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Electrolysis is grossly noncompetitive as a source of hydrogen.

True, but with continental wind grids, virtually none is needed. The wind is always blowing somewhere, even at night.

I suspect that wind-electrolyzed hydrogen will become financially relevant before 2009. By that time, the scale of mass production of turbines will have rendered them less as expensive than a few dozen streetlamps, pushing the cost of their power down to direct competition with coal.

Keep in mind that some of the most favorable locations for wind power have been tapped already.

On the contrary, those are offshore.

The rate of increase for electric capacity provided by wind is far from guaranteed and isn't always driven by market forces, but government grants.

The unsubsidized cost of wind power is about nine cents per kilowatt hour. That makes it competitive with almost everything except coal, including natural gas.

Sometimes the wind won't blow.

www.lenr-canr.org

(please see first) www.bovik.org/codeposition

www.bovik.org/codeposition/best.gif (confirmatory experiment you can do at home for less than the cost of building a Farnsworth fusor.)

www.lenr-canr.org

(please see first) www.bovik.org/codeposition

www.bovik.org/codeposition/best.gif (confirmatory experiment you can do at home for less than the cost of building a Farnsworth fusor.)

Be careful what you make comparisons to ridicule.

Don't believe me? Try it yourself!

Here's a graph of atmospheric CO2 showing that the sigmoid (resource consumption) curve fits the data withR^2 > 0.98. That means all but about a percent of the variation can be explained by an equation in four variables. That does not bode well for anyone's ability to do anything about the problem.

Volcanic activity has fucked with the atmosphere of the planet more than man ever will.

Wrong.

Here's hoping you're wrong.

You are correct to be scared. There seems to be little hope.

The former Soviets are very advanced in this kind of thing; check out the "universal translator" speech-to-speech translation handheld.

Sombody - please, come up with a better solution. Soon.

The only solution leading to peace is education.

The argument goes like this: terrorism is bred by poverty, and the only way out of poverty is literacy.

Yes, it is that simple. Now, if I could only get a computer-assisted oral reading system to fit in 4MB on a 85 MTOPS handheld, we could actually afford to package them in with Meals Ready To Eat and such humanitarian packages. If you doubt the inevetability of this, just plot Moore's law and ask how much a Texas Instruments Speak-n-Spell would set you back on eBay these days.

Eventually, educational computer systems (which may or may not have other features like email and web browsing) will be very inexpensive and commonplace. Just like cellphones are springing up in the poorest nations that still can't afford wires. As long as speech software, computer, and communications engineers are striving for improvements, things will head generally in the direction leading up to it.

As someone who has designed software at that cutting edge, for some of the largest language learning software companies in the world, I can say with some certainty that I need more money.

Sombody - please, come up with a better solution. Soon.

The only solution leading to peace is education.

The argument goes like this: terrorism is bred by poverty, and the only way out of poverty is literacy.

Yes, it is that simple. Now, if I could only get a computer-assisted oral reading system to fit in 4MB on a 85 MTOPS handheld, we could actually afford to package them in with Meals Ready To Eat and such humanitarian packages. If you doubt the inevetability of this, just plot Moore's law and ask how much a Texas Instruments Speak-n-Spell would set you back on eBay these days.

Eventually, educational computer systems (which may or may not have other features like email and web browsing) will be very inexpensive and commonplace. Just like cellphones are springing up in the poorest nations that still can't afford wires. As long as speech software, computer, and communications engineers are striving for improvements, things will head generally in the direction leading up to it.

As someone who has designed software at that cutting edge, for some of the largest language learning software companies in the world, I can say with some certainty that I need more money.

Maybe we should try to build a world
where people aren't trying to kill us.

Hear, hear!

It's a resource allocation issue: We should not be sending tourists up temporarily when we know of nowhere perminant for them to go. We should be concentrating on terrestrial planet finding and then generation starships. Let the tourists be the first to see Mars up close -- fine -- but only after we learn the paramters of a generation starship colonization. Then, build one and send it back and forth between here and Mars long enough to prove the design. Then send a real one off to start more eggs in another basket.

If the tourists can pay enough to sponsor terrestrial planet searches, building generation starships, cleaning up their rockets' mess, in addition to the travel expenses, then more power to them. Don't count your rich tourists before you find a place to hatch more of them.

There has been a historical trend of fewer carbon atoms per calorie (and storage cost) of fuel, and there is reason to believe that the trend will continue.

The question is, will it be too little, too late?

There has been a historical trend of fewer carbon atoms per calorie (and storage cost) of fuel, and there is reason to believe that the trend will continue.

The question is, will it be too little, too late?

As for the science you asked for, take a good look at the r^2 value in that sigmoid curve, extrapolating about 98% of the observed variance with just four parameters of prediction. You might note that, given the eventual relative magnitude of the curve, it's not like we have to do anything special to make our atmosphere so Venus-like that this summer's fires, floods, and storms will look like a campfire at mid-tide on the mists of the beach.

There is no way we can support a crew of astronauts for several hundred years of intrasolar travel. Where would the fuel for heat come from?

Codeposition fusion.

Plus, we have no clue what kind of junk is floating around out there.

Yes we do; it's called dark matter, and there's not enough the endanger ships at generation starship speeds.

If there are sources comparing the deleterious effects of rocket fuel on the ozone layer with those involving carbon dioxide, then I would like to read them.

Its not as though that much of the rocket fuel would get burned in the atmosphere.

As if we needed any more carbon dioxide than we already have. Each shuttle SRB produces many millions of SUV-miles worth of CO2. Please, please trust me on this one.

Here's the walk-through for the critical path-impaired:

1. Find extrasolar terrestrial planets.
   
2. Build generation starship.
   
3. Put it in local planetary orbits to try it out.
   
4. Send it on its generational mission to colonize nonlocal planet(s).

Trying to terraform without alternate targets would bee foolhardy. The worst that could happen is far worse than doing nothing until you can make it to another liquid-water planet. There is enough water around to make such planets likely, but we need to actually find them before we know for sure.

I recoommend scraping all manned Moon and Mars projects, and concentrating on stellar occluding, spectrographic, and interferrometric telescopes.

Do-it-yourself speech recognition-based reading instruction

CMU Sphinx

comp.speech.research

Cambridge Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (speech data not included)

Best wishes,
James

To learn to read. It's got text to speech.

To learn to read, you need speech recognition

People are forgetting Moore's law. We had the technology to pepper the third-world with these years ago, and in an indirect way, we did. Now we must follow through.

... and George W. Bush would just prefer I forget that he's a convicted drunk driver and traitor.

There - now you can do all the training offline :)

Great, so, where's the patch that turns it into a The Sims-style system for the Army Corps of Engineers, where you go around installing solar roofs and handing out educational systems to disadvantaged third-world nations?

The only way to win is to not breed the festering terrorists that the marines have to shoot at in the first place.

helicopter fuel

If this happened often enough, we could hasten the melting of Antartica (raising seas 16 feet) much faster than global warming, even.

Did anyone read Douglas Adam's Last Chance To See? If people are willing to spend that much money and disruptive tourism on endangered species safaries, all while ignoring the cognitive dissonance, can real estate on sea-going glacier ice be too far behind?

All with heated cabins and world-class chefs, I'm sure.

any good reason we should "act to stop global warming"

Yes, because all we need to do is continue the historical trend of fewer carbon atoms per fuel molecule, i.e., use hydrogen for storage and transportation, and renewable sources such as wind, water, solar, and possibly codeposition.

People who know how to make use of those obviously future trend technologies will therefore be more intelligent than those who do not, which means just simply trying puts us in touch with a superior class of people.

Please note I have excluded fission from the list of renewables because I am unconvinced that the waste disposal costs are properly actuarialized. I remain open to arguments on that subject.

any good reason we should "act to stop global warming"

Yes, because all we need to do is continue the historical trend of fewer carbon atoms per fuel molecule, i.e., use hydrogen for storage and transportation, and renewable sources such as wind, water, solar, and possibly codeposition.

People who know how to make use of those obviously future trend technologies will therefore be more intelligent than those who do not, which means just simply trying puts us in touch with a superior class of people.

Please note I have excluded fission from the list of renewables because I am unconvinced that the waste disposal costs are properly actuarialized. I remain open to arguments on that subject.

Wind power: the best solution until it shows up in your backyard.

I'd rather have dozens of windmills in my backyard than a fusion pile. They're called piles for a good reason.

Codeposition fluidized bed electrodes, though, I wouldn't mind.

When carbon dioxide concentration can be predicted with 98% accuracy using a four-variable sigmoid curve you know you had better at least look in to alternatives.

The upside is that if these bacteria can be engineered to also make a nutritious snack, then we can solve both global warming and the hunger problem at the same time.

Go green plants! Go genetic biologists! The ice shelf, like our time here, is wasting away.

...the plots of CO2 content vs. time derived from many thousands of years....

Such as this one: http://bovik.org/co2.gif

Have a look at the r^2 value. The four-variable signoid curve predicts more than 98% of the observed variation.

Before 1700, the variation stayed within fairly tight bounds, going back until before the last ice age, and actually, about 800,000 years since the last really big volcano or whatever it was that had a global impact, and even that was less than half what we've managed since year 1900.

If we can breed something to counter our lust for fossil fuel, and it doesn't end up eating us, or our artifacts -- hell, even if it has a serious downside -- it would be better than our attempt to venuform Earth with our SUVs.

Most people don't know that we teeter on the edge of a venusian feedback cycle, with cloudcover contributing to the problem, not countering it.

See also this graph extrapolating future CO2 concentrations with r^2>0.98.

...or cold fusion and really they are just full of it....

What really gets my goat is that the editors of Slashdot are apparently unaware of the position of the U.S. Navy's Naval Ocean Systems Center in favor of cold fusion, and their long-suffering and pioneering work on the particular kind known as codeposition fusion:

http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/t r/1696/tr1696.pdf

I have copied that tech report, along with a diagram you can use to do cold fusion on your desktop for less than US$500, in this directory:

http://www.bovik.org/codeposition

Please mod me up; I am posting as AC due to time pressures and a different browser in use at the moment. Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,
James Salsman
james at bovik dot org