“Falling asleep over here, Hodge-podge,” said the beautiful new female character, Camille Saroyan (played by Tamara Taylor) who heads the research institute in Fox Television’s crime drama, “Bones” as it forged into it’s new season with a second installment last night. What was “scary” about the episode last night was not so much the slimy gore of the autopsy on a long-dead, waterlogged corpse, but the fact that the new HEAD of the institute is urging character “Hodgins” (the “bug guy” as they call him) to skip the technical details and get on with the point and state his conclusion.

Okay, okay, so before you start to think of me as one of the soap opera fans watching television shows who endows the characters with such verisimilitude that I actually believe they are real human beings with an existence independent of the miracles of Hollywood (or Vancouver, Canada’s “Hollywood North” in many instances over the past couple of decades). No, I worked behind the scenes in film and television for a few years. My delight in the popularity of all of those crime lab dramas, from Miami, to New York, to Las Vegas, to Washington and back, is the apparent underpinning of the fascination with the SCIENCE that the audience has displayed that I found really encouraging. Of course, it was a small personal thrill to be ahead of the curve in that I had read a couple of Kathy Reich’s novels before the television series, “Bones,” based on her writings, first aired. But I was just delighted that the crime drama genre in general had evolved beyond Perry Mason’s clever trickery of always getting a last minute, on-the-witness-stand confession to confirm his logical analysis of what really happened. Somehow, it seemed a lot more believable that forensic science could come up with hard evidence that proved guilt beyond a shadow of viewer doubts.

Nor, am I ignoring the fact that introducing the beautiful (yes, I’ve said it before, but she really is lovely enough to be worth repeating that fact — those eyes are entrancing) rival to Emily Deschannel’s Dr. Temperance Brennan character adds a nice dynamic to the interplay, especially with a history of romance between the lovely newcomer and Dr. Brennan’s sometimes love interest, Agent Booth (actor, David Boreanaz). I was “Director of Development” in the story department of a small film company in Santa Monica for a while, and a USC Film Department instructor once called me “the best story editor I have ever met.” Far more interesting than the rivalry between Hodgins and the previous director of the institute, I would rate this “Bones” vs. Saroyan faceoff an upgrade of at least 300% in dramatic potential. But that’s not what bothered me about the character’s attitude.

What upset me was that the writers and producers, sharp though they were in making this change in the cast and character dynamics, also seemed to be starting down that slippery slope toward “Lucy” television. Nobody is going to out-Lucy all-time favorite Lucille Ball. So, please, let us not dumb down the television we’ve got. CSI and the rest are popular because of the science and the special effects that generates. Young audiences, the ones coveted by advertisers are comfortable with science, and moving more in the direction of soaps is going to cost these shows their core audiences. Those audiences made CSI (the original) such a hit that it spawned two of its own spin-offs, and numerous imitators; some pale, some gloriously vibrant.

Even setting all that aside, let us not forget that we need to continue to promote science education, and science careers as our world relies more and more on advances in technology. The good news hidden in that fact is, that although we are becoming more and more dependent on technology as a society and as a planet as a whole, the technology of making stuff go “bang” so that we can turn its chemical energy into the kinetic energy of motion for our vehicles is pretty low tech stuff. It can fairly easily be understood by anyone with a good high school education, or slightly more.

Notice I did say, a good high school education, which, unfortunately seems as rare now as a couple hundred years ago when few people actually went to high school. Sorry. That is not fair. The various “gifted” and academically enriched programs are turning out graduates who are, in proportion to the population, about the same percentage as 19th Century upper school graduates. The problem in that area is more that we are now taking 12 years to give children what used to be considered a 4th grade level of education. But I digress.

The simplicity of the technology and the chemistry involved in producing those short chain carbon based fuels, methane, ethanol, and CNG/LPG are comparative child’s play considering the sophistication of electronic semi-conductors. These electronic circuits’ manufacture requires each product to consistently layer wafers of materials that are merely a few hundred atoms thick to guide electrons down pathways narrower than a tenth the width of a human hair. Compare that process of clean room vapor deposition of materials to methane production.

To produce methane, simply put some rotting organic material in a sealed container, then periodically siphon off the vapor that results from the natural processes of anaerobic bacteria. In fact, Sweden is powering whole municipal fleets of vehicles by doing just that. They build a city waste dump with a liner on the bottom, fill it with garbage for a few years, cover the top and pump the gas into storage containers to run the city’s cars and trucks. Not very efficient, but a whole lot better than not topping it, thus allowing the escaping gases to disperse into the atmosphere, making yet another contribution to global warming.

So, good news number 1 is that methane is (and many of the simple short chain hydrocarbon molecules that make viable portable energy sources are) easy to produce.

Good news number 2 is that although natural processes produce these gases, it is also relatively easy to hurry that process along using mainly technology that has been around for a hundred years or more. You simply “cook” the organic material at very high temperatures for a very short time. High temperatures break the bonds that hold long chains of carbon and hydrogen into long chain hydrocarbon or elaborate carbohydrate structures. In general those long structures of hydrogen and carbon are endless repetitions of the same sequences, so breaking them down is called “de-polymerization.”

Again, the natural organic processes that do this have been known and used by men for thousands of years. Virtually all processes for making alcohol (to drink) use them. But it takes hours, days, or even weeks to get the most out of those grains, starches and sugars. Modern high pressure equipment can do it in minutes. And what is alcohol, the drinking kind? Ethanol. Scotch drinkers don’t despair. Bourbon sippers need not weep. There will still be plenty of the high priced stuff to quaff after we start putting millions of gallons of ethanol into vehicle fuel tanks. Besides, you can’t make good whiskey for under $2.00 a gallon, and you can’t sell truck fuel (today, at least) for $12 a fifth.

More good news. Cummins has formed a partnership, CWI to produce natural gas burning “diesel” engines. Same horsepower, mixed diesel and compressed (actually LNG, if I understand it correctly) natural gas that is “sparked” (unlike compression only ignition in normal diesel engines) although not in the same way as internal combustion spark plugs do it. A heavy duty truck engine (15 litres displacement) is planned. The “spark plug” to all this is a high pressure direct injector of the fuel mixture. Some language in their publicity suggests that it fits in the same injector ports as conventional diesel engines without modification. They illustrate a combination of fuel tanks, one diesel, one LNG both about the same size. Although LNG contains half the energy density of diesel per volume, it is only about half the weight, so there is no loss for the cleaner burning combination. Clean? Not yet, but cleaner than conventional diesel. Yet more good news is that there is no reason the approximately 10% diesel used to “pilot spark” the high pressure LNG can’t be biodiesel.

Other kinds of Westport’s engines are used in Los Angeles buses using the older “Otto cycle” type of cleaner burning CNG engines, too. But the promise of the “Westport cycle” high pressure direct injection engines is that they are designed for heavy duty, long haul type trucking and even for electric generator type diesel replacement applications. But what got me really excited was to find that these Canadians (in Vancouver - see, you knew there was a reason I brought up Vancouver earlier, didn’t you) have also developed a high pressure injector system for direct injection of hydrogen into internal combustion engines.

It is a linguistic and philosophical “fact,” not just an optimist’s point of view that, even if you haven’t noticed, the future starts NOW, not tomorrow.

Love

Stafford “Doc” Williamson