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a bit about writing and reading origins
We’ll perhaps never know – but I should never say never. We’re still a long way from knowing when we first developed language. After all, what exactly is language? How do we define it? Chimps and bonobos, and other apes and monkeys, not to mention cetaceans and perhaps other species, perhaps in the class of cephalopods, have more or less sophisticated ways of communicating which at least partially resemble language…
But that’s not what I wanted to focus on in this essay. I want to focus on the origin of writing, and its corollary, reading. I’m reading Maryanne Wolf’s 2010 book Proust and the squid for the second time, this time perhaps a little more carefully, while thinking on what constitutes a writing system and how writing and reading changed the human world. Terms such as logogram, syllabary, cuneiform, abecedary and hieroglyph, as well as peoples – the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians and the Ugaritic people of the northern Levant – these are all floating around in my head like so much flotsam and jetsam at present, and I’m hoping that some writing of my own might make sense of it all.
There are questions, of course, about the first writing system. For example, when we find impressions on clay, or daubs on walls which appear to have some structure that we can’t decode, how can we know if it is writing? There appears to be some agreement – though it’s contested by some Egyptologists – that the first writing was Sumerian, from the lower Mesopotamian, which evolved into something called cuneiform about 5400 years ago. But it’s also generally agreed that writing was invented independently as many as four times. And there may yet be more early forms to discover. And there should be no reason to believe that these independently-created writing systems would resemble each other.
So let’s have a look at some of them. First, cuneiform, shown above:
The word ‘cuneiform derives from the Latin word cuneus, ‘nail’, which refers to the script’s wedge-like appearance. Using a pointed reed stylus on soft clay, our ancestors created a script that looks, to the untutored eye, a lot like bird tracks.
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the squid, p32
Around 5000 of these clay tablets have been found, in temples and palaces but also in ancient warehouses, used mostly for accounting. What’s most important to note with these figures is that a sufficient number of people would need to know how to interpret – ‘read’ – them to make the process worthwhile. And that this writing-reading system would require new neurological connections, or the adaptation of existing ones. This would require time, a gradualism from a more painstaking pictorial representation to more abstract, easily constructed and comprehended forms. It’s been argued that many written languages retain the vestiges of pictorial forms, though clearly some more than others. Wolf makes this observation:
Soon after it originated, Sumerian cuneiform, mysteriously and rather astonishingly, became sophisticated. Symbols rapidly became less pictographic and more logographic and abstract. A logographic writing system directly conveys the concepts in the oral language, rather than the sounds in the words. Over time many of the Sumerian characters also began to represent some of the syllables in oral Sumerian. This double function in a writing system is classified by linguists as a logosyllabary, and it makes a great many more demands on the brain.
Ibid, pp33-34
It’s a difficult passage, for me at least. How do we know today the ‘syllables in oral Sumerian’, a language nobody has spoken for millennia? I understand that a logographic writing system, like Chinese, is conceptual, but a concept can also be pictorial in some sense. A website called WikiDiff puts it this way:
Strictly speaking, a “pictogram” represents by illustration, an ”ideogram” represents an idea, and a ”logogram” represents a word: Chinese characters are all logograms, but few are pictograms or ideograms. Casually, ”pictogram” is used to represent all of these: it is a picture representing some concept.
So, to put it, mildly, it’s complex. I’m not sure if there’s anything ‘strict’ about it – a piece of writing, in the alphabet I’m now using, is read as sounds, images and/or ideas, or none of these (if we don’t know the word). Do we think of ‘the’ and ‘and’ as sounds when we read them (as opposed to hearing them)? Perhaps, but so fleetingly… The word ‘and’ surely conveys an idea of continuation or plurality depending on context, and ‘the’ conveys the concept of definiteness as opposed to ‘a’ or ‘any’. But all of these are composed of sounds, or ‘sound representations’, of course, barely noticed due to their familiarity.
My own brain, and the brains of virtually all my acquaintance, is wired for the alphabet, derived from Ancient Greek. A Chinese reading brain is apparently quite different. Quoting Wolf again:
Unlike other writing systems (such as alphabets), Sumerian and Chinese show considerable involvement of the right hemisphere areas, known to contribute to the many spatial analysis requirements in logographic symbols and also to more global types of processing. The numerous, visually demanding logographic characters require much of both visual areas, as well as an important occipital-temporal region called area 37, which is involved in object recognition and which [the French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislaus Dehaene] hypothesises is the major seat of ‘neuronal recycling’ in literacy.
Ibid, pp35-36
I have no memory whatever of leaning to read. It’s as if I could always do so, and grammar and spelling came very easily to me. I was never read to as far as I can recall, though our home, in one of Australia’s most working-class neighbourhoods, was always full of books. The Sumerians, of course, didn’t have books in our sense, and their writing systems, and those of today’s Chinese, took years to learn. The Sumerians – those of the upper class – learned their symbols off clay tablets, which they would copy on the reverse side. It took years of self-discipline, and harsh discipline from above, to learn long lists of words and how to convey them, phonetically and conceptually, in symbols.
I’m trying to understand this, to get it under my skin. What the Sumerians were doing wasn’t just learning a handed-down alphabetical, phonemic system, they were creating such a system – not alphabetic in our sense, but based on phonemic and morphological symbols that needed to be agreed upon and bedded down. Morphemes being those essential additives that indicate plurality or tense. And this, according to Wolf and many others, was a decisive breakthrough in our intellectual history:
For the first Sumerian teachers this resulted in a long-lasting set of linguistic principles that facilitated teaching and learning and also accelerated the development of cognitive and linguistic skills in literate Sumerians. Thus, with the Sumerians’ contribution to teaching our species to read and write, the story began of how the reading brain changed the way we all think. All of us…
Ibid, p39
But Sumerian died out, as languages do. By 1600 BCE no-one was left to speak it. By that time the Akkadian language was in the ascendant in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian writing system and teaching methods, though, had been incorporated in various forms by the early Persian and Hittite civilisations, among others, and the Akkadians continued the tradition, helping to preserve something of that system over the next millennium.
Akkadian script, however, became increasingly syllabic, retaining only a few significant logographic (pictorial) elements. We have managed to uncover a lot of Akkadian texts, including the first great adventure story in literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which seems to have refined and greatly elaborated upon earlier Sumerian and Old Babylonian tales. It’s likely that it had a stylistic influence on the later Homeric tales – looking forward to reading it.
As to how different reading and writing systems affect the brain, and associated thought processes, I recall when I obtained my first computer in the 1990s. I’d been writing regularly, in diaries, since the late 70s, crabbed non-cursive writing in foolscap books, about 14 in all. Changing to a computer slowed things down as I’d never learned to type and I still can’t touch-type. It’s hard to say how this change affected the content and style of my writing, but I know it did. Editing, of course, became much easier, though I sometimes felt guilty, or a cheat, for so easily erasing my first thoughts for more ‘improved’ ones.
But that’s another story. How did the alphabet we use today come about? One of the first alphabetic or proto-alphabetic systems was the north Semitic alphabet from the region of what is now northern Syria. The term ‘Semitic’, often these days associated with Jewishness, actually refers more accurately to a language group widespread throughout Western Asia and Northern Africa. The north Semitic alphabet is the first known alphabetic writing system, ancestral to the Phoenician and later Greek alphabets. The term ‘north Semitic’ now seems questionable, as the oldest inscriptions in the language were recently found at Wadi el-Hol, a site near the Nile in Egypt. The topic of early or earliest alphabetical scripts anyhow seems very tangled and contested, and no doubt mixed up with national and regional pride as well as scholarly reputation. Still, I might have a go at at in a future post…
References
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the squid, 2010
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sumerian-language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
humans and neanderthals and chimps and bonobos
We now know for sure that humans and neanderthals interbred. How much, we don’t know, nor do we know the nature of the interbreeding. The spectrum presumably goes from love and flowers to warfare slaughter and rape, and I recently heard one pundit arguing for the latter option, and I tend to agree, especially given what information ancient DNA is providing about human populations over the last 50,000 years or so – that’s to say, it appears that it was much less a case of cultures and practises spreading from one place to another than populations replacing earlier populations. And it may well be that we’ll get a more gory-detail picture of human-neanderthal intimacies in the foreseeable.
We’ve also learned that chimps and bonobos bonked after their separation due to the creation of the Congo River between one and two million years ago. I wish I’d been there to see it. My guess is that would’ve been far less traumatic, though perhaps not too lovey-dovey either.
So if we accept that violence was involved – who were the perps and who the victims? My feeling is that humans were the rapists, for the simple reason that we’re still here. Neanderthals disappeared some 40,000 years ago, though a remnant population appears to have survived in the Iberian Peninsula for another few thousand years. With chimps and bonobos it was probably more fifty-fifty, though I’m prepared to accept that nothing is ever that simple.
The fact that many of us – I don’t know about me – have some neanderthal DNA is probably a mixed blessing (some genes for absorbing sunlight may have predisposed us to skin cancer, others may have affected our ability to process carbs), but it hasn’t prevented us from quadrupling our population in the last century. And since we’ve produced the first whole-genome sequence of the neanderthal genome, they’ll soon be back with us, so no worries. Unfortunately, their memories of what we did to them will have been wiped, but we’re working on it.
Seriously, humans most likely were one of many contributors to neanderthal extinction. The two species shared similar European territories for the last few millennia before their disappearance, with human numbers apparently growing as neanderthals dwindled. Maybe they were out-competed in hunting big game, and small, as their diets would’ve been more or less identical to ours. Studies of neanderthal teeth from different environments (north-west and south-west Europe) indicate that they were opportunistic dieters, eating more meat in some regions, less in others, not all-out carnivores as previously thought, so this brings them even closer in line with humans, and in competition with them when habitats overlapped. And if anything, ancient DNA is telling us that our human ancestry was even more violent than previously thought – and we’ve long known how bad it was.
We don’t have any direct evidence that modern humans killed neanderthals, and we may never have such evidence. Professor Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum argues that, as we now know that both species inhabited Western Europe for about 10,000 years before neanderthals died out, there was more likely a kind of awkward balance between the two species for much of that time. So, maybe killing but not outright extermination. Of course the same can be said for the large mammals that humans hunted. There was never any intention to exterminate them, but the pressure they were put under did for them in the end.
With chimps and bonobos, that seems to me even more of a mystery. What does a chimp look like to a bonobo, and vice versa? Most of us wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other, but that’s because we’re humans. In the past, Europeans used to say that all Chinese looked the same. Back in Darwin’s day and before, the people of Africa, Australia and Indonesia were collectively termed ‘savages’ by ‘white’ people. It’s taken a while for us dumb humans to become more discriminating. So it’s hardly surprising that bonobos weren’t recognised as a separate species from chimps until well into the twentieth century. Speciation itself is a rather more complicated and questionable affair than it was thought to be in the time of Linnaeus – and it wasn’t particularly simple then. Here’s an interesting quote from a Science article on chimp-bonobo interbreeding:
These findings come on the heels of other genome analyses—such as between coyotes, dogs, and wolves—showing such gene flow between species. “The more we look at genomes, the more it seems to be found,” [Professor Jim Mallet] says. “It’s going to be pretty common,” he predicts.
An article in earth.com, a popular science site, linked below, provides a summary of the physical and social differences between bonobos and chimps, though I can’t vouch for its accuracy – for example it claims that bonobo males and females are ‘much closer in size’ than chimp males and females. I’d always thought that the sexual dimorphism difference was slight, now I’m not so sure. Another interesting difference, that I’d not noticed before in my reading, is that bonobos have dark faces from birth, whereas chimps’ faces are lighter, and darken with age. I can well believe though that there are individual differences, in this as in robustness and gracility, bonobos being in general more gracile. Of course, chimp males are more dominant, so I can well imagine chimp-bonobo interbreeding to be a violent affair. And with bonobo females tending to stick together it would’ve been difficult to pick off an isolated female. Perhaps we should build a few Pan-friendly bridges across the Congo River and see what happens….
References
https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/science-culture/neanderthals-in-prime-time
https://www.science.org/content/article/chimps-and-bonobos-had-flings-and-swapped-genes-past
https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/chimpanzees-vs-bonobos-whats-the-difference/
understanding genomics 2: socio-sexual inequities and bonobos!
1 in 200 Men are Direct Descendants of Genghis Khan – Answers in Genomics!
Jacinta: So this blog piece is a bit of a change of pace from the science we’re obviously having trouble with – and I should mention that we’ve started watching the 11-part ‘Introduction to genomics’ videos online to help us with the basics – but what we’ve read in Who we are and how we got here and other texts is providing further evidence of a violent past that reflects an ancestry more associated with chimp-like behaviour, much exacerbated by the deadly weapons we developed along the way, than the bonobo togetherness that my endless optimism sees signs of in that part of the world that is increasingly empowering the female sex.
Canto: Yes, that in itself is a long story of gradual release from the masculinist Catholic hegemony of the medieval world, with its witch-hunts and its general suppression of female power and influence…
Jacinta: Going much further back in fact to the ancient Greeks and, for example, Homer’s Odyssey, and the treatment of women therein, as explored on this site years ago (referenced below).
Canto: Yes, this general improvement in the treatment of women, and of each other – the end of witch-hunts (I mean real ones) and public executions and torturings and so on – at least in English-speaking and Western European nations, has been highlighted in Pinker’s The better angels of our nature and other analyses. But we still have the Chinese Testosterone Party, the masculinist horrors of Iran and Afghanistan, and the macho thuggery of little Mr Pudding and his acolytes, to name but a few. The humano-bonobo world is still a long way off.
Jacinta: Yes the Ukrainian horror, getting all the airplay here that Mr Putin’s incursions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia didn’t, reminds us that the horrors of two major European wars and Japan’s macho offensives in the first half of the 20th century haven’t been enough to reform our world – from a human one to a humano-bonobo one. But I doubt that genetic tinkering would do the trick.
Canto: Vegetarianism perhaps? But then, Hitler…
Jacinta: No easy solutions I’m afraid. But there are some who are interested in using genomics to highlight just how un-bonobo-like our past has been. Or rather, it’s not so much an interest, it’s more like telling the gruesome story that genomic data is revealing to them. In Neil Oliver’s History of Scotland, for example, he recounts how genomic data reveals that the Pictish men of the Orkneys and the northern tip of Scotland were almost completely replaced by men from Northern Europe, the Vikings, in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, while the female line remained largely Pictish. Slaughter, combined with probable rape, being the best explanation. Reading this reminded me of the chimpanzee war of the seventies in Tanzania, which admittedly was more of a civil war, and apparently less one-sided than the Viking invasion of the Orkneys, or the European invasion of the Americas, or the British invasion of Australia, but in some ways it was similar – an attempt, if not entirely conscious, to replace one population with another, and to the victor, the spoils.
Canto: Well, Reich is fairly circumspect in his book, but he does have a small section towards the end, ‘The genomics of inequality’, from which we may draw pretty clear inferences:
Any attempt to paint a vivid picture of what a human culture was like before the period of written texts needs to be viewed with caution. Nevertheless, ancient DNA have provided evidence that the Yamnaya [a relatively advanced steppe culture that emerged about 5000 years ago] were indeed a society in which power was concentrated among a small number of elite males. The Y chromosomes that the Yamnaya carried were nearly all of a few types, which shows that a limited number of males must have been extraordinarily successful in spreading their genes. In contrast, in their mitochondrial DNA, the Yamnaya had more diverse sequences.
and
This Yamnaya expansion also cannot have been entirely friendly, as is clear from the fact that the proportion of Y chromosomes of steppe origin in both western Europe and in India today is much larger than the proportion of steppe ancestry in the rest of the genome.
This is a roundabout or academic way of saying, or ‘suggesting’ (oh dear, I’m becoming an academic) that the Yamnaya forcibly replaced many of the males of earlier populations in those regions and interbred, in one way or another, with the females.
Jacinta: Yes, again very chimp-like, mutatis mutandis. The good thing is that we’re more and more coming to terms with our violent past – and I would love to be able to trace it further back, beyond Homo sapiens, or at least to the earliest H sapiens 100,000 years ago or so.
Canto: Well, I’m thinking that the CHLCA (chimp human last common ancestor) would be a good place to start, but we’ll probably never know what that population was like – was it more chimp-like or bonobo-like in its social (and sexual) behaviour? But there’s a huge difference between that CHLCA and us – just consider brain size.
Jacinta: But that’s a tricky measure – look at H naledi and H floresiensis. Chimps average around 400cc, gorillas 500cc, H naledi has been estimated at anything from 450 to 600cc, and H floresiensis, from the only extant skull, came in at 426cc. And those two hominins are considered relatively modern. Our brain size is about 1300cc. It’s over the place. But forget all these caveats for a moment, I’ve heard that we got our bigger brains courtesy of hunting big game and cooking meat – and the hunting at least strikes me as a macho activity, leading to a hierarchy of the big and strong, and so, alpha males and all the shite that follows…
Canto: Yes, and bonobos have evolved in a more physically restricted but resource-rich environment, and have somehow become less hierarchy-obsessed, though still hierarchical – the sons of the most powerful females apparently have a higher status in the male hierarchy.
Jacinta: Yes all this is important as we strive to establish a humano-bonobo world. In our incredibly diverse human world we have people dying of over-eating in some parts, and of starvation and malnutrition in others. But in the world of relative abundance that you and I live in, mechanisation and other technologies have reduced the need for physical strength, and testosterone levels in males have dropped rapidly in just the last few decades. We’re eating meat more than ever, but in our cities, nobody can hear the victims’ screams. And we don’t have to do the hunting and killing ourselves, so if we want to toughen up we have to do it via gymnasiums and sports, which are no longer gender-exclusive.
Canto: All this has little to do with genomics, but it seems to me that the macho-chimp orientation of early humans since the CHLCA has much to do with increased proliferation, diversity and inter-group competition for resources, especially over the last 20,000 years, or less. The domestication of horses and the invention of the wheel, and sophisticated sea-going vessels would have helped. Different groups advanced at different rates, with some developing better weapons – for hunting and then for warfare, and naturally they hankered for more territory to expand into, to ‘lord over’. Those more advanced groups became more hierarchical, and gaining more territory and ‘winning’ over more people became an end in itself – think of early versions of Genghis Khan and little Mr Pudding.
Jacinta: That’s why, like the female bonobos who gang up on uppity males before they can do too much damage, we need to stick it the Mr Puddings of the world – hit em hard, before they know what hit em.
References
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here, 2018
an interminable conversation 12: more on hydrogen, and wondering about local power costs
filched from an anti-global warming dinosaur – all’s fair….
Jacinta: So we’ve learned a lot about the problems with hydrogen as a potential fuel, and its problems as a chemical, in the production of fertiliser, in the petrochemical industry, and the need to clean up such usage, for example the contribution of ‘fugitive methane’ to carbon emissions. We also learned that carbon capture and storage, mooted for decades, seems to be going nowhere, largely due to its unprofitability re the private sector…
Canto: So now we’re going to listen to Rosie Barnes, of “Engineering with Rosie”, at a Hydrogen Online Conference, one of many interactive conferences apparently being planned. I’ve heard Rosie before, expressing some skepticism about hydrogen in general, so I’m surprised that she’s prepared to enter the ‘lion’s den’ of what I naturally presume to be hydrogen advocacy.
Jacinta: Yes I’m not sure I want to listen to the post-talk interactive session of this video, as I’m a bit squeamish about confrontation. Why can’t everybody just be nice and agree about everything?!
Canto: Yeah well Rosie begins with the question – which hydrogen projects should we prioritise? And she also mentions the hydrogen energy supply chain, which is apparently a liquid hydrogen transport project between Australia and Japan, about which I know nothing.
Jacinta: Though actually we did write about this before, in a piece that now seems haplessly naive (linked below, FWIW). Anyway, the ScienceDirect website has this ‘headline’ in its overview of liquid hydrogen:
Production of liquid hydrogen or liquefaction is an energy-intensive process, typically requiring amounts of energy equal to about one-third of the energy in liquefied hydrogen.
which don’t sound promising.
Canto: But Rosie seems to think the hydrogen future is a bit more rosy these days. Another focus of her talk will be ‘giga projects’, presumably meaning ginormous projects, such as the ‘Asian renewable energy hub’ and the ‘western green energy hub’, about which more research is needed – by us.
Jacinta: So she was hearing a lot of hype, mainly from politicians, a couple of years ago, about all sorts of hydrogen ‘applications’, but mainly about ‘power system balancing’, which hopefully we’ll hear more about – maybe to do with balancing for the variability of wind and solar – and for vehicular transport. And clearly she didn’t get it, especially in respect of other applications, no doubt, such as home heating. I mean, why hydrogen?
Canto: Indeed. She identified four red flags at the outset – and we need to dig deeper into these. First, ‘will developers keep building wind and solar if prices are negative?’ I don’t know what that means…
Jacinta: Economics is definitely not our strong suit. Actually we don’t have a strong suit. So here’s Wikipedia:
In economics, negative pricing can occur when demand for a product drops or supply increases to an extent that owners or suppliers are prepared to pay others to accept it, in effect setting the price to a negative number. This can happen because it costs money to transport, store, and dispose of a product even when there is little demand to buy it.
Canto: So it’s not immediately clear what that has to do with hydrogen, but let’s mention the other 3 red flags: 2 – will negative electricity prices persist? 3 – round trip efficiency, and 4 – the head start for and rapid improvement of other renewable technologies. Just putting those out there for now.
Jacinta: The questionable nature of the first one is – if electricity production becomes virtually free (negative pricing) then hydrogen production will be virtually free too, using renewables. I think. So the first two red flags are clearly connected. Businesses need to be profitable, so they won’t build (wind or solar) if there’s no market or if the market is saturated. With green hydrogen anyway, the production costs are, or have been quite extreme and those costs would have to come down by a factor of three to be equivalent to ‘dirty’ hydrogen production, to say nothing of cheaper electricity competing for the grid. To wait for the energy to be ‘negatively priced’ and only then use it for electrolysis seemed risky and possibly unworkable. A lot of equipment, etc, for little return.
Canto: Much of this was looking back at 2020 – not so long ago – and looking to Germany as an example of a highly renewable grid, but now she considers our Australian state – South Australia, which produces a lot of wind, first, and solar, second. Over the past 12 months, 65% or so of our grid electricity has been from renewables. Largely wind and solar, rather than base-load renewables (meaning nuclear perhaps, in the case of Germany?)
Jacinta: Yes, presumably nuclear, also hydro could be base load, as presumably it is in Tasmania. Rosie mentioned that we don’t have a lot of geothermal, and that rather shocked me, as I thought there wasn’t much geothermal anywhere, that it was one of those eternally future technologies….
Canto: The USA’s EIA (Energy Information Administration) tells us more:
The most active geothermal resources are usually found along major tectonic plate boundaries where most volcanoes are located. One of the most active geothermal areas in the world is called the Ring of Fire, which encircles the Pacific Ocean.
Most of the geothermal power plants in the United States are in western states and Hawaii, where geothermal energy resources are close to the earth’s surface. California generates the most electricity from geothermal energy. The Geysers dry steam reservoir in Northern California is the largest known dry steam field in the world and has been producing electricity since 1960.
Jacinta: Well, thanks for that. Something new every day…
Canto: So Rosie tells us we have had persistent negative electricity prices in SA – which is interesting considering that our household bills are painfully high. She presents a couple of graphics that I don’t fully understand… I certainly can’t understand negative pricing. Clearly not talking about consumers…
Jacinta: I’d like to know why our electricity costs are so high. Right now please. We can get back to Rosie later.
Canto: Well it’s a worthwhile detour to pursue, but it’ll require a bit of research. So maybe next time. So having watched Rosie’s not-so-rosey presentation, without watching the Q & A, because I tend to be a bit squeamish about that format, I find myself wondering…. there was little mention of Prof Cebon’s concerns about the questionable future of blue hydrogen and CCS, or of the problem of fugitive methane in the production of hydrogen from natural gas, or of the obvious failure in the take-up of hydrogen for passenger transport, or of the cost and difficult logistics of hydrogen compression and transport. And as to its possible use in storage, the battery solution seems more likely, surely?
Jacinta: She did point out, either in this talk or her earlier one, that hydrogen often looks like a solution looking for a problem, and this seems surely to be the case for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. It seems that EVs have won that race, and the improvements continue to be rapid. Well, we might pursue the hydrogen issue, and why so many people are hooked on hydrogen, and the details of hydrogen production, and many other issues relating to renewables, for a while yet, but let’s have a look at the cost of energy here in South Australia, where rooftop solar is very popular, and wind farms are kicking up a storm, but our electricity bills are still painfully high….
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/liquid-hydrogen
an interminable conversation 11: Hydrogen?
yeah, hang on a minute
Jacinta: So green hydrogen – what is it, is it real? Does it really have a future? Where, if anywhere, does it fit in that future? It keeps getting put down, it keeps getting talked about, and it seems most experts say, yeah, it’s in the mix, but at a fairly low concentration.
Canto: Good topic – this will allow us to look back at some videos we’ve viewed which have left me scratching my head. So first, on the inestimable Fully Charged podcast, Robert Llewellyn interviewed a clearly Australian Prof, David Cebon…
Jacinta: And this interview received really rave reviews in the comments, I noticed, which surely says something.
Canto: Yes, so let’s try and get our heads around it… and wow, having watched that interview, I feel a bit dumb for having vaguely hyped green hydrogen’s promise, and for being overly skeptical of Elon Musk’s dismissal of hydrogen a few years go – especially in light of the difficulty of compressing and moving the stuff.
Jacinta: So let’s start at the beginning. Prof Cebon is with the Hydrogen Science Coalition (https://h2sciencecoalition.com), and is a professor of mechanical engineering at Cambridge University. He’s the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight, and he’s co-authored over a hundred papers etc etc, so he’s super-knowledgeable about this stuff, especially when it comes to vehicular transport.
Canto: So Robert started by talking positively about hydrogen fuel cell cars as clean and green – no toxic fumes. But, nowhere to refuel them – and refuelling is one of many issues.
Jacinta: And then it was onto the colours of hydrogen, which I didn’t know about. So you ‘make’ hydrogen in two ways – electrolysing water, that is separating into hydrogen and oxygen by means of an electric current, which is energy-intensive. Pulling the H2O molecules apart isn’t easy. If the electricity you use for this is renewable, that makes ‘green hydrogen’. If that energy isn’t renewable it’s called ‘yellow hydrogen’. Of course, energy out of the grid may be a mix – here in South Australia it’s largely gas and renewables, whereas in the eastern states a lot of it is coal – nasty brown coal in Victoria. And so on.
Canto: And as Prof Cebon points out, using green energy to produce hydrogen, rather than to grid it directly into houses and businesses, might seem a bit odd. He calls it an opportunity cost.
Jacinta: The next main ‘colour’ of hydrogen comes from fossil fuel, particularly gas (mostly methane, CH4). By treating gas with super-hot steam, you can break it down into hydrogen and CO2. That carbon dioxide normally goes into the atmosphere. Some 2% of the world’s carbon emissions comes from producing this sort of ‘grey’ hydrogen, which is used to make ammonia (NH3) for fertiliser, and in the petrochemical industry. That percentage is about as much as aviation uses (though fertiliser is pretty essential). However, if you can ‘carbon capture and storage’ that CO2, then the hydrogen involved becomes lovely blue hydrogen.
Canto: Yes but as the Prof points out, once you’ve stripped the carbon from the methane, the remaining hydrogen isn’t very energy intensive, so you need a lot of methane to make a useful amount of hydrogen. Better to use the methane directly via the grid!
Jacinta: As Prof Cebon says, you need more methane to fuel your economy via hydrogen (around 40% more) than if you just used natural gas directly. All very attractive to the natural gas industry!
Canto: Right – what with the ‘electrify everything’ trend, the gas industry will be worried about its market, so here’s an opportunity – pump up hydrogen. Beware of the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying! And it’s blue hydrogen they’re really after, for financial reasons.
Jacinta: So back to electrolysis, green hydrogen, and efficiency. The electrolysis process is about 75% efficient, but importantly the energy has changed form. Think of energy as either work or heat, and forget kWhs for the moment. It’s work that’s important. You want the energy to produce more work and less heat (as with LED versus incandescent light globes). The combination of the two is the total energy output according to the first law of thermodynamics, or the law of energy conservation. Electricity from your battery produces work (eg in an EV) with very high efficiency. Diesel, petrol and other chemical fuels, including hydrogen, produce a lot of heat. According to the prof, the efficiency of an infernal combustion engine, which is essentially its work to heat ratio, is around 30%. Diesel may get up to maybe 45% but that’s the limit. Electricity can reach 90 to 95% efficiency. Chemical energy apparently runs up against the second law of thermodynamics, which limits the conversion of heat back to work. There’s always going to be a loss.
Canto: Right again. So 25% of the energy used in electrolysis is lost as heat. You have to convert the heat back to electricity via a fuel cell, which also has limited efficiency. And this efficiency reduction is before the energy required for compression, transportation, etc. So it’s all very problematic, though hydrogen has been touted as a miracle energy source since the early days of the nuclear industry.
Jacinta: Yes, and there are plenty of other problems with hydrogen – first, it’s colourless and odourless, and it’s very hard to contain without leaks, being of course the most molecularly tiny element in existence, so to use it as a home fuel would require a massive infrastructural upgrade, and of course it’s highly explosive and generates high NOx emissions when burned in the home – more so than methane. It’s also very inefficient compared to electrified heat pumps, which the prof calculates as about six times more efficient. So why would you use renewable energy in this inefficient way? The industry, according to the prof, is trying to hide this impracticability from the public.
Canto: Professor Cebon is involved with, or maybe heads up, the Hydrogen Science Coalition, which highlights five principles. First, the only acceptable form, in terms of fuel, is green hydrogen, using electrolysis via green energy. Blue hydrogen isn’t clean – being gotten from ‘dirty’ methane, and what Cebon calls fugitive methane, emissions from flaring and venting and leaking, amounts to the total annual carbon emissions of Europe – it’s a huge problem, due partially to the unregulated nature of the gas industry in Russia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Carbon capture and storage, which has been mooted for decades, has gotten nowhere, because – where are the profits in it? No private enterprise would touch it.
Jacinta: The second principle, or project, is to clean up the chemical use of hydrogen in ammonia fertilisers and in the steel and petrochemical industries by preventing the escape of so much of the C02 byproduct from escaping into the atmosphere. Not so much via CCS as by more efficient processing. The third project is to speed up electrification – let’s not pretend that hydrogen is an option for heating homes, for example, or that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can be competitive with EVs. That battle has already been won.
Canto: Fourth is to rid ourselves of the idea that blending hydrogen into gas for any energy purposes is going to be useful. Hydrogen is a low energy replacement for methane, so you would need much more of the stuff, with all the attendant problems. And fifth and last is that hydrogen can only be used locally – that’s to say, at source. Transporting hydrogen safely is hugely expensive – being very light, many vehicles would be required to transport a sufficient energy load – 16 to 1 compared to diesel, according to our Prof. Not at all practicable.
Jacinta: And apparently hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are much more expensive to run than EVs, requiring replacement parts and so forth. So why are people still touting hydrogen. We’ll look more into that in a future piece.
Canto: Yes, Australia’s ‘Engineering with Rosie’ vodcaster has participated in a webinar for Mission Hydrogen, which sounds ominous, but I’ve heard her being skeptical about the green hydrogen movement, so we’ll see what she has to say.
References
an interminable conversation 9: some basic physics
yer most basic sine graph
Jacinta: So it’s time for us oldies to go to school, and get into physics from scratch, including the maths.
Canto: Yes, we’re not going to go all historical this time, much as we love all the nerdy characters to be encountered, instead we’re going to go with the concepts, from simple to complicated. I’ve found a collection of videos, called ‘crash course physics’, and we’re going to follow the ineffable logic of the presenter, Dr Shini Somara, to reach the pinnacle of sagesse en physique. Starting with basic motion in a straight line.
Jacinta: Exciting. I’ve done that. But in this first episode she deals with cars and acceleration, inter alia, including its maths. Equations! Time, position, velocity and acceleration will be explained/analysed in simple terms for this starter.
Canto: Kinematic equations – we’re going to the Kinema! So, motion in one direction on a straight line. You’re stopped at a red light, and then put your foot on the accelerator when it goes green. Seven seconds later (precisely), there’s a siren behind you – a police car is asking you to stop. They give you a ticket for speeding in a 100kph zone.
Jacinta: So, in 7 seconds you’re up to more than 100kph? I know nothing about cars but that’s – unusual? Is it?
Canto: I’m sure car nerds can tell us, but so can google. There are plenty of cars that can get to 100 in less than 4 secs, even less than 3. Supposedly. Anyway, you’re doubtful about the police claim, but you can’t be sure, your speedometer is stuffed. How can you challenge the police claim, using maths?
Jacinta: You can’t, and anyway in Australia you’d be defected for a stuffed speedo.
Canto: But this is the USA, the land of shitty libertarian laws. So you’re travelling in one direction, one-dimensionally, so to speak. So the key variables here are the afore-mentioned time, position, velocity and acceleration. We also have to bear in mind change in position, aka displacement, which could have a positive or negative value – in this example, clearly positive. Now, velocity is about how that displacement occurs over time. It also can have a positive or negative value. Acceleration is about changes in velocity over time. You can feel that change – positive or negative – when you’re ‘thrown’ forward or backward on acceleration or braking.
Jacinta: So Dr Somara presents graphs that are fairly easy to read for a stationary vehicle, and one moving at a constant velocity. The vertical x-axis measures position or displacement in metres from an initial position, the y axis measures time. A stationary vehicle will show a straight horizontal line from the moment it stopped until it starts to move again. Constant velocity will show a straight line moving diagonally along both axes. An accelerating vehicle will of course show a curving line, curving up to the vertical, while a decelerating one will be curving to the horizontal.
Canto: So that’s a simple position v time graph, now to look at velocity and acceleration slightly differently, with velocity in metres/second on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal, and with acceleration in metres per second per second, that is, metres per second squared, on the vertical axis, and time, in seconds, on the horizontal. So this relates all our variables, time, position, velocity and acceleration. Average velocity is the change in position over time, and acceleration is the change in velocity over time. To get average velocity you divide change in position by change in time.
Jacinta: But as Dr Somara says, subtraction is also a feature – to find out ‘change’ you subtract initial value from final value, which sounds right but somehow seems to contradict the previous….
Canto: One’s talking about a change, the other about an average. They’re quite different. So the change in a particular value, or variable, is symbolised or abbreviated as delta, ∆. So, v = ∆x/∆t, average velocity (the v should have a bar above it, but I haven’t learned how to do that – will I need an extra keyboard?) equals change in position over change in time. For Dr Somari’s example, the car moved from 4 metres to 13 metres (the change in position), i.e. a value of 9 metres for ∆x. This occurred over 3 seconds, apparently, which divides as 3m/sec for average velocity over that period. But of course the car was accelerating during that period. The equation for acceleration is a = ∆v/∆t, for average acceleration.
Jacinta: Okay, and we can, apparently handily, rearrange the equation to get v(average) = v(at time zero) + at. This equation is called the Definition of Acceleration. Tadaaa! Constant acceleration is equal to the change in velocity divided by change in time. This is the first of the two main kinematic equations, which links velocity acceleration and time.
Canto: Okay now our physicist turns to gravity (g), which here on Earth is a force causing acceleration at 9.81 m/sec squared. But then she talks about the second kinematic equation, the Displacement Curve, which involves acceleration, starting velocity and time in order to calculate displacement:
x(position) – x(at time zero, initial position) = v(initial velocity)t +1/2a(acceleration)t(squared).
All of which looks very messy because I haven’t learned how to do the proper notation. Anyway this links acceleration as change in velocity to velocity as change in position. Right?
Jacinta: Uhhh, yeah. And the other kinematic equations, we’re assured, are just rearrangements of this dynamic duo. So apparently this takes us back to our speeding issue at the start. The initial velocity was 0, the time was 7 seconds. The displacement curve²equation/formula can be used to work it all out, or at least the acceleration. Our physicist tells that x – x (initial position) is 122 metres, which equals initial velocity (zero) multiplied by 7 seconds (which must surely be zero?) plus I/2a (which is to be found) multiplied by 7s squared, which is 49 seconds. So 122m = 0 + 49 (49) multiplied by half the acceleration, which by calculation I discovered to be close to 2.5, so the acceleration was approximately 5 metres per second squared.
Canto: It works out! And, following our expert, we can use the Definition of Acceleration formula to arrive at final velocity. It’s basically V + at, or 0 + 5 X 7, so a speed of 35 m/sec, which in km terms is about 126 km/h. Amazing! We got the maths. There is hope!
Jacinta: Well they’re diving into the deep end with crash course physics, as the next video is all about calculus and derivatives. About which I have no idea.
Canto: Yes, maths are the basis of physics, and we lost contact with complex maths decades, though I’m quite good at multiplication. But calculus, duh. Though our teacher tells us that it’s all just about accurately describing change.
Jacinta: Important – she goes on to explain things called derivatives, but I note in the inset:
Not all equations have derivatives! When we say ‘equations’ here, we really mean a function – an equation with only one output for each input. More specifically, we’re talking about functions that have derivatives.
I’m looking forward to clarification of all that.
Canto: So calculus explains the why’s and wherefores of change through derivatives. She also mentions integrals early on, as ways of calculating area under a curve – which we actually mentioned in those terms in a previous post.
Jacinta: We sound smart sometimes. So, derivatives. Dr Somara returns to the car and speeding example. The car drives off after the police incident, accelerating of course. But we don’t have a direct measure of the acceleration, but we know positional change over time. This is apparently equal to amount of time driving, squared, X = t². After 20 secs of driving, some kind of roadside ‘detector’ reveals the car’s speed. The driver takes time to register that she’s going even faster than 126 mph.
Canto: Dumb blond? Maybe not, maybe the detector is dodgy. How to find the velocity at the moment she passes it? Which, according to Dr Somara is the derivative of her change in position. And this is also about limits. These are key ideas:
Limits are based on the idea that if you have an equation on a graph, you can often predict what it’s going to look like at one point, just by knowing what it looks like at the surrounding points.
Jacinta: So our teacher gives the example of graphing x = t² when t approaches the limit of 0. So remember we have our time on the horizontal, and distance covered (or displacement, or positional change – it seems ‘distance’ is a no-no in this maths) on the vertical axis. So, moving back to zero from t=1 and x=1 she finds that when t=0.5, x=0.25, and when t reaches 0.1, x=0.001, so both values approach zero. This apparently shows what happens when you make intervals smaller. Another definition:
An interval is just a range on a graph. It’s the space between two points on the horizontal axis.
Of course, because that’s the time axis, generally. This is great parroting, but then when parrots copy their trainer perfectly they’re regarded as brilliant.
Canto: So we’re calculating the average velocity over a particular interval – from 15 to 20 secs. We use the equation v = ∆x/∆t (∆x is change in position, ∆t is change in time). The change in position, after subtraction, was 175 metres, the change in time 5 secs. So the average velocity works out as 35 m/sec. But this is only an average, and doesn’t take into account acceleration. But using limits gets us closer to the number we want. You can calculate your average over increasingly small intervals to arrive at an increasingly accurate figure.
Jacinta: So, sticking with our teacher, velocity is an equation that describes change in position, acceleration describes change in velocity. Velocity is thus the derivative of position and acceleration is the derivative of velocity. This is expressed in writing, using, for example, the power rule, expressed using variables and their numbered exponents. So x = t² is an equation that works here. To calculate the derivative, you take the exponent, 2, and put it in front of the variable, and subtract 1 from the exponent, and that’s the derivative, 2t. In full, the derivative of x = t² is 2t.
Canto: That’s a trick, as Dr Somara said, but it’s not really explained. She says ‘no matter how [you’re accelerating], your velocity will be 2t – double the number of seconds’. So I think it depends on those seconds. After 5 seconds, say, you’re travelling at 5m/sec, but after 20 secs, your speed is 40m/sec. So dx/dt = 2t ‘which is just a way of saying, mathematically, we’re taking the derivative of x with respect to t’. But it’s also written differently sometimes: if f(t) = t², then f'(t) = 2t. And I’m guessing that f stands for function, but I don’t quite know what a function is.
Jacinta: A function is:
in mathematics, an expression, rule, or law that defines a relationship between one variable (the independent variable) and another variable (the dependent variable). Functions are ubiquitous in mathematics and are essential for formulating physical relationships in the sciences.
That’s from Britannica online. So to continue, if f(t) = t², then f'(t) = 2t. That’s to say, f prime (t) = 2t, according to our teacher, who doesn’t explain ‘prime’. Do we have to do a maths course before we do this physics course? Does it have to do with prime numbers?
Canto: Apparently not. The symbol can serve a number of purposes in maths. Let’s just leave it for now. Using the power rule we can find other derivatives, e.g. x = 7t to-the-power-6. This equation has the variable t, and its exponent 6. We take the exponent and put it in front of the 7t variable, multiplying the number and subtracting 1 from the exponent, 42t to-the power 5. That’s to say dx/dt = 42(t to the power of 5). But maybe that shouldn’t be bracketed. And when the exponent is a fraction or decimal, the derivative of, say t to the power of one half is 1/2t to the negative one half. You always minus one, I don’t know why.
Jacinta: Ours is clearly not to reason why, at least not yet. This derivative trick works for negatives too. In the case of x = t to-minus-2, the derivative (dx/dt) = -2t to minus 3. Not very comprehensible, and then she mentions the dread word, trigonometry, used for calculating triangles, their angles and sides. Apparently physics uses right-angled triangles a lot. We shall see.
Canto: Indeed, let’s get into it. The derivatives of sine x and cosine x. If you have a right-angled triangle with an adjacent angle x, sin(x) = the length of the opposite side divided by the hypotenuse. For cosine, cos(x) it’s the length of the adjacent side divided by the hypotenuse. So, sin(x) = o/h, cos(x) = a/h. ‘So the graphs will tell you what those ratios will be, depending on the angle’.
Jacinta: I’m not sure if I really understand this, but let’s move on into further weird territory, in which sin(x) is plotted on a graph going from -360° to 360° on the x (horizontal) axis (that’s the ‘phase’, in degrees) and -1 to 1 on the y axis. At x = -90° and x = 90° the curve turns – that’s at every 180°. At those points the equations aren’t changing and the derivative is zero. Between the points the derivative oscillates from positive to negative. That derivative is in fact cos(x). I’m not sure why, but the derivative of cos(x) is -sin(x), the derivative of -sin(x) is -cos(x) and the derivative of -cos(x) is sin(x), for future reference. I’m hoping it’ll all become clear some day. Graphing all these will provide the proofs, evidently.
Canto: Yes, so Dr Somara finishes off this vid with another derivative that’s important in calculus, e×, the derivative of which is also e×, always. e, like π, is an irrational number which is quite vital to calculus, apparently. And even finance. Can’t wait to find out. So with the preceding we can, supposedly, take any equation for position and calculate the derivative, and so, velocity. And for velocity, your acceleration. Using integrals, which we’ll soon learn about, we can go backwards from acceleration to velocity, and from velocity to position. Presumably that will be next time.
Jacinta: So easy…
References
the leader of the free world?: three things
Canto: So now we’re going to have a go at US jingoism, which is the same as jingoism elsewhere, only more so.
Jacinta: Yes, when nationalism gets in the way of simple humanism, or what might be better termed as ‘humaneness’, or any term that can be defined as opposition to needless suffering, human or otherwise, then it’s a problem.
Canto: And nations, it seems to me, are a much more recent phenomenon, by and large, than cultures. So when national governments suppress particular cultures within their boundaries, as the Chinese thugocracy is doing today, in the name of some unifying national principle, it’s a problem.
Jacinta: And let’s be fair, Australia has done this in the past, as has the US – both nations in respect of their indigenous populations – and it has been a common feature of many nations as they seek to forge this ‘national identity’ dream.
Canto: But also to be fair, some nations are learning lessons from their history, and embracing a more multicultural national identity. But to return to the US, and the term US exceptionalism’, we’ve already agreed that, from an outsider’s perspective, the US appears to be exceptional in only two things, when compared to other WEIRD countries – its jingoism and its religiosity.
Jacinta: It’s kind of religiously jingoistic. As well as just plain religious, compared to Australia, Western Europe etc. Religious, or worshipful, about its political system, its Presidents (remembered by number!), and its clearly outdated and overly vague Constitution.
Canto: Indeed. But, having paid rather too much attention to US politics since the advent of Trump – because we could barely believe that any WEIRD nation could elect such a Chump, or permit to stand for the office of ‘President of the Leader of the Free World, or ‘President of the World’s Greatest Democracy’, a person whom no rational interview committee would hire to run a public toilet, an incompetent buffoon, in fact -having been seduced to watching this slow-motion train wreck, I’ve often heard these terms – ‘the Leader of the Free World’ and ‘the World’s Greatest Democracy’ – spoken by pundits of the Left and the Right, by politicians as well as journalists, generally in an offhand ‘speaks for itself’ sort of way that suggests to me that they might’ve learned this mantra in kindergarten. So I want to say three things about this, and I’m going to focus specifically on the ‘Leader of the Free World’ claim.
First Thing. The free world – a relative term, of course – doesn’t require a leader. Essentially, that’s what makes it free. It certainly doesn’t need to be led like a flock of sheep by a self-appointed shepherd.
Second Thing. There seems to be an assumption that the USA, which has the largest population of all the ‘free world’ or WEIRD countries (India, a nominally democratic nation, doesn’t quite tick all the boxes for WEIRDness), and the largest economy and military capacity, should automatically be named WEIRD leader. But that’s like assuming that the biggest and strongest kid in the class should be named ‘class leader’. After all, the biggest and strongest kid might be a blithering idiot. In fact, under Trump’s leadership, the USA did become something of a blithering idiot, and was so regarded by much of the WEIRD world. And it could become so again. If, for some specific purpose, the WEIRD world requires a leader, then it should choose a leader fit for that purpose. But I would argue that, most of the time, a leader is not required. What is most required is collaboration and mutual support. The free world shouldn’t be seen as hierarchical.
Third thing. When we talk about the free world, obviously the key word is ‘free’. Yet there is a problem within the USA vis-a-vis freedom, because the imprisonment rate there is higher than that of any other WEIRD country, by a long way (and meanwhile, high-level criminals can be elected to the nation’s top leadership positions). This third thing is worth looking at more closely. The World Population Review website has figures on incarceration rates by country, and it does provide sources, but let’s face it everybody knows that the USA’s incarceration rate is way off the scale – the greatest proportion of imprisoned citizens on Earth. And considering that second, third and fourth places are filled by Rwanda, Turkmenistan and El Salvador, nations not noted, historically, for their political freedoms, this screams at anyone that something is seriously wrong with this ‘bastion of freedom’.
Jacinta: Mind you, I wouldn’t trust any statistics coming out of China or Putinland…
Canto: So why such a high rate of the unfree in the land of the free? The World Population Review website provides the figures in numbers per 100,000 of the population. The USA’s number is 629, which has actually fallen in the last few years (it was 716 in 2013), but it’s still easily the highest in the world. Okay, as far as we know. Australia’s number is 167, which is bad enough. Western European countries seem to be doing something right – they’re obviously not riddled by crime, or they don’t see imprisoning people as the solution. Here’s some numbers. France 119, Portugal 113, Spain 113, Belgium 93, Austria 91, Italy 91, Switzerland 73, Sweden 73, Denmark 72, Germany 70, Netherlands 60, Norway 56 and Finland 50. And in Japan, that admittedly odd country, the number is 37. So why is the US number so horrifically high, and why isn’t the WEIRD world investigating the USA for crimes against its own humanity? Well, it may be that the USA is like the proverbial frog in the slowly warming pot – it seems oblivious to its self-made mess. But there are some clear-cut reasons. For a start, to call US prisons correctional institutions, as they do, is an obscene joke. The privatisation of the prison system has only increased the problem of dehumanisation and recidivism – the USA’s recidivism rate is one of the world’s highest. A tendency towards longer sentences – for whatever reason – has exacerbated the problem, and the USA’s fantastical ‘war against drugs’ has meant high rates of imprisonment for victimless crimes.
In short, no country that treats such a vast proportion of its own citizens, many of them struggling to survive in situations of severe disadvantage – in this way should be allowed to get away with claiming to be a bastion of freedom.
Jacinta: Yes, but you can’t get away from it, history tells us that might is right, and if you don’t get it, you’ll get stomped on. Peter the Great told me that.
Canto: Okay… so this was all a waste of time then.
what is electricity? part 3: capacitors, dielectrics and confusion
an electrophorus, apparently
Canto: I’ve found a useful website on the history of the capacitor, which tells us that the term condenser was an early term for a capacitor, presumably because it accumulates charge, condensing it – like condensed milk?
Jacinta: Condensation in chemistry, or whatever, means transformation from a gas, or vapour, to a liquid. Remember they were thinking of an electrical fluid in the early days.
Canto: Well this excellent website on the early days tells me that the effect they were creating by rubbing a glass globe is now called the triboelectric effect. And by the way it was Franklin who worked out that it was the glass that was creating the effect – nout to do with water, it seems.
Jacinta: Yes, it’s an everyday effect – you can get it just through combing your hair, or rubbing a plastic pen on your sleeve and then picking up bits of paper. I did it at school! I was very sciencey in them days.
Canto: Interestingly, there are lots of nice comments on this website, pointing out that the term for capacitor in a number of European languages is kondensator, or variants thereof. But we get yet another story here on early Leyden jars, which I’ll need to unpick:
It was realized also at Leyden University that it worked only if the glass container was held in your hand and not if it was supported by an insulating material. Today we realize that the alcohol or water in contact with the glass was acting as one plate of the capacitor and the hand was acting as the other while the glass was the dielectric. The high voltage source was the friction machine and the hand and body provided a ground.
Jacinta: So sometimes water was used as a ‘plate’ instead of the tin foil on the inner surface, and the hand was acting as the other plate. So, different versions of Leyden jars. And the dielectric? Yet another unexplained term.
Canto: Yeah, they just never simplify things enough for fuckwits like us. A dielectric is apparently an insulator. Or, as Wikipedia expands it, it’s ‘an electrical insulator that can be polarised by an applied electric field’. Now, I thought that an insulator was the opposite of a conductor, that it tends to be a bad conductor, something that’s difficult for a charge to pass through. Or is that a resistor? Anyway, I can see how dielectric, meaning two, has to do with polarisation, positive and negative, but it still remains vague. I just thought an insulator kind of protects people from getting electric shocks.
Jacinta: So, going back to Crump, here’s a quote:
Franklin succeeded in giving Leyden jars both positive and negative charges, and showed that the force itself was stored in the glass of the jar with the charge being proportional to its surface area.
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS. I WANT TO UNDERSTAND. Does he mean positive and negative charges at the same time? Is that what a dielectric is? And when he says the force was stored in the glass, and the charge bore a mathematical relation to the surface area of the glass, does he mean a different thing by force and charge? And if the charge is proportional to the surface area of the glass, does that mean that if the surface area of the glass was equal to, say, the surface area of a glassy planet Earth, you’d get a more than respectable charge? And if our universe has a surface area?
Canto: The universe isn’t made of glass, I learned that from Dava Sobel’s The glass universe. Or not.
Jacinta: Okay, let me look up some common definitions before we go on.
A dielectric is a material that transmits electricity without conducting. That’s to say, an insulator (BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS MEANS). Examples of dielectric materials include glass, ceramics, metallic oxides, plastics and dry air.
An insulator, electrically speaking, is a material in which electricity can’t flow freely. In such materials, electrons are tightly bound – though it’s all relative. They’re said to be resistive. So presumably there’s a connection between resistors and insulators. Most insulators are non-metals.
A conductor is a material that allows a flow of electrrical charge, aka a current. Metals, such as copper wire, are commonly used as conductors.
Electric charge – and I think this is really the biggie – is a state or property of matter when a certain force from an electromagnetic field is applied to it. Or when it is within an electromagnetic field. But we won’t try to define an electromagnetic field until part 30 or so. An electric charge can be positive (carried by protons) or negative (electrons). This is not, of course, a full definition.
Triboelectricity is a charge of electricity gained by friction. The triboelectric effect can be varied and unpredictable, depending on the precise structure of the materials being rubbed together.
A capacitor, originally called a condenser, a term first coined by Volta, is… well, we posted a piece over four years ago called ‘What are capacitors?’ – but we’ve never thought about them since…
Canto: Yes, I’ve skimmed through that piece and I barely understand it. Let’s just say for now that a capacitor is a device for temporarily storing electricity, but that it differs from a battery somehow.
Jacinta: Okay, one more term used in Hackaday’s ‘History of the capacitor’ that needs explaining is hygroscopic. It says that soda glass, whatever that is, is hygroscopic. Franklin used soda glass in his experiments, apparently.
Canto: Google only tells me something about soda-lime glass, which I’m hoping is the same thing. It’s the most prevalent type of glass, composed of 70% silicon dioxide, or silica, 15% soda (sodium dioxide) and 9% lime (calcium oxide). The other 6% is made up of ‘other’. Hygroscopic materials attract water molecules from the surrounding environment, either by absorption or adsorption, but Wikipedia, which gives a large list of hygroscopic materials, makes no mention of glass or silicon as hygroscopic, though it does mention sodium salts.
Jacinta: So let’s move on with the history of these electrical discoveries, and maybe we’ll solve the problem of our own ignorance along the way. I note that potted histories of the battery, such as the one I’m about to quote from, don’t bother to distinguish between a battery and a capacitor:
Ben Franklin built an electric battery using glass window panes and thin lead plates. Using his “electric battery,” a term he coined himself, he showed how electricity could be stored in the glass and passed through it. Shouldn’t we call it the great-grand-dad of electric batteries?
So let’s not worry about it, though I suspect Yank jingoism is at play here. Let’s move on to Alessandro Volta.
Canto: And the continuous current battery. Volta’s first contribution to electricity was to improve on the electrophorus…
Jacinta: And here’s a great definition of the electrophorus, a device actually named by Volta:
An electrophorus or electrophore is a simple manual capacitive electrostatic generator used to produce electrostatic charge via the process of electrostatic induction.
Canto: Clear as mud. An electrophorus apparently consists of a dielectric plate…
Jacinta: Yeah, something that transmits electricity without conducting it.
Canto: Okay, let’s clear that up – perhaps. Dielectric materials don’t have free electrons for conducting electricity – they’re insulators. Electrons are, of course, electrically charged particles, and in dielectrics they’re tightly bonded to their nuclei. What does happen when an electric field or current is applied is that they become polarised. This raises the question of what polarisation actually is, and what it is about an electric field/current that causes this polarisation.
Jacinta: Not to mention whether there is a difference between an electric field and an electric current.
Canto: Okay, more work to be done. There are different types of polarisation. The polarisation of light, for example, is a complex story which we’ll have to deal with in another 50,000 part series. But here’s a general description from Britannica:
polarization, property of certain electromagnetic radiations in which the direction and magnitude of the vibrating electric field are related in a specified way.
So, just off the top of my head, an electric current seems to imply direction, whereas electric field not so much. On electric polarisation, ScienceDirect, which takes material from scientific papers, has this:
Electric polarization refers to the separation of center of positive charge and the center of negative charge in a material. The separation can be caused by a sufficiently high-electric field.
I think this means that dielectrics can be separated in terms of overall positive and negative charge in their individual atomic make-up, so that they can become magnetised, sort of? Because I think of magnetism in terms of polarity. They can become polarised, like magnets, while not being able to conduct an electric charge. Maybe.
Canto: We seem to have come a long way from capacitors.
Jacinta: We got lost on electrophoruses. An electrophorus consists of a dielectric plate..
Canto: Okay, here’s another definition, from Oxford Reference:
An early form of electrostatic generator. It consists of a flat dielectric plate and a metal plate with an insulated handle. The dielectric plate is charged by friction and the metal plate is placed on it and momentarily earthed, which leaves the metal plate with an induced charge of opposite polarity to that of the dielectric plate. The process can be repeated until all of the original charge has leaked away.
Jacinta: So this gives me a visible image, of sorts. The flat dielectric plate – and I assume a plate is something flat and thin – is polarised by friction, and a metal plate, that’s to say a conductor, is brought into contact with it and then momentarily earthed (I DON”T UNDERSTAND THIS), which leaves an induced charge of opposite polarity on this other plate )I DON”T UNDERSTAND THIS EITHER), and with repetition the original charge is leaked away (DITTO).
Canto: It seems every explanation needs further explanation, and we’re constantly changing electricity’s tail. And we’ve only just begun 🎵.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygroscopy
https://www.britannica.com/technology/soda-lime-glass
https://www.britannica.com/science/polarization-physics
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095746578
me and Montaigne
Montaigne’s better half
I have no more made my book than my book has made me
Michel de Montaigne
Before I start on Montaigne, some remarks on the title of this essay. Many English teachers are wont to correct it to ‘Montaigne and I’, hohum, but as an English teacher myself and an iconoclast of minuscule proportions, I beg to differ. The idea is that ‘me’ is an object pronoun, and that using it as a subject pronoun (as in ‘me and Montaigne is good mates’) is simply incorrect. This is bullshit, technically speaking. There’s no such thing as correct English, or correct any other language. I’ve had run-ins with fellow teachers on this, and it’s very headache-inducing. One argument is ‘How can you call yourself an English teacher if you don’t believe in the rules?’ But the rules of grammar aren’t delivered from on high, by lofty teachers or grammarians. They emerge in a community of like-minded souls who want to communicate effectively. There are some 7000 languages (and falling) in the world, setting aside dialects within particular languages. Less than half of these have a written form that’s utilised regularly by the language-users. So they don’t have grammar books telling them what the rules are. The first English grammar book, which was little more than a pamphlet, was published in 1586, obviously long after the language started on the evolutionary path that it’s still on.
All of this is not to say that language teachers are redundant. Sticking with English, what we teach is standard English, the English that’s found in current grammar books and written in works of fiction and non-fiction currently. It has two slightly divergent forms – British and United Stater English. Now anyone who’s an avid reader of English literature, going back to Shakespeare, Chaucer and so on, and forward to Milton, Austen and Eliot (George or T S), will notice subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in the language – in orthography as well as syntax. And with the spoken form we’re less structure-driven, we change our language depending on who we’re talking to, and we accompany our speech with a variety of paralinguistic features. Language is as alive as we are, it grows and changes, and in ye olde days grammar texts and dictionaries had to be renewed regularly to keep up, but now we have the magic of the internet…
But getting back to ‘me and Montaigne’, this is now acceptable in speech, and mostly in writing, because it involves no ambiguity whatsoever, and, more importantly, because it has become common usage. On the contrary, to say ‘me went for a swim’ also involves no ambiguity, but it sounds wrong, for the sole reason that it hasn’t become common usage, though it might, sometime in the future. To argue that ‘me went for a swim’ is simply wrong because me is always an object pronoun is just a statement about current usage. ‘You’ is currently used as both a subject and and object pronoun, why not ‘me’? Of course, saying ‘me and…’ is more plebeian, while saying ‘…. and I’ means you’re more likely to have a six-figure income and live in a gated community (not a gaol), but unfortunately ‘speaking the King’s English’ won’t guarantee you a place at court, so don’t worry about it.
So, getting back to Montaigne and me, I first read a selection of his essays in my early twenties, and he’s been a touchstone for me ever since. I need to thank him for encouraging me to become a writer. His mixture of me me me together with reflections on history, politics, science (insofar as there was much decent science in his time) and human behaviour really struck chords with me. I think he once wrote something like ‘I write not just to explore myself but to create myself’, though I can’t now find the reference – but the epigraph to this essay comes close enough. Anyway, I think he also wrote something like ‘whenever I learn of another’s good or bad behaviour, I think ‘how is it with me?”, and if he didn’t write that, it’s clear from his writings that this ‘egoism’ is a major focus. It’s what inspired me – a positive egoism – and I’ve followed him in trying to create a better self through reading, learning, and writing about it all.
There’s a vas deferens, of course, between me and him. He inherited a castle and a whole lotta land from his dad, who was clearly the dominant parent for him. My dad once bought me a motorbike, and to my shame I never thanked him for it. By that time my parents had separated. My mother was the head of our household, the breadwinner, the disciplinarian and influencer, and sadly for me, very much the enemy. To use the phrase of the day, I came from a broken home. The major result of the various minor traumas I experienced at home and school was an excessive hatred of being told what to do. My mother, sensing that I needed some ‘male discipline’, and with a mortal fear that I might be homosexual, tried to interest me in a manly career in the military, or the police perhaps. I would have preferred a quick, painless death. Sometimes mine, sometimes hers. All the same she was a hard-working, successful woman, who turned her children into feminists without ever saying a word on the subject.
Anyway, I read, and lived in the different countries of the past. And so it continues, though over time I’ve moved from the worlds of Hardy, Austen and Stendhal (fond memories) to the Big Issues of politics, science and How We Are to Live, and I started to write, and to like myself as a writer, while always being a bit ashamed of my hubris.
And I encountered Montaigne. Thoroughly egoistic and yet kind of self-effacing. Que sais-je?, his Socratic motto, sort of summed it up, especially as it was worn as a medallion around his neck (but perhaps this was a conceit of the artist who painted his portrait). It made so much sense to me – I loved it. Now I’m trying to mine his essays for anything faintly bonoboesque, with little success so far. Montaigne, typically for his time, was absorbed in the affairs of men, and in his essay-writing retirement he loved to consult the ancient classics, all written by men. Montaigne did marry and have children, but we know little more than that. His father seems to have been a much more significant influence on him, at least as far as he understood it, than his mother, whom he barely mentions – but then, he seems to have been the subject of his super-rich dad’s humanist experiments. He was literally farmed out as a baby to one of the peasant families his father owned, presumably to experience the sweated labour of the indigent, but it’s doubtful that he learned much since he was back in the castle by age three. Another of his dad’s brilliant ideas was to force the lad to learn Latin by having all his servants and teachers speak to him solely in that language. Then at age six he was shuffled off to a boarding school headed by the leading Latin scholar of the day. He apparently performed well in his studies, perhaps on pain of death, albeit a very humane one. So with his aptitude, and especially his connections, he became a rising star in the legal and administrative world of his day, and was a member of the French king Charles IX’s court before he was thirty. He hob-nobbed with the aristocracy, finessing the then-toxic Catholic-Protestant skirmishes, and earned the respect of Charles’ successor, Henry III, as well as the future Henry IV, France’s greatest monarch.
Now when I look at Montaigne’s life and achievements, I think ‘how has it been with me?’ But seriously, what has always attracted me in Montaigne’s writing and outlook (exemplified also in Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker – I had considered using a variant of Rousseau’s title for these essays, just altering one letter in the word ‘walker’), mutatis mutandis, is its discursiveness, its apparent willingness to follow a thought into all sorts of by-ways, so that you look up from the screen – in my case – and wonder, Jeez, how did I get here?
In any case, Montaigne’s marriage is a bit of a black box, and he has little to say of women in general. The upper aristocracy in those days tended not to marry for love of course, and his relations with his wife appear to have been cordial – if overly diluted cordial. There is at least one extant letter to her (Françoise de la Chassaigne by name, of doubtless unimpeachable pedigree), a short piece enclosing, for her own consolation, Plutarch’s consolatory epistle to his wife upon the death of their young daughter (Françoise ultimately gave birth to six daughters from two marriages, but only one lived to adulthood, and none outlived her). It’s a friendly if rather formal letter, and includes the line ‘Let us live, my wife, you and I, in the old French method’. I believe the French method may refer to cunnilingus, but perhaps not in this instance.
But this merry thought brings me back to bonobos. We’re emerging from millennia of patriarchy, in which men have been instructing their female inferiors how to behave. Plutarch, in the above-mentioned epistle, praises his wife for her womanly restraint in attending to her baby’s funeral – no over-the-top female caterwauling, an obvious sign of vainglorious insincerity etc etc. For some reason it all made me think of those bonobo females biting the penises of uppity males. And of the SCUM manifesto….
on love and hormones
The subversive family, a book written by Ferdinand Mount some 40 years ago, argues that the basic family unit, with two or, more rarely, three generations housed together, is indeed more basic than a great many critics allow, and that marriage based on mutual attraction has been more common throughout human history than many historians claim. However that may be, he makes no mention of prehistory, by which I mean the long period of human, and early hominid, existence, before the invention of writing.
What interests me is the nature of sexual relationships during that period, and that nature is hardly likely to have been static. Clearly, marrying is a ceremonial act, which requires a certain level of sophistication. It is apparently intended to ‘tie the knot’, to formalise two persons’ commitment to each other, a commitment expected to be lifelong. Ideally, this commitment is based on love.
It’s interesting that many bird species are monogamous. They stay together, with only the occasional bit on the side, build nests together, share the feeding and teaching of the kids and so on. We talk of love-birds, we love the willow pattern tale, but do we really think these birds love each other? Probably not, because we like to reserve this state of being for humans.
This human specialness thing is eroding though. Dogs mourn their human owners. Elephants grieve over their companions and their children. The more we look at complex social species, the more we find evidence of deep feeling which we may or may not call love, though to call it something other than love would seem insensitive.
But marriage, freely entered into, is about romantic love, and that, some say, is singularly human. Others, of course, say romantic love is a myth, a mixture of hormones and psychology that doesn’t last, though the commitment might continue after the passion is spent, especially where children are involved.
This monogamous arrangement has proved effective for the raising of offspring, in humans as well as in swans, cranes and eagles, and in prairie voles, Azara’s night monkeys and a few other mammalian species. However other complex social animals, such as elephants, dolphins and chimps, are not monogamous, and in fact only about 3% of mammals practice monogamy, and they still manage to raise their young just fine. I have a special interest in bonobos, our closest living relatives, on a par with chimps. They are highly sexualised, yet manage to avoid getting pregnant more than is needful. Females dominate in spite of sexual dimorphism which favours males. Are bonobos, Pan paniscus, a more loving species than Homo sapiens? I leave aside our species’ predilection for aggression and warfare, I’m considering the comparison in times of relatively peace for both species. It is probably impossible to make such a comparison, social contexts are perhaps too different, and bonobos are an endangered species, and quite difficult to study in the wild. As to human apes, it seems that in our human history, which dates back to the development of writing as an effective information and communication tool, we have been almost universally patriarchal and monogamous. But this takes us back only a few thousand years. Our species is at most about 300,000 years old – there’s a lot of debate about this – and tracing our ancestry back to its connection with the bonobo-chimp line has been problematic. There’s also the question of the connection between monogamy and romantic, exclusivist love. For example, it has been found that monogamous prairie voles mate exclusively for life, with the first ready member of the opposite sex they encounter. Clearly this isn’t about romance or conscious decision-making. It will be argued that it is preposterous to compare humans with prairie voles, but from a biological perspective, perhaps not so much. We often talk of ‘love at first sight’ and ‘I don’t know what hit me’ (sometimes with regret). There is no doubt that this sort of immediate sexual attraction can largely be explained by biochemistry. Monogamy in general appears to involve an interplay of hormonal and cultural effects.
Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and Rutgers University, separates romantic love into three parts – lust, attraction and attachment. To summarise, doubtless too briefly, the hormonal effects here, the sex hormones testosterone and, to a lesser extent, oestrogen play a predominant role in increasing libido, or lustful sensations. The hypothalamus stimulates production of these hormones by the ovaries and testes. Testosterone, it should be emphasised, is not a ‘male’ hormone. It produces a variety of effects in both sexes. Attraction is a more complex, more conscious elaboration of lust. It may involve some weighing up of the costs and benefits of particular lustful feelings, though generally under the ‘sway’ of lust. The brain areas involved include the hippocampus, hypothalamus, and anterior cingulate cortex. The activation of these regions tend to increase trust in the object of lust and to inhibit defensive behaviour and anxiety. The hormones dopamine and norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline), which create a sense of euphoria, the sense of ‘being in love’, with its sleeplessness and obsessiveness, will have obviously differential effects depending on the object of attraction’s response to the person attracted. Feelings of attraction also appear to reduce serotonin levels, which help regulate appetite and mood.
Attachment, not surprisingly, is the most complex, conscious and culturally influenced of these three stages. It’s quite a bit cooler (temperature-wise) than the other two, and extends often to other connections, such as friends and family. The hormones most involved in this stage, or state, are vasopressin and oxytocin. Interestingly, those prairie voles mentioned earlier differ greatly from their promiscuous cousins, montane voles, in that they express far more of these two hormones. When these hormones are blocked by researchers, prairie voles turn promiscuous. It would of course be depressingly reductionist to describe attachment, and the other states, as well as their more negative features, such as jealousy, possessiveness and emotional dependence, in purely hormonal terms, but we need to understand, and so to positively change a world of human aggression and thuggery, so prominently displayed on the world stage today, to one a little more bonoboesque, while still preserving the best of our humanity – our inventiveness and our curiosity. Understanding how our hormones affect us is a good start.
References
https://www.ckn.org.au/content/cupid’s-chemical-addiction-–-science-love
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family, 1981
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2017
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0265407511431055