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[ I submitted the following as a story on Saturday. Plenty of links and info, but it got passed up. ]

Solar Car Race - Chicago to California

We all know that solar power is cool. Even cooler is when you use it to go 80mph on a freeway, with the power consumption of a hairdryer! The American Solar Challenge unites teams from many Universities in the goal of racing their custom-built solar-cars from Chicago to California.
That's 2300 miles along Route 66! They start Sunday morning in Chicago, but you can check out the official schedule to see when the cars will be passing through your state. If you're in Chicago now, the cars are on public display (while last-minute tuning continues) at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Google has a number of related items. For photos and blogs, try these: ASC daily photos, ASC dialy diaries, a Stanford blog.

For the first time this year, 2-person cars will be entering the race. Unfortunately, only two of these passed the scrutineering tests: The Stanford Team is racing a 2-person back-to-back configuration. Here's a list of races held in the U.S.A. in the 90's. A similar race in Australia is less student-oriented.

Because concentrations sufficient to suppress fire in the top half of the room will result in non-life-sustaining concentrations at the floor, and people die. Like this....

Building codes (and fire departments) tend to frown on things like that in ordinary commercial inhabited spaces. The link above refers to a false CO2 suppression release in a heavy industrial setting where water would be a really bad idea (a 4MV switch/breaker room), and presumably they did frequent emergency training, and they still killed a worker.

If it's legal for an inhabited commercial space in your jurisdiction (where, by the way?), that's interesting. The person who spec'ed the rooms this way is an incompetent moron, though.

Here at the Yucca Mountain Project, we are evaluating an Open Source application called eNote . To use it, you need a web server that can run Perl.

Although editing is straightforward, the application is not so much for collaborative editing as it is for collaborative documentation of work and data. Here is the first paragraph from the eNote web site:

An electronic R&D Notebook is the electronic equivalent of a paper research notebook. Instead of recording information on paper, the sketches, text, equations, images, graphs, signatures, and other data are recorded on electronic notebook "pages", which can be read and navigated just like in a paper notebook. Instead of writing with a pen and taping in images and graphs, reading and adding to an electronic notebook is done through a computer and can involve input from keyboard, sketchpads, mouse, image files, microphone, and directly from scientific instruments. Electronic notebook software varies in how much it "looks and feels" like a paper notebook, but all the basic functions of a paper notebook are present. In addition, electronic notebooks allow easier input of scientific data and the ability for collaborators in different geographic locations to share the record of ideas, data and events of the joint experiments and research programs.

You don't need Hydrogen. Use a steam burner or some other catalyst.

If a reasonably cheap extraction process could be developed there would be nothing stopping people running their cars on LPG, Gasoline, or even Canola oil.

Granted current H2 extraction technology is very immature, in the long run it is more viable than expensive H2 tanks

You gain traction by synchronizing the motion of the wheels to the surface underneath them.

The dynamic coefficient of friction on tires is much much lower than the static coefficient of friction. Deliberately creating a speed difference between the two ensures that things stay well on the dynamic constant side of the equations.

If I'm humming along at 50MPH and hydroplaning, the right solution to get traction back is not to hold down the throttle such that the rear wheels spin at a rate that would give you a 100MPH speed. That will inhibit them from regaining traction.

From The DOE's Defensive Driving Tips:

Hydroplaning occurs when a film of water causes tires to lose contact with the road surface and is not dependent on high speeds and large amounts of water. The correct reaction for loss of traction because of hydroplaning is different from the response to other types of traction loss. If you experience hydroplaning, slowly decrease pressure on the accelerator, steer the vehicle in the direction of travel, and let the vehicle regain traction from deceleration. Firmly grip the steering wheel because the vehicle may swerve when it regains traction. Once traction is regained, steer the vehicle in the desired direction.

From the California DMV Commerical Driver Handbook:

You can regain control by releasing the accelerator and pushing in the clutch. This will slow your vehicle and let the wheels turn freely. If the vehicle is hydroplaning, do not use the brakes to slow down. If the drive wheels start to skid, push in the clutch to let them turn freely.

Bullshit. A lot of the USA's oil comes from Canada, but not 70%. More like 19% of the USA's imports.

Well, back to the drawing board on these Hydrogen Fuel Cell Buses. I suppose we should all go back to riding horses, but who ever had to walk their car/truck/suv all night because it was collicing?

This gives you a lot of faith in the kind of screening they do at the national weapons labs and at Homeland Security!

Um, I don't think so. According to this article, the Yucca Mountain facility can't even hold it all. It isn't all solid and dry, either. There's plenty of high-level liquid waste around too.

I guess you have been playing so many games and seen so many Holywood movies, they have clouded your judgement.

OK, probably no cat will read this anymore, but this kind of post begs for a reply.

I guess that the oil in Iraq, combined with the enormous energy spending nature of the US (on average 2x or 3x more than any other western country for households) has nothing to do with it.

The US attacked a country of which it was not proven it had weapons of mass destruction and there were serious doubts about this (and now, even your politicians are admitting this), while they leave another country alone of which it is proven that they are actively developing and have weapons of mass destruction.

Talk about hypocrisy. But with a predicted oil shortage, I am only afraid that this is the first of many wars over fossil fuels (face it, if you believe it was about anything else, you must be very naive).

And to get back on the topic, do you really expect other countries to trust the US without any reserve? I applaud the initiative to launch an alternative to GPS.

If so, then why did us taxpayers get stuck with a $58 billion basketball court called Yucca Mountain?

You didn't.

It was paid for by the nuclear power industry.

Sorry if that blows a hole in your kneejerk envirowhackism.

Um, the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than any other country, except maybe Mexico. It varies from month to month.

Nope. They are #3 behind Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/rankings/crudebycountr y.htm

Like *injecting plutonium on human beings* kind of nice?

ODP has been doing research into the area of gas hydrates for a while now. Not only can natural gas be turned into hydrate, but there are vast amounts of gas hydrate "stable" on the sea floor. Gas hydrates are also stable in certains areas of permafrost in the arctic. On an environmental note, it is not known exactly how hydrate. influences global climate change. Methane is 10 times the the global warmer that CO2 is. A large hydrate landslide off the northern coast of norway coincides nicely with an warm period. As sea level falls during an ice age, pressure on hydrates decreases, destabalizing them, and releasing methane into the atmosphere. This could serve as a natural buffer against ice ages. On an interesting side note, Gas hydrates have been proposed as the cause of the dissappearances in the bermuda. triangle. The theory is that a field of gas hydrates destabalizes right below a ship releasing a plume of methane gas. The water density will decrease. The ship sinks.

Less than 3% of nuclear waste from conventional plants is spent fuel. Now, it's true that most of the radioactivity is locked up in that tiny bit of maeterial, but the other 97% of the waste is still a real pain in the ass to safely store until it is no longer hazardous. For more info on the composition of nuclear waste, check out the DOE summary of waste categories that it made as part of its Yucca Mountain work.

According to the DOE the total U.S. generation of electricity for 1999 was 3691 billion kilowatt hours. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav1/int ro.html#tab1

According to the Danish Windpower Industry Association, a modern wind turbine will generate about 2 to 3 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
http://www.windpower.org/faqs.htm#anchor727849

If these numbers (and my math) is right, your conclusion is off by about an order of magnitude.

You are right. I calculated using average peak turbine output, which, given that the wind doesn't blow all the time, is about 1/10 of average sustained output. I should have said 1.5 million modern turbines. Thank you for checking that.

The US is a net CARBON SINK.

A little more to the point: there's $8.5 trillion in actual, tangible dollars in the world. U.S. GDP is %28 of the world's GDP. This is a super-duper rough (gravelly, even), back-of-the-envelope calculation, but you might say, then, that there's about $30-$40 trillion worth of real wealth in the world. My point being: RIAA is suing for something like twice the money in the world. `Nuf said.

(Isn't there a law against something like that? ;)

It's not directly about oil. Oil factors into it, but we aren't there to take it from Iraq. We don't need it as many others have pointed out.

The war is about war. The war is about reconstruction. Both of these things require a lot of money to be spent -- money that will be spent to pay US firms that are friendly to the Bush administration. When the cruise missles and other military supplies that we had in stock are used up, will we sit back and not build more? No. We'll spend taxpayer money on replinishing our supplies "for our defense." This taxpayer money will go to enrich the owners of various military contract companies which have always been in good with conservative politicians. However, you can only spend so much taxpayer money if you want to champion the cause of cutting taxes.

The real cash cow is in Iraq's reconstruction. Look at how the administration is already talking about awarding Haliburton (Cheney's oil company) with the contract to repair Iraq's oil fields and how Congressmen are talking about forcing Qualcomm's CDMA cell phone standard on Iraq instead of the worldwide standard of GSM which is backed by non-US companies. This is where all the real money is. There's a lot of work to do to rebuild Iraq after two US-led wars and a decade of UN sanctions. What companies will get all the contracts to do so? Coallition companies, of course, with US companies taking the lion's share.

The workers who do all the work will be Iraqis, but the management at the top and the shareholders will be largely Americans. How will Iraq pay for all of this reconstruction? Why with the oil that we have many times said "belongs to the Iraqi people." We don't really care who they sell it to afterwards -- we're well-supplied by the rest of the world. However, all the money that comes from selling that oil will go into rebuilding Iraq. After all, they need supplies to rebuild and who better can offer these goods and services to the new government that we install? We're already awarding contracts to US companies to get started doing all this with taxpayer money. Once we're in place we'll be the natural choices for the new goverment to stick with and to pay for with oil.

So, no -- this isn't about going in and taking their oil. While oil isn't the reason we're doing this, oil is what allows us to do this. This will be a shot in the arm to the US economy and to the wealthy heads of companies that members of Bush's administration are so friendly with. Without oil, we wouldn't be talking already about what companies to send in there. Just look at Afghanistan. We could've done the exact same thing there, except that Afghanistan has few readily available natural resources to exploit to foot the bill. Here's pretty much all they've got, and it's not that impressive when you look at the fossil fuel capacity of its neighbors.

Of course, this war is about power too. This war is America's first chance to test the waters in its neoconservative thinkers' agenda of Pax Americana. If we can bring Iraq and the rest of the world to heel, we'll have taken our next step as the world's only remaining superpower to cement our position when China (and maybe India) rise to the world stage next. We're locking down our control of world politics before the Chinese get strong enough to rival and maybe surpass us industrially. While I don't agree with neoconservative politics like that of the Bush administration, I have to admit that it's a ruthlessly pragmatic and logical decision. If we play the "nice guy" on the world stage, we may find ourselves in the #2 position in 20-30 years.

Surely it is worth mentioning in a list of the top 100 hoaxes?

Actually the Carnot cycle puts a limit on the conversion of heat energy into any other form of energy (kinetic, potential, electrical, magnetic, chemical, nuclear, etc). However, heat is the only form of energy so limited. Other conversions, say chemical => electrical are only limited by the second law of thermodynamics. For that matter, converting any other energy to heat can be very efficient. Electrical energy => heat, for example.

So, something like a microturbine is limited to ~30% efficiency for electricity generation. Larger plants can get up to 35% efficiency. A fuel cell has no such limit and could potentially reach into the 90% range for efficiency of electricity generation. Hybrid fuel cell-turbine generation systems are being tested which have efficiencies of over 50% and they speculate that they could hit 70% or more. The problem with such a system is that the upfront cost is very high and it does not get offset by the savings in fuel. Not yet, anyway.

Remember too that conversion of any energy to heat can be very efficient. Natural gas furnaces can be extremely efficient, as high as 97%. That's because converting chemical energy => heat is not a Carnot limited process, and is only limited by the second law of thermodynamics.

Several persons interviewed in the first article discussed dissection, experimentation, and preservation of Venter's body, which would probably be more useful than his previous contributions.

I keep seeing people that claim that fusion and fission are the way to go, still I have a question...
I am absolutly not knowledgeable on the subject so beg with me...

I was reading two link, this and thiswhich kind of explain all this to kindergarden level audience, read fine for me.
And from what I understood, fusion uses both deuterium and tritium at the moment. They state that both are a nuclei of hydrogen.

They go on to say that deuterium can be found in water while tritium can be found in the lithium in the earth crust
First of all, they say that they extract the deuterium from sea-water and lithium from the earth crust/sea water (one says earth crust the other says sea water).
While the amount of energy they can produce with this kind of reaction is very impressive, and the waste is supposed to be 100X less then with fission,
how will they manage to clean it up after 100 years? And how is it renewable energy?

I understand that it is VERY efficient, and I am all for that, just want to know how it is renewable.
And how do they clean up the resulting stuff? Maybe it is 100X less radioactive then the result of a
fission plant, but it is still radioactive none the less, isn't it?

I think that it will be a major breakthrough in the energy field for the generations to come,
but I fail to understand how at mid to long term it will be any more safe then oil.

I know oil is very bad on the environment, but if we managed to get to this point damaging earth with oil in what,
100 years, what does it change if this gets us to the same point in 300 or 400 years?
Maybe it won't pollute air and water the same way, but it still pollutes a lot!

I worry because I think energy is just like bandwidth, the more you have, the more you consume.
and then, you need more. So if it still produce a fair amount of damaging garbage, ain't it bad in the long term anyway?!?

Well, I'm not to coherent this morning, but I am just asking :-)

Your arguments seems like the ones you will read on a Superman comic, you people can't be sooo gullible...

Hey, you've got some fucking expensive universities and all there...

I did a little research (it took about 60 seconds) and find this (note the .gov suffix) http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves .html

If you look carefully, the estimated reserves of oil for the whole world are about 1213 x 10^9 barrels. Iraq has the third position (after Saudi Arabia and Canada) with about 10% (112 x 10^9) of the total reserves of the world. If that seems little to you, then may be you are retarded

The US imports the majority of is oil from South America?

Wrong.

The US only imports oil from one South America country (Venezuela - http://www.ott.doe.gov/facts/archives/fotw246.shtm l) and it certainly doesn't import anywhere near a majority of oil from there.

Nothing pleases me more than when someone wants to debate things and uses facts to support their argument. I commend you, sir. Now, with the plesantries out of the way . . .

This statement is not correct:

"their imports from Iraq FAR exeec those of any other country except Saudi Arabia."

It would be correct if you added "from all OPEC countries." UK & Norway aren't in OPEC. Saudi Arabia & Iraq are (you can see for yourself here.) And, as my previous post stated, UK & Norway were numbers 2 & 3 on the list (Saudi being #1, and Iraq #4 as i recall)

Referring to the excel spreadsheet (t310.xls) you can download from the link you provided - look at rows 12 & 13. Row 12 is total gross import of oil - for the year, adding up that row, I get 26.88 m bbl. Row 13 is gross imports from OPEC :the sum for that row is 8.55 (same units). So OPEC provides 31.8% of France's total oil imports. The other 68 odd percent come from other sources (including Norway, the UK, and other various and sundry countries), which, unfortunately, weren't broken out in this spreadsheet. Now, let's continue with the math - using your number of 0.953 m bbl total Iraqi oil, with a total of 26.88 m bbl, we can get the actual percentage coming from Iraq.

Iraq provides 3.5% of the total imports to France. November 2002, the month which you mentioned had the greatest Iraqi imports, the figure came out to 4.3%.

Interestingly enough, from the same link you provided, you can download a spreadsheet with the U.S.' oil imports. (it's table 3.7, or t37.xls). I did the same series of mathematical manipulations for the U.S. as I did for France (going by gross imports - not sure what net is, but doesn't change that much.)

Iraq provides 3.9% of the total imports to the U.S. (5.316 m bbl from Iraq, total of 136.259 m bbl).

So, since France gets 3.5% of its total oil imports from Iraq, and that fraction is large enough (by your & Mr. Limbaugh's argument) to make them want to oppose the war . . . wouldn't that mean the U.S., with our 3.9% dependance on Iraqi oil, would be even less willing to "rock the boat," if you will?

And if you think the 0.9 m bbl France imports in Iraq is stunning - what do you think about the U.S.'s 5.3 m bbl?

BTW - go read through the transcript this Rush quote came from. He spends a significant amount of time discussing France's dependence on Iraqi oil as the sole reason they're against the war. When you read that, keep in mind the relative percentages of imports for the US & France. Really think about it. Now ask yourself - was his statement really "not too damn far off"? I contend in the context in which he used it, it's very far off. And I also contend if you do more fact checking like this, you won't find he's 99% correct.

Also - I'm not going to let you get away with the line "certainly doesn't compare to the outright lies coming from the left." When somebody says something like this (doesn't matter who, doesn't matter what political affiliation) my BS meter goes off. Everybody's BS meter should go off. What lies? Be specific. I'd be happy to research whatever you point out, so that I know the truth, because I don't like to be fed BS. But you've got to give some details.

People want to manipulate you. They will lie to you. They will not tell you all the facts. You've got to dig deeper. When somebody from the right or the left tells you something "big" - go investigate.

By the way - it took me no more than 10 minutes the first time I went looking for this. Quite a bit longer on this reply, obviously.

Oh - yea, thanks for the link on oil imports. It's really a wealth of information.

You can get this quote from the Rush Limbaugh transcript archive from Tuesday, Feb 25, 2003:

Rush: "the one nation on earth to whom this is only and all about oil is France. France imports most of its oil, and gets the vast majority of that from Iraq. They have sweet economic deals that go back to the 70s made between Saddam Hussein and Jacques Strap Chirac, and I'm telling you, their opposition to this is rooted solely in their desire for an uninterrupted, continued supply of oil from Iraq."

Let's see what the Department of Energy has to say about this little bombshell:

"French imports come primarily from Saudi Arabia and Norway, followed by the United Kingdom (UK), Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, and Russia. In July 2001, the Iraqi government stated that it would reconsider oil projects with French companies and no longer give French companies "priority" due to France's support of the U.S.-British "Smart Sanctions" proposal at the United Nations Security Council."

So - no, France does not import "the vast majority" of its oil from Iraq, and any "sweet deals" they had worked out were apparently ended in 2001 because France wanted to continue sanctions against Iraq.

Think of all the "anit-France" bashing going on in the U.S. right now. Don't you think this kind of claim from Rush helps contribute to that? Does it really have the same impact if Rush says, "for France, this is all about oil from their 4th largest supplier that cut their oil companies out in 2001 because of their willingness to continue with sanctions?"

I don't know - maybe you'll say "well, it's just one little misstatement", but it's symptomatic of a pattern. There is more than one of these "little misstatements" that get thrown out there, that nobody bothers to follow up on, and that shape the tone of the debate (for the worse, I'll say - because it's not based on the truth).

Browse his radio transcripts (see the link above). Look for particularly inflammatory claims, or statements of fact. Do some research on your own to see if it's exactly as Rush has proclaimed. Perhaps you'll find out 99% of what he says is true. Perhaps not. But at least then YOU can say with confidence that you trust what he says because YOU have checked up on him.

oh, yea - I did a fair amount of looking, and this was the most recent, least biased source I could come up with. Feel free to find a more recent (than Jan 2002) article from an equally repudiable source to prove me wrong.

Ugh! It has been said again, and again, and again... the US does not get the majority of it's oil from the middle east! Yes, it gets a lot, but it gets far more from Canada, Mexico, and South America. See here.

you've got some facts horribly wrong.

Venezuelan oil accounted for more than 17% of total U.S. oil imports, compared to just 12% during the first nine months of 2002.

look here

Iraq has more proven oil than Venezuela, and about 90% of the country is unexplored. It's second to Saudi Arabia, and many people believe it's first. However, if it is 'for the oil' chances are it's also for the natural gas as well. Iraq is also loaded with that.

More than 50% comes from the Mid East, eh? Maybe if you LIVE in the middle east that is true, but not here in the U.S. (see Domestic Oil Use). oh, and not all Middle eastern countries are "terrorist" states--rarely are Kuwait or Saudi Arabia (or other autocratic allies) classified as "terrorists." So I suggest you think about this: terrorism is not a new problem and is not confined to the middle east. Try Pacific terrorists, the right-wing extremists in the U.S., we used to have Puerto Rican extremists blowing up cars on the interstates, Northern Ireland, Corsican terrorists, etc. These are all non-Muslim terrorists that have been more dangerous until one amazingly high-profile attack (9/11). That was not the end-all and be-all of the terror world. And if you really want to get coy, you can stop buying sheep from Corsica and rum from Puerto Rico (in case the Puerto Ricans deicde to start a new terror campaign). Grow up; we cannot stop all chanels to terrorists in a free market system. So if you want to create a central planning and development structure for the world with its politburos, fine, but short of that and a MASSIVE police force, you will never stop chanelling money to bad people (like Coca-Cola who has hired the military in South American states to execute labor organizers, or Exxon-Mobil, etc, etc).

Since I've seen no mention of methane hydrates yet, I'll bring it up. Methane hydrate is a compound somewhat similar to natural gas that is found trapped in ice crystals on the ocean floor. We don't know how to extract it economically yet, but according to the this article there are about 400 million trillion cubic feet of this stuff worldwide. Replace "Hydorgen Economy" with "Methane Gas Economy" and you've now got a resource that you can mine. Check out google for more info on methane hydrates.

I find it interesting that US alone is using about the same amount of oil as Europe, Central and South America combined. Or the entire Asian uses only a bit more than US.

> So at current rate of consumption, all oil on Earth will be burnt in 36 year.

The remaining oil reserves are only estimates and all the previous estimates have been proved totally incorrect. I wouldn't give much weight to the number. I agree that the current comsumption level cannot stay forever. Oil probably never ends, in some point it just comes so expensive to use that we stop burning it for energy. This probably happens sooner than 30 years.

Well, I live in Brazil where 87% of electricity is hydropower.

Figure 1:
World Crude Oil and Natural Gas Reserves, January 1, 2002 (PDF) (Go directly to the bottom line of last page). World reserves, as of 1st january 2002: 1,018.7 billion barrels.

Figure 2:
World Petroleum Consumption (idem) 77,125 thousand barrels per day.

So years to go at CURRENT RATE before there's no oil left on Earth:

1.0187E12/77.125E6/365=36.19 years.

So at current rate of consumption, all oil on Earth will be burnt in 36 year. As we extract only roughly 60% of the reserves due to technical reasons, it boils down to 21.7 years. You've got that long to buy a bike, if the consumption doen't skyrocket as China's life standards increases.

Figure 1:
World Crude Oil and Natural Gas Reserves, January 1, 2002 (PDF) (Go directly to the bottom line of last page). World reserves, as of 1st january 2002: 1,018.7 billion barrels.

Figure 2:
World Petroleum Consumption (idem) 77,125 thousand barrels per day.

So years to go at CURRENT RATE before there's no oil left on Earth:

1.0187E12/77.125E6/365=36.19 years.

So at current rate of consumption, all oil on Earth will be burnt in 36 year. As we extract only roughly 60% of the reserves due to technical reasons, it boils down to 21.7 years. You've got that long to buy a bike, if the consumption doen't skyrocket as China's life standards increases.

We've got 30 year of oil to go maximum. I made the calculation 2 week ago. I think this figure is broadly overestimated (yes, over).

It's basically all world proven reserves of oil (1000 Bilion barels) divided by the world daily consumption (75 milion barrel per day).

That brings us to 36,5 years (2040).

BUT the reserves can't be fully extracted (usually only 60%) and the consumption is likely to go up, so 20-25 years seems more likely, or even less. (ouch, isn't it?)

The figures were comming from the Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government

A sizeable portion from renewable energy?

If you're in the US, that's about 6%.

The UK sits at an embarrassing 2.3%.

If you're in Canada, then it's a much more respectable 60% - gotta love that Hydropower.

Unless you're in Canada, I don't think it's fair to say that a healthy chunk of your electrical power is from clean sources. Not yet, anyway.

A sizeable portion from renewable energy?

If you're in the US, that's about 6%.

The UK sits at an embarrassing 2.3%.

If you're in Canada, then it's a much more respectable 60% - gotta love that Hydropower.

Unless you're in Canada, I don't think it's fair to say that a healthy chunk of your electrical power is from clean sources. Not yet, anyway.

A sizeable portion from renewable energy?

If you're in the US, that's about 6%.

The UK sits at an embarrassing 2.3%.

If you're in Canada, then it's a much more respectable 60% - gotta love that Hydropower.

Unless you're in Canada, I don't think it's fair to say that a healthy chunk of your electrical power is from clean sources. Not yet, anyway.

What?.. no helicopter gunships and armed personnel carriers were dispatched?.. no snipers?.. not even one attack dog?.. even an eensy weensy attack chihuahua?

You know what'll happen now... the DOE and Homeland Security, having been caught with their pants down - no, make that with their pants down, peeing ON THE SIDE OF THE TOILET, will be so embarrassed they'll immediately go for shooting the messenger for the message, and put poor Noah in jail.

I hope he thought of that before he published in Wired.. then again, maybe that's part of the plan for Becoming A Real Journalist - get arrested for your cause! I hope the ACLU and/or Wired (if they're loyal to their reporters) can get him off of the felony trespassing rap the gov will slap him with..

I am now going to taunt you.

The land area of the United States is 9363130 square kilometers.

0.06 * 9363130 = 561787.8 square kilometers

or to use square miles:

0.06 * 3,794,083.06 = 227644.9836 square miles

Or the size of the *entire* states of Arizona and New Mexico together.

Sure. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and use about one sixteenth of our total land area for nothing but windmills. It'll be like a chipper-shredder for birds the likes of which the world has never seen. I like wind power just fine, but let's be sane about what kinds of quantities of power we can extract from it.

Besides, I'd be curious to know what kind of effects pulling this much energy out of the air would have on the weather. According to this, the U.S. generates about 3.6 billion kWh of power a year. What would happen if we sucked all that juice out of the air? No more tornadoes maybe, but what if no more thunder storms to dump rain on crops? I'm not sure if we could affect the weather this way, but I would imagine that there'd be *some* consequences.

However, these are small-time crooks, by and large. The real money is in the white-collar big time. It is now our historic privilege to be witnessing the greatest example of legalized embezzlement in the history of mankind.

• This year's Defense Department budget ~370 billion
• Additional funding for ABM system ~70 billion, probably much more
• Additional expenses from invading Iraq ~200 billion

...but isn't Oak Ridge also infamous as a contaminated site? Any truth to all that? A Google search reveals a war of the cites.

I know similar questions were raised about the Rocky Flats Plant (renamed "Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site" in an Orwellian twist) in Golden, CO (of Coors fame?).

(Another leaky drum example, in northwest DC a few miles from here, they have to be careful when excavation of drums of chemical warfare materials that were misplaced 70 years ago. One wonders how these things happen in the first place.)

Here is a Dec. 2002 DOE press release re cleanup near Y-12. Cleanup is part of the price of nuclear programs, military or civilian.

Looks like they provide a bus tour, and that the museum is still open.

But tours are pretty common at big federal facilities these days. The federal facilities still want to promote themselves to the public, and a bus allows more secure control and over the visitors.

My wife and I were able to take a special bus tour through the Kennedy Space Center, which brought us within 1000 feet of the Shuttle launching pad and the huge storage building (the normal tour took you within a mile, and you have to stay in the bus). This was April, 2002. The special tours had been closed from 9/11 until a few days before we got there, so we were very lucky.

Miniature video loops of the full-screen movies showing the atomospheric testing program can be viewed at this DOE website

Thomas Gold is not, of course, in the oil industry.. he's an astronomer. I have had a look through his work; all I can say is that if he wants to get taken seriously, he should take an undergraduate course in Geology first..

Although it has to be said that the existance of a deep, hot biosphere (down to about 3-6 km, depending on the thermal gradient) does seem pretty likely; in some special circumstances in Russia, natural gas deposits appear to be generated by deep bacteria acting on source rocks, and oil will biodegrade if it gets in contact with oxygenated water (see the canadian and venezealean heavy oils/tar sands).

It's also possable to produce oil in the lab by heating the source rocks with water in the absence of oxygen - this is basically what 'oil shale' projects try; this oil is idendical to that found in association with the source rocks.

Oil will also crack fairly quickly to methane under temperatures >150 degrees centigrade. This alone severely limits the depth at which oil can accumulate. Methane will tend to 'crack' to carbon dioxide at greater depths, although a greater problem is the low porosity and permability of the rocks at depth.

• Started an incentive program that grants a one-time payment of $4.50-$6.50/watt generated by homes or businesses connected ot the LA DWP power grid, starting 2000/9/1 and ending five years later.
• The State of California provides an income tax deduction of 15% towards the net cost of installed grid-connected solar electric systems. This new tax credit is retroactive to January 2001.

Uh, Mecca is in Saudi Arabia, not Iraq. And Iraq is sitting on a shitload of oil. What do you think US was doing cozying up to Iraq 20 years ago? To get Iraqi oil of course. Only Saudi Arabia has more oil than Iraq, and that's just what we know, which, seeing as we haven't been there exploring in a while, is probably greatly understated.

...maybe we could just lock in the coordinates on our freight transporter and teleport it directly into the sun. You're thinking 1000 years, not 100. Think of what we have accomplished in the past 100 years and stop being ridiculously optimistic.