Fire, fuel, compression

Someone on our local community assistance FB page couldn't start their car. I wrote this to help. 

There is a sequence of basic tests to do to repair a non-starting vehicle or any gas piston engine. You do them in order and do them thoroughly, so that you are sure you've eliminated each cause as you go. The mnemonic is "fire, fuel, compression." 

Fire means spark. You remove a spark plug from a cylinder, lay it somewhere metal on the engine where you can see it and you're sure it's grounded, crank briefly with the help of a friend if your arms are short, and hope to see a spark. If there isn't a spark, try very hard to check that it was grounded just to be sure. 

Still no? Problem is "fire." You then need to troubleshoot the ignition system. There are too many possibilities under the category of "bad ignition" to go into over FB, but with high miler cars it's often the spark plugs that are so worn that the spark gap is too large. The gap should be around 30 thousands of an inch, which is about the thickness of thin cardboard. No spark and a large gap, change the plugs. 

If there is spark, move to "fuel." The easiest test is to spray starter fluid in the intake manifold, replacing the gas experimentally. If the car fires, you know by logical elimination that it was fuel, so troubleshoot the fuel system. 

For compression you need a compression tester and the knowledge to use it, but most mechanics can tell if an engine has very bad compression in one cylinder by turning the engine over by hand with a wrench on the crankshaft pulley or by using the belt, comparing the compression resistance between cylinders. 

Don't be tempted to jump to random causes. It's necessary to use a logical troubleshooting scheme to fix the problem.

Building stuff as pedagogical strategy

I believed and believe that action is helpful to learning. This is part of the Hahnian pedagogy we practised at the old, true, Unity College. We put it into action. We built barns, solar systems, grease vehicles, wind turbines, electronic gizmos of all kinds, we fixed cars and trucks, and grew food. Why? Because it works. It overcomes the boredom and disengagement that young people feel after a decade or more of formal schooling. Don't believe me? Read the blog. It's all there, going back to 2007. Or just read this article.

Update to Hansen et al 2016

Although I'm no longer employed as a climate professional, I still monitor the climate science news and cherry-pick the latest papers. In particular, I look for progress that would or would not confirm the primary hypothesis in Hansen et al 2016, "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming could be dangerous."

This is the paper that turned my professional life upside down. It took me three weeks to read it carefully, annotate it, and follow up on the primary literature cited therein. It's a very dense eighty-some pages. But I had a feeling then and still do that I was witnessing the emergence of the best prediction for the fate of the earth, and its consequences, all in real time, and that nearly everything I had done as an environmental activist, scholar, and teacher would become moot as a result.

Seems like the kind of thing you would want to keep track of. Especially if you have a six year old daughter.

In the years after Hansen and his colleagues published this tome, I tried to teach it. I was responsible for general education classes that included a climate change module, as well as a senior-level climate science class that taught the general science and the basics of climate modeling. It seemed my responsibility to give them this paper. But I failed badly in the attempt to teach it. 

It's just too complex a proposition. 

Not "if a then b," which is what most undergraduates can handle in terms of logic problem, essentially linear cause and effect, but "if a and b and c, then d might happen and e will perhaps ensue and then f is a distinct possibility if we cross threshold g and reach set point h, and hypothetical feedbacks i, j and k set in, and we have evidence of varying quality for a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, and k, and if we get to f then a total catastrophe will drown all major cities within seventy years and set off storms that can flatten Florida, but you have to be an expert to understand the evidence and by the way, even you, the professor, is probably too stupid to understand any of this."

I have to admit I took a certain morbid and masochistic satisfaction trying to teach it. I could spend a lifetime just learning to teach this one paper. But this is what science is about for me: struggling with logic and reason and consequences.

Anyway. Updates, right? They have been fairly scarce and not written for the lay person.

Dr. Hansen has finally published an informal update of sorts here. It is intended to be a foreword to a book, but looks to me more like an attempt to put forming thoughts about updating H2016 on paper.

As such, I would expect it to either disappear or appear later in some other format. But for now it's very interesting. I plan to follow up on the literature as soon as I can get a draft copy of Chapter 48 of his new book, which is where he says to go next.

Here's a thought..

If all you really could think of to do with your life was to put into practice some educational idea you'd cooked up for your PhD, and you had absolutely nothing better to do with that life (like for instance saving the planet), then the right way to go about it would be to start an institution dedicated to that purpose.

That would have saved an awful lot of grief on the part of the people that loved the institution you crapped on and climbed all over and finally dropped in the toilet to get your dream accomplished, wouldn't it?