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You don't believe global warming is causing climate change?

G: No. If it is, it is causing such a small part that it is negligible. I'm not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle '40s to the early '70s. And there has been warming since the middle '70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.

I say atheists, because some who advocate on behalf of evolution want to disprove Christianity through science. In Discover magazine recently, there was an article about Sir Richard Dawkins, refered to as Darwin's rottweiler, who uses evolution to attempt to disprove Christianity, even to scientists who believe in both evolution and God.

Frankly, science and religion have little in common, other than the search for truth that was talked about in the movie Contact. I believe that science's purpose is to explain the natural (physical) world, but that it cannot say anything about the spiritual world. Religion/faith is about who we are in relation to the natural and spiritual world, and is suppose to show us how to fulfill our potential as human beings.

If someone else is paying for my healthcare, why should I care what it costs?

For example, when my grandmother was dying of cancer, Medicare and her supplemental picked up 95+% of the tab. Her doctor sent her to a nutritionist at first, as a way of acknowledging the mountain of research that proves nutrition is an important part of health. Grandma later said, "she wanted me to eat 5 servings of vegetables a day. She's CRAZY!" The doctor never mentioned nutrition again, and stuck to the high-tech/high-cost treatments he'd been trained in. She died after six months, after having spent $50k+ of other people's money.

A year ago I started seeing a Doctor of Osteopathy in the Cranial Field for some Osteopathic Manipulation. He works from a home-office, has an answering machine for an assistant, answers all his own messages, and basically does everything himself. He gives me a receipt that I can submit myself for insurance reimbursment, if I so desire. He doesn't accept insurance because a) he'd need an employee to handle the billing b) his practice is full regardless c) many insurances are likely to disallow his kind of therapy, or pay him pennies on the dollar.

In January I decided to see a homeopathic M.D. to see if there was something I could do about my cold hands. After taking an extensive history, he decided that my autonomic nervous system was probably out of balance, and injected me with novocain (same as what dentists use to numb the mouth) in a couple locations. He also gave me a couple of homeopathic remedies, and some fish oil/vitamin E at the next visit. I'm out $400 or $500 for his services, and am totally pleased with the results. He doesn't bill insurance either, also because it's not worth his time.

If I'd gone the conventional route, my insurance would've had to spend $2000 or $5000 on diagnostic tests (an MRI goes for $1000, and CAT scans aren't cheap either), $20,000 on hand surgery/whatever, and I still would've had the problem. As it is, I've spent approx $5,000 with the D.O., and I'm totally satisfied because the treatment program works.

Health Insurance should be carried for accidents, because you never know when you might have a $40,000 medical bill (like me, 8 years ago: a helicopter flight, a plane flight, a cat scan or two, 10 days in the hospital, etc...). But we should all pay our way, for the costs associated with living.

Modern Medicine has evolved with almost univeral insurance coverage, so our doctors have the mindset of "if cost were no object, what would I do?" (this is not a concious thing, but a mindset that gets passed from generation to generation of medical professionals) Which explains why there are so many $60,000 heart bypass surgeries being done, even though some researchers say that bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives, because it is almost universally incompatible with the patient's long-term outcome. I clipped a story from the paper a few weeks back about a guy who died in his 50's, 3 weeks after having a bypass operation. Re-plumbing the heart while ignoring the rest of the vascular system seems like a foolish way to go about attaining health. But it makes the heart surgeon wealthy, so why should he do anything else?

See also:
100 years of Medical Robery
Real Medical Freedom

So new we have an active refienery in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerizat ion

At least Japan knows how to PR the tech - you never hear about it here - which is just sad.

i actually thought the increase in oil prices would probably help this technology along. the only thing anyone has questioned about the process is the cost efficiency of making oil from thermal depolymerization versus the cost of just buying it from opec countries and/or successfully mining it from the oil shale in canada. i think the depolymerization method obviously has a lot more positives in its favor.

i also read that the livestock manufacturers, now understanding that their waste was actually useful and profitable for someone, had decided to charge for their waste product rather than just give it away, which was at least somewhat assumed by the cost analysis of depolymerization to begin with. even though it made sense at the time to assume that rather than paying for people to remove biological waste, they would rather have someone do it for free or even pay them for it, you can never overestimate the greed of corporations. i sure hope the technology continues to develop until it becomes more cost efficient. even if it can only reduce our needs for oil a small percentage, that would be a significant difference in our reliance on opec.

This article:

http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-06/cover/

is what I was thinking about. It is in the back of my mind that I have seen spinning elsewhere also, but I don't remember where.

A rocket engine wouldn't work in the context of a process that took any signifigant amount of time. It also doesn't seem like centrifigal artificial gravity would be directionally 'pure' enough, but that is just conjecture/instinct on my part. If my assumption about centrifigal gravity is correct, I don't think there is any practical way to use gravity to shape a mirror in space.

It seems that they use gravity spinning to preshape the mirror because of the size; it would take a while to grind off 15 tons of material, or even 5 or whatever.

The cover story for this month's Discover magazine tells of a recently discovered gigantic virus, Mimivirus, that has blurred the lines between viruses and bacteria, and spurred speculation that viruses could be the reason life evolved past single-celled organisms.

The cover story for this month's Discover magazine tells of a recently discovered gigantic virus, Mimivirus, that has blurred the lines between viruses and bacteria, and spurred speculation that viruses could be the reason life evolved past single-celled organisms.

Instead of proto-bacteria, it might be more accurate to use "protobiont," because the characteristics that make bacteria bacteria weren't necessarily around at the beginning of life. Also, self-replicating DNA is kind of a big first step - more modern theories point to ribozymes as the original self-replicating molecule, being a ribosome molecule that can act as an enzyme and therefore have information-storing and metabolic functions. The oil droplets, or micelles, that you mention are probably better known as liposomes (that's actually a really good article on selectively permeable membranes and the first cells) and the presence of what are essentially protists (mitochondria and chloroplasts) inside eukaryotic cells is called endosymbiosis, and occurred (at least with mitochondria) by endocytosis. More on that here.

And here's a bugmenot search for Discover.com: http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.discover. com

Instead of proto-bacteria, it might be more accurate to use "protobiont," because the characteristics that make bacteria bacteria weren't necessarily around at the beginning of life. Also, self-replicating DNA is kind of a big first step - more modern theories point to ribozymes as the original self-replicating molecule, being a ribosome molecule that can act as an enzyme and therefore have information-storing and metabolic functions. The oil droplets, or micelles, that you mention are probably better known as liposomes (that's actually a really good article on selectively permeable membranes and the first cells) and the presence of what are essentially protists (mitochondria and chloroplasts) inside eukaryotic cells is called endosymbiosis, and occurred (at least with mitochondria) by endocytosis. More on that here.

And here's a bugmenot search for Discover.com: http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.discover. com

Don't be deceived. The advocates of global warming could very well be wrong. See this article which cites a Stanford climatologist who advocated in the mid-70s that the world was cooling:

http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-06/rd/global-co oling/

Perhaps the most enlighted part of this short article appears in the last paragraph:

"Science is a self-correcting institution," Schneider says. "The data change, so of course you change your position. Otherwise, you would be dishonest."

The article does not seem to contain mention of just when this all started. The Globe & Mail is a bit behind- Discover magazine reported on the project in 2001: http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-01/features/fea tsimple/

How do complex and allegedly "irreducible" organs and systems come about?

First, you must have a serious definition of what irreducibly complex means. From the examples I've been given me, it's a subjective guess.

Second, you have to consider what you would accept? We can look for examples in the fossil record and "connect the dots". Is that good enough? I mean, it is when you accept that the planets are moving in elliptical orbits. All we can do is observe them every night and "connect the dots", and use other theories to back up our completed picture. But perhaps some people won't be satified until they can park their butt in a lawn chair above the solar system and observe it for thenselves.

There are also modelling techniques. Since evolution takes a lot of time, one way of observing it is to simulate it in a manner faster than natural time. Tierra is an example of digital evolution, as is a more recent simulation built at MSU. Mathematics also offers models of evolution. But will you accept these as you do for just about every other scientific field out there?

I think pleny of people are willing to answer how

What's particularly weak are these 'guest author' articles, which I imagine is this one from Google's brass. The article is near the beginning of the mag, if memory serves me correct, and is written by some different guest author each month and can be about anything, really. It's pretty lame, usually some post-menopausal woman bemoaning her children leaving home, or some high school person talking about preparing for college, or some disaffected 29 year old explaining the challenges his generation fails between sips of a double-tall.

(I'm not much into the printed magazines, but the only ones I'm subscribed to now is Discover and Make. I used to subscribe to Newsweek several years back, but was continually disappointed by the fluff and eventually canceled.)

Indeed, this was in the press before the movie. Discover posted the original article on their website when the movie came out.

I was reading on a link from LRC about Nature's Nuclear Reactor, so the timing of this /. post comes just as I was thinking about the potential energy inside the ground.

I've ran the numbers for solar cells and windmill generators and can't see the overall savings. Taking into account the manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs, are these techniques better for the environment or any cheaper?

Geothermal seems like it would work well, if you can store the energy or throttle back the generation during lulls in need. The setup costs seem huge and I wonder how often they'll tap out a given dig's heat (if ever).

I think money will be better spent in more efficient storage of energy. Batteries, salts and event heat tanks all interest me. I'm not seeing any long term viability of anything but coal, gasoline and natural gas until the storage exceeds the unit per dollar ratio of the 3 gases mentioned.

This is a little off-topic, but the new issue of discover magazine has an article on people trying to brew stone age beer. They used a mix of rice, honey, malt, grapes and berries. It was supposed to taste rather nasty. http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/features/sto ne-age-beer/

For further reading, here are some links:

A quick write up about it: http://www.bfi.org/Trimtab/spring00/longnow.htm

A wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

An interview aobut it: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand/brand_p2.htm l

A Discovery Article: http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/cover/

A book about the clock: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465 007805/002-9433271-9089642?v=glance

Just read an article stating that they've found remnants of some 9000-year-old beer at a Chinese archaeological dig. The interesting thing is, I'm pretty sure agriculture has only been around for about 10,000 years, and there's no reason to think this is the oldest beer around... Could it be that beer caused civilization? This impartial observer believes, almost certainly yes.

Strong correlation is considered evidence of causation.

If I see a lot of people leaving an alley and coming out bruised, and most of them say that they were mugged while in the alley, then it is reasonably safe to conclude that when you come out of the alley bruised that you were mugged. However, without actually seeing it, I have no way of knowing for sure, and it's possible that you got in a fight before you went in the alley and actually came through the alley itself unscathed.

If you look at the graph presented in TFA, you'll see a relatively constant increase in temps from 1910-1945, following by about 35 years of fluctuating temps. A stay of execution? Perhaps. But there was also a fairly consistent increase in temps from 1860 to 1900, followed by a decade of cooling.

I'm interested in the work of Dr. William Gray, who back in 2000 published this opinion piece indicating his lack of belief in the hypothesis of man-made global warming, and in this interview continued to proclaim that the global warming threat is overblown. That interview, and some other recent words, have led me to believe that he's researching how global currents may be at fault for the changes, and to what effect man-made emissions are (or are not) at fault.

I'm one of the few still on the fence, I guess. I'm willing to hedge our bets with a major expansion of the use of nuclear power, but not a lot of people seem to be interested in that.

I actually agree, I believe the world community of scientists have said that there is a link between the increase in natural disasters/weather conditions and pollution.

Please read this link. The meteorologist that predicts hurricanes doubts this link and the ammount of how much humans have affected global warming.

"These people aren't scientists, they are politicians."

Fine then, ask the scientists. William Gray, the grand daddy of hurricane forecasting and the go-to guy at the beginning of the season thinks the hurricane-to-global-warming connection is way overblown to non-existant.

If that is too definitive for you, a group of scientist out of the University of Colorado have come to the conclusion that the claims of a linkage between global warming and hurricane impacts are premature [PDF]. So the brightest minds in hurricanes don't see it and I doubt that they would be in denial.....

reporting the obvious

Oh, well, now, I wouldn't say that.

This article is from February 2003. The guy is an evolutionary biologist, but search for the word 'factory' and notice where this factory is rumored to exist. You guessed it, Liaoning Province.

Very interesting read.

Watch a bit of New Orleans news, and think about how readily people dismiss the warnings about increasing severity of storms and other atmospheric extremes due to global warming.

Read this, then get back to me on if global warming is having a big effect on hurricanes.

Either that or maybe the United States will actually address and attempt to fix global warming with this hurricane blow?

Lets see what Meteorologist William Gray the guy who predicts the hurrican season has to say.

With last year's hurricane season so active, and this year's looking like it will be, won't people say it's evidence of global warming? G: The Atlantic has had more of these storms in the least 10 years or so, but in other ocean basins, activity is slightly down. Why would that be so if this is climate change? The Atlantic is a special basin? The number of major storms in the Atlantic also went way down from the middle 1960s to the middle '90s, when greenhouse gases were going up.

He's skeptical on mans cause of global warming and the effect on hurricanes.

You may want to update what you know about William Gray, because this recent Discover Magazine interview suggests that he's completely opposite your statements. Examples:

"I don't have the budget that I had, so I have cut my project way back. I am in retirement. I'm still working every day, but I don't teach and I don't have as many graduate students and as much financial need. I've got a little money from Lexington Insurance out of Boston, and I have some National Science Foundation money. For years I haven't had any NOAA, NASA, or Navy money."

Nothing from NOAA, an organization you specifically mention as working with him.

"Right now I'm trying to work on this human-induced global-warming thing that I think is grossly exaggerated. ... I'm not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle '40s to the early '70s. And there has been warming since the middle '70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced. ... Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us."

That -- and the rest of the interview -- sounds like a great deal of disagreement that global warming will lead to bigger western Atlantic hurricanes. He's convinced that it's all natural cycles of ocean temperatures, and that humans have little or nothing to do with it.

1. How to work with other people
2. How to get along with people you may not like
3. Discipline and focus, with regard to achieving a goal
4. Planning and stragety
5. Competitiveness, which certainly can help later in life if applied correctly

(Actually, I believe some laboratories have managed to accellerate light to faster than its normal speed, though I can't be bothered to dig up any articles on it.)

someone already killed this one in another thread

they have got laser beams in the lab to travel faster than the accepted speed of light in the vacuum. Have a read here

Not exactly.

I recall reading of research at the Washington School of Medicine that found, at least in the test group of mice, that the types of bacteria living in the intestines break down otherwise indigestible carbohydrates and secrete a compound that prevents the production of a hormone that limits the amount of fat stored in the body. The popular fad of admonishing carbohydrates of various types is based on the same idiocy as shamanism. There is research however, that has identified what the acting function is that causes the foolish to fall for that illusion. An article in Discover is located at: http://www.discover.com/web-exclusives/fat-bacteri a0505/

Not entirely true:

"On the other hand, liquid mercury vaporizes at room temperature, and when you inhale the vapor it moves right from the lungs to the bloodstream to the brain. A broken thermometer can release enough mercury vapor to poison the air in a room"

http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-05/features/our -preferred-poison/

Of course a cooling system using mercury would heat the mercury so any leaks would release more vapor. Any leaks would likely enter the watershed and wind up in our food supply.

The caption under a photo in the article seeks to address concerns that the machine will build "concrete bunker" houses:

Khoshnevis believes that the varied shapes created by a miniature version of the contour crafter herald a revolution in architecture. "You will see houses, neighbor-hoods, and cities that look very different," he says.

This caption accompanies a photo of swirly shapes cranked out by the tabletop version of his wall-builder, suggesting that someday we can all run out and design cool spiral-shaped Custom Future Houses.

However, there is a little problem with this vision of artistic utopian housing called "financing". Banks LIKE cookie-cutter bunker-style housing. Speaking as someone fighting banks and appraisers to get financing for a relatively standard-looking custom home, I can tell you that even very minor deviations from "the same house everybody else already has" will make it nearly impossible to finance a homebuilding project.

Those freaks who live in converted 747 fuselages and water towers didn't pay for their weird domiciles with the help of a banker. I can't imagine this wall-builder will magically reduce construction costs to the point that nobody needs mortgages. Examples of people getting a banker smack-down are easy to find -- ask around, you'll discover you probably already know somebody who had an interest in those octagonal domed houses that were in all the magazines in the 80's, for example, and those are relatively extreme cases.

Big business likes their houses built just like they love their cube-farms... neat and orderly and more or less identical...

IIRC, one of the interesting implications was that people blind since birth could not grasp concepts like "roundness" if they were suddenly endowed with sight.

Titanium prices most likely will fall over the next two years as a result of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, which delivered tons of titanium to the shores of India. It would make sense that Inida would start mining as quickly as possible to generate funds for reconstruction.

Oh and by the way, titanium is mostly found in dunes and beaches, so yes mining the ore is about as cheap as sand.

From an article in Discover Magazine

Colin Norman, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, notes that NASA has already built two expensive new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3, for the cancelled Hubble upgrade. Instead of salvaging the current Hubble, he proposes using the parts to create a replacement, the Hubble Origins Probe.

Also see the John Hopkins Newsletter.

A British Airways 747 flew through volcanic ash once. The results were nogt good, though kudos to the crew for getting the bird down safely.

Interestingly enough, the last page in Discover magazine this month is about exactly this issue. You can see it here.

First off, you rarely find elemental mercury in the environment that hasn't been put there by man. Yes, mercury is "natural" but that doesn't mean it's natural to find high concentrations of it free, in the environment. Lots of the "natural" mercury is locked up in other compounds, often deep below the surface.

Second off, I'd actually say that mercury in the landfill will give your CO2 a run for its money. check out some of the recent press coverage. Really quick, here's a link to a story in Discover: http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-05/features/our -preferred-poison/ and if you look a bit further, you'll find all sorts of other recent publications on the present dangers of mercury.

Mindfully.org note: While it does have the bright side of getting rid of a lot of trash, burning the oil from the process is about the same as burning any oil. The combustion waste of burning the byproduct of this technology is definitely toxic and most likely causes global warming. If burning petroleum causes global warming, then so does this.

If it were used, it would prolong oil supplies. But then, we shouldn't be burning oil in the first place.

Beyond it being a get-rich-quick scheme, it is a cure for a symptom, not the problem(s). We need to combat the problems of this world. Rather than compounding the errors of the past, we need to see things for what they really are and deal with them. Adding technology does not solve anything in a sustainable manner.

They are almost completely wrong. Here was my response:

I have to disagree with your rating of Brian Appel's Changing World Technologies, as appended to the May 2003 Discover.com article about it. You give it a unanimous prolonged thumbs down. This shows a lack of knowledge about the petroleum products industry.

The oil produced by the process patented by CWT is invaluable as a source to produce plastic products, even though, Godwilling, we will move to more efficient and less environmentally impactive energy sources than burning hydrocarbons (produced from oil).

Plastic is an excellent material. The word plastics refers to an entire world, not limited to what most people think of as plastic. It may not be best stated as even a class of materials but a currently very developed system of manufacturing a particular class of materials. The problem it has is that it is not cheap to recycle, so it gets put back into the environment. While it is almost never toxic, it still causes problems because of its natural physical properties--its impermeability, and all the other properties that make it useful to us. All of those properties make it bad outside of its intended setting, and in some random place in the biological environment. It is usually very tailored to a precise function.

The other problem with plastics is that they are derived from petroleum--oil. This impacts the environment as it must be removed from the ground. They are also derived from various other chemicals, like, well, like the chemicals described resulting from CWT's processing of plastics and other various organic and mixed feedstocks. These chemicals are now procured from a wide variety of processes, some of them *extremely* deliterious to the environment.

CWT's system is the BEST way I have seen to recycle what society depends on. The replacements for current plastic products are often worse for the environment than plastics themselves, if you take the whole manufacturing system into account. We will always depend on these products. Now we can do so ad infinitum.

We will ween ourselves from consuming our precious oxygen and heating our environment to produce usable energy. This story isn't even tangential to that change in my mind though.

We will alway use plastics in one form or another. This is how we will do it without destroying anything. That's the good story about CWT.

It even developed its own sustainable nuclear fission reactor 2 billion years ago according to Discover magazine.

http://www.discover.com/web-exclusives/natures-nuc lear-reactor0204/

The Author, Michio Kaku, also had essentially the exact same article in the December issue of Discover. The article is right here. Very interesting read, but the engineer in me makes me laugh at the sheer impracticality if the possible methods.

www.owlsden.com/moroha

1. Commitment to something greater than oneself
2. Self-respect, but with humility, self-discipline, and acceptance of personal responsibility
3. Respect and caring for others
4. Caring for other living things and the environment

Discover magazine wrote an article about this already. To save you from signing up and reading the whole thing, the conclusion was that we won't in the near future have the ability to shoot down a missile with a missile, and the government is wasting its time and money.
With current technology its almost exactly like trying to shoot a bullet in mid-flight with another bullet.

This Article in Discover Magazine has data against this. It additionally puts an upper limit on the time to approximately 20,000 years ago and a lower limit of approximately 17,000 years.

This data is based on genetic mutation in the Y chromosome. This works as it is passed father to son almost without change. (Some genetic variation happens due to random mutation.)

This Article in Discover Magazine has data against this. It additionally puts an upper limit on the time to approximately 20,000 years ago and a lower limit of approximately 17,000 years.

This data is based on genetic mutation in the Y chromosome. This works as it is passed father to son almost without change. (Some genetic variation happens due to random mutation.)

Here is a link to a Discovery article
Nuclear Planet
Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth?

Yes the core is mostly Iron, but it's not pure iron. I mentioned iron as a core material in my post.

I have heard it estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of pregnencies end in miscarriage before people even realize they are pregnent

Discover had an article back in May of 2004 that talked about this. In fact, it seems, the viability of a pregnancy is sometimes determined even before fertilization.

I am glad Discover decided to re-run this story again this year...

Why? You're either overly sensitive or reading something into the parent comment that was not there. There was nothing about WHO is at greater risk or WHY.

AIDS is, indeed on the rise in minority women, especially in sub-saharan Africa. The prevalent theory is that the culture in the region encourages multiple sexual partners within a small circle (see Why AIDS is worse in Africa for more on this.

And you've now offended me.

First, while most of us think of toilet output when we think of sewage, the reality of most municipal wastewater is that it has loads of soap in it.

The beauty of aerobic processes is that most of the water is back in the river in about eight hours. Can the same be done with Anerobic digestion?

... did anyone notice that little item on the technology and products part of the web site marked "organic vapor"? What is that? Is it recoverable? Can you burn it for fuel without incurring the wrath of the EPA? Who would want to live anywhere near that kind of thing?

Believe me, for what we spend on sludge hauling contracts, if there were any better solution, we'd jump at it even if it were more expensive in the short term.

It could work, but other technology needs to catch up first. Fairly detailed sensors could be installed in current prosthetics, I'm sure, but the machine-nerve interface just doesn't carry enough data yet. It doesn't matter whether we know what that data means, since the brain can probably learn to interpret it on its own, but we just don't have the fine control over the interface that we would need. In related news, an article in this month's Discover (full text viewable to subscribers) discusses a lot of these limitations, although it comes at it from the angle of whether mind-reading (or controlling) computer chips are possible.

In this, the magazine notes (not a direct quote): Once a strand is put up, you can have very light objects climb the strand... this is similar to the first strand placed to wire a suspension bridge. It's very cheap relative to trying to wire the entire weight of the cables. This makes it much more inexpensive than you think

Note also that the article mentions it might be as little as $6 Billion to build it. I think the venture capital industry would laugh at $6 Billion - that's the easy part... the tough part is the science to ensure it can work.