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"And natural gas (methane) only combusts into CO2 and H2O (water vapor) unless you introduce other reactants or starve it of oxygen."

Pretty much exactly right. :)

CO and NO2 are also produced as well as fine particles primarily from the burners volatizing dust. Surprisingly the levels can easily hit levels that would be illegal.

Ideally you should turn the fan on before you light the stove (or turn it on with electrics); its worst at the start as any dust, food residue, soap residue from cleaning etc on the burners gets burnt off. ie -- "Introducing other reactants"

Here's another couple references:

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/201...

https://www.aivc.org/sites/def...

Retinal damage is not the only ocular risk.

https://velodynelidar.com/newsroom/guide-to-lidar-wavelengths/

1550 nm systems use a wavelength that is allowed to run more power compared to 905 nm. However, under certain conditions, the 1550 nm wavelength of light can still cause corneal damage and potential damage to the eye lens.

Electric universe is bullshit.

Their assertions are complete bullshit. There is a reason they make those assertions, and that is where things get interesting.

Pretty much everyone agrees that at The Beginning, their was nothing but energy. It is explained as being at a single point, no mass, no space. Assuming that is correct:

Energy, for whatever reason, "knotted" or "condensed" into 'matter'. When energy became 'matter' it forced the creation of the 'compliment' of mass, which is what we call spacetime. Spacetime is a field. A field of electromagnetism. Space is literally electromagnetic. This is how photons move. Photons aka electromagnetic waves, are literally ripples in this electromagnetic field. The photons are always measured at the same speed regardless of the strength of this field because measurements are always taken in relation to the electromagnetic field, aka spacetime.

The spacetime field falls off in proportion to lorentz invariance as applied to speed in relation to the speed of light. http://www2.lbl.gov/MicroWorld.... If you look at the graph in the lower right corner, the center of the galaxy would be at the far top right of that graph. Technically, any "black hole" will do as far as the top right of that graph goes. The field falls off in direct relation towards the outside of the galaxy. This is why galactic rotation curves do not make "sense" to humans. Time is literally moving faster at the edge of the galaxy than the center. Proof: http://www.astronomy.ohio-stat...

Since spacetime is literally an electromagnetic field, I can understand why the Electric Universe folks get so bent out of shape... they perceived part of a Truth and went running with it... rather like I am. ;)

Try this one.

Whoever wrote the TFS had zero chance of understanding the point or import of the upgrade. Such a hyperbolic jumble of nonsense. If you want real information, go to the people who actually do this for living.

Los Angeles is one the leading smog capitals of the world.

Umm... no.

http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/a...

Construction Costs:
Nuclear: $14 billion (Vogtle units 3 & 4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Solar: $2.2 billion (Ivanpah Solar Power Facility) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wind: $1.5 million (typical 1 megawatt windmill in USA) https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/...

Power produced:
Nuclear: 2 GW (2 units x 1.2 gigawatts each x 0.85 expected capacity factor)
Solar: 80 MW (400 MW capacity x 0.2 measured capacity factor)
Wind: 0.33 MW (1 MW x 0.33 typical measured capacity factor)

Expected Operational Lifespan:
Nuclear: 60 years
Solar: 25 years
Wind: 20 years

CO2 emissions: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Nuclear: 60 g/kWh
Solar: 40 g/kWh
Wind: 21 g/kWh

Someone check my math but this is what I came up with. Wind produces 1/3rd the CO2 of nuclear but costs twice as much. Solar produces 2/3rds the CO2 but costs *TEN TIMES* as much. I'm taking into account installed capacity, operational lifespan, and capacity factor. You can take into account things like cleanup costs after the power plant is retired, lifetime operational costs, etc. Some people just love to point out the extreme costs of building a nuclear power plant but if the actual potential for producing power is taken into account it looks real cheap.

Trying to find actual historical costs of energy of these energy sources has been difficult. Lots of people like to "estimate", "project", or just plain leave things out of their study. A study by what people might assume to be biased pro-nuclear shows electricity costs around the world: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/p... It shows solar to be quite expensive compared to anything else in the study.

By my estimates wind and nuclear really win out here. Solar might look marginally better than nuclear for reducing CO2 but the costs are just outrageous.

Individual applications don't but open your task manager and look at how many processes are running. The more cores you have the more processing power the operating system has to distribute all those processes, and their threads, across. Furthermore some graphics programs and game engines sometimes use upwards of a dozen worker threads.

CPU power in general hasn't lept by great bounds in the last decade like it did 20 years ago when every new computer would be outdated in a year, so now the best strategy is to add more cores so each individual core isn't as burdened as it would otherwise be, and it will likely be the only strategy when we reach the limits of silicone based CPUs in the near future due to quantum tunneling unless someone comes up with something better. Stacking transistors could also be a possible solution sort of like a CPU skyscraper.

> We're still paying 0.528kWh for solar here in Ontario

I don't know why you are getting screwed up in Canada, but US Power Purchase Agreements are down around $0.05kWh ($50/MWh):

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/wp-...

A PPA is an agreement between the owner of a solar plant, and an electric utility or large commercial user, for a fixed amount of output for a fixed amount of time.

In 2014 around 30% of new installations used tracking (Figure 2 and Figure 3), and this is increasing in utility-scale installations as the technology improves and costs reduce (LBL ref figure 7, shows installed price per megawatt in 2014 was almost the same for tracking and fixed systems).

They're playing some tricks with the numbers to get capacity factors close to 0.3, which is physically impossible unless all your PV panels are super-high efficiency and track the sun. But this isn't the sort of thing you can just cover up. It's trivial to calculate the actual capacity factor for PV solar:

• Installed peak capacity at the end of 2014 and 2015 was 18,173 MW and 25,459 MW respectively. So figure average capacity for 2015 was (25459 + 18173)/2 = 21,816 MW.
• PV solar generation for 2015 was 23,232 GWh.
• There are 8766 hours in a year (factoring in leap years).
• (23232 GWh) / (21.816 GW * 8766 hours) = 0.121 capacity factor.

Yeah sure, there's a conspiracy to cover up the real numbers. Or, you know, you might have botched your calculations. You took the solar output from large utilities only and divided it by the total solar capacity including distributed generation.

Solar capacity factors of >25% are relatively easy in the sun belt and can go as high as 36% with tracking and a high panel-to-inverter ratio (Lawrence Berkely study, 2014 figures).

• The amount of K40 and Rb87 in your body gives off about 4600 Bq.
• The K40 (same radioactivity source as in bananas) dissolved in seawater gives off about 12 Bq/L, or about 12,000 Bq per cubic meter. (Cue the alarmists crying that the amount of K40 in your body is static and so we should subtract it. No, you don't subtract it, you divide by it. 0.3 Bq / 4600 = 0.006%. So it's increased the radiation your body normally withstands while staying hale and hearty by 0.006%)
• The Rb87 dissolved in seawater gives off about 0.11 Bq/L, or about 110 Bq per cubic meter.
• The U238 dissolved in seawater gives off about 0.04 Bq/L, or about 40 Bq per cubic meter.
• Heck, the amount of Tritium in seawater gives off about 0.0006 Bq/L, or about 0.6 Bq per cubic meter.
• A granite countertop gives off about 1000 Bq per kg.

If 0.3 Bq / m^3 were dangerous, you'd be dead ten thousand times over just from the natural radioactivity in your own body, a hundred thousand times over from natural radiation from other sources. These measurements of residual radiation from Fukushima are a testament to how good our instruments are at detecting minute quantities of radiation. Not a sign that our oceans are dangerous.

Clicking through to the article finds - for example - they are refering to Glycidol.
NIOSH in the USA recommends a limit of 25ppm over a 8 hour shift for workers.

The first link I find says 350l/hr are breathed, meaning 3000l/ work day.
This is about 4.5kg of air. 1ppm is 4.5mg, so 25ppm is 110mg.
It showed about 2 micrograms per puff in the graph at http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016...

In order to exceed the NIOSH recommendations for worker safety for glycidol, you need to take _HALF_A_MILLION_ puffs.
PER DAY.

So, yes, they have found novel compounds in the vape, but at least some of these are considered 'safe' in other context at levels way above what is found in the smoke.

Here's the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature record for Los Angeles: berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/locations/34.56N-118.70W

This is slightly more informative view than just comparing two random years, 1921 and 2013. As you can see, a lot of noise in the data (when you average the entire globe, the noise tends to average out. A single location, though, has a lot of variation.) But the trend is up. Looking at the red (ten year average) curve, about 1 degree C of warming from 1921 to 2013.

Nevertheless, do keep this in mind: Los Angeles is not the world.

40 cents/W was probably some clearance price by a warehouse trying to move old stock. Average total installed costs for PV solar (including mouting, inverter, switching equipment, labor) is around $4 per Watt. (I should note that California tends to be on the expensive side. Arizona is below $3/W installed median price.) Remember folks, marketing brochures use the lowest cost. For real-world policies and implementations, you need to use the average cost.

$4/W gets you $4000/kW. Capacity factor for fixed panels in the continental U.S. (ratio of actual generation to peak generation) is about 0.145. So the price per kW of actual production is $4000 / 0.145 = $27586 / kW.

$0.115 / kWh is the average retail residential price for the U.S. A good chunk of that is transmission fees (installation and maintenance for all the wires, poles, transformers, etc), which is why net metering won't be coming back. If you can actually use all the electricity the PV panels generate on-site, then great! You're saving yourself a net $0.115/kWh and will pay for the panels in $27586 kW / $0.115/kWh = 239878 hours = 27.4 years. (It's lower in California because residential electricity prices are about $0.18/kWh, capacity factor for Southern California is around 0.18, which puts payback at around 14 years. And the state was giving large rebates to encourage people to get PV solar installed, dropping the net payback for the homeowner in some cases to around 7 years.)

From the standpoint of a power company though (which TFA is about), you need to compare this to the wholesale price of electricity. For coal that's about $0.03-$0.04 / kWh. So to recover $27586 / kW at a rate of $0.04 / kWh = 689650 hours, or a hair under 79 years for the U.S. India's payback time will be shorter because they're closer to the equator so their capacity factor will be higher. Levilized cost will be higher though because solar and wind costs are nearly all up-front meaning you have to take out a bigger loan than for other power sources. Other types of power costs are partly up-front, partly for fuel during the lifetime of the plant. But it's still getting close to the expected 30-50 year lifetime of a power plant.

You can certainly hear about models, but there isn't any actual evidence for the "A" in AGW, unless you consider models evidence.

Of course there is. It's easy to show that the increase in CO2 is due to human burning of fossil fuels. It's easy to show the infrared absorption properties if CO2. This study from 2000 to 2010 showed an increase in radiative forcing at ground level from increasing CO2.

They found that CO2 was responsible for a significant uptick in radiative forcing at both locations, about two-tenths of a Watt per square meter per decade. They linked this trend to the 22 parts-per-million increase in atmospheric CO2 between 2000 and 2010. Much of this CO2 is from the burning of fossil fuels, according to a modeling system that tracks CO2 sources around the world.

Finally someone gets more to the point.

Can you tell me where to find the conditions the original experiments were performed to determine CO2 raises the temperature? I know it was measured in a greenhouse but how was the CO2 generated? What was the delivery mechanism? What were the controls?

This is a very serious request: Where can we find the accurate details on how this experiment can be replicated?

Of course John Tyndall first measured the infrared absorption characteristics of CO2 back in the 1850s. More recently an experiment that ran from 2000 to 2010 at sites in Oklahoma and the North Slope of Alaska directly measured the increase in radiative forcing from increasing CO2 from the ground.

They found that CO2 was responsible for a significant uptick in radiative forcing at both locations, about two-tenths of a Watt per square meter per decade. They linked this trend to the 22 parts-per-million increase in atmospheric CO2 between 2000 and 2010. Much of this CO2 is from the burning of fossil fuels, according to a modeling system that tracks CO2 sources around the world.

The function that calculates the intersection between two line segments could not make such assumptions. One could estimate the numerical error in the final result and recalculate it with 128 bit or 256 bit precision. Or one could try to predict when it would be needed by looking at some determinant. At some point it is more engineering hacks rather than strict mathematics. 128 bit calculations would be 10 times slower than 64 bit and 256 bits will be 100 times slower if implemented in software using highly portable but unoptimized functions ( qd lib I am looking at you). There are much faster implementations that will take two or four adjacent registers and use bit shifts to make it much faster. But it would be a pain to get them working cleanly. There are infinite precision arithmetic modules available. But they too are very expensive.

What if the problem came more from the black asphalt road surface grabbing
sunlight and radiating the heat back into the atmosphere than the engines
spewing diesel smoke? (a massive 'Urban Heat Island'

http://heatisland2009.lbl.gov/...

a continent wide and replicated many times to allow vehicular access to the
interesting areas) If that were the case, how would switching back to dirt
roads affect your choice of transportation? I'm thinking a monster truck
with high ground clearance and extra winches for getting unstuck in the mud
would be a much better choice for driving to the grocery store to pick up
your 150# of groceries or dropping off your kid at school. Of course, that
would reduce the Govs opportunities to tax you.

1) In general, criticizing a citation is only valid if you can provide a better citation. In this case, a newer article would qualify.
2) People still use 7-year-old electronics.
3) Newer articles seem to indicate this is still a problem. Ex:
PS4: 10 watts
XBOX One: 13 watts
(Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...)
"Is standby growing or shrinking? It's probably growing."
(Source: http://standby.lbl.gov/faq.htm...)
Displays: 12 watts
(Source: http://www.energysavingsecrets...)

I think the original paper on this is by H. M. Gutman. For an intro to more modern methods see Regis and Shoemaker's 2007 paper.

Juliane Mueller has some working code available.

This is not a worthy story. Cryo-EM is a fast growing, exciting field but higher resolution electron microscopes that what this article trumpets have been available for years. For example, the TEAM microscope built in 2008 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has a resolution of 50 pm:

http://foundry.lbl.gov/facilities/ncem/expertise.html#team1

I personally saw individual gold atoms deposited as a nanobridge on a graphene substrate. In 2010.

They are not designed with power efficiency in mind. They are designed to be functional, fashionable and cheap to produce.
So, though the same setup could be designed with more power-efficient components or solutions...
Why bother about a Watt or two or twenty lost on standby on a product that uses hundreds or thousands of Watts when working, right?

http://standby.lbl.gov/summary...

I think that my favorite on that list is the gas range that uses on average 1.13 Watts per hour on standby.
GAS range. As in... it doesn't run on electricity.

That's about 6-15 kilowatts wasted every year, per household.
Just so one could light the highly flammable gas with a press of a button instead of with a match or one of those piezoelectric gas lighters.

The amount of energy it would take to launch from Earth (accelerate), rendezvous with an object (accelerate again), and provide enough energy to accelerate that object into a different orbit is more than we know how to engineer. If you really want a few gallons of water on Mars, send a cargo ship. Forget about steering an object with hand waving technologies like ion engines or heaters.

Here's a real world calculation for you:

CONCLUSION: A meteor has 100 times as much energy per gram as does TNT!

I'd rather use thermochromic paints.

You might be able to find other references, but here is a whole study. http://heatisland2009.lbl.gov/...

Solar pricing is a monopoly.

Green Building Programs that offer incentives (http://www.dsireusa.org/) are in decline year-over-year due to reduced cost of panels, yet no increase in efficiency is offered on those panels in the same timeframe (2009-2014) AND price/W has nearly stagnated over the past 4 years:

2009 median installed price of PV systems installed was $6.10/W for residential and small commercial systems smaller than 10 kW
2011-13 median installed price of PV systems installed was $5.30/W for residential and small commercial systems smaller than 10 kW

http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/f...
http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/f...

Solar pricing is a monopoly.

Green Building Programs that offer incentives (http://www.dsireusa.org/) are in decline year-over-year due to reduced cost of panels, yet no increase in efficiency is offered on those panels in the same timeframe (2009-2014) AND price/W has nearly stagnated over the past 4 years:

2009 median installed price of PV systems installed was $6.10/W for residential and small commercial systems smaller than 10 kW
2011-13 median installed price of PV systems installed was $5.30/W for residential and small commercial systems smaller than 10 kW

http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/f...
http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/f...

Can someone explain to me in plain English how the laws of physics are supposed to have worked some of the time but not all the time? because I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the speed of light is supposed to be the ultimate speed limit yet for their big bang theory to work you have the time immediately following the bang having this FTL expansion?

This is pretty good for plain English... you may need to look up some of the terms.

http://aether.lbl.gov/www/science/inflation-beginners.html

I don't run Linux, and I've never had to deal with X, so this isn't an emotive issue for me. But your post was clearly not a serious of facts, more of a backlash against perceived slights from Wayland developers and/or "fanboys", the latter being a useful way to smear people who disagree.

Your post might make more sense if the existence of Wayland meant that X no longer existed, but as that's clearly not true it's hard to take claims of "throwing out a perfectly good system in favour of an ideological rewrite" seriously. And ideology? There have been plenty of technical arguments since the beginning, here's one set that was posted on /. a while back, and it's just the first one I found.

As far as I'm aware X currently does act like VNC in most cases, except without any compression at all and a synchronous API - so nobody uses it directly because of the performance issues, instead using ssh as a tunnel. Even having it act like per-window VNC with H.264 compression would be an advantage. But anyway, that's all part of the compositor, which now has RDP as part of the core, and I've yet to see any explanation of why or how X forwarding is different or better than rootless RDP.

The assumption that forwarding is a critical feature is based on the idea that your personal requirements are the only important ones. If a piece of software doesn't do what you want, don't use it. As it turns out, they are supporting it (as I'd read from pretty much day one), it's just taken time to get to that point... as you'd expect from alpha software.

SIgh. The article you link, from 2011, says "yet"
Its all about creating a band gap, with with silcon doping*.
However, their is research in this area.

http://www-als.lbl.gov/index.p...

*yeah yeah, but people get the idea.

Google Reader is the closest thing to a replacement...but it's really not. Basically it was an RSS reader with a *very* different UI and some widgets for things like gmail, weather, games, etc...

https://commons.lbl.gov/downlo...

And yeah, it was actually a pretty big deal when it shut down...were you living in a cave or something? ;)
https://www.google.com/search?...

The force of gravity is faster than light. Why this isn't widely known is a mystery to me (probably breaks someone's pet model - you think science doesn't have heretics?) but it's true. The earth doesn't orbit where the sun was 8 minutes ago. If it did it would have long ago left the solar system. The earth orbits where the sun is right now. It takes light about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth.

Do the math sometime and you'll see that you are wrong (you are right that it orbits where the sun is now, but not for the reasons you think); or at least, do the math from our current models. I don't know what the math would say from whatever model your theory is.

As for heretics and pet models, a summary of where the current pet models stand with regard to being tested can be found here. From the conclusion:

All present experimental tests are compatible with the predictions of the current “standard” theory of gravitation: Einstein’s General Relativity. The universality of the coupling between matter and gravity (Equivalence Principle) has been verified around the 10^(-13) level. Solar system experiments have tested the weak-field predictions of Einstein’s theory at the 10^(-4) level (and down to the 2 × 10^(-5) level for the post-Einstein parameter gamma-bar). The propagation properties of relativistic gravity, as well as several of its strong-field aspects, have been verified at the 10^(-3) level (or better) in several binary pulsar experiments. Recent laboratory experiments have set strong constraints on sub-millimeter modifications of Newtonian gravity. Quantitative confirmations of General Relativity have also been obtained on astrophysical and cosmological scales (assuming dark matter and a cosmological constant).

This pet theory is almost 100 year old now, and though there is still lots of interesting things to study and find, it does not have a problem explaining the orbits of the Earth and Sun as you seem to think it does.

You are beating up a staw man. I never said there is no acceptable risk or even that low doses of radiation are not acceptable in some situations.

Truly sorry about that. I do skitter about and fly off with my agenda hanging out sometimes.

I do appreciate the quandary faced by diagnosticians and those trying to establish occupational exposure guidelines, these measurements do matter. There was a time when even shoe stores had fluoroscope X-ray machines children would play with after school, emitters were much stronger and few doctors used lead aprons. Some hypothesis -- preferably a provable one -- is necessary. The "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" is a good effective dose of common sense intended to become a policy and legal framework, but what numbers and equations will we plug into it?

It may be that for every hundred workers exposed to some small level of radiation -- aside from the horde that is happy with playing it really safe, there may be some dozen who are actively hoping that allowable 'safe' limits can be raised, with sound supporting reasons, so they do not have to live with the regulatory Sword of Damocles hanging so close above their heads. I would be one of those. Nuclear energy sounds a lot safer than some of the potentially lethal hazards I face daily.

You are right to pose there might be a non-linear risk curve hidden in the noise (of low dose risks). There are proposals to reconcile low-dose adjustments to LNT in such a way that it does not present such a hard 'barrier' when conflating dose with mortality, and (perhaps, me guessing) from a consensus that in a field of exponential or even quadratic relationships, drawing a straight line through anything more complicated than cow-counting is uncomfortable.

A Dose Rate Effectiveness Factor (DREF) attempts to half risk per unit dose at low doses or low dose rates (or both) from its point on the linear scale. Arbitrary but probably closer to reality. NASA takes it down to the organ level and calculates a career limit. Add to that cancers that may lie dormant, held in check by the body's own immune responses and you have a lot of 'noise' and extra screening to sift through.

Maurice Tubiana, MD has compiled an excellent 'fact check' on LNT The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data which summarizes many sources (167 ref citations!) to conclude that there is no (small) elephant in the living room. He even covers nine studies that suggest that low does may exhibit Hormesis (a beneficial effect).

As you might guess, finding evidence of hormesis was astounding and is a hot research potato. But an ecological study done by an outspoken Bernard_Cohen is mentioned on the DREF page, emphasis mine:

"Efforts to confirm directly the effects of indoor radon have led to mixed and highly controversial conclusions. One class of studies, termed ecological studies, looks for correlations between the average radon level in a region and the lung cancer fatality rate. In the largest and best known of these studies, covering 1,729 counties in the United States, Bernard Cohen finds the county-by-county lung cancer rates to be inversely correlated with average radon levels. Although many readers have interpreted this study as suggesting hormesis, Cohen limits his conclusions to saying that the results refute the linearity hypothesis. This study covered most of the US population, and therefore the statistical uncertainties are small

You are beating up a staw man. I never said there is no acceptable risk or even that low doses of radiation are not acceptable in some situations.

Truly sorry about that. I do skitter about and fly off with my agenda hanging out sometimes.

I do appreciate the quandary faced by diagnosticians and those trying to establish occupational exposure guidelines, these measurements do matter. There was a time when even shoe stores had fluoroscope X-ray machines children would play with after school, emitters were much stronger and few doctors used lead aprons. Some hypothesis -- preferably a provable one -- is necessary. The "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" is a good effective dose of common sense intended to become a policy and legal framework, but what numbers and equations will we plug into it?

It may be that for every hundred workers exposed to some small level of radiation -- aside from the horde that is happy with playing it really safe, there may be some dozen who are actively hoping that allowable 'safe' limits can be raised, with sound supporting reasons, so they do not have to live with the regulatory Sword of Damocles hanging so close above their heads. I would be one of those. Nuclear energy sounds a lot safer than some of the potentially lethal hazards I face daily.

You are right to pose there might be a non-linear risk curve hidden in the noise (of low dose risks). There are proposals to reconcile low-dose adjustments to LNT in such a way that it does not present such a hard 'barrier' when conflating dose with mortality, and (perhaps, me guessing) from a consensus that in a field of exponential or even quadratic relationships, drawing a straight line through anything more complicated than cow-counting is uncomfortable.

A Dose Rate Effectiveness Factor (DREF) attempts to half risk per unit dose at low doses or low dose rates (or both) from its point on the linear scale. Arbitrary but probably closer to reality. NASA takes it down to the organ level and calculates a career limit. Add to that cancers that may lie dormant, held in check by the body's own immune responses and you have a lot of 'noise' and extra screening to sift through.

Maurice Tubiana, MD has compiled an excellent 'fact check' on LNT The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data which summarizes many sources (167 ref citations!) to conclude that there is no (small) elephant in the living room. He even covers nine studies that suggest that low does may exhibit Hormesis (a beneficial effect).

As you might guess, finding evidence of hormesis was astounding and is a hot research potato. But an ecological study done by an outspoken Bernard_Cohen is mentioned on the DREF page, emphasis mine:

"Efforts to confirm directly the effects of indoor radon have led to mixed and highly controversial conclusions. One class of studies, termed ecological studies, looks for correlations between the average radon level in a region and the lung cancer fatality rate. In the largest and best known of these studies, covering 1,729 counties in the United States, Bernard Cohen finds the county-by-county lung cancer rates to be inversely correlated with average radon levels. Although many readers have interpreted this study as suggesting hormesis, Cohen limits his conclusions to saying that the results refute the linearity hypothesis. This study covered most of the US population, and therefore the statistical uncertainties are small

Managing 1,000 entangled particles would require the universe to keep track of a staggering amount of information. Does the underlying machinery have information-space this big? No one knows.

Quantum entanglement appears to be a key element of photosynthesis, and systems of more than a hundred million entangled photons have been achieved.

OK, feeding a troll here, but this tired misinformation's still making the rounds, and someone's gotta fight it, so here goes...

Don't forget that plutonium 239 has a half life of over 24,000 years and is lethal in minute quantities at only brief exposure time.

Uh, no. It's not.

Remember, kids, long half-life means decay events are rare, meaning low cancer risk.

Any single radioisotope can be either highly radioactive or last for thousands of years; both at once is impossible. (Nuclear waste, of course, contains various isotopes of both sorts, and some in the middle -- this complicates fuel reprocessing and cleanup of shutdown or failed reactors, as you have to contain it, wait a few years for the short-half-life stuff to decompose, then deal with the long-half-life stuff.)

You obviously haven't been around nuclear physicists arguing about the isomer of Thorium that has an excitation energy of 7.5 eV. The argument is about whether such a decay can happen on a human timescale, because it would produce an "ultraviolet gamma ray," a photon from nuclear decay well within the UV range.

It does depend a lot about which field you work in, in which case there places you can't say a 50 keV photon will always be called a gamma ray. Colbalt 57 has a standard peak at 14 keV that comes up in any undergrad lab class that does measures its spectrum, and is considered one of the gamma ray standards frequently used for calibration of equipment (or at least advertisement of dynamic range of some equipment...). And it is not uncommon to find gamma ray tables going down to 1 keV or below.

Don't just assume, work it out from some real data. According to the US Army, you can survive an explosion just a few feet away with no lung damage if you don't get hit with any debris:
        http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA286212

In another posting, I worked out that if you turn a body into gas at room temperature, you get about 100m^3 of gas. Alternatively, consider that the 12kg of non-water "dried pork" has as much energy as 48kg of TNT. (Since the energy density of "dried pork" at (4 kcal/g) 4 times that of TNT (at 1 kcal/g)
  http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/1-Explosions.htm
Its enough energy to vaporize the remaining 66kg of water without raising the temperature too much.

But the real issue is how fast does a phaser do it's work? If it takes a few seconds to "Vaporize," there won't be a shock wave at all. On Star Trek, we see the victim glow for a few seconds, then disappear. Unless you're in a tiny room, you might only get a gentle breeze as the gases flow by. That's important, because otherwise those hand phasers would set everything around the target on fire. As I calculate it thermodynamically, turning a body to gas requires very little net energy - in fact, about 120MJ gets released. The trick is somehow the phaser has to make the reactions happen quickly, but not too quickly.

What I appreciate most about the Star Trek hand phaser is how it maps out the region to apply it's mechanism to just impact the target and nothing around it. There'd have to be some excellent imaging software so that the phaser ray is applied in just the right pattern, and to recognize when to stop so it doesn't burn the wall behind the victim. To do so, it must recognize when the phaser ray has disintegrated the back edge of the victim.

The elements in our bodies come from exploding stars.

The earth coalesced from a swirling ball of gas and dust. Which had various quantities of these elements. Then yadda yadda, lifeorms started popping up. Of which man was one of the later variants.

Man needs this fishbowl of earth to survive in the universe, just like goldfish need a fishbowl to survive in our living room. Imagine if the goldfish could get to the refrigerator.

We're just trying to get to the refrigerator. Or maybe even go outside.

The earth is not the center of the universe. It's a smallish planet in the solar system. It's part of the universe. Just like man. Eventually the sun will red giant. If we don't go outside - leave the womb - we're finished. A fruit that died on the vine. Seems like we should be working on that problem now.

And the problem if mankind dies on the vine? Are we that critical to the universe that the universe will suffer if the human race is no longer here? There are two possibilities one, there is other intelligent life in the universe or two, there is not. If there is, then we are not unique, so our loss would not be a loss at all. If there is not other intelligent life, then our loss makes no difference as what we are trying to preserve is of no use, nobody but us cares about it -- there is nobody to leave a legacy for.

In either case, when mankind ceases to exist, our actual existence will not even have been a blink of the eye on the cosmic time scale. The Catholics say "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." That phrase was coined long before we knew much about the universe, but has more truth in it than many people realize. At some point in the future, the cosmic dust that created the human race will be returned to the universe. What we are will go on, in new forms, new stars, new planets, maybe even new lifeforms. But who we are will cease and there won't be anybody to care.

Of course our existence doesn't matter to the universe, it matters to us. Why not make the best of it??

The elements in our bodies come from exploding stars.

The earth coalesced from a swirling ball of gas and dust. Which had various quantities of these elements. Then yadda yadda, lifeorms started popping up. Of which man was one of the later variants.

Man needs this fishbowl of earth to survive in the universe, just like goldfish need a fishbowl to survive in our living room. Imagine if the goldfish could get to the refrigerator.

We're just trying to get to the refrigerator. Or maybe even go outside.

The earth is not the center of the universe. It's a smallish planet in the solar system. It's part of the universe. Just like man. Eventually the sun will red giant. If we don't go outside - leave the womb - we're finished. A fruit that died on the vine. Seems like we should be working on that problem now.

And the problem if mankind dies on the vine? Are we that critical to the universe that the universe will suffer if the human race is no longer here? There are two possibilities one, there is other intelligent life in the universe or two, there is not. If there is, then we are not unique, so our loss would not be a loss at all. If there is not other intelligent life, then our loss makes no difference as what we are trying to preserve is of no use, nobody but us cares about it -- there is nobody to leave a legacy for.

In either case, when mankind ceases to exist, our actual existence will not even have been a blink of the eye on the cosmic time scale. The Catholics say "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." That phrase was coined long before we knew much about the universe, but has more truth in it than many people realize. At some point in the future, the cosmic dust that created the human race will be returned to the universe. What we are will go on, in new forms, new stars, new planets, maybe even new lifeforms. But who we are will cease and there won't be anybody to care.

The elements in our bodies come from exploding stars.

The earth coalesced from a swirling ball of gas and dust. Which had various quantities of these elements. Then yadda yadda, lifeorms started popping up. Of which man was one of the later variants.

Man needs this fishbowl of earth to survive in the universe, just like goldfish need a fishbowl to survive in our living room. Imagine if the goldfish could get to the refrigerator.

We're just trying to get to the refrigerator. Or maybe even go outside.

The earth is not the center of the universe. It's a smallish planet in the solar system. It's part of the universe. Just like man. Eventually the sun will red giant. If we don't go outside - leave the womb - we're finished. A fruit that died on the vine. Seems like we should be working on that problem now.

noone would be entirely off the grid. solar panels wont keep your house running with maximum power during cloudy days or nights... that being said... solar panels CAN decrease the cost of your energy bills by a lot... and this amount of money would easily pay the cost of solar panel installation over a decade or so.

Melbourne/AU - 4.5 kW at peak installed PV. Saves me about $1200-$1350/y in power bills. If I include the money I get back for the power exported to the grid, they pay themselves in 5 years.>/p>

The reason for which in US is much more expensive: there aren't enough authorized installers (I can't find that link now) - the cost of installation is roughly twice the price of the installed modules

You might be happy somewhere like http://crd.lbl.gov/

Nothing new under the sun or maybe it's the same only different! When one reads the source article: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/ "seawater formed highly stable CA-S-H and Al-tobermorite, insuring strength and longevity. Both the materials and the way the Romans used them hold lessons for the future. “For us, pozzolan is important for its practical applications,” says Monteiro. “It could replace 40 percent of the world’s demand for Portland cement. And there are sources of pozzolan all over the world. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have any fly ash, but it has mountains of pozzolan.” We see that this amazing new discovery is not new, at least to anyone who has been in or around the Ferro-cement boat culture over the last hundred years or more that the use of pozzolan (ultra fine volcanic ash) has been used all along for it's ability to completely fill the pores in the 'cement' mix by the nature of pozzolan's small aggregate size, allowing it to be impervious to water penetration when fully cured.

I'm not pooh-poohing their efforts, I'm just skeptical that lime-ash concrete as used by the Romans will lead to breakthroughs. I think their work is very interesting, and any kind of discovery like this lets us better-understand our world. It's just that if you make concrete much more expensive, other materials start to make more sense. For instance, if I'm making a big breakwater, eventually a giant hunk of stone will be more economical than concrete. The scientists involved seem to be chasing the carbon angle, since the Roman lime was baked at a lower temperature and yet they still made decent concrete. If we could learn to do that, that would indeed be nice...

I'm pretty sure the Roman concrete is still very porous - especially given the way they say it cures by water creeping in and activating the reaction. Here is the press release, which has much better detail than TFA.

This Lego creation is really amazing in person. The guy did a stellar job. It's permanently located in the lobby of building 50 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (right next to the cigar box where Glenn Seaborg put the first ever sample of Plutonium). If you go on a tour there or visit an Open House, you can see it for yourself. Here's a site with a lot more details about its construction: http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~sdube/lego.html

A couple of benchmarks have been done over the past 2 decades. Though it's a shame they're not mentioned in the article.

The reference paper on the topic is Keith Packard's and Jim Getty's USENIX 2003 paper on LBX (Low Bandwidth X), a compression proxy for the X protocol. This paper compares LBX against the standard X protocol (both with and without a compressed SSH tunnel). A couple of key findings from the article:

• SSH compression is almost as good as LBX (which is probably why nobody bothers with it)
• X11 is pretty efficient on bandwidth for everything except raw image data
• X11 is very sensitive to latency

Now some of those issues have been (somewhat) mitigated in various libraries such as xcb, Qt and Gtk+, X11 can only be used comfortably over low-latency links.

While searching for that first article, I came across a more recent presentation which compares X11 against VNC and NX. Again, the author(s) conclude that X11's performance suffer greatly whenever latency increases. As for my own daily experience working company X terminals, remote X even on speedy gigabit networks is a major PITA and I'm planning to work on comparing alternatives (VNC, RDP, SPICE, ...)

X still has value, it's the lingua franca of GUI protocols on UNIX and I don't think anyone expects it to disappear anytime soon. But it is an antiquated protocol, both for local operations and for remote displays.

There friend, you've hit the crux of it. Until we all agree on the cause we cannot in good conscience be sure that we're attacking the right problem.

Until an abundant source of non-carbon energy is up and running these things are science fiction.

If you believe that CO2 is the problem there are really only two options, (1) a return to a stone age existence by a population dramatically reduced by mass murder. Merely simplifying the lives of 7 billion people will not work. And (2) implementing large scale industrial process to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it. A bountiful carbon-neutral source of energy is required for this, it might require as much energy as we use to run our civilization. Nuclear fission is the only such possible source on the table.

The only CO2 sequestration technique that impressed me as possible was proposed by Marshall Savage in his book The Millennial Project... where floating OTEC platforms along warm equatorial waters pump cold nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface creating an algal bloom around the platform that is confined by booms. Some would be used to feed fish farms, but the bulk of it would be packaged into weighted bales and sunk into the ocean. It may have been a slow and arduous process (OTEC are only marginally possible and the best energy efficiency is ~1%) but it would at least work.

I've seen lots of global warming combative measures, and some that would induce warming to help combat an ice age... that involve synthesis of something and scattering of that something over large areas, but it all requires a clean energy budget that we just don't have. So it all comes down to energy.

In order to even consider these things we would need that proverbial 'clean, abundant and too cheap to meter' energy source.

If safe nuclear fission remains off the table and undeveloped, specifically the thorium fueled liquid fluoride molten salt reactor, it looks to me like we're screwed.

I personally never believed that pure chemical CO2 was a serious issue climate-wise, although if you believe coal is a problem (carbon black, atmospheric particulates) then we've always been on the same page.

It is no wonder that so many people fall back to the depopulation return to stone age solution. They refuse to realize it but they are really advocating mass murder by proxy --- for when the ineffective conservation phase has failed and the problem becomes worse they will elect bold courageous leaders who are not afraid to get the process rolling, and the (selective) mass murders will begin.

Mankind does encourage global warming and glacial melt via deposit of carbon black on the surface and arctic pollution. This is a particulate/aerosol problem not a purely chemical CO2 problem, which is why I think temperatures in the Antarctic have been more stable than the Arctic, the world's worst carbon polluters are in the Northern hemisphere.

Another (fascinating!) recent paper poses that our 1970~2002 use of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a key driver in the brief global temperature rise rather than carbon dioxide emissions.

Mankind does encourage global cooling regionally via airplane contrails, the seeding of clouds where none would otherwise form (it adds up) --- as described in this kick-ass documentary Global Dimming from BBC Horizon.

Some related ideas:

Doubly Special Relativity.
Henry Stapp on Whitehead's Quantum Ontology

... a newly developed audio extraction technology called optical scanning ...

I was reading the above quote in TFA and hmm... I just had to find out what is that "newly developed technology"

Here's the link ... http://irene.lbl.gov/3D-Scanning.pdf