What caught my eye is the story behind the stuff:

It was a quiet night on our farm. Stan was in the kitchen, working on a new ethanol fuel recipe. Gladys was catching up on some reading. Stan stepped into the living room for a moment while a batch heated up on the stove. Suddenly, KABOOM! Stan and Gladys came running. There was exploded corn all over the kitchen! Being the inquisitive type, Stan was more interested in tasting the stuff than cleaning up or explaining to Gladys – though by now she had gotten somewhat used to this sort of thing. While it didn’t look like much, he discovered that it was about the best tasting stuff he’d ever eaten!

Of course I noticed the word “ethanol” so I had to buy a bag of the treat (4oz for $1.69 for 4 oz). It’s made from yellow field, or dent corn, rather than popcorn, plus soybean oil and salt. About halfway between popcorn and “Corn Nuts” both in size and in the degree of fluffiness. And the yellow color distinguishes it from popcorn.

The primary use for field corn is animal feed. The secondary use is ethanol, and I guess the third use is to make corn starch and corn syrup. I chose the “gourmet cheddar” flavor.

So how’s it taste?

Oh it’s good all right. Let’s see if I can describe it. It’s meatier than popcorn, without all that air in it. It feels good between the teeth. As far as texture, it’s like those popcorn kernels that didn’t quite explode as much as they should; you know, the ones that are cooked enough but expanded enough that they are quite edible, but wouldn’t cut it in the popcorn world. Somewhat less brittle and hard than Corn Nuts. And there’s a slight sweet flavor to it that must come from all the starch in that dent corn.

The flavor I tried, “Gourmet Cheddar” was pretty subtle, unlike the flavoring in corn nuts which almost overwhelms that of the corn. Here, most of the flavor is corn. Quite good. I’ll try the other flavors as I visit Big R, the only place where I’ve seen this for sale.

I should write a post on the Big-R. Their huge building is packed with interesting things that are hard to get elsewhere and surprise and amaze me. Like “Farmopoly”, Children’s lariats, cowboy boots for little girls, horse “tack” , and equipment to remove testicles (ouch). I didn’t realize just how much of a city slicker I was before I walked the first time through the Big-R. I shop there because it makes me feel good to know that the place exists.

Special Applications

So, what is GladCorn good for besides a quick snack? Well, I bet that if I grind it up a little, it will look just like Dried Distiller’s Grains. I’ll put it in a little glass sample jar. The next time visiting royalty comes out to see our facility, I’ll stuff a handful in my mouth and go on about what a great breakfast cereal it would make; “giving DDGs to animals is wasting it”. In fact, DDGs are already added to some breakfast cereal; it gives a sort of yeasty or bread-like flavor, and it tends to darken the color a bit.

An alternative would be to secrete some in a pocket, and then, when giving a tour of our grain elevator, point out the 4-year-old dent corn still piled up in corners of the place (where it has fed a host of pigeons and, subsequently, various pigeon eaters), and say that our elevator is so well built that the corn in it is still good to eat, and has become tastier due to the aging process (despite the fact that everything in the buildin is covered in pigeon poop). This could be almost as much fun as getting visiting dignitaries up on top of the building and then warning them not to step on the rusty parts of the catwalks.

To put this into perspective, in Northern Ireland, between 1998 and 2002, 4 people were killed by pipe bombs. Of these, the authorities think that 2 were targets and 2 were manufacturers.

The first recent Grant County incident was an unexploded pipe bomb discovered on the banks of an irrigation canal. That was around 3 months ago. Then two weeks ago, a pick-up truck was completely destroyed by a pipe bomb. And now two men have been killed in explosions just 11 hours apart by pipe bombs. And the most recent incident was an undetonated propane / pipe bomb combination.

Pipe Bombs

Grant County Undersheriff John Turley says that “Finding pipe bombs is not that unusual,” “We find them every now and then,” “It’s been quite a while since we had one.”

The manufacture of pipe bombs is not that uncommon in rural America. Wikipedia has what appears to be complete instructions that if you naively follow, are likely to kill you. My understanding is that in the US, most bombs are built by juvenile males who wish to make big noises, and that this is amazingly common in rural areas. In fact, our waiter at dinner tonight vouched that he knew people who had assembled pipe bombs. His opinion seemed to be that the 69 and 53-year-old Grant County victims were killed while assembling bombs, and from the complaints in comment sections of the local newspaper blogs, I suspect this opinion is fairly common in Moses Lake and is vocally expressed to the survivors.

I find this just amazingly difficult to believe. I really am in awe. By the time you reach 25 or 30, about the time your car insurance starts decreasing, a male should have completely lost the inclination to do extraordinarily dangerous stunts like this; testosterone declining and all that. Maybe there’s something in the water here. Or the food.

Pipe Bomb Makers

Making explosions in the desert sometimes progresses to bored kids blowing up outhouses and the like. If you’re curious, save yourself the felony conviction and watch the many self-incriminating videos (like this one) on you-tube instead. These videos are stunningly common. If you’re interested in doing this, do review: Man blows up leg with pipe bomb (You Tube). What an idiot.

I would guess the bomb on the irrigation canal was of the juvenile hobbiest sort. At the location of the second death listed above, that of the 53-year-old, the police say they found “bomb making material”. That would be pipe, end caps, fuzes, timers, and, judging by the smell of sulphur noticed at one of the explosions, black powder. But as it turns out, the police aren’t saying they’ve found anything explosive, just building material in buckets. I would infer that the police did find a suitable explosive but are keeping quiet for various reasons. Also, on execution of a search warrant, the police found meth in the house. In general, drugs and alcohol do not make you smarter, and they probably do not make you a safer pipe bomb builder.

The other death in Grant County was of a 69-year-old grandfather in his shop. It is suspicious in several ways, particularly in that it is claimed that the lights were out when the explosion went off, and that the victim always kept the lights on while working in his shop. What is going on there? And he was a grandfather with no obvious relation to meth or inclination to building bombs. Homicide? What could the victim have done to attract a bomb attack? His family has no idea. And why bomb the workshop? Apparently he was holding the bomb when it went off. To me, if it were not for the fact that it was one of two deaths in 24 hours, it sounds suspiciously like suicide. I guess we will have to wait for the investigation.

Safety

A point at which many people get hurt with pipe bombs is in screwing on the caps. Adding things like nails to the inside of the bomb increases the likelihood of friction or a spark setting it off. Gunpowder (or whatever) in the threads can ignite when the pipes are tightened, killing the assembler, and there can be chemical reactions between the metal, or impurities on the metal, and the explosive mixture.

How Far Away is Safe?
A typical pipe bomb fragment is supposed to travel at around 500 m/sec (1500 ft/sec). Worst case could be faster. This is 50% faster than a 0.22 rifle bullet and you do not know what direction the fragments will go. In addition, a substantial piece, like an end cap, could weigh more than a 0.50 caliber heavy machine gun slug. It can kill a few miles from the explosion. Getting hit by a pipe bomb fragment is like getting hit by an extremely large caliber rifle round.

So how far should you be away from a pipe-bomb? This depends on how safe you want to be. Distance decreases the probability of your being hit because your body subtends a smaller angle. Eventually you are so far away that fragments cannot reach you. And that distance would likely be so far away that the thrill of the explosion would be negligible.

A really smart person will arrange to be very far away from an exploding pipe bomb. How far? Well, four kids discovered that 120 feet was not far enough. One was killed, one went to jail (involuntary manslaughter), the other two went to juvenile court.

Yesterday’s front page news from ML, as reported by the Columbia Basin Herald:

Water

The “Columbia basin” is the part of Eastern Washington that drains into the Columbia River. The Columbia river provides the irrigation water used in the farming region here, which was reclaimed from the desert and is called the “Columbia Basin Reclamation Project”. The project consists of dams that make electricity and provide irrigation water here.

Moses Lake is in Grant County, which is said to have the US (and probably the world) record for corn yield per acre per year, recently 182 bushels. Converted into ethanol, this amounts to 540 gallons per acre per year. The high yield is due to the intense sunlight, moderate temperatures, and excellent irrigation water. But only about half the available irrigation water in the reclamation project here is used, the rest is wasted, even though the land is available to farm with it and evidently people are available to eat the crops.

The reclamation project uses just over 2% of the water going through the Grand Coulee Dam, which is where the water is pumped from. The primary use of the Grand Coulee dam is electricity production; it produces 6.5 gigawatts. This power saw its first major use in the smelting of aluminum ores for the aircraft used to win the Second World War. Most of the rest water flows down to the Pacific Ocean. It would be fairly easy to increase the irrigation to take 4 or 5% of the flow and this would double the irrigated land here from 100 square miles to 200 square miles. In fact, these water rights are permanently reserved for the project but environmental pressure, mostly for salmon, have kept them from being used.

The “PUD” is the Public Utility District. Around here, electricity is provided by a dam on the Columbia river (which also provides the irrigation for the local region) and is very inexpensive. There’s been a certain amount of press to the effect that ethanol requires too much water to manufacture and therefore is ecologically unsound.

Here are the figures: An ethanol plant requires about 3 gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol. In addition, about 15% of the corn crop is irrigated, but since ethanol plants can use dryland crops like sorghum or barley, let’s look just at the water consumption of the ethanol plant itself.

The US uses around 150 billion gallons of gasoline per year. If this were entirely replaced with ethanol, the amount of water required to refine it would be 450 billion gallons per year. The average flow of the Columbia river is 265,000 cubic feet per second. There are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot and 31,556,926 seconds in a year (about). So the Columbia river sends 62,468,512,863,300 gallons into the ocean each year. Therefore, the water requirement to run enough ethanol plants sufficient to fuel the entire fleet of US gas guzzlers totals to less than 1% of the flow of the average flow of the Columbia river alone.

Assault

The second headline is the result of a Moses Lake woman shooting at, and missing, her husband. She was arrested and charged with 1st degree assault. A neighbor called the cops; no sense in taking rounds. The article is kind of interesting in that an hour before the shooting, the husband had been involved in another incident; he reportedly threatened a 29-year-old woman and spat in her face. The police are unsure if the incidents are related. I’m betting they are.

Math at Moses Lake

The school system at ML is considering a new textbook. In the US, texts are chosen by states, and states can defer the choice to local school districts. In this case, the textbook at hand is called “Growing With Mathematics”, an apt choice for a rural town, and the selection of 115 out of 126 teachers querried.

One could not mention “math” and “Moses Lake” and “Columbia Basin Herald” without also mentioning the paper’s Sudoku puzzles. Perhaps because I’ve been trained on the trivial sudokus published in the Seattle papers, I find the CBH sudoku shockingly difficult. I wonder what sort of mathematics geniuses this little town is breeding?

Now I haven’t tried the following puzzle; I can’t vouch that it meets the standard that I’ve come to expect from the Columbia Basin Herald. But here it is. Enjoy:

P.S. If the above Sudoku puzzle turns out to be too difficult for you, you might want to try and figure out how to use my Java applet Sudoku puzzle solver. Now this program is intended to help design Sudoku puzzles and may require you to assist a little in guessing at times, but it will automatically fill in all the really obvious numbers. The rather short source code is here.

Oh, and the Shilo Inn I’m staying at? Here’s a picture:

Prices have been high now for several months, and the new data is out. Yes, the public is using less gasoline, but it ain’t much less, from the US Department of Energy
Short‐Term Energy Outlook Supplement: Motor Gasoline Consumption 2008, US consumption of gasoline will decrease by 0.1% in 2008 over 2007. An increase in ethanol means that the average Btu in a gallon has gone down 0.5%, so the net decrease is 0.6%.

And why is consumption so little changed? It’s because the price of gas isn’t very high. It’s close to unchanged since 1945:

So what does this tell us about the future? I’ll make a guess on the supply demand curve for gasoline:

Why? See below the fold.

The 2008 data show that a 50% increase in the price of gasoline only resulted in a 0.6% decrease in gasoline consumption, and part of that was probably due to a possible early recession.

Linear Extrapolation

The 0.6% decrease amounts to a decreae in supply. Suppose that the supply decreases by 6%. This is 10x larger, so, assuming a linear price relationship, the price should increase by 10x 50% or around 500%. That would put the price of gasoline at about 500% over $4 per gallon or maybe $24. I guess I can imagine putting $240 into my gas tank, but I can’t imagine treating it as anything less than gold afterwards.

Suppose that some sort of catastrophe, say a war, or maybe just oil running out, decreased the supply by 60%. That would mean an increase in price of 5000% to $306 per gallon. I doubt that gasoline priced at that level would still see 40% demand. In other words, I think that long before gasoline gets to $300 per gallon, the demand will fall because people will just quit buying it and walking instead.

Right now, gasoline accounts for around 6% of US “real disposable personal income” (see figure 12 in the above link). I doubt that this number can get much larger than 50%. So I expect that a really severe gasoline crunch could get prices to around 8x current prices, maybe 32 dollars per gallon, but not much higher than that.

You would think that pronouncements by entomology professors on the subject of the manufacture of ethanol would be ignored but due to the surprising conclusion of the paper, it received a great deal of press and it continues to receive press, being quoted by right wing commentators who wish to eliminate government subsidies , and by left wing commentators who wish to see industry reduced and “factory farming” eliminated.

The faulty calculations of Pimental’s silly paper have been repeatedly blasted in the literature, and less often in the press, but the average person doesn’t have the time to learn enough engineering, physics, chemistry, biology and economics to understand these papers. Rather, people tend to believe the tales they are told based on their estimate of the sanity of the person who does the telling. To give the reader a better idea of who Pimental is, I’ve collected a few of his other papers here. He’s a deep ecologist, a modern Malthusian. Enjoy:

Contamination of water, air and soil leads to 40 percent of the planet’s death toll, according to a study conducted by Prof. David Pimentel, ecology and evolutionary Biology.

Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy (1994):

Reducing the U.S. population to 200 million, while reducing the consumption of energy and other resources by one-half, is a first difficult step. Then, with the effective development of solar energy technologies, a quality of life similar to that of our European friends would be possible.

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Also see Ecology of Increasing Disease

Oddly enough, Pimental is in favor of genetically modified organisms: Genetically Modified Crops and the Agroecosystem: …