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is not a rare element - "There is more titanium in the earth's crust than there is nickel, zinc, chromium, tin, lead, mercury, and manganese combined!" http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/titanium/overview.php

My source says the Escalade is 7,100 pounds gross. Perhaps you have a better source that puts it above 8500 pounds?

Meanwhile this link backs up everything GP said.

The basic definition of a light truck--any truck or truck derivative with a gross vehicle weight rating of 8,500 pounds or less--allows plenty of room for family vehicles. Because light trucks is considered a separate category from passenger automobiles, vehicle manufacturers have been able to build and market SUVs and other large vehicles with a less stringent CAFE standard, currently 20.7 miles per gallon (mpg). Furthermore, most SUVs and pickups, and all vans, are currently permitted to emit 29% to 47% more carbon monoxide and 75% to 175% more nitrogen oxides than passenger cars.

1. Your basic arguments are hostile to the poor, or your ignorant. One of the two.

False dichotomy. You could simply be factually wrong. Let's look at the facts...

People aren't going into debt because of lavish lifestyles. They're going into debt because adjusted for inflation they've lost ground every year for 30 years. You make less than your father did.

[citation needed]. Not about the inflation bit, but rather about that being why people are going into debt. Fact is, adjusted for inflation, people are still 5 times deeper in debt than they were in 1975.

2. Lenders accept no risk.

Maybe you conveniently missed how many banks went bankrupt recently. That's an awful lot of damage for "no risk".

They bundle bad loans together until they're so big that letting them go would wreck the economy, then demand 'Austerity' from the poor to pay for it. This is what really happened.

And nobody's saying they didn't. Of course, the question of whether it was legal or not is still up for debate, and as of a few days ago was still under investigation by the US DOJ. Of course, you're free to jump to your conclusions... just recognize they aren't facts.

Remember the S&L scandal? As for the loan and inflation, easy to deal with. Just lobby congress to raise minimum payments.

Um, yeah. That's rather the whole concept of inflation. The same about of wealth requires more money, so paying back the same amount of your loan requires more actual money. Now, a fair outcome would be to also raise wages to meet the higher needs, but Congress failed there.

3. These laws don't matter if they're not enforced. There are places you can get 50% credit cards.

[citation needed]. The highest I've heard of in the states is 40% for an unsecured credit card immediately after bankruptcy... which puts the highest risk on the lender.

Also, see point # 1 of this post. After 30 years of declining wages it's difficult if not impossible for anyone to get out of debt long enough to build up any wealth.

Alright, let's look at point 1... Adjusted for inflation, people are still going deeper into debt. It's not a matter of building up wealth, it's a matter of spending beyond means routinely.

4. My argument is that debtors need leverage over lenders or the system quickly breaks down. In the absence of that leverage (bankruptcy) there's no incentive for the people who own you and me (re: George Carlin) not to return to debtors prisons and 16-tons.

Similarly, lenders need leverage over debtors, or the lenders can't expect any safety in lending. In the absence of that leverage (court-ordered payment plans), there's no incentive for the people who borrow money to pay back what they took.

It's the same crap argument I hear all the time that says we should get rid of regulations and safety nets. That you don't need it anymore. That things are better. Safer. There's other ways. You ignore the fact that there's a reason why people were given the power of bankruptcy in the first place.

And yours is the same crap argument I hear all the time that we need to help the little guy at the expense of Big Credit or whoever the bad guy is this week. That Big Credit is going to abuse us all into submission, because we're all forced to take their high-interest loans to buy the overpriced luxury goods that we need so badly. You ignore the fact that defaulting on loans is the reason high interest rates are charged in the first place.

It's a careful balance, and we just farked it right up.

Well, you got

I'd spend more time digging into this if you weren't an AC, but let me take the low-hanging fruit and attack his theory that reducing your personal use of the automobile will help the environment.

Let's get the "gas demand is inelastic" myth out of the way. This study calculates the average and long-term price elasticity of gasoline. For global warming, we are interested in the long-term number, which is -0.58 - meaning that a 10% rise in gasoline price leads to a 5.8% decline in quantity demanded. In "Review of price and income elasticities in the demand for road traffic", they come to a similar calculation of 6% decline in quantity demanded.

So it is pretty clear that your individual "conserved" gasoline will in fact obey the demand curve of economics.

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gravity/overview.php

The ULTIMATE alternative fuel conspiracy ... I found this story myself just searching around on the web for a few days over a period of many years ... Here is the first source in 2000 an IRAQI professor at the University of Babylon in Iraq claims to create an AWSOME alternative fuel ... http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewrecord.php?requester=gs&collection=TRD&recid=0487992EN&q=related%3AcvDnjuQ1qzgJ%3Ascholar.google.com%2F&uid=787066510&setcookie=yes "Performance study of a four-stroke spark ignition engine working with both of hydrogen and ethyl alcohol as supplementary fuel Al-Baghdadi, Maher A.-R. Sadiq" Here a Davis grad student who previously was referencing the above professor in his quest to get funding to do similar research as the only expertise in the field with these fuel supplements ... http://gate.its.ucdavis.edu/enrollment/preprop06/jordan/ “GATE Center > Enrollment > Research Proposals Awarded in August 2005 > Eddie Jordan Hydrogen Enriched Ethanol Project” The library at the University of Babylon was particularly looted and destroyed over a long period of time after the war started. This is where the original work was done ... http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_4_63/ai_104971393/ A few years later the author/professor, Al-Baghdadi, Maher A.-R. Sadiq, shows up at a university in Libya researching fuel cells but that link is DEAD, but now there is this book at Borders ... http://www.borders.com.au/book/cfd-modeling-and-analysis-of-different-novel-designs-of-air-breathing-pem-fuel-cells/7689234/

"You know this, how?"

Uh, science?

No one is doubting Global Warming.

That's simply not true. There's a large contingency of folks who are outright denying even the temp rises. They're typically the mindless followers of Beck & Limbaugh.

By "solar weather theory" are you referring to the false arguments that AGW is caused by cosmic rays and/or temps are increasing on other planets? If so, no problem. Here's 34 different scientific papers that refute each aspect of them. :)

So, you ready to change your business model now?

Yeah, okay.

Being opposed to government sanctioned same sex marriage is not gay bashing. Tom and Bob's relationship will never have as much value to society's as Tom and Jenny's. Why? Tom and Bob can NEVER produce offspring. Tom and Jenny's can. No offspring. No society. Before you get all spun up about, "Oh, now you need to have a kid to be a productive member of society, blah, blah, blah." No, that's not what I said. Tom and Jenny's relationship at least has the potential for offspring. That makes it different than Tom and Bob's. And it's potential value to society (furthering it) is clear. So one could make the argument that it's in governments interest to promote marriage between a man and a woman as a "better thing" than not. And if Tom and Bob want to get married. I couldn't care less. Good for them. May they live long and be happy. I just don't think that government should bestow it with the same benefits of marriage between a man and a woman. If you consider that position "gay bashing" that's fine. We have no common ground on the issue at that point I would imagine. Finally, yeah, I'm fine with government getting out of the marriage business.

Immigrant bashing. Damn, you're not a careful reader (I know, I know, it's slashdot.) I took great pains to point out that people here illegally are not immigrants. I'd like more immigrants to come. I'd like it to be easier for people to immigrate. Hell, I'd love for Mexico and Canada to perhaps become part of the union. Illegal aliens are just that. Don't call them immigrants because they've done nothing to immigrate. If people don't want to come here legally, I'm 100% for building a big fence and sending people back home. I'm also fine with naturalizing them and having them pay fines. I'd just like illegal migration to stop (note, once again, I didn't call it illegal immigration.) Finally, I'm sympathetic. If I was dirt poor in Mexico, I'd want to come here any way I could. That doesn't make it any less illegal. And if that still makes me an "immigrant basher" in your eyes, apply the lack of common ground point above to this as well.

As for anti-science, thanks for pointing out the Texas deal. I'll ammend my above quote "I think the creationism in schools is dumb but that's not a national issue." I don't know the specifics of the Texas case (don't live there, don't really care) so I'm not going to condemn nor defend it. My knee-jerk reaction is to be in opposition but that's as far as I'll go at this point. If you feel like producing some actual links, I'd be happy to take a look. As for the ice cores, they may not be the holy grail you think they are. It seems to me that you have your own (religious) dogmas that you denigrate in others. Personally, I'm agnostic on both God and anthropogenic global warming.

Aren't we supposed to all get along now in this new era of b-ipartisanship and national unity? Hell no, debate like this is good IMHO. Keep it up.

I'll leave you with this:

A woman once came to Gandhi and asked him to please tell her son to give up eating sugar. Gandhi asked the woman to bring the boy back in a week. Exactly one week later the woman returned, and Gandhi said to the boy, "Please give up eating sugar." The woman thanked the Mahatma, and, as she turned to go, asked him why he had not said those words a week ago."

Gandhi replied, "Because a week ago, I had not given up eating sugar.

Take from it what you will.

That's fine, fact is that size has little to do with off-road capability. There have been off-road vehicles for both the individual and the family who have an actual need for such since forever. 90% of the SUV market has nothing to do with them, and their bloated size has nothing to do with being useful off-road, since most of em aren't.

You already have pulsating magnetic fields in your house. In the US, AC current is 60 hz, so you have a constant 60 hz magnetic field. That hum you hear is the oscillating magnetic field moving steel back and forth.

Electrical wiring in houses shouldn't produce very strong fields -- on the order of mG a few inches away. That hum you hear is most likely from transformers in devices you have plugged into the wall than from induction on the beams in your house unless you have a very strange house.

The magnetic field won't hurt you. My dad was an electrical lineman for forty years, often working on the 30,000 volt towers. He couldn't wear a mechanical wristwatch because it would become magnetized. He just turned 77 and he's healthier than a lot of guys my age.

If magnetic fields caused cancer, linemen would die of lukemia right and left.

Wrong type of cancer.

Epidemiological studies show that people working with magnetic fields in fact *do* have a higher rate of brain cancers than the average population. (See here , here, and here.)

That last study notes that leukemia rates aren't affected by EM exposure, and this study shows no increase in breast cancers in rats due to magnetic field exposure.

We actually have a model and theory for how AC fields promote brain cancers. You can read this full paper on an experiment to test a theory that iron-mediated free radical creation is at fault. Here's an abstract for a study testing for oxidative effects of EMF in snails.

(Also, the plural of anecdote is not evidence -- much less, "I knew a guy who did [X risky thing] and is doing just awesome, so stop worrying about it, you pansies!")

• Molecular hydrogen (H2) physically sticking to a porous storage medium, such as a metal organic framework, without chemically reacting.
• Chemically storing atomic hydrogen in a compounds, such as metal hydrides, where it can reversibly react to form H2.

The reason the weight percent numbers seem small is that H2 has a molecular weight of ~2 AMU and any material with the capacity to adsorb lots of hydrogen or store it chemically is going to be made of much heavier atoms. In this way, mass percentage is deceiving but it is the most common measure of storage capacity. My wild guess is that the 6.5% cutoff is in the ballpark of the energy output to mass ratio of gasoline. Luckily, neither fuel requires the automobile to haul around all the oxygen necessary to for the reactions.

If people aren't happy with single digit weight percentages, they could suggest using a heavier hydrogen isotopes to double or triple the numbers!

See this.

Actually Sulfur is a major determinant of cloud formation.. at least over the ocean.
http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/dimethyl/overvi ew.php

Sulfur acts as a cloud condensing nuclei (CCN) which attracts water molecules...

Clouds are formed by dust, dirt, and sulfur... So your point about an "all natural
all organic" pure water solution is just plain wrong..

I seem to remember reading that the BBC had actually created a vast archive of their broadcast library on state-of-the-art laser discs to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening ... unfortunately, there are no longer any players that work with the media. Whoops.

I think your talking about the BBC's The Domesday Project a 'detailed snapshot or time capsule of British life in the mid-1980s'. Completed in 1986 it used a laserdisk based system (There was no CD-ROM standard at the time). After 15 years the hardwere used to access the disks was breaking down and the disks near unreadable fortunatly the data has been resued and preserved as a software emulation has been. reading the article I would not bee too fast to carp the project was way ahead of its with ... the disks stored 140Gb of data and this was back in 1986.

Its a interesting object lesson in Digital preservation.

http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewrecord.php?request er=gs&collection=TRD&recid=A7421234AH&q=g.+kukla&u id=788325659&setcookie=yes

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972Sci...178..190K

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5638/ab s/270573a0.html

Dozens of others that are accessible to casual search.

Owned much?

No, they don't say "plunging into the next ice age", any more than the current articles claim that New York will be buried under a mile of boiling water next week.

However, the screeching hippies and the sensationalist press of the day spun it that way, just like they're spinning the current (modest) increase as the end of civilization.

I always thought the most effective last ditch response was dumping iron in the ocean.

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/oceangard/overv iew.php

-ccl

I dug around a little and found the following abstract detailing an older version of Buzz Aldrin's work. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a free link to the actual paper...

Evolutionary space transportation plan for Mars cycling concepts
Aldrin, Buzz; Byrnes, Dennis; Jones, Ron; Davis, Hubert
AIAA Space 2001 Conference and Exposition

A promising new human Mars exploration approach based on the use of an Earth-Mars Cycling Interplanetary Transportation System is described. In this approach, a cycling vehicle acts as a permanently emplaced transportation element that continuously cycles between the Earth and Mars using gravity assist with minimal course adjustment on each cycle eliminating the need to repeat the large and expensive injection propellant requirement of traditionally conceived Mars vehicles and missions. With the implementation of a two Cycler system, one Cycler would always be going to Mars while the other is returning to Earth. When in the vicinity of the Earth or Mars, the Cyclers release or are intercepted by smaller aerobraking "taxis" that ferry people and supplies to and from the surface. Alternatively, in the Semi-Cycler Concept, the Cycler vehicles themselves would use aerobraking and gravity assist to orbit about the Earth or Mars for a period before returning. In this way, unmanned cargo flights to Mars could use the minimum energy, long trip time trajectories while crewed flights could use the shorter flight time, longer stay time options. Both concepts are addressed in the paper, and the results of preliminary flight mechanics analyses are presented. In addition, a transportation plan is presented based upon a logical extension of existing space assets augmented by new vehicles providing a reusable transportation capability.

Well, the earth is huge. Sure, humans have a huge impact on the earth, but the area we occupy is a small percentage. Volcanos put out large amounts of CO2. The believe that when earth was a complete snowball (entirely covered with ice) it was the volcanos putting CO2 into the atmosphere which warmed the earth again (despite the high reflectivity of the snow/ice).

One of the approaches I've read about which would be high-impact for low effort would be to seed the shallow seas with powdered iron. From what I've read that is sometimes/often the limiting factor on growth of algae is the lack of iron. So the idea is to add iron to the system, the creatures (not sure if it's just algae, or diatoms or what) grows and sequesters CO2 and sinks to the bottom of the oceans. Of course this can cause lots of problems while the environment changes (red tides kill fish...), but may be our best bet to stop the CO2 increase.

Here's a link I found on 'gardening oceans'.

Space shuttle replacements

Hypersonic X-30 cancelled in 1993.

What happened to the X-33.
Cnn article on the troubles of the X-33
aerospike engine for x-33

Gasoline is a favored fuel precisely because it is so safe. A simple tank is sufficient container.

Pressurized hydrogen gas is much more dangerous. The simple tank must become a pressure-holding vessel. I think this is what the general fear is.

There are ways of storing hydrogen that don't involve high pressure hydrogen gas in a tank. They're not as simple as a tank, nor as light when empty, but they aren't rolling Hindenburgs.

That's essentially correct: there is more information inside a quantum system than anybody can measure.

Quantum Cryptography: Privacy Through Uncertainty

Here's how I think about it as a computer programmer. Newtonian+Maxwell physics are like C data structures, where every member is public, and an experimenter can 'get' and 'set' arbitrary values. But quantum objects are like O-O objects: the internals are private; the objects have methods; and you can only use the methods; and there are no raw "set" and "get" methods!

So consider an electron with a 'measure_position' method and a 'measure_momentum' method. Calling e1.measure_position() affects the internal state of the electron (there are no const methods in nature -- everything you do to measure an object affects the object).

QC is based on the construction of quantum objects where there is no set of method calls that are sufficient to create a second object which is indistinguishable from the first one. In the Newtonian universe, you just memcpy() more objects, but in the quantum world, there is no memcpy() -- there are only the object methods found in nature.

In order to "read" the photon, you will need to measure the polarization of that photon. But, due to quantum mechanics, as soon as you measure the polarization (for example, with a filter), you will in effect have changed its polarization, and thus its original, actual polarization will be unknown to you. And that's the trick. In essence, the message is "read once." Even if you happen to use the exact same filter as the sender, and read the original photon (and message) for yourself, you can not retransmit the photon with its original, actual polarization -- and thus your "clean one" will arrive at the destination as garbage (thus notifying the receiver that the message has been compromised).

For more info read this primer.

On the subject securing optical links, quantum crypto is an interesting aproach. It is not useful to transmit a lot of data, but can be used in secure key interchange.

More on this:
here
here
and here

Modern schemes wouldn't be necessary because quantum cryptography would become the standard and is proven to be unbreakable by the laws of quantum mechanics. Any interaction (malicious or otherwise) of a third party is noticable to the proper parties and the message/key transmission is just repeated until a clean send is achieved.
Here, here and google (of course) provide some good reading if you're interested

Metal Hydrides can store Hydrogen at densities greater than even solid Hydrogen. Of course, the hydride weighs 10x the amount of Hydrogen it can store, so I don't know if it would be practical for use on airplanes, but it's definitely space-efficient and safe.

I don't know why people think creating Hydrogen is expensive, either. Electrolyzers can be made anywhere from 80 to 90% efficient. Of course, electricity isn't as cheap as gasoline, but Hydrogen could be produced during off-peak times. I'm sure it would be comparable to or cheaper than highly-refined jet fuel.

I posted a link earlier, so here it is again, if you want some information about hydrogen storage.

I doubt granite is quite so efficient as these alloys, so you might be able to just sink big pieces of metal underground to absorb hydrogen from the surrounding rock, although it would probably be a slow process.

That doesn't leave much room for the rock...

As I said before, it leaves plenty of room for the rock.

If you don't understand, spend a minute or two of your time trying to understand more about hydrogen storage.

See this.

Echidnas (Australian spiny ant eaters) have no REM sleep.