Why catalytic converters are being increasingly stolen

It is increasingly common for the catalytic converters on cars to be stolen. This is because the precious metal that forms a key element of the converters has become more expensive. That element is a rare one called rhodium which is, by weight, reportedly the most expensive element on the planet, beating out gold and silver and other precious metals. It is one of the rarest, just one part in a billion, compared with 5% for iron.

The converter on regular fuel vehicles is simple: a stainless steel shell surrounds a ceramic honeycomb monolith— that monolith is coated with three important precious metals: platinum, palladium, and rhodium. 

As the car’s exhaust passes through this honeycomb the metals heat up and act as catalysts: turning carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide, unburned hydrocarbons to H20 and C02, and nitrous oxides into nitrogen and Carbon-dioxide.  

Because these metals, and especially rhodium are so stable and durable they can perform this function over an extremely long lifetime of the car part—suffering very little loss in performance.

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Radiation paradoxes 5: Mass

On the surface mass, like space, seems like a simple and straightforward concept but there are deep subtleties involved here too. In order to bring out the subtleties about mass, I had a practice of asking students in my introductory physics classes to explain what they understood when they spoke of the mass of some object. The would usually give some vague formulation along the lines ‘the amount of stuff’ it has. When I pressed them by asking how that differs from their concept of volume, they would sharpen their answer, usually saying that volume was a measure of the amount of space that was occupied by the object but mass was a measure of how heavy it was. There are teachers who insist that we must emphasize that mass and weight are different but I am not one of them. After all, we all know from experience that objects with greater mass are heavier to lift. The intuitive idea that mass has a relationship to weight is a good enough starting point for learning about the subtleties of mass.
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More obituaries should be like this

Thanks to reader Birger Johansson, I learned of this obituary that celebrates a decidedly unconventional life.

Some obituary notices open with the grand achievements of a life well-lived, or the tender details of a person’s passing with loved ones at their side. The death in El Paso, Texas, of Renay Mandel Corren, however, was marked in somewhat more unorthodox fashion. “The bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it,” it read.
…

They include her birthplace of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, “where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism”; Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, “where Renay’s dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried”; and Miami, Florida, “where Renay’s parents, uncles, aunts, and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere, are all buried pretty deep”.
…

“Renay has been toying with death for decades, but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova,” the obituary states.

“Covid couldn’t kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast cancer twice, two mastectomies, two recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major, divorce in the 70s, six kids, one cesarean, a few abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist of Spring Lake, NC or an affair with Larry King in the 60s.”

It also lists her many talents: “She played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped.”

“Renay didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she was lousy with money, too. Here’s what Renay was great at: dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines.”

The desperate defenses of the January 6th rioters

As I wrote before, so many of the January 6th rioters gleefully posted vivid accounts of what they did on that day on social media that they pretty much eliminated any reasonable legal defense that could be mounted in court. The only option left was to throw themselves at the mercy of the courts, using permutations of “I am really sorry”, “I was stupid”, and “I was misled by Trump and others”. That defense is getting mixed results.
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‘Tis the season for returning stuff

Retailers have realized that people are more likely to buy something if they can return it later if they are not satisfied. When it comes on online purchases, they are even more likely to do so if the company offers to pay for the return mailing costs. This has resulted in some people taken advantage of this to essentially get free short-term loans of products that they use for a specific occasion or period and then return.

I had thought that retailers simply put the retuned items on the shelves to be resold. But according to Samantha Bee, much of this stuff is just thrown away and ends up in landfills, a tremendous waste.

Straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel

Take a look at this graph that disaggregates the rates of covid-19 deaths according to vaccination status.

Note that if you are unvaccinated you have at least a five-fold greater risk of dying. This is a massive difference. And yet, many people choose to ignore information that is effectively smacking them upside the head and telling them to get vaccinated.

Compare this with how people are willing to adopt all manner of practices that promise even small benefits. People start taking things like turmeric, acai berries, pomegranate, and adopt all manner of diets, exercise routines, and things like detoxing even though the promised benefits may be just a few percent reduction in cancer or a slight increase in longevity, and the like. And even those benefits have been shown to not be that robust or are even spurious. This behavior reminds me of something that Jesus said in Matthew 23:24 about people straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.
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Journalists should seek to be pariahs

One of the corrupting influences in US journalism lies with people shifting back and forth between the roles of reporter, a talking head pundit, political advisor, and press spokesperson for a public figure or organization. Being a reporter is the hardest job involving having to do real work and research and yet it is likely the least remunerative and has the least visibility. So it should not be surprising that reporters can be lured into those other roles. While they may think that they can remain untainted, it is not easy to maintain the intellectual separation.

In some case, they do not even try that hard to maintain a separation between what they do when working for a media outlet and advising the people they are supposedly covering. A good example of this can be seen in the report released a few days ago that Fox News personalities were privately sending messages to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the January 6th riot expressing alarm at what was going on and calling on him to persuade Donald Trump to call off the mob.
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Radiation paradoxes 4: Stars, space, and rotating frames

How do you tell if you are in an inertial frame or not? According to Newton’s model of a fixed space, an inertial frame is one which is at rest or moving with constant velocity through that fixed space. We saw that determining this required us to observe the state of motion through that space of an object Q that was known to be not under the influence of any forces. If you observe Q to be at rest or moving with constant velocity, then you are in an inertial frame. If however, even in the absence of forces, the freely floating object Q appears to be accelerating in some direction with respect to you, you could conclude that this must be because you are in a frame that is an accelerating in a straight line in the opposite direction and hence you are not in an inertial frame.
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Live by social media, die by social media

We live in an era when people have the opportunity to broadcast the minutiae of their lives far and wide via social media. It is surprising to me that so many people do not seem to realize that along with the attention they receive, there are also serious pitfalls. In the rush to be in the spotlight and impress their circle of friends and relatives, they seem to lose all sense of judgment. Nowhere was this more evidence on a large scale than in how so many of the people who invaded the Capitol building on January were eager to tell everyone of their exploits.

First of all, they gave the authorities information about their identities that allowed them to be arrested. Secondly, their online posts were effectively confessions of guilt. The best they could hope for was leniency on the grounds that they were too stupid to know that they were breaking the law. But judges are taking their posts into account in determining how harshly to sentence them and they are not amused.
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