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The patent on the wheel would have long expired... oh wait, it hasn't!

Especially considering that the library people who are supposed to be teaching them are all idiots. We had to do that in my sophomore year in high school, and our librarian taught us such useful things as "Google uses boolean search terms" and "The internet is never reliable".

New Scientist covered this in an article several weeks ago. The experiment is about retrocausality - the future affecting the past - rather than sending information back in time.

A few weeks later they also printed a letter which suggested retrocausality was redundant.

I don't pretend to understand this stuff. The message I got from the article though was that the future affecting the past only seems weird because we assume that time flows, because that's how we perceive it: if you imagine all time existing like a spatial dimension, then retrocausality is "normal".

New Scientist covered this in an article several weeks ago. The experiment is about retrocausality - the future affecting the past - rather than sending information back in time.

A few weeks later they also printed a letter which suggested retrocausality was redundant.

I don't pretend to understand this stuff. The message I got from the article though was that the future affecting the past only seems weird because we assume that time flows, because that's how we perceive it: if you imagine all time existing like a spatial dimension, then retrocausality is "normal".

1) http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/gribbin. asp/ There's plenty more with a quick google. Ignorance does not mean actual absence of data.

2) Localized data set for a global climate model. Not relevant.

3) Your point that the water problem can be solved by engineering is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Though the original point itself has the problem of using a local datapoint to support a global climate event.

4) I'd say as well that no one said we'd have crop failures now. Give it another 50 years or so. Though deadly heat waves were rampant across the world last year.

5) No one said that local climates are directly to global trends. Not only that, but no paper argued that there'd be a linear increase in hurricane strength in the Golf of Mexico.

6) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/03 25_030325_belizereefs.html/ Google for Coral Bleaching if you want to find out more what causes coral reefs to die. And no, contrary to your whishful thinking, it isn't divers that cause it.

7) In the same article you listed, there's this little quote. "Finally, Joughin says that two nearby West Antarctic glaciers are thinning rapidly, so the trend cannot be extended across the continent." It's at the end of the article, so I can understand why you didn't see it. Just for kicks, from the same site, here's another link: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6962/ Just google for Antarctic Ice sheet for more of the same.

8) Now you're either plain lying, or deliberately ignoring facts. In the 60s, the Ozone layer was fine. For the data, see here: http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour/part2.html/. Or just google for Ozone layer Antarctic.

I'm glad that people who deny Global Climate Change have such lousy arguments. It means there's plenty of money to be made from them once real issues hit.

Disruption of the gulf stream - not predicted to happen just yet, so this prediction hasn't been refuted.

I would be happy with *any* observable effects. The rhetoric would suggest that the process in imminent. But no, they are perpetually 5 years off, which was the point of my original post.

Desertification of the US midwest - underway.

In the past 10 years I have lived in Kansas and Minnesota, where we have enjoyed excellent harvests without exception.

I live in Alberta (Canada), and we expect to run out of glacial runoff in the next 15-20 years, leaving our river and main source of water bone dry for half the year. On top of that, the climate is getting dryer, and the water shelf is dropping. These are known to most residents here.

I assume you live on the eastern slopes of the Rockies (a desert) with a rapidly growing population (like Denver). The mountain interior is very wet but there are no large lakes. North and east you have some of the largest fresh water bodies in the world. Your problem is one of lagging civil engineering not climate.

US crop failures - we'll see. Technology is improving all the time to offset this. Its happened before, though.

Wait long enough and you might be right, for one year at least.

More frequent/severe Atlantic hurricanes (were there any this year?) - Nope, but again they expect a trend towards stronger storms, and last year it was certainly evident.

But if warming were such a major factor, wouldn't the forcing mechanism operate year to year. I am only using the 'Al Gore' argument in reverse. Maybe the hurricane cycle is more complex?

Decline of coral reefs - underway. Most of the reefs affected by El Nino (Belize's great barrier reef in particular) are almost completely dead. Scuba diving was a lot more interesting about 15 years ago.

one wonders if it isn't due to overuse by divers.

Disruption of Antarctic ice shelves - underway. There has been massive breakups of ice shelves in the last few years. Actually the predictions were mostly wrong; this is happening faster than we thought.

Riiight.

are you disputing the ozone hole now? That's a separate issue, but one that governments at least took significant steps towards solving around 15 years ago. The hole is larger this year than ever before, btw.

No. It has always been there. Chlorine compounds are activated at low temperatures in the stratisphere. When satellites looked, there it was! There has never not been an ozone hole!

However, the global warming debunkers and the global warming zealots are both arguing about man-made global warming. Many of the debunkers are firmly on the side that any global warming we are seeing now is part of a natural cycle, and CO2 emissions from human activity have very little to do with it.

Now for my bit of ranting. CO2 is the least dangerous of the greenhouse gasses. Carbon emissions trading schemes are horribly rigged to favor the most polluting countries. The US and Australia are probably doing more to stop CO2 emissions than Europe by simply giving the technology for cleaner burning of fossil fuels to China and India, the two fastest growing and soon to be most carbon emitting countries in the world.

The issue is whether we can sustain our usage at current levels indefinitely. The answer is of course, no. Can we then sustain current usage until a substitute energy source comes along? Possibly.

I've spent a bit of time reading around this area, and I think you can divide the problem into a couple of areas

1. Depletion of reserves

A big problem. Oil will run out, its really a question of when. If you believe the Peak Oil proponents, we may well be in a depletion phase already. Certainly May 2005 was a peak in production which we have not yet exceeded, and the longer this goes on for the more likely that it was the true peak. Also we are currently consuming reserves at 4 times the rate we are discovering new one sources. It is unlikely that we will ever find another major producer like Saudi Arabia, and so if we haven't hit peak, we will soon enough (in the next 10 years). After that peak, we probably have 20 years or so of decreasing production.

With oil reserves limited, attention is turning to other energy sources. Natural gas and Nuclear Power are the obvious choices.

Unfortunately, natural gas isn't infinite, and while it will last a while, its loss will be accelerated by oil substitution. In other words, it will peak not long after whenever oil peaks.

Nuclear power is contentious, difficult, and actually not in infinite supply. The world would consume all the nuclear power in a couple of decades; and there isn't any easy way to make its energy available for transportation.

2. Ecological Damage

Whilst all this stored energy will run out, the bigger question that we face is: Can we really afford to ever actually use all these sources without damaging the environment too much?

Carbon Dioxide emissions are a big concern. A recent article highlights the rapid rise in CO2 that we are producing right now. Its hard to see how we an avoid terraforming the planet (in a nasty way) with current consumption of fossil fuels. There are options such as sequestration or even shading the planet from space, but its hard to know which country is going to start this process off. Perhaps more economic solutions exist, but for now all these solutions are just theories, and nobody is doing any of it yet to my knowledge.

Environmental damage from renewable resources is still an issue. Wind farms make noise and kill birds, hydro power floods large areas of the environment, solar takes out alot of space and uses a great deal of non-renewable resources to manufacture. Nuclear comes with its own set of environmental problems.

Coal, historically, is the worst offender. Most coal mines have killed more miners individually that all nuclear accidents in the world have done. Coal contains radioactive isotopes, and coal powered stations actually release a substantial amount of radiation. Also, there are a great deal of pollutants in coal - its not a really clean energy source; and in fact causes more CO2 and less H2O release as its mostly carbon - unlike natural gas, which has a lot of hydrogen in it and therefore has water as a waste product of combustion which is much better than carbon dioxide.

Renewable alternatives

The renewable resources all have problems.

Bio Diesel (and/or ethanol) is a really promising alternative, but will require huge amounts of land to be converted to fuel production to support this - perhaps as much as 25% of the surface area of the US would be required to support the US at current rates of usage. In this sense it suffers the same problems as most renewables - environmental degredation. Its hard to know where all the fresh water is going to come from to grow this fuel, let alone the land. On the

Maybe not a gas cloud, but there seems to be a "Dark Spot on Uranus".

Cosmic dingleberry.

(Uranus jokes will never get old. Insert renaming to Urectum joke here).

"The team tested the mice's vision by observing how their pupils responded to different light intensities (Nature, vol 444, p 203)."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225775.100 -cell-transplant-may-restore-lost-sight.html

I was just reading a relevant article on New Scientist about the "hockey stick" graph which says that it has since been duplicated by other scientists.

From : New Scientist
Another scientist to suffer the ire of the sceptics was Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He was attacked after the IPCC assessment in 2001, which highlighted his "hockey stick" graph showing that temperatures began a rapid rise in recent decades and are now higher than at any time over the past thousand years. The sceptics accused Mann of cherry-picking his data and criticised him for refusing to disclose his statistical methods which, they claimed, biased the study to show recent warming (New Scientist, 18 March, p 40). Last year, Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, ordered Mann to provide the committee with voluminous details of his working procedures, computer programs and past funding. Barton's demands were widely condemned by fellow scientists and on Capitol Hill. "There are people who believe that if they bring down Mike Mann, they can bring down the IPCC," said Santer at the time. Mann's findings, which will be endorsed in the new IPCC report, have since been replicated by other studies.

Bold emphasis mine.

600 million years is not a long time, geologically speaking - or even evolutionarily-speaking - and I'm not convinced that every necessary process to get from Iceworld to habitable planet could occur in such a short space of time. I could be wrong, but I would need some VERY hard evidence.

We certainly have our surveillance problems, but the UK is way ahead of us. What about the stat that 20% of the world's CCTV cameras are in the UK? One for every 14 people? I mean, we're still debating whether you can give people traffic tickets when the pictures show them running red lights. How about the town where you need fingerprint ID just to go into a bar? I mean, I'm wasting my time arguing with libertarians here and I find that absolutely frightening ... http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/

"You don't ejaculate testosterone"

Not so, according to these articles in New Scientist and the BBC

Ketamine works like an SSRI but blocks a different group of neuro thingies

Please don't spread misinformation like that. The action of ketamine is entirely unlike that of SSRIs. Sure they both inhibit some proteins in neurons but hell, if that's your criteria for "works like" you could say aspirin "works like" SSRIs. Your statement is so vague as to be misleading. SSRIs block the reuptake of neurotransmitters presynaptically so that there is more neurotransmitter available to cause a post-synaptic response. Ketamine blocks the postsynaptic NMDA receptor, inhibiting a post-synaptic response. SSRIs work on the serotonin system, ketamine on the glutamate system.

The antidepressant response to ketamine is a truely novel phenomenon. I suspect it has some similarities to the response to electroconvulsive therapy, since many of the same players (NMDA receptor, CaMKII) are involved in each.

In other news involving novel theraputic uses of recreational drugs, MDMA seems to help treat parkinsons symptoms. Check it out at the New Scientist. Maybe we can get Michael J. Fox to come out in favor of medicinal MDMA?

There are practical advantages in problem solving which have been tied to the language used in mental formulation, for example the development of what is metaphorically called "logical circuitry" has been shown to diverge between native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers.

My expectation is that spoken language will eventually go the way of handwriting: creature comfort, dying art, what once defined the best of us but becomes in many cases an indulgent inefficiency. How?

Anybody who dares to at this point, has realized they can jam wires into the human brain and let it learn to control machines on the other end. It's already beyond that in fact, with embedded communication devices being the next step, stepping shoe now currently in air: you'll see in a few days in Nature how real the "Neurochip" already is.

People should stop pretending this is about helping paraplegics by playing Space Invaders or moving a cursor with mind control, or that we're only trying to help brain injury, stroke, or paralysis patients. This is about construction workers with better than human strength in their better than human limbs. We drive vehicles through obstacles on land at 10 times the speed human beings can run, and we fly vehicles at 800 times the speed we can biologically move ourselves. We are mentally capable of managing bodily abilities far beyond those with which we are born.

This is not only about helping the disabled, and it's not only about incredible speeds or strengths. It's also about perfectly able people who would rather control personal electronics with their thoughts than search for or decipher other remote control electronics. Personal electronics are going to be a lot more personal, too; these people will eventually prefer to have personal electronics embedded in their bodies and networked with their minds.

Don't worry about losing human language: we will only lose it when we'll be better off for it, when we communicate and think better without it. The translator here, with IBM and elsewhere is of course more narrowly focused, but with this we are converging on technological telepathy and obsoleting human language.

Human logic and good intentions have come at it from a more traditional, less technological direction, giving us Esperanto, Loglan, Lojban, etc. You've probably heard of only one of these, which you probably laughed at somebody for being Geek enough to know any of. Most of them have been great ideas and well executed, but despite inherent gains in efficiency or intellectual force they are nowhere near the markets and their returns depend on mass adoption. Technology is different, it's tied directly to markets and to private profiteering with immediate amplification of wealth among the wealthy. Human beings are not going to create a better enough language, soon enough, before we create a technology which in itself superior to all human language. BG

Fixing up previous post

Move to Ireland for the following reasons

1. Fantastic economy
2. Good prospects for 20-30 years of high economic growth
3. Easy to become a citizen if you are European/American
4. The only English speaking country in the Euro (a currency).
5. Good academic research funding http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225720.400 -the-lure-of-the-celtic-tiger.html [newscientist.com]
6. Investing large amounts of money (finally) in public train systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luas [wikipedia.org] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Metro [wikipedia.org]
7. Free travel area with the UK.
8. Right beside the UK, so we get all of the British TV stations.
9. Militarily neutral - constitutionally enshrined, virtually impossible to go to war.
10. Full employment, leading to massive migration to Ireland http://www.heritage.org/research/worldwidefreedom/ bg1945.cfm [heritage.org]


You could go to London and in fact I'd be quite tempted to do that myself but... I suppose being Irish... I'm required to say move here anyway.
Until Dublin finishes building it's tram system though... the London tube is just too excellent to reasonably discount London as an amazing place to live.
Really though Dublin or London are ideal places to move to especially if you don't speak French/German/Italian/Spanish/(Norsk|Dansk|Svenska )

Ride the tiger baby !

1. Fantastic economy 2. Good prospects for 20-30 years of high economic growth 3. Easy to become a citizen if you are European/American 4. The only English speaking country in the Euro (a currency). 5. Good academic research funding http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225720.400 -the-lure-of-the-celtic-tiger.html 6. Investing large amounts of money (finally) in public train systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Metro 7. Free travel area with the UK. 8. Right beside the UK, so we get all of the British TV stations. 9. Militarily neutral - constitutionally enshrined, virtually impossible to go to war. 10. Full employment, leading to massive migration to Ireland http://www.heritage.org/research/worldwidefreedom/ bg1945.cfm Ride the tiger baby !

I have been doing this for the last few months and it has really turned the tide for me, before I really felt like I was loosing the battle against diabetes. The only trick is finding the right *kind* of cinnamon can be difficult. There are hundreds of types of cinnamon and the kind you want is commonly called "cassia" or "cinnamonium aromium" (sp?) or sometimes "cinnamonium romulus" (generally the chinese name). It is grown in indonesia and china. Problem being that most cinnamons sold in the US are blends of Saigon Cinnamon which does not seem to have the same properties. A number of nutrition stores sell cinnamon pills (vitamin shoppe, gnc) that have the correct cinnamon in them. Currently the best price i've found is at GNC -- if you buy their GNC card ($15/year) it knocks a bottle of 200 pills down to about $12. Before you say "thats expensive for cinammon" as yourself -- what are you spending on medication right now? On your glucophage, on your metformin, on your zocor, on your benazepril, on your insulin?

For me the cinnamon does not have the horrible side effects of things like metformin and glucophage. The side effects (sudden intense hunger, increased appetite) make me eat more, gain weight, and thus require more medication. I am not suggesting you replace your medications for cinnamon, but if you are having trouble controlling your blood sugar, try adding cinnamon to your diet. If you are not having trouble, try replacing some of your medication with cinnamon.

I am planning on starting a website soon about this to try and get the word out. How many times in life is there something simple and safe that can improve your health?

It took millions of years to sequester carbon dioxide in the ground and cool our climate

Surely if the forests had sequestered all that CO2 and lowered the global temperature, then there wouldn't have been such massive rises in sea level in the past. Yet this happened time and time again over millions of years, as evidenced by layers of coal upon sedimentary rock upon layers of coal upon sedimentary rock etc etc.

If we are to believe that CO2 is responsible for global warming that melted the ice caps, then the sequestering didn't have much effect, given the repeated flooding and ice ages. And given that there was vastly more forestation millions of years ago, but there were still repeated ice ages, I suggest that there is more to global warming than just lack of CO2 sequestration. After all, the ice cores have shown that CO2 levels are highest just before the temperature drops ! And I think it's fruitless to argue that successive periods of sequestration have lowered the overall CO2 levels in the atmosphere, as all the ice cores show a gradual rise in CO2 levels over time.
This isn't a very good graph but it's the best I can find right now.

It took hundreds of millions of years for earth to develop its diversity and abundance of life forms and again in hundreds of years we will have decimated all of them.

None of what I have said above means that I deny global warming or that human CO2 could be a factor, or that we shouldn't take better care of our environment. But I'm fed up with being terrorised by the media and the government over something which, judging by the evidence, isn't entirely our fault. Not that we can do anything about it anyway. Sure, stop using fossil fuels, adopt a f*kin whale, but at the end of the day, there WILL be another ice age, and there WILL be another mass extinction. King Canute realised this a long time ago.

Here's an example of the crap I'm talking about (from the new scientist)

The tight coupling between temperatures and the greenhouse gas levels revealed by the core matches the predictions from climate models used to forecast future global warming. It also bears some good news: the warm interglacial periods between ice ages can last a long time, contrary to the view that we may already be due for the onset of the next ice age.

The data also show that half of the previous six interglacial periods each lasted nearly 30,000 years - far longer than the roughly 10,000 years of the most recent cycles. The current interglacial period has persisted for about 10,000 years so far.

bah !

Wow, I can't believe nobody is excited about this. This is the birth of the next evolution of computers: bio-computers. Think about it. The first computers could only place simple games as well, but now look at us. Bio-computers are closer to recreating human technology: life.

"It's lovely work," says Peter Bentley, a computer scientist linked to University College London. But he notes that a system that cannot be extended much further than playing tic-tac-toe "is merely a novelty". Stojanovic and Stefanovic are aware of this and are now focusing on developing simple decision-making solutions that can operate in vivo. Molecules could, for example, assess faults in a living cell and then either kill or repair it. source

Some cities, such as Reykjavik, already use hydrogen to power buses. But Iceland gets some electricity and over 80% of its heating and hot water from geothermal energy sources, and can produce the hydrogen emission-free. Other countries need to find ways to produce the hydrogen sustainably.

And when we see fearless regenerative howling hyper-muscular mice with giant human brains, then we know our world is lost.

Also, I wonder what Fatmouse thinks of all this? Some mice get all the good mutations...

And when we see fearless regenerative howling hyper-muscular mice with giant human brains, then we know our world is lost.

Also, I wonder what Fatmouse thinks of all this? Some mice get all the good mutations...

The only downside is rising ocean levels ...

• Europe might be gripped by an ice age (despite the global warming).
• Warmer temperatures elsewhere can accelerate the release of methane into the atmosphere and that could push global temperatures to increase dramatically. Think Venus.

I think the parent poster brings up a good point here, in that many of the comments on this article so far that have been in opposition to GM foods have failed to cite any specific examples

If you're going to talk about some mysterious bad voodoo that GM foods have perpetrated on the unsuspecting populace, at least take the 5 minutes required to google it and provide some citations. Just saying "oh well, you know, GM foods are pretty bad and can do some nasty stuff" isn't going to convince anyone or make for a constructive debate.

You can find the flaming here and the grovelling apology on their blog.

The winner of the medicine prize got it for ground breaking research into curing intractible hiccups by sticking his finger up a patient's anus.

He also suggests that sex is the most potent cure for hiccups, but that won't really affect anyone on slashdot.

1. Turbines can make a LOT of noise, especially if they are not perfectly tuned. That is certainly a concern for nearby households.
2. They demand maintenance, without which they become serious hazards. Given the state of repair of your neighbor's automobile, do you trust him to spend money each year to maintain the windmill?
3. Turbines don't work unless they are above the disruptive effects of other towers, necessitating heights of up to 11 meters above the surrounding roofs and antennae. That's a lot of windmill sticking in the air, especially if you live in an area prone to high winds.
4. If everyone has one, everyone's efficiency goes down because of turbulent interference.

So, even if the efficiencies are high enough in the lab, and even if homeowners start driving prices down through economies of scale, and even if no one complains about their view being corrupted by dozens of spinning blades, there are still a host of difficult barriers here.

Seems to me that wind micropower is going to be popular for ranches and remote households, just like the windmills of old, and not many others.

Furthermore, we have the famous Swinging Patent. While not everything should be patentable, the US patent office disagrees. Everything is fair game.

"The point is that a call over a POTS line is very difficult for nefarious users to compromise unless they have physical access between you and the exchange"

You see that green box in the neighborhood? Good.

"Even conversations on a normal old fashioned GSM mobile are encrypted and cannot be trivially snooped with an off the shelf scanner."

To be specific, you can't get a scanner that covers the 800MHz range. Not a new one, anyway. Go to any hamfest and find someone selling their old one (good luck). There _are_ downconverters you can _build_, however.

And....

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4130

"Actually, that's not true for virtually anyone who has upgraded their home phone at least once in about the last decade. Virtually all except the nastiest less-than-10-USD handsets use DSC."

You should talk to my aunt. She's got the same phone from 20 years ago and it sounds like crap. Wish she would go back to an antique rotary dial _good_ sounding phone or a new phone.

--
BMO

Various mechanisms involving dust, wind, steep slopes, etc. have been proposed, see this article.

WHAT makes a scientific paper "surprising" or "unexpected"? Michal Jasienski believes the rapid increase in the frequency of these words in papers' titles is simply a bid by the authors to stand out amid the deluge of publications."

"If grabbing attention is the goal, it is not working. Jasienski took a sample of 100 "surprising" papers and found that on average they were cited by other researchers no more often than 100 matched papers from the same journals."

You have to realize that the correlation of data to what you may call fundamental laws is very compelling. The claim being made as I read it is that this system can generate thrust from a closed system. This is bollocks. Two forces are being generated at ends of the cavity with the ends being different sizes. That's ok. But saying a net force has been imparted on the whole system is the problem. Having a microwave resonator means this is a closed system so there is force acting on the walls of the device. If he were claiming photons were being expelled that would help but that's not the claim. The newscientist article is suprisingly very bad. For example there is a comment about microwave photons moving at near the speed of light. bzzzt. They are at the speed of light. They at least have the source article up. One thing that looks bad is that he's calling it an open system and it can't be open or you wouldn't have it resonate. http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/shaw yertheory.pdf#search=%22thrust%20microwave%22

You may not have heard of it, but the evidence is out there.

It's an interesting reading here:

  http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/shaw yertheory.pdf

the link is provided by the article linked. It sounds interesting to me, though referring to the special "relativity" is a bit too much; basically one end of the tubes experience more normal force than the other (narrow end) would result in a net forward force, which drives the system.

Of course the key is the generation of the cavity and its material, and the magentron design.

Nontheless, it sounds interesting to me. Not an expert on these systems, though.

Even better, it could fund the construction of about four or five more clean, safe nuclear power plants so we can remove our dependence on power plants that produce more global warming, e.g. fossil fuel and hydroelectric power plants. (Yeah, that's right. Hydro plants in some cases cause more global warming than fossil fuel plants thanks to decaying matter in the holding ponds producing methane.)

Then, California could mandate that all automobiles be powered off of electrical power using some of the newer, fast-charging batteries. At today's electrical rates, if my math was correct, assuming no conversion loss in the storage process, electric-powered cars would be equivalent to paying $0.125 (12 1/2 cents) per gallon at the pumps. With more nuke plants online, the price of energy would be even cheaper. This would have a significant economic benefit for the state, reducing the cost of consumer goods and driving the economy. This, in turn, would free financial resources that could be used to buy the next crop of automobiles, so in the end, auto manufacturers come out ahead, too.

Because they don't involve gasoline dispensers, mandatory electric cars (as in 100% of all new vehicles sold must be electric by 2012) would eliminate multiple causes of smog and pollution; not only would you drastically reduce automobile emissions, but you would also drastically reduce evaporation of gasoline vapors, fuel spills, etc. at the pumps. You would also eliminate a major cause of groundwater contamination---specifically, leaking fuel tanks.

Finally, this would dramatically reduce our state's dependence on oil, which would make us less vulnerable to the goings on in parts of the world where oil is produced. The long-term economic benefits are fairly significant.

The problem is that in order to remove our dependence on oil, we have to have a replacement. That means that the cost of battery technology needs to drop by a couple orders of magnitude. Volume will achieve this, but only if all car manufacturers are forced to switch by law. otherwise, they will look at the initial cost and say that it is too expensive in the short term, and would harm their ability to compete in the market.

And solving the battery problem is only one problem. The fact is, we also have aging power grids that haven't been maintained, coupled with a serious lack of generating capacity. Much of this shortage has been the result of environmentalism gone amuck, screaming "not in my backyard" about nuclear plants, all the while promoting things that are much worse for the environment.

That's what bothers me most about the environmental movement. It always seems to take a knee-jerk approach rather than a studied view of the whole system, and the result is that more often than not, the things that are pushed in the name of environmental reform usually do more harm than good. What we need most is a careful study of our energy policy in CA, a careful study of our generator capacity, and a detailed analysis of how much additional power we need to be able to handle EV cars. Then, we need laws that demand EV cars. It is far easier to control emissions from a few power plants owned by a few companies than to control emissions from a few million automobiles.

Studies show that birthrates for a nation track industrialization. Farmers have lots of kids pretty much everywhere. Officer and factor workers don't (partially due to the differences in the role women play in the different societies). The birthrates of most nations that are not industrialized now but are headed that direction are slowing, more or less on track with the historical trends of currently industrialized nations. With some assumptions it can be estimated that world population will top out around 9 billion people sometime in the late 21st century. There are many variables of course.

New Scientist article

Israelia laser processors have been out http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4331 aka enlight. The device is called Enlight and can perform 8000 billion arithmetic operations per second, about 1000 times faster than a standard processor. The beams from 256 lasers are added or multiplied together when shone on a matrix device called a spatial light modulator. The outputs are then read by an array of light detectors. etc etc.

So long & thx for all the sharks...

According to a recent New Scientist article, homing pigeons use their nose to find home rather than the Earth's magnetic field.

From the article:

She released 48 inexperienced homing pigeons 50 kilometres from their home loft. Half of them had had their olfactory nerve severed and half their trigeminal nerve, which is responsible for magnetic navigation. The next day, all but one of the birds deprived of their trigeminal nerve had returned home. Only four without a sense of smell returned (The Journal of Experimental Biology, vol 209, p 2888).

According to this New Scientist article you can get odds of 6-1 that the Large Hadron Collider will find the Higgs before 2010 at 6-1. Sounds like a dead cert to me.

For instance, the oceans dissolve tons of carbon dioxide and slowly deposit it in rocks. The hotter the climate, the more carbon dioxide can be dissolved in the water

There is the small issue of CO2 acidifying these oceans you speak of...

One other way is that rather than banning software patents have them patentable for a shorter amount of time and actively enforce the non-obvious rules.

How to turn this idea into a workable system is left as an excersise for overpaid lawyers.

Now, as always, we can cue a horde of astroturfers and deluded followers, rushing in to tell us all how global warming is a myth, and that the shocking recent rise in CO2 levels is somehow not demonstratable, or not significant, or something.

Well, that's okay: Now that the Siberian permafrost is melting, along with Antarctica, it looks like the Earth's processes have been pushed into a region within which global warming will continue, even if humans reduce their carbon emissions, which itself isn't likely. So congratulations, guys: you won. You kept us from doing something about the problem until it was too late, and now we're going to be stuck with it.

You "skeptics": in twenty years, when the problems caused by global warming make Katrina and heat waves that kill 35,000 people look pretty trivial, are you going to look back on your postings on slashdot -- and whatever else you're doing to spread the idea that global warming can be ignored -- and feel ashamed? Are you going to feel partly responsible?

Probably not.

Now, as always, we can cue a horde of astroturfers and deluded followers, rushing in to tell us all how global warming is a myth, and that the shocking recent rise in CO2 levels is somehow not demonstratable, or not significant, or something.

Well, that's okay: Now that the Siberian permafrost is melting, along with Antarctica, it looks like the Earth's processes have been pushed into a region within which global warming will continue, even if humans reduce their carbon emissions, which itself isn't likely. So congratulations, guys: you won. You kept us from doing something about the problem until it was too late, and now we're going to be stuck with it.

You "skeptics": in twenty years, when the problems caused by global warming make Katrina and heat waves that kill 35,000 people look pretty trivial, are you going to look back on your postings on slashdot -- and whatever else you're doing to spread the idea that global warming can be ignored -- and feel ashamed? Are you going to feel partly responsible?

Probably not.

White House report says people cause global warming

Um, no. The Sahara is growing, expanding into the Sahel region (which is shrinking)

Um, yes it is shrinking

The Sand Hills were real live dunes during the Little Ice Age. In point of fact, where you are living right now is reclaimed desert. Warming shrinks deserts and cooling expands them. Given the choice, I'd go for warming every time.

honestly I don't see how you could "grow" meat.

It's coming . They do it already .

My guess tho is that the "final product", once "processed" with the apropriate "barbecue taste" chemicals is not going to taste too good.

You've never heard of VAT meat? Coming soon to a dinner table near you.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3208

PS. Tofu rocks.

They do it with goldfish:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2066