion (don't forget that $150 billion ISS), it is possible that Humanity will well be on our way to a fabulous new and renewable energy form (remember, there is sufficient deuterium in the ocean for 150 billion years at current consumption--and our Sun becomes a Red Giant in, oh, 5 billion years, enveloping Planet Earth).

I remember forty years ago, when I worked in the U.S. Senate, some staff members conniving (without our Senators' official permission) to kill the Superconducting Super Collider  in Texas.  In 1993, about a decade later, the project was cancelled (I've not seen the true story of how this happened--I wonder why no one wrote that book or made that movie) after a magnificent toroidal (15 feet diameter and 30 kilometers long) hole in the ground was excavated (left) for $2 billion.  The finished facility was expected to cost $11 billion, so in 2012 dollars, that was a savings of almost $25 billion.  While it is possible that the SSC should have discovered the "God Particle" before CERN, as it was supposed to have five times the collision energy of the LHC, so what?  Well, that would have been nice for national bragging rights, but for all that money?

Now, there is a rekindling of a NASA-led movement (with a lot of help from major aerospace companies), to send Man to Mars.  This mission is currently pegged for $500 billion (which automatically means at least a trillion dollars).  Not sure they got the message, but Congress in 2010 killed the 2020 Mars Project.  On September 25 there is a talk about just this effort on the University of Hawaii campus, in fact, four floors up from my office, to cheerlead this initiative.  I should go and express my annoyance, for we need to abandon space for at least a century until we first resolve the onrushing double hammer of Peak Oil and Global Warming.  But, I have something more important to do.

However, I hope an influential group is actively working to bring ITER  to an early halt before it gets too expensive and too late.  Even though the hole is already in the ground (above), remember the Superconducting Super Collider.  But I suspect bureaucratic inertia and a desperation to do something will prevail, for, according to Steve Cowley, CEO of the U.K. Atomic Energy Commission:

     It is going to work...because it must.

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If you're planning to travel to the Orient, there is a brand new tropical storm, Jelawat, east of the Philippines, now only at 40 MPH, but expected to strengthen into a Category 2 storm and head for Taiwan.  

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WHAT IS THE STATE OF FUSION POWER?

My interest in fusion I place at the same level of imagination as my forays into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) with NASA and my current interest in the Blue Revolution.  The odds for success are minimal, but the potential reward would make a real difference for Humanity.  With respect to energy, I've come to a conclusion that the combination of sun-wind-biomass will not be able to adequately replace oil.  We need a whopping next generation energy source that can be quickly  (for a new energy form, this means within half a century) commercialized.  How soon this occurs will determine the state of the world economy and size of our population over the next century.

I've long subscribed to the concept of Occam's Razor, which says, given a choice, the simplest solution is best.  This why I've titled all my books SIMPLE SOLUTIONS.  

Why is fusion, then, the simplest?  For one, this is how our Sun and all the stars create heat and light, from hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the Universe, making up 75% of all matter.  Solar energy, thus, starts with fusion.  If there is any kind of fate or writing on the wall, what more do you want?  The Sun simply fuses hydrogen atoms into helium, where a small bit of matter is converted into energy.  It is reported that there is sufficient deuterium in our oceans to supply our future fusion power plants for 150 billion years.  Now how did all that hydrogen accumulate into one ball (100 sextillion, if you count all the stars)?  That will be another posting in the future.

Inspired by all the above, after gaining a PhD building a tunable laser, I found myself one summer nearly 40 years ago at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), working in the group led by Edward Teller, the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.  Yes, another evidence of fusion is this deadly weapon.  He convinced President Truman to develop the H-Bomb and President Reagan about Star Wars.  In fact, the people I most interacted with at Livermore were the ones that drew up this plan.  Teller, however, had a terrible conscious about his bomb, that he dedicated his life to finding a useful application of the idea.

One of my interest areas in a second assignment I spent at Livermore had to do with Operation Plowshare, where we suggested the use of conventional explosives to spur in-situ coal and oil shale gasification.   It has taken nearly a third of century for this early research to lead to fracking and natural gas.  Plowshare, of course, used nuclear weapons and spent nearly a billion dollars until 1977 when it was terminated.  No one talks about it today, but one fantasy thought was to explode hydrogen bombs underground and capture the energy in place.

There are two major types of fusion:  inertial (laser) and magnetic (donut) confinement.  There is a hodgepodge of others, such as cold fusion, and a variation of the former in heavy ion fusion.  I will report on all four technologies in subsequent articles.

Much of science and technology is driven by military priorities.  We sent Armstrong to the Moon because Sputnik embarrassed our country, and we just had to be the first there.  During the Cold War, fusion was an important focus.  Why?  For one, Russia invented the Tokamak reactor, a magnetic confinement scheme that in the 1950's appeared to be the answer to "cheap" energy.  Two years after the laser was invented in 1960, Teller at LLNL announced the inertial confinement counterpoint using this new device.  Not particularly mentioned was an X-Ray laser, the Death Ray, which morphed into the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.  When the Cold War ended thirty years ago, funding for laser fusion receded.  There was no real need for an ultimate laser weapon.  However, it is noteworthy that in Europe fusion research still gets just about as much as all other non-nuclear (all renewables, etc.) programs, combined, and this does not even include what is expended by ITER.

Interestingly enough, during this period, specifically in 1985, at the Geneva Superpower Summit, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, proposed to President Ronald Reagan an international project to develop fusion energy for peaceful purposes.  This was the beginning of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, now only known as ITER, and selected the Tokamak.  The U.S. remains a partner, but now seems more interested in our laser focused National Ignition Facility at LLNL.


NEXT:  ITER.

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