This is my blog about programming, technology, politics and other random stuff of interest, where information might be hard to find or be otherwise scattered across the vast internet.
It seems as if Amazon has problems with functional dependency of its product data.
Depending on with language is chosen on the Amazon.de webpage, for example German, there are books where the website language used remains English. In addition to that, this results in totally different editions of the books being displayed or different sellers being listed for the same book.
Also, when selecting “Foreign books” on an author’s Amazon page, nothing is selected, although one might expect to be shown the author’s original, untranslated works.
Sometimes, multilingual editions of books (which are mostly used for teaching foreign language at schools) show up instead of a particular edition in a desired language.
Shopping cart and wish list
There have been instances where I was unable to move items between different wish lists with a failure message from Amazon claiming it could not move the item, while said item was definitely not on the destined wish list.
This also fails when trying to add the item to a particular wish list directly form the product page. It makes not difference whether the item in question is already in the shopping cart or not during the time of trying to move it to the faulty wish list.
Shopping cart bottlenecks
When moving items from the Amazon shopping basket to the “Save for later” section, it is only possible to do this for one item at a time, and also only after each individual item has been moved is it possible to even click on the next item. This creates an opportunity for the underlying code to be restructured in support of faster operations.
Link rot
From the book “Superfreakonomics”, a link claims to lead to a webpage for the entire series of books, including “When to rob a bank”, “Think like a freak” and “Freakonomics”. However, when clicking the product link for the latter (https://www.amazon.de/dp/B074CB84JK?binding=mass_market&ref=dbs_dp_sirpi), Amazon claims it is unable to find the page:
Book editions varying in the number of volumes
When books gain additional volumes with newer revisions, one example being Rosenberg’s Molecular and Genetic Basis of Neurological and Psychiatric Disease, which fit in a single volume for its fifth edition, but grew to include a second volume in its sixth edition, product pages can list any part of the multi-volume editions along with books from the single volume editions.
Another example would be Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, which initially was comprised of two volumes, but was later released as a single volume edition.
War is the single most unproductive economic activity known to date, en par with environmental pollution. But while we still have not figured out how to prevent the emergence of warring activities, could there be a way to transform war preparation efforts into something that is also useful during times of peace? After all, the physical principles that enable the massive destruction of livelihood also have the potential to protect from many naturally occurring hazards.
Build missile and rocket storage facilities in a way they can double as delivery systems for projectiles that can immediately be fired at incoming asteroids when there is no enemy threat that requires fitting the weapons to delivery systems like aircraft. Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory simulated nuclear explosions directed at asteroids to deflect the object trajectory (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad0838/pdf).
Fitted with landing gear and braking parachutes, decommissioned cruise missiles could find use in time-critical courier delivery. Development already done on the JDAM guidance kit that makes unguided bombs “smart” could serve as a starting point. The SSM-N-8 Regulus I and SSM-N-9 Regulus II cruise missiles of the Cold War era were fitted with landing gear during testing to enable them to return, landing like planes on a runway.
Civil shelters (also in private homes / public or commercial buildings) can serve a dual purpose as shelters for wartime and natural threats like storms (homesteads in the Tornado Alley of the US Mid-West sometimes have them, while cyclone-prone areas in tropical regions could certainly benefit) or, a less likely event, asteroids. A prime example of dual use is Peking, where during the summer of 2023, with its unprecedented heat waves, they opened shelters for people looking to escape the extremely high temperatures outside.
In Peking, where each building is required to have underground shelters even today, and an estimated 1 million people live in dwellings built into former shelters dating from the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the threat of nuclear war between communist China and the Soviet Republic seemed imminent (Sino-Soviet border conflict along the Ussuri river in 1969). Construction of the 85 square kilometer wide complex dubbed “Nuclear City” was completed in 1979.
Appropriate shielding requires use of high-density concrete containing baryte or magnetite to shield against gamma radiation, or boron in the form of borate minerals or to be effective against neutron radiation. Elevator shafts are made from high-density concrete to reduce noise emissions. Crane counterweights are also made from this type of concrete. While 80 % of global baryte production is currently used for drilling fluids in fossil fuel exploration, civil shelters are a better use of the material.
Existing Swiss shelter building codes need a closer look: do they require use of radiation-shielding high-density concrete? If not, their strategy has major flaws.
Neutron bombs have been described as humane weapons which only affect humans (or, by extension, biological lifeforms) while leaving infrastructure such as buildings and equipment intact.
What remains unstated are the effects of neutron activation, where elements in the vicinity of the explosion absorb the neutrons and become radioactive themselves, emitting gamma radiation.
A comprehensive table of neutron activation energies for many elements can be found at:
Ventilation in Swiss-style shelters relies on a hand-cranked system if the power goes out. This means that in order for people to be able to sleep during the length of the required sheltering period, which could be 4-5 weeks, there must be several people occupying the shelter. In order to alleviate this restriction, build hydroponic systems into the shelters, where the plants / algae provide oxygen, and fish provide food. During peacetime, those systems can be part of a local food chain.
Building resilient underground structures that incorporate large-scale facilities would make civil shelters feasible at scale and double as structure for peacetime housing.
Soviet-era closed cities still exist in Russia today and serve as proof that such concepts do work.
Manufacturers of tunnel boring machines like Herrenknecht or Aker Solutions could find additional business in the construction of fallout shelters in built-up areas.
Underground facilities for large-scale particle physics experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN already contain high-density concrete in critical sections of the design. When old accelerators at CERN are dismantled, the remaining tunnels could be turned into a shelter superstructure. However, this is an unlikely scenario, as the LHC will continue to serve as an accelerator stage for future, even larger particle accelerators.
Ultrasonic drilling could also find applications.
Since the height of the Cold War, fallout shelters have been reduced in numbers. The current situation with Russia threatening Ukraine shows that this may have been a mistake.
So what could be a more sustainable approach to building fallout shelters?
Looking to Scandinavia and Switzerland, where large shelters are built into underground parking and recreational facilities for use during peace time.
Manufacturers of fuel storage tanks could use available production capacity to build shelters from the same geometrical designs which can then be buried underground on private property to provide basic shelter. In times when there is concern for public safety, e.g. when unexploded ordnance is found nearby, residents could shelter in place instead of having to be moved to a special safe location.
During the Cold War, German motorways were built to function as airstrips with the middle lane separators removed, and rest areas along highways doubling as aircraft parking. Those road sections featured reinforced surfaces in order to handle the higher weights of aircraft compared to cars and trucks.
Ventilation equipment of large bunker structures could serve as direct air capture inlets during peaceful times, diverting the air intake away from wartime sand filter units to carbon dioxide scrubbers, this way aiding in the climate change recovery effort.
Light-gas projectiles
Attach a thin-walled cartridge containing pressurized hydrogen gas to the bottom of a projectile to achieve propulsion velocities exceeding the Earth’s escape velocity.
Re-manufacture surplus shaped charges and kinetic energy penetrators to be used with Voitenko compressors for aerospace applications.
A while ago, when browsing the collective works of Mafalda by the Argentinian cartoonist Quino, I tried having parts of the sentence translated from Spanish to English by Google Translate.
This is what I tried as inputs:
el pomo de témpera el pomo de tempera el pomo de tempera
and this is what I got as the results eventually:
the tempering pommel the seasoning pommel he snitch tempered
Why Google Translate even failed to properly identify articles and proper nouns, instead translating them into pronouns and verbs, is beyond me.
However, what Mafalda really refers to is a jar of paint, specifically the “tempera” kind of paint, which has pigments combined with delicate emulsifiers.
Also tried a translation to German, which for “pomo de témpera” gave me a word I had never heard of: “Würzknauf”. Which would translate to “seasoning knob” if used in an English context.
Shockingly, trying the Google web search on it, the results were very limited:
Why would Google return exclusively Arabic texts (which, judging by the results Google Translate gives me, seem to be very sexually explicit) for a made-up German word that their own system had in all likelihood created itself? Was this a foreshadowing of the hallucinating artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT?
Maybe the following paper could shed some light on the inner workings of the neural networks that drive the Google search engine technology?
Google Chrome website translation from Singhalese to German in Chrome 78 was not supported for some unknown reason, and when German was selected as the target language, translation failed, while a translation to English worked fine.
In the current Google Chrome version 120, a Russian Wikipedia article translated to German does not preserve the context of numbers, i.e. it switches bases and exponents of numbers written in scientific notation.
Repeating the process of translating from Russian to German with Google Translate instead, the same problems dealing with scientific notation are exhibited, additionally failing to identify a HTML tag and including it in the translation instead.
All this leads me to believe that proper machine translation of digital documents still has a long way to go.
All the above examples can serve as a hint that forced dependence on any technological path or the abandonment of one, like it happened in 2011 with the German exit from nuclear power and like the planned exit from fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035 in the EU, are not totally beneficial when looking at the whole picture. It is the network effects that count.
In September 2014, the US senate passed legislation claiming that resources on asteroids belong to the entity that discovers / mines them.
Alternative process: phytomining, where plants that are so-called hyperaccumulators take up the metal and incorporate them, creating high concentrations of metals in their biomass.
“Pressure to Power” describes technology that recovers energy at distribution stations of gas pipelines where the pressure is reduced before distribution to local users. (expansion turbine)
For crude oil pipelines, this has already been realized in 2018 with the Trans Alpine pipeline from Italy to Austria using the potential energy from the pipeline traversing the Alps to recover some of the energy required for pumping the crude oil.
Pigging devices currently used to inspect and clean pipeline networks could be modified to a form of hydraulic transport using the existing fossil fuel and gas pipelines, although it would require the constrution of a greater number of receiver stations than those that currently exist. Such “pigs” are already used today when multiple products differing in composition are sent into the pipeline at the same time, with the devices limiting mixture of the different products.
In a long shot, those ships could serve as launch platforms for space exploration because moving platforms closer to the equator reduces the amount of rocket fuel needed to reach orbit.
If used in fuel cells instead of engines or turbines, crude oil, natural gas and methane hydrate will remain viable sources of energy in the the future.
With the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a scramble among European countries to secure enough new LNG supplies to counteract the dwindling Russian deliveries of natural gas through pipelines such as NordStream 1.
As LNG requires the prior existence of LNG-capable terminals onshore, the lack thereof creates major hurdles when it comes to severing the ties with Russia in the energy domain. Luckily, there are special ships called FSRU (Floating Storage Regasification Unit) which are capable of turning the liquid natural gas back into gaseous form which can then be injected into the existing European pipeline network.
LNG carrier ships should be designed to also allow the transport of ammonia to facilitate a hydrogen economy. Built as FPSO ( Floating Production Storage and Offloading Unit), they could make use of surplus wind energy and produce ammonia. The first of those ships is named P2XFloater.
Using deep geothermal drilling to produce supercritical water to be fed into the steam generators of existing coal power plants can help provide clean energy using former fossil fuel power plants. Deep geothermal wells can be drilled almost anywhere in the world, not just where there is volcanic activity. An improvement over conventional drills are gyrotrons that use microwave energy. While the gyrotron can stay at the surface, a waveguide can deposit the energy where it is needed. Existing wells can be used as a starting point to reach initial depths of 500 meters or more, from where the microwaves can extend the wells to the necessary depths of 5 to 20 kilometers.
Exhausted oil formations can be used to harness geothermal energy while providing energy storage much like a battery. The process uses water injected into a deep well, while using a second well to extract highly pressurized, heated water when needed. This can be done for many hours after injection has completed, thus effectively storing energy.
Water passing through iron-rich underground rock formations results in the production of hydrogen, a resource that can be tapped by drilling and then feeding hydrogen motors in a similar manner to current gas wells (so-called “orange hydrogen”).
It is also possible to directly source naturally occuring hydrogen (so-called “white hydrogen”).
This series of four articles in a style similar to a stream-of-consciousness format wants to shed some light onto the challenge we face in times of enormous climate challenges:
The proposed taxation of estimated fossil fuel reserves realizes a concept of fictionalized gain that forces companies to exploit all available resources, which is detrimental to global climate when done with current technology, i.e. without carbon capture. (It remains to be seen how the similar concept of advanced flat capital gains tax will affect private ETF investors)
In-situ mining of oil sands and leaching of ore deposits promise new ways to extract resources from otherwise unviable deposits.
In-situ coal gasification would allow to exploit coal seams without having to dig them up, while simplifying the process of carbon capture. Products of this advanced process are syngas and synfuel. This technology also enables exploitation of undersea coal reserves that would otherwise be inaccessible. (https://petrowiki.spe.org/PEH:In-Situ_Combustion)
In addition, fossil fuel deposits contain non-negligible amounts of radioactive material, which, when they are released into the environment during the conventional firing process, are more harmful than if these elements (such as thorium) were to be extracted from the fly ash and used as fuel in nuclear power plants. With the fly ash stripped of radioactive elements, it can used in concrete for building construction or roadway surfaces more safely.
Drilling fluids account for about 80 % of global baryte usage. Finding alternatives to free up baryte for use in high-density concrete applications of fallout shelters needs to be of higher priority.
Fossil fuel infrastructure can be given a second, more environmentally beneficial, life, in an effort to enable future developments that are independent of a certain technology path:
This includes the modification of processes ion existing refinieries to shift production from combustible fuel to LOHC (liquid organic hydrogen carrier). Using toluol and benzyl chloride to create dibenzyl chloride in a Friedel-Crafts alkylation yields a diesel-like LOHC that allows hydrogen to be transported in a liquid without cryocooling requirements. One liter of this LOHC can bind 650 litres of hydrogen, facilitating a mobility concept that does not need high-pressure vessels.
On July 30, 2012, India was hit by the worst power blackout in its history until then, affecting 19 of the 36 states and leaving roughly half of the 1.2-billion strong population without electricity. This is certainly an over-estimate, as back then, just under 40 percent of people only ever may have had access to the grid.
According to Reuters, peak-hour demand at the time exceeded power capacity by about 10 percent, impairing economic growth. A weak monsoon that resulted in a fall of hydroelectricity generation worsened the situation as people tried to cool down in scorching heat.
The Indian government was slow to respond to some of the pressing challenges facing its population. This power cut could have offered the opportunity to make a change and transform India’s energy-hungry economy into one that is greener, and more resilient to outages, which are even more likely to happen in the future is nothing is done about it.
Growth in demand exceeds new capacity being added by far, even more than a decade after the event. The fact that there are only five electricity grids makes the system prone to cascading failure.
People need to re-think the way power is generated, by opting for locally generated power using renewable sources like photovoltaics, solar-thermal power and wind. Microgrids connected to power storage solutions such as batteries would at least partly eliminate the need for expensive, environmentally-unfriendly diesel generators and kerosene, which are causing respiratory problems in the millions of people using them for lighting and cooking.
Pakistan power blackout 2015 and 2023
After terrorists destroyed a transmission tower in Baluchistan, Pakistan, nearly 80% of Pakistan’s population – or more than 140 million people – were left without power for hours. (see Bloomberg article)
Just like India in 2012, Pakistan would hugely benefit from a distributed, highly resilient grid.
But they seem to have learned nothing from it:
During the early hours of January 23, 2023, interventions by the grid operator intended to reduce energy consumption resulted in a total collapse of the grid across the nation, taking all day for power to be restored.
Apparently, providing electricity to your people is harder than building nuclear weapons.
South Africa
South Africa has had rolling blackouts (“load shedding”) since 2006, forcing people to take them into consideration when they want to do laundry, charge their phone or when students can do their homework.
Western Australia
The state of Western Australia can be thought of as an example, as they are currently in the process of abandoning their 93,000 km long electricity grid in favor of solar-powered microgrids for the sprawling farms dispersed throughout the bush, with diesel generators for backup.
Germany
Germany has separate networks for providing electricity to the railway network and the rest. The railway network mainly uses 16.7 Hz, while the rest of the country uses 50 Hz. Could the railway network help with the transformation towards renewable energy?
Latest developments as of 2022 / 2023
Germany loosens restrictions on plug-in solar power systems, allowing electricity meters to run in reverse for up to four months. However, without compensation, this further enriches the established power and grid companies.
For less developed regions such as Africa, considering various scenarios for simulation can save considerable cost before actual implementation. Numerous tools have been developed to help with such efforts, a selection of which are listed below:
Use the consensus mechanism of the cryptocurrency protocols to build distributed voting tools for the people based on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, depending on the decision at stake.
If inputs on the network are treated as Gödel numbers for the encoding of programmable state machines, together with the majority voting mechanism the nodes on the Bitcoin network could form a powerful distributed computer. Individual nodes must agree, as per their common protocol version, on how to treat given nonces, i.e. how to interpret them to execute a particular instruction on the global distributed computing system they form.
While exploring Vancouver Island in 2018, I was using OpenStreetMap-derived map data converted to the format used in Garmin automotive navigation systems like my trusted Garmin LMT-51.
However, when using the device on some remote backroads of Vancouver Island, I noticed a strange behaviour: it wouldn’t compute a route along those roads. Instead, if it was able to find a route at all, it resulted in a massive detour on the major roads along the not-so-remote parts of the islands. When testing the parameters with OpenStreetMap’s online route finding service, a route was returned using the rural backroads I had originally intended to use.
Have you experienced similar results with OpenStreetMap data and Garmin devices? If so, please let me know in the comments.
When time allows, I will try to debug the device’s software in order to learn what might cause this kind of ‘bug’.
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