The Dead Cow Lecture

This is the best example for paying attention that I have ever heard.

First-year students at the Purdue Vet School were attending their first anatomy class with a real dead cow. They all gathered around the surgery table with the body covered with a white sheet.
The professor started the class by telling them, "In Veterinary medicine it is necessary to have two important qualities as a doctor. The first is that you not be disgusted by anything involving the animal's body." For an example, the professor pulled back the sheet, stuck his finger in the butt of the cow, withdrew it, and stuck his finger in his mouth.

"Go ahead and do the same thing," he told his students.
The students freaked out, hesitated for several minutes, but eventually took turns sticking a finger in the butt of the dead cow and sucking on it.

When everyone finished, the Professor looked at them and said, "The second most important quality is observation. Note: I stuck in my middle finger and sucked on my index finger. Now learn to pay attention. Life's tough but it's even tougher if you're stupid."

I don’t trust the IPCC.

The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental (Sic) Panel on Climate Change) has changed it’s balance of probabilities of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) from 90% to 95%.

As an engineer, if any diesel engineer manufacturer tried to sell me a diesel engine that only had a 95% chance of not blowing up in 25 years, I’d put the phone down on him in an instant. I’m not in the business of being killed.

In fact we were sold such a diesel engine in the past due to a previous labour government that bought British at any cost when the country was failing. (No change there it would seem).

The engine in question was the Paxman RPH. These had the dubious quality of deciding, without warning, to disengage the connecting rod and piston from the crankshaft and hurl it out of the crankcase at any unlikely passer bye. It’s even more dangerous when you have an engine room with ten of the blighters in situe. Having had one blow up about two seconds after I’d passed it,I learnt to pass them at speed.

Like the IPCC I’m sure this engine was designed by a committee that was only interested in selling their product to the gullible.

As a callow youth I was promoted to the lofty heights of looking after these instruments of the devil engines, and with youthful enthusiasm looked forward to the challenge. Till I actually had to work on one.

On every other engine I’ve worked on, a simple piston ring change has just entailed removing the cylinder heads, disconnecting the bottom end and removing the piston through the cylinder. Simples.

Not so the Paxman. From the manual: “Place the engine in the turning frame…………” WTF. It boiled down to the fact that they were trying for a market of ships with low head room in their engine room. If they’d visited ships before they had designed this parody of an engine,they would have seen that their are constraints in space in the other two dimensions as well.

This nicely  brings me back to the IPCC. They have become fixated on the cause of man made CO2 being the cause of Global warming. As an engineer I consider them a danger to humanity especially as they seem to disregard any other causes, and castigate those who question their theories.

Take one of their latest theories of why the temperature hasn’t risen for the last fifteen years. “It’s all been absorbed by the deep ocean”. Don’t make me larf. Warmer water rises not sinks. Apart from that the Argo buoys that measure ocean temperatures can only measure to a few thousand metres, how do they come by this supposition?

You tell me.

That’ll work then.

More green technology ideas. Having realised that wind turbines only supply power when the wind is blowing, a company is trying to imply that they have a solution to the problem.

Gaelectric Holdings Plc, the Dublin- based developer, is in discussions with infrastructure investors for a 300 million-pound ($466 million) project in Northern Ireland to store surplus energy from wind turbines.

Sounds like a good idea. Or does it?

Gaelectric’s plant will use excess electricity from turbines to power a motor that will drive a compressor to store air in an underground salt cavern. When demand is high, the air is released to run a turbine generating power, burning some natural gas at the same time to boost output.

Now air compressors, even low pressure, high volume, require quite a bit of power. So they’re losing some of their wind energy straight away.

Then the laughable fact that they think that they can contain all that semi free air in salt caverns.

When I was a marine engineer in a past life we relied on compressed air for a number of purposes, such as:

Starting diesel engines. (Ship’s don’t have starter motors and huge banks of batteries).

Air operated control systems.

General purpose air, (Power tools etc).

My point that I’m going to make is all that air at different pressures had to be stored for use.

We stored that air in steel pressure vessels fed by steel pipes.  Guess what? We could never, ever, stop that pesky air from escaping. We had automatic air compressors that had to keep them topped up.

So when that article mentioned storing compressed air in SALT caverns I burst out in hysterical laughter.

If steel pipes and steel pressure vessels with their fittings can’t stop leaking, what hope have we with salt caverns. FFS.

Then the article goes on to state that they are going to use that stored air, you’ve guessed it, in driving another wind turbine. It’s ludicrous. When you consider the losses of efficiencies throughout the whole process, then we are in for even more expensive elektrickery than at present.

But that’s alright though, they’ll supplement it with gas.

FFS(again). Why not simply generate power in a combined cycle gas turbine in the first place?