Zesty Mordant

Blame the Liquor, Randy

Ethanol is a clear colourless liquid, with a pleasant smell. By itself, pure ethanol has a boiling point of 78.4°C. In normal distillation, you’ll never get it just by itself, because at 95.6% by volume it forms an Azeotrope with water, and cannot be further purified by boiling it off.

So if your mate tells you he drank some ‘Polish liquor’ that was 100% alcohol, he’s a moron, and was probably talking about spirytus. Because if he really did drink something that was 100% ethanol, it would also have contained a small amount of Benzene. And that would mean his brain now has the consistency of mashed potato.

At the molecular level, Ethanol looks like this:

H  H
|   |
H-C-C-OH
|   |
H  H

The hydroxyl (OH) group on the end makes it polar, because Oxygen is incredibly electronegative. What this means is that an electron in the molecule’s electron cloud will spend more of its time hanging around the Oxygen than anywhere else.

This makes ethanol a solvent, and solvents are particularly good for dissolving things. Things like nail polish, grease, or paint. Or your brain cells.

And it’s this brain cells part that is currently causing such a big kerfuffle in the media. The problem is that too many people between the ages of 14 and death are drinking too much, then going out and stabbing each other in the face with beer glasses.

This might sound acceptable if you’re in a Glasgow pub or on a football team, but it’s not how the Government would like us to behave. So Nathan Rees has decided to crackdown on dangerous licensed venues by stopping entry after 2am, serving beer in plastic cups, and providing a ‘drinks limit’.

The ‘drinks limit’ strikes me as interesting, because this is something that it is different for everyone. It’s different if you’re a man or woman, short or tall, skinny or fat, it’s different if you haven’t eaten all day, or had two pides and a felafel for breakfast. This means that any drinks limit might be low enough to stop the BAC of a regular person shooting through the roof, but still high enough to get a midget wasted.

So there will still be violent drunk people, but now they will all be short and skinny. Which is good, if you’re a bouncer, or bad, if you’re Grant Denyer.

It comes as no surprise that the Glasshouse Tavern is on the list of clubs to be affected by the new rules, because this is exactly the type of venue filled with the type of wankers the government wants to eliminate. I can count on one finger the number of times I have been there and not seen a fight erupt. But will it work?

The 2am entry limit will be nothing new because as far as I know, at the Glassy it has always been like that. Nothing will change. Beer in plastic cups is nothing new either. Cooney’s has been doing it for ages. People still engage in fisticuffs on the street.

So as far as I can see, you’re turning one set of problems into another, by treating everyone like small children. Taking away our glass privileges and setting a drink limit won’t work, because small children still like to throw tantrums, shit in the sandbox, and pull each others’ hair.

What, then, is the solution? As engineers, we are taught to look at the ‘real design problem’ and the ‘apparent design problem’. The real design problem is the most obvious problem, in this case, that people are drinking too much and causing trouble. The apparent design problem is the actual problem that needs solving. This one is less obvious, but will ultimately provide a better solution.

The apparent problem here is the culture. Drinking, especially drinking too much, is deeply imbued in the Australian way of life. After all, it’s how strangers become mates, coworkers become friends, and how bogans, wankers and the ugly pick up chicks. It is not something you can change easily, nor are peoples’ attitudes to drinking something you can change instantly.

One night I went out for a drink with some German friends in Cologne. We’d just had our second round of fruity beverages and I was gearing up for numbers 3, 5 and 7 but it seemed I was alone in my enthusiasm. I was a bit taken aback because this would not happen at home. When I pointed this difference out to my friend, she said that it was because people there liked to remain ‘in control’, and that she had noticed a similar attitude in Italy, where losing too much face is a social faux pas.

Unlike Australia, in many of the European countries I visited, alcohol was readily available anywhere and any time. In Germany, you could buy a beer at the station and drink it on the train or walking down the street. Often you would see people doing this. Normal people drinking beer, just like you’d drink a coke. When I tried this back home, I felt guilty, because here the only sorts you see on the street with booze are the homeless, or people with rat’s tails who will want to fight you.

That, then, is the biggest reason these problems exist. It’s the culture here, it’s the attitudes towards boozing that are the problem. Save for prohibition, no amount of ridiculous little laws are going to change things with this generation. People still want to go out and get stupidly drunk because it is fun and because there are few social repercussions. It’s the next generation whose attitudes the government should be trying to change.

What do we do in the meantime? Well, putting a cutoff time on clubs won’t help. It will make people angry, and send them onto the streets, where they will encounter other angry people with whom to engage in warfare.

This exactly the reason why London did the opposite to Sydney, and introduced 24-hour trading licenses. But that didn’t work there either, because their culture is very similar to ours, and people are still idiots.

Throughout eastern europe though, there were literally hundreds of 24-hour watering holes. Warsaw’s Zachodnia train station had three of them, and it was a bomb shelter. Hradec Kralove had one, I was in it until the sun came up. But nobody tried to fight me, and none of my friends were murdered.

As for plastic cups for beer, well that has one positive. Happily, it will stop people losing their eyesight on an inebriated fool’s whim. But there is a better way, and of course, it was developed by the Germans.

It’s so good, they even have their own word for it, “pfand”. This means deposit, because each time you buy a drink you leave a small amount of money for the glass it comes in. Bring the glass back unbroken, and you get your money back. Break it, and you’re down a few bucks. It’s efficient, pays for breakages, there’s less mess for them to clean up, and nobody gets glassed in the face. Why?

Because if it’s going to cost you five bucks, why bother?

Carpool tunnel syndrome

I have many body parts, but out of all these my legs are probably my favourite. So I was surprised the other day when the physio told me that one was shorter than the other. Not because of this fact, but because he had actually noticed. I had a similar suspicion myself after looking in the mirror and noticing my hips weren’t exactly even. But I do that every day, and here this guy had only known me for five minutes.

The discrepancy isn’t much, about 4mm, but it’s enough to compress the discs in my lower back slightly more on one side than the other. This would explain the annoying twinge I have been feeling at the gym and the mild pain after long hours standing up. The temporary solution so far has been to stick a second insole in my shoes. And I’m already drafting up plans for a medieval torture device that will stretch my right tibia to its proper dimensions.

This, however, was not why I was at the physio. I was there to treat an ongoing case of patello-femoral pain syndrome that had been causing trouble in my right knee. It is a condition that is common among young adults, but most prevalent in soccer players, cyclists, rowers, tennis players, ballet dancers, horseback riders, and runners, of which I am none. You can imagine my irritation at this fact, but nevertheless I would like to fix it before I turn 43 and discover that the cartilage on my kneecap has been whittled to dust and I have been left with a nice case of arthritis.

The answer, thankfully, is quite simple. As well as a multittude of stretches for the muscles surrounding the knee, I have to do an exercise which involves moving just one small muscle of the quadriceps, the vastus medialis obliquus. Moving this muscle without moving anything else is for me nigh on impossible. Apparently, because it is not ’switching on’ properly when I bend my leg, my kneecap drifts slightly in the wrong direction, and that’s where all the trouble starts.

This means the problem, funnily enough, is not with my knee, but with my brain. Its ability to control the VMO is poor, and so I must work on building up the nerve connections to the muscle in order for it to start doing its job. This may sound easy, but it is in fact rather difficult. When I was in Vienna, I met a rather tall Norwegian guy who had gotten really drunk one night and slept on his arm in an awkward position. When he woke up the next morning, he couldn’t move his hand, and a few weeks later when I met him he had only just regained a slight range of movement in his fingers. He was a medical student, and proceeded to explain in great detail that in his drunken slumber he had severed an important nerve in his forearm, the name of which I now can’t remember. The amazing thing is that the brain can slowly regrow the nerve and form a new pathway to the muscles, so within a few months he would be repaired. I’d like to think the thing with my knee is working in roughly the same manner, except with less alcohol and Scandinavians.

The other related factor is mind-muscle connection. Lots of people can flex their biceps, but ask them to flex their lats and they will struggle. Your mental ability to move specific muscle groups in isolation determines your ability to do such things. I’m usually pretty good in this regard, as evidenced by anyone who has seen me move my entire scalp. But somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong. And I think I can work out where.

Way back in year 9 or 10, I went downhill biking with some friends on a firetrail at Bulli pass. Unlickily for me, I came a crocker on a steep section and badly sprained my ankle. I went to a physio at the time, who, inbetween thrusting my foot into his groin, showed me pictures of a normal ligament and a damaged ligament. In the normal ligament, the tissue fibres were nicely aligned with each other. In the damaged ligament, the tissue fibres looked like someone had gone nuts with a spirograph. He said it was impossible to fully repair, and he was right. Ever since then my right ankle has clicked and popped itself in and out of place, and it’s nowhere near as flexible as the left one.

My hypothesis is that I began to use my right leg in an unorthodox way to overcome the lack of flexibility in the ankle. This led to a muscle imbalance, which led to the ongoing knee problem. And because it happened when I was still growing, it might have caused the right leg to grow slightly shorter than the left leg. A bit like the kid at school who broke his thumb one day and after that it never grew as long as the other one. Leg length discrepancies are common, so this scenario is unlikely. But it may just be that that accident was the cause of all these troubles.

So what if… what if I’d never been downhill riding that day. What if I’d been to the cinema. Or wasted the day indoors on the computer, like I did all too many other times.

Well, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. But if you are the sort of person who wants perfectly symmetrical tibiae, or ankles that don’t click, don’t go downhill riding on a BMX. Watch a movie of it instead.

Chernobyl

On April 26th 1983, reactor number 4 at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. It was the worst Nuclear Disaster in history, reaching a Category 7 on the International Nucelar Event Scale. The reactor was located in what is now the Ukraine, but the radioactive plume created after the explosion spread over all of Europe and even North America. Belarus was the country worst affected, receiving 60% of the fallout. The effects of the disaster are still being felt there today, though it is amazing to see the amount of wildlife that has returned to the area surrounding the site.

Although only 2 workers were killed in the initial steam explosion, the number of people affected by fallout was much higher. There were 237 people directly affected by radiation from the site, mostly firemen and rescue workers, and countless more people who were indirect victims of radiation poisoning.

Vladimir Shevchenko, a Ukranian filmmaker, was the first person on the site with a video camera. With no protection, he filmed workers tunneling under the structure to place concrete in order to stop the building collapsing on itself. He also captured an MI-8 helicopter losing its bearings and crashing into the structure below, killing the two man crew.

Back when I was in primary school, we were given the task of creating a project based on a disaster. While everyone else was building erupting models of Mount Vesuvius, I created a mini-Chernobyl out of paper mache milk cartons and toilet rolls. The melted reactor core was simulated using a wound ferrite rod from an old radio, and to top it all off I added some cotton ball smoke, cellophane flames and a flashing battery powered light.

The reactor that exploded was far more complicated than my model. It was an RBMK-1000, capable of producing 1000MW of electric power. The Chernobyl site had four of these reactors, the last two of which only went out of service in December 2000.

This reactor design is now quite old, but it is interesting to note that 70% of Lithuania’s energy is still produced by an RBMK located at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, albeit a supercharged version producing 1360MW. Originally, two of these reactors were in operation there, accounting for 80% of Lithuania’s power production. Number one was decommissioned in December 2004, as a condition of Lithuania’s entry into the EU. Number two is expected to close in 2009, to make way for a new plant with 3000 to 3200 megawatt capacity.

During my travels through Europe, I noticed a few nuclear power plants from the windows of buses and trains. France is the country most dependent on nuclear energy, at 87.5%, with Lithuania taking second place. So will Australia ever adopt this technology?

At the moment, 90% of our energy comes from gas and coal. As supplies run short, the demand for alternative energy increases. Australia has about one third of the world’s known uranium resources, and it accounts for 22% of all international uranium production. With all that potential on our doorstep, what is stopping us from turning it into a viable energy solution?

As Dr. Ziggy Switkowski, chairman of ANSTO, says “it’s kind of interesting when you travel around the world and you discuss with these nuclear-powered countries Australia’s thinking, they’re a bit perplexed as to why we find it hard to take that step to go all the way to nuclear electricity because for them it’s turned out to be clean, efficient, the technology is reliable, it’s now off the shelf and most of the historical issues associated with the management of the spent fuel rods etc … lend themselves to relatively straightforward engineering solutions.”

With increasing focus on climate change, and Australia’s recent ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, it is now our responsibility to search for cleaner forms of energy that reduce our carbon emissions. Nuclear power produces almost no emissions, and methods of effectively disposing of spent fuel rods have been developed quite extensively.

There are other issues to consider, though. Nuclear power has a high startup and capital cost, but low fuel cost. Building a reactor costs billions of dollars, and during the lifetime of a project (40-60 years) it may only just recoup the operating, construction, and decommissioning expenses.

Regardless of Nuclear Power’s advantages and disadvantages, there is still something quite primitive about our reliance on fossil fuel. To paraphrase James May in episode three of Big Ideas, “it’s amazing that despite all of mankind’s modern achievements, our primary source of energy is derived by digging a hole, extracting a lump of rock made from million year-old dead trees and animals, and setting fire to it.”

Although fears of a Chernobyl-like catastrophe are not without ground, it is important to take incidents like these and learn from them what we can. In the wrong conditions, nuclear power has the potential to destroy, but if we take the necessary precautions and learn from our mistakes, nuclear power is a step towards the future. And that’s a step in the right direction.