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Photons with energies in the range 3-10 eV can cause damage to DNA, but can't cause ionisation. Ultraviolet photons have energies in the range 3-1000 eV, so not quite all of them are ionising, but all of them can damage DNA (thus causing cancer).

And even that is only true because the government's definition of "non-ionizing" (10 eV) is arbitrary and wrong, as it is based on the minimum energy needed to ionize Hydrogen or Oxygen. However, other elements ionize at a much lower energy. At the low end, Cesium atoms ionize at only 3.89 eV, which makes the portion of UV that is not ionizing almost nonexistent. In fact, a whopping 86 elements ionize below 10 eV (source: Lenntech), making that limit not just wrong, but alarmingly wrong.

Of those 86, to my knowledge, about sixteen are biologically significant:

• Potassium: 4.34 eV
• Sodium: 5.14 eV
• Lithium: 5.39
• Aluminum (debated): 5.99
• Calcium: 6.11
• Chromium: 6.77
• Titanium (debated): 6.83
• Magnesium: 7.65
• Copper: 7.73
• Cobalt: 7.88
• Iron: 7.9
• Boron: 8.30
• Cadmium (in microscopic sea life): 8.99
• Zinc: 9.39
• Selenium: 9.75
• Arsenic: 9.79

Notice that some of those are pretty critical biologically, like Iron (0.006% of body mass according to Live Science), Calcium (1.5%), Sodium (.15%), and Potassium (.25%). So the so-called "non-ionizing" radiation still has the potential to create ions in materials that are fairly common and fairly important inside your body. And some of the trace minerals like Zinc (0.0032%) and Cobalt (0.0000021%) play a role in gene regulation, so ionizing those elements is probably not a good idea, either.

I hope you just don't understand the idiocy you are spouting, because https://www.lenntech.com/perio...

"All ruthenium compounds should be regarded as highly toxic and as carcinogenic. Compounds of ruthenium stain the skin very strongly. It seems that ingested ruthenium is retained strongly in bones. Ruthenium oxide, RuO4, is highly toxic and volatile, and to be avoided."

Then the very next paragraph "Rhutenium 106 is one of the radionuclides involved in atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, which began in 1945, with a US test, and ended in 1980 with a Chinese test. It is among the long-lived radionuclides that have produced and will continue to produce increased cancers risk for decades and centuries to come."

The poor do not live on water front with the exclusionary intent to deny others access to that waterfront. The poor also rarely own their homes, so moving not that much of a hassle.

At an estimate we are talking 2 metres of water rise and mitigation is impossible unless billions is spent. Want to preserve you exclusionary waterfront property, pay for it, put it on stilts and ride a boat to work. You bought there, your problem, it's not like you weren't warned http://www.lenntech.com/greenh... a very long time ago, 18fucking96. Want to get paid, sue those who lied about it, don't expect the poor to pay for the excesses of the rich yet again.

The surface temperature there is 470C (878F), approximately 90 times that of Earth.

Maybe if we were talking about the Kelvin scale, but even then, 90x is a pretty meaningless way of comparing temperatures. Much better to maybe mention that at 470C:

• 327C Lead
• 420C Zinc
• 449C Tellurium

Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/period...

Really? Read more science, and learn some actual history. Supplement other skills as needed (reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. -- all the stuff kids should learn).

So fucking what? What matters NOW is what effects HUMAN habitats and especially human settlements i.e. everything from mega-cities like NY, Shanghai, Tokyo, etc. to the subsistence farmers in Burma and everywhere else on the entire planet. Massive population shifts are exactly what brings increased death, disease, and destruction. Humans have been fucking up the global atmosphere for more than 200 years and it was KNOWN 200 fucking years ago.

You STUPID FUCKER.

Stop shouting, Illiberal asshole... You aren't on an anti-Trump rally complaining about "not being heard".

And 10 are dead from water-borne Legionella.

They did not die on the first day the pipes got contaminated, did they? Not even the first month. Back then, somebody wishing to be sympathetic to the people involved in the mess could've said, the same thing: "Nobody got poisoned or sick in the end".

Today, somebody sympathetic towards the hackers, is making the same mistake making the same claim. Some of the chemicals involved in water treatment are nasty and messing with their levels may make the tap water poisonous as well. Whether anybody was, in fact, affected may not even be known, because, if it is the well off and White skinned folks, they are unlikely to attract much attention from media or government regulators. But to make the above claim was bogus — and that's my point.

Children exposed to lead are doomed to irreversible neurological damage, including lowered intelligence and a propensity for violence

Yes, yes, sure. All according to government "scientists", who also claimed for decades, that fat and cholesterol are bad for you...

dyed-in-the-wool, reality-denying neoconservative.

Che Guevara much? Please, don't hate...

Now, prove that its safe.

If continuous sampling proves it confirms to both these standards it is safe.
Seriously. Any decent muncipal water supply in the Netherlands continously monitors not only for baterial cultures but also PH and various chemical concentrations. If a test fails there is a major problem. I haven't had any trouble with our water (all toilet to tap) in my 30 years. The problems I heard of were things like broken pipes where mud got into the water. That'll give you bacteria.

About half of California's water is used for alfalfa, hay and pasturage. Next to that, every other Californian water use is almost irrelevant - even almonds.

When you look at the numbers, it's clear water stress can only be managed by reducing consumption of animal products and restricting animal agriculture.

Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately.

And, surprise! It does. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...

While I agree with most of your post, what you describe here is not science. That approach turns science on its head. The scientific method begins with a reasoned hypothesis, followed by a prediction based on the hypothesis, and an experiment to prove or disprove this prediction.

Correct. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius 1896 http://www.lenntech.com/greenh... The numerical calculation of greenhouse warming due to carbon dioxide was first accurately done using measured value for infrared absorption and numerical integration of the profile was done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald-- it's summarized in any reasonable book about atmospheric science (such as the one on my desk at the moment, An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, by Liou (1980), p. 188). Calculating the greenhouse effect alone (that is, assuming no change in cloudiness, and constant relative humidity), Manabe and Wetherald showed "a ten percent increase in CO2 concentration (from 300 to 330 ppm) would lead to a warming of 0.3 K." It's a logarithmic response function (Arrhenius calculated that much back in 1895, although he didn't have the data to do the complete numerical integration), so it's easy to extrapolate this to the current carbon dioxide of about 400 ppm. It comes to about 0.8 K increase by their model.
Comparing it to the data, from 1967 on... looks like the experimental result matches the prediction.

Climate "science" on the other hand does exactly what you describe here. It looks at past data and attempts to fit it to a hypothesis.

Nope. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius. The detailed calculation dates to Manabe and Wetherald.

In any case, while the measured temperatures are a nice validation that the models are in the right ballpark, there's plenty of other data. You seem to be unaware that there is is a lot of measurements of the atmosphere.

That's not science at all. That's little more than a statistical model. These guys believe they have their answer and are trying to fit all observations to it.

That's a description of deniers. That's not the way climate science is done.

The reason we believe that the model is more or less accurate is that there are terabytes of data confirming it. The reason we don't believe that alternative models are accurate is that there aren't any. All of the alternative models proposed so far fail when compared against the evidence.

When there's an alternative model that fits the data, believe me, people will pay attention. Many people have looked very hard to come up with an alternative model. So far, no success.

You don't seem to know much about the subject, but this is not one or two scientists doing questionable work and then everybody else saying "oh, they must be right". There are thousands of scientists working on it; supercomputer models built on five different continents; ground, balloon, and satellite measurements, terabytes of data.

I read a lot of hype about hydrogen, but that is an expensive road

It also has the side effect of exploding when released under pressure and sparks are applied.

http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/h.htm

Physical dangers: The gas mixes well with air, explosive mixtures are easily formed. The gas is lighter than air.

Chemical dangers: Heating may cause violent combustion or explosion. Reacts violently with air, oxygen, halogens and strong oxidants causing fire and explosion hazard. Metal catalysts, such as platinum and nickel, greatly enhance these reactions.

OK, but lead does dissolve in the presence of oxygen and water, which would seem quite plausible in the open-air scenarios being discussed here.

As to the Thorium, I spotted this in an web article, but could not find much out more about it and was not entirely satisfied that the information was 100 percent good. But here goes anyways. Coal contains Thorium and other radioactive materials that are released into the air when it is burnt. They do not purify coal before the burn it. Coal is a mixture of all sorts of stuff, most of flammable, but some of it other stuff. The scaremonger writing the piece claimed that coal plants spewed more radiactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant. Who knows for sure. I could not google enough up.

Factiods I remember:
1. A coal plant releases more radioactive material than a nuclear plant produces
2. There's more potential energy in the radioactive materials in coal than you can get from burning the coal itself

Okay, here goes: Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Uranium and Thorium content of coal. CO2 production of a coal plant,
500MW = 3 million tons of CO2/year. The carbon is 27% of that, and coal is 'almost' pure carbon. Call it 1.7M tons of coal consumed per year for a 1GW plant. Of course, this site says 2M tons of coal. At 1 part per million Uranium and 2 parts per million Thorium, that's ~5-6 tons of radioactive material released per year, 1% of it up the flue(EPA limit). It says that you need about 162 tons of Uranium to fuel a conventional reactor a year.
However, conventional reactors are only about 1% efficient at their fuel burn - if you go to breeder reactors, that could, theoretically at least, drop to 1.62 tons of nuclear material needed per year per GW. Outside of accidents, the nuclear waste isn't released.

Realistically speaking, you could get more electricity out of the coal via nuclear power if you were using breeders. Thorium reactors would be required, but at least they are naturally breeder-type.

So I'd tend to say that my 'coal plants release more radioactive materials than nuclear plants produce' is true - only limited amounts, less than 1%, are actually being converted into more highly radioactive material. It's producing 2 tons of radioactive material*, vs 'release' of 5-6.
Your 'emits more than a nuclear plant' is also very much true.
My last statement - 'more energy in the heavy metal traces' depends on using highly efficient processes and somehow having an energy-cheap way to collect the relatively diffuse uranium and thorium.

*I'm ignoring waste that isn't annual, like the reactor vessel, at the moment, though it's probably only a ton or so more.

I hear about the Chinese Economic Miracle. But when I see the youtube videos of the 'Fog' in Bejing, the price they paid was too high. You could be the richest man in Bejing, but your quality of life, as a living creature, is horrible. This is not some abstract human rights issue. This is breathing filth into your lungs with every breath.

I figure that if you give them another 10 years or so, they're going to start taking their own environmental rules much more seriously, precisely because of this.

Also, keep in mind, ZnO is not a salt. It will not dissociate in liquid water to form Zn ions. Also, Zn when added to water will not form zinc hydroxide.

The ZnO bond is primarily ionic. It is generally insoluble in water, but it is most certaily a salt.

And Zn when added to water will most certainly form zinc hydroxide, particularly when powdered or added as a vapor. It may not form zinc hydroxide in supercritical steam above 800 C, but you did not specify that and I clearly referred to aqueous systems. Water spontaneously disscociates to yield the hydronium and hydroxide that forms the zinc hydroxide skin on bulk zinc metal. It's not a rapid process, as I already suggested, but your blanket statement is wrong.

You will create disasters worse than that of any communist dictator if you think that you can just remove all regulation and have the free market spring into existence, like a maiden from the lake.

I was ready to take exception to this comment, until I decided to check my theory with Google...:

Time's Top 10 Environmental Disasters
Lenntech.com's Top 10 Anthropogenic Environmental Disasters
Business Pundit's "World's Worst Environmental Disasters Caused by Companies

Just off the cuff, it looks like most of these were caused by corporations operating in nominally democratic countries rather than by communist states. I guess maybe you're right on this one...

dissolving sodium hypochlorite in the water or by dissolving salt (NaCl) and producing the chlorine in situ by electrolysis. Either practice makes the water sufficiently conductive to carry lethal currents.

From some quick googling, I find that chlorine concentrations are typically 1--5 mg/L. (ref). Given that dissolved salts in tap water are typically 100 mg/L (water hardness on wikipedia), I doubt that a bit of chlorine makes a lot of difference.

That said, the conductivity of drinking water is (much) lower than 0.05 S/m. With 100 volts over 2 meters, you get a current density of 2.5 A/m2. If you put a human body in that water (surface area 1 m2), that is certainly enough to kill. With very pure water, the current is a factor 100 lower, but I think 25 mA through the body is enough to kill.

The Surgeon General C. Everett Koop stated that radioactivity, rather than tar, accounts for at least 90% of all smoking-related lung cancers. The Center for Disease Control concluded Americans are exposed to far more radiation from tobacco smoke than from any other source.

You can thank the tobacco industry's choice of fertilizer for that.

You don't know what tantalum is do you ? And you definitely don't know much about tungsten. What makes you think your comment is of any use at all ?

Tantalum - Tantalum finds use in four areas: high-temperature applications, such as aircraft engines; electrical devices, such as capacitors; surgical implants and handling corrosive chemicals. It is rarely used as an alloying agent because it tends to make metals brittle.
Tungsten - There are several minerals of tungsten, the most important are scheelite and wolframite. The main mining area is China, which today accounts for more than two-thirds of the world's supply. Other places with active tungsten mines are Russia, Austria, Bolivia, Peru and Portugal.

So your rant about Africa taking over the manufacturing world looks a bit stupid.

You don't know what tantalum is do you ? And you definitely don't know much about tungsten. What makes you think your comment is of any use at all ?

Tantalum - Tantalum finds use in four areas: high-temperature applications, such as aircraft engines; electrical devices, such as capacitors; surgical implants and handling corrosive chemicals. It is rarely used as an alloying agent because it tends to make metals brittle.
Tungsten - There are several minerals of tungsten, the most important are scheelite and wolframite. The main mining area is China, which today accounts for more than two-thirds of the world's supply. Other places with active tungsten mines are Russia, Austria, Bolivia, Peru and Portugal.

So your rant about Africa taking over the manufacturing world looks a bit stupid.

Google for "exploding Pyrex". Snopes.com will tell you that it's a bullshit urban legend, but actual facts about the materials will tell the truth.

Now tell me Snopes isn't being paid to manipulate "the truth".

What do we do with all the nuclear waste produced from fission?

Well, let's see. You're talking about a substance with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, so let's assume you meant that. According to a sub-entry on the page I just referenced, U-238 can be used for radiation shielding.

Yup. You heard right. You can use this horrible waste product to protect you from the more hazardous waste products.

Long half-lives mean the structure is relatively stable. Only when an atom decays and/or spits out a particle are you in any potential danger.

I asked my father (a condensed matter physicist) to name a highly dangerous radioactive substance and he said Radium. Various isotopes of Radium can have half-lives ranging from a few nanoseconds to 1600 years.

Very short half-lives mean the isotope is extremely unstable and decays very quickly. If you were standing next to a kilogram of 215m3Ra, it'd probably kill you pretty quick. On the other hand, if you were standing a mile away from it, there'd be no way to transport enough of it to you to do any damage.

Radium, due to its shorter half-life, is more dangerous than U-238. Much more dangerous.

And yet we release Radium into the atmosphere by burning coal.

This is why nobody takes environmentalists seriously on the debate over nuclear power. It's all FUD.

I guess that depends on your definition of "heavy metal"; the term is poorly defined, although I don't think anyone would dispute lead or that many would dispute cadmium. Cobalt is atomic number 27 and only mildly toxic (small amounts of it are even required in the body, and the body gets rid of it reasonably well); its LD50 in rats is 6,171mg/kg -- twice that of table salt. Iron is atomic number 26 and... well, deficiency is far more common than having too much, so I don't think people are going to complain about that. ;) I suppose that if you went by what's probably the least common definition -- density in their metallic states -- then you could call them heavy metals (although not *that* heavy). But, of course, they're not in their metallic states.

Well the hydroxl radical, is one of the top oxidants. Greater than peroxide, ozone, and Chlorine. Which means that it wants to react with almost anything. http://www.lenntech.com/water-disinfection/disinfectants-hydrogen-peroxide.htm see table in the middle.

It would almost be like humans developing resistance to getting shot in the head with a .45 gun. I don't see it happening.

That said Radiodurans extremophiles are able to repair themselves at amazing rate from ionizing radiation induced: From wiki: While a dose of 10 Gy of ionizing radiation is sufficient to kill a human, and a dose of 60 Gy is sufficient to kill all cells in a culture of E. coli, D. radiodurans is capable of withstanding an instantaneous dose of up to 5,000 Gy with no loss of viability, and an instantaneous dose of up to 15,000 Gy with 37% viability. A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred complete breaks into the organism's DNA.

It's amazing how much paranoia has become ingrained in certain subsections of modern western society.

In terms of the American political world, given how often what is called "paranoia" turns out to be close enough to fact twenty or thirty years later it's not really a surprise. In the 1980s global warming was considered paranoia,even though it had been theorized in 1896. Treehuggers were fringe political freaks thirty years ago, now we know that they were mostly right. Orwell's 1984 was thought a bit over the top during most of it's literary history. But thoughtcrime and doublethink are a modern reality. Predictions of government abuse of "anti-terrorism" laws were written off as treasonously unpatriotic just six years ago.
Given how much "Big Oil" countries have been investing in the US, it would be foolish to think that they didn't have considerable influence here in the US, both through lobbists and through business and real estae acquisitions. Also given is the oil import/export relationship is the prime source of income to most OPEC countries, it only makes sense that they would act to protect it. Maglev trains powered by stationary nuclear plants don't burn nearly as much imported oil as jumbo jets. Now exactly how successful they would be in their efforts to block the progression of an oil free infrastructure taking hold in the US is a potential topic for debate, but the fact that they will use what considerable influence they can to that end would seem obvious.

Quick question. If this does come to pass by 2050 instead of consistently selling vapor ware. Is anyone aware that there's a game that predicts this stuff in a cute / liquid format? I believe you may have heard of it. Deus Ex. Very neat story that ties in all this lovely stuff with another lovely story... that of the so called "NWO", but it doesn't go by that name, in that world, the United Nations Anti Terrorist COalition has declared war on any group that doesn't follow orders. The USA has been split by a civil war, China had conquered Hong Kong and let it be financially and it became the New Mecca for property owners (America was lost by then, as its government almost completely went totalitarian and stopped hiding it.) And lets see, when Deus Ex came out, Hong Kong was still an independent territory, now it belongs to China and China predictably did EXACTLY what was predicted in the game. Left its commerce alone. Hong Kong may not be a FREE market but its the closest thing in the whole world. The USA has continued its drift into fascist socialism, and so has Canada. The midwestern states are starting to get riled up over the abuses of rights and the proposed Trans Texas Corridor (along with the Canada-Mexico Corridor), collectively known as the so called "Nafta Super Highway" (the amazing part is that its being called a hoax on TV, and yet the government has a "working group" on it, and has had it since before 2005 when the documents to make it official were signed at the site of a previous attrocity. Waco, Texas. All very amazing, and all very predictable, I mean damn, it was predicted accurately by a game company based where? TEXAS... Ion Storm put out Deus Ex, and it was probably the only GOOD game Ion Storm ever made (since Daikatana was the biggest failure they ever made and it was their much touted flagship product).

As for Barium - I seem to recall that barium is pretty nasty stuff... especially concentrated and absorbed by the body, but as found in the atmosphere and common in nature all over the world it is too little to cause harm (and yes they give you a nice tall glass of it solved in a liquid medium before a CAT scan), and it usually gives you the runs an hour later, or is that rather "the squirts"? The interesting thing to note is that barium is considered a dangerous (the word used is heavy, but it is inappropriate as I'm told) metal by some, and a nasty one like our usual suspects lead, uranium, plutonium, etc. When the issue of gun cartridge primers (those little metal dots on the back of centerfire pistol and rifle cartridges that look different than the rest of the brass or steel cartridge) came up as containing a mixture of lead (supposedly bad), barium (supposedly bad), and several other substances keeping them inert until the pin strikes the primer and the flame ignites, the issue was raised by the FBI (why not the EPA I will never know) as to the dangers of primers emitting 7.9 mg of lead into the atmosphere on average per shot. The feds wanted "low lead" primers and got them from CCI. Of course they're insanely expensive and the tax payer pays for the feds to have cleaner methods of murdering innocents and thugging on the harmless. Nothing new. Police state doing its thing, policed sheep doing their thing. I'm merely stating the obvious, move along!

Well, it has been going up lately, but MS stock outperformed it (click the Max zoom in the upper right hand area of the graph). A much better investment might be copper. I read an article years ago by an economic geologist (haven't found a link to it though) in which it was stated that at current known copper reserves, there isn't enough copper to wire the third world to the same extent the industrialized nations are wired (power and communications). Wireless may change that, but the third world still wants electricity, and China is building 544 new coal power plants in the foreseeable future. That's a lot of copper, and without some kind of gigantic new source, that's likely to mean higher copper prices in the future.

I'd advise apple to invest in either copper of MS stock.

The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon.

Okay. No problem. Let's work that out then.

We need to plant X number of trees to counteract Y tonnes of CO2 being produced. As CO2 production goes up, we need to increase the number of trees we plant.

Oops. It seems that those numbers aren't exactly favourable to your solution right now. Could it be that currently, the amount of trees is going *down* while the amount of CO2 being produced is going *up*? Oops. Well, okay, let's reverse that trend.

Let's start in America, where most of the world's human contribution to atmospheric CO2 is produced (see earlier citation)? Well, to soak that up, you'd need to have about 146 25 year old pine trees for every (metric) tonne of CO2 produced. Not plant, but *have*. They have to be at least 25 years old before that sort of CO2 absorbtion is being done. And then you'd have to add 146 more 25 year old pine trees per year per ton of CO2 that that amount goes up.

So how many tonnes of CO2 does the US produce? About 5.4 billion, way back in 1997. You would need to *have* 788 billion 25 year old pine trees in 1997, and increase that number by 1.5% every year (11.82 billion) to keep up with growth.

Let's assume each tree needs 4 square meters of land to grow on. That's a wildly optimistic number, by the way, but it makes the math nice and easy. That's 3.154 billion square meters, which means 315 million hectares. Great. According to The World Factbook, that's 34.4% of the total land mass of the US.

Looks like it's time to get out there and start planting. :)

See the thing is, in just about every city where smoking is banned from bars, lots of bars close down.

I've seen reports that say there is no significant impact; please cite your source for this claim. Thanks. (Hate secondhand smoke; love bar. Usually try to sit by the door of my favorite tavern when fresh air dillutes the cigarette fumes.)

Instead of banning smoking entirely, the correct way to handle it would have been to simply enforce a minimum standard of air quality in the "workplace" where people are serving smokers

Sounds good in theory, though I'm not sure if that can be enforced in practice.

It would also be helpful to get the radioactive polonium and lead out of cigarette smoke with appropriate agricultural regulation.

Too bad you're breathing and ingesting U and Po on a daily basis already, from natural sources.

Didn't say I wasn't. However, the existance of a baseline of exposure doesn't resolve the ethical question of how much exposure risk we can force on others. The fact that there's a (very very tiny) baseline risk of any given person getting hit by a meteorite, does not imply it's ok for me to throw stones out my window that might hit passers-by.

(And it's questionable how much U and Po in the air could be said to be from "natural" sources. Trace amounts of both are released from mining; U is released by burning coal; Po exposure comes from contamination of mineral phosphates used as a fertilizer, on crops including tobacco. (And yes, that does make it ironic when someone worried about the risk of Pu exposure from a failed rocket launch tells you about this over a cigarette.)

I haven't investigated enough myself to have a informed opinion on the magnitude of risk, but all other things being equal I'm pretty breathing plutonium is less than heathful.

This page mentions that there are no recorded cases of fatality from plutonium ingestion. But it also lists what could happen (and where the Plutonium goes in your body). It may simply be a case of it increasing the likelihood of certain cancers.

NASA claims that modern RTGs are just about unbreechable.

And that a 5lb (or whatever it was) block of foam couldn't do any damage to the spaceshuttle.

Skeptics note that NASA also once claimed that the odds of the Space Shuttle being destroyed by a launch failure at 1 in 100,000

Lol - they should be right for another 300,000 years then.

What happens if the "slug" stops being a slug? (it'd probably take a really hot fireball to do that - where would they find one of those?)

Plutonium melts at 914K and a typical rocket exhaust is 2500K to 3600K. So even if the resulting fireball is half the temperature of the exhaust, it still has the potential to liquify the plutonium. Summary: Stupid people should apologize for trying to influence policy according to their stupidity. Smart people should not apologize for trying to influence policy according to their smartitude

Stupid people make up words too.

You're wrong. Hope you're man enough to open your mind a bit and dump the science of the 70's and read a bit.

Notice the green dots? I guess Google's censoring some of their map data.

Someone apparently hasn't flown cross-country.

The green is plants. They're circular because there's a irrigation machine like this spinning around on a central pivot.

It does feel good walking on recycled tyre foam, it was used as a spongy concrete-like playground safety base for awhile. Then the scuttle got out about how tyre manufacturing uses cadmium as a colour fixant, and it seems to have stopped being used.

Cadmium is a nasty pollutant. Tire dust has enough cadmium (etc.) in it to be a real concern; they voluntarily took it out of pesticides in '97, but it is still used in many manufacturing processes. Direct application to the feet by walking on it barefoot is only going to increase our already elevated intake.

I agree wholeheartedly that architects need to get out of their CAD caves and back into the tribe, watch the patterns of movement and usage, and design for that. You know, what actually happens, instead of what looks pretty on a freakin' screen. If your design anticipates everyday behaviour, it will be pretty enough. Slap all the gewgaws you want on it after thinking about living vectors.

Good point. Not for the diesel the farmer has to burn to create ethanol (if this really takes off, his tractor will eventually be replaced by something that uses a fuel cell as well), but for a completely other reason. As you so adequately put, that corn was grown in a large field. Where are we going to grow our own fuel (wheat, vegetables etc.) if we need the fields to grow ethanol-corn? And it will take a lot of terrain to grow enough ethanol if fossil fuels are to be replaced by it.

I'm really enthousiastic about hydrogen fuel cells, but for some reason this doesn't seem the way to go. Maybe because I'm Dutch, but I prefer the idea of windmills. Or solar or hydroelectric power.