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IT'S a chart that no one wants to top, but global warming's worst offenders, in absolute terms, are the US, China, Russia, Brazil, India, Germany and the UK. New calculations suggest that these nations are responsible for more than 60 per cent of the global warming between 1906 and 2005.

Basically, they cherry picked a small period of time. The fact that they stopped at 2005 is even more telling. Since 2005, US's emissions have dropped, while ALL of BRICS have gone way up.
Heck, here is a better map that shows more CURRENT data. It came from CO2. In this case, it shows 2008's. What is truely wicked is that China has been going up 10-15% EACH YEAR for the last 10 years.

Secondly, Europe out did America in coal emissions for centuries. In fact, they emitted more CO2 UNTIL 1998 when suddenly, they started downwards. In fact, even the UK says that they are the global historical cause of climate change.
Third, check out the following 2 reports:
Here and Here.
What do you see?
That the west, esp. USA, is dropping their emissions, but china alone, emits more each year that destroys those savings. IOW, China is increasing faster than what the entire west can cut. This does NOT include other nations.

So, if you really were the least bit honest, you will get off the high horse and realize that we are in this together. Either all nations work together on this, or we all sink. And if USA takes the same approach that EU took, it will actually RAISE emissions, not lower them. It is EU's racism against China that keeps them from moving more work to there. And sadly, American businesses have taken a non-responsibility approach to issues, so they go on over to China, while ignoring the fact that China is cheating on everything.

Forgot the link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24855-drink-two-espressos-to-enhance-longterm-memory.html

It seems that every time there's a post about something to do with frame rates, there's always someone going "but the human eye only runs at 30fps" or something like that.

Even if we assume for argument's sake that the eye has a certain "frame rate" (it doesn't), then it's still gonna capture a range of motion every time, leading to a strobe effect which makes the motion feel jittery. It's especially apparent when being as close to the screen as you are with the Rift.

And there's other situations besides using the Rift where it's very apparent that 60hz simply isn't enough. I'm an illustrator, and putting down quick curved sketch lines with a drawing tablet makes it immediately clear that 60 comes nowhere close to real motion. Another example: if you ask a pro FPS gamer (which I am definitely not) about the difference or lack thereof between 60 and 120, the answer will be that it's kinda like how 30 vs 60 feels to most of us.

So, no. You're absolutely wrong.

Also what the other guy said about the latency. With all the hype about how they eliminated almost all latency, I was gravely disappointed when I first tried it.

I thought this was about this article which uses a pistonless pressure wave and makes all the same promises.

More... No patent, no medical trials. How the cure is dismissed because it's not profitable: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html

so a productive approach may be to find what it is that is causing people's bodies to fail to continue to detect and correct cancers in the body. Unfortunately, that has more to do with diet than drugs and so there isn't a strong profit motive to take that vector seriously.

There is plenty of research trying to determine why a person doesn't see the cancer, and plenty of research to train the immune system on how to fight the cancer.
See: http://www.mayo.edu/research/discoverys-edge/training-immune-system-fight-cancer
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029442.800-cancer-meets-its-nemesis-in-reprogrammed-blood-cells.html

Diet has an effect on cancer but it's not how you state it. Drugs are all very powerful ally in the fight against cancer.

A quick search got me:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys.html

same study (I think) with a pro-feminist women-are-smarter-than-men spin near the end
http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks.html

Not sure about its pedigree because it's pushing a political narrative, but here's more corroborating evidence suggesting biological basis for gender role/behavior
http://www.parentingscience.com/girl-toys-and-parenting.html

Each of these has varying amounts of placative language to satisfy the PC crowd, so, as always, skepticism is the rule of the day when investigating research that's been contaminated with political correctness. I think it is obvious that masculine/feminine traits, both physical and behavioral, boil down to levels of different hormones as one matures.. They manipulate aspects of temperament and behavior that drive people towards some directions and away from others. The reason this is so politically charged is that it conflicts with the liberal dogma that says gender typical behavior is based on social conditioning.

And here's another source, if for some reason you don't like your own:

OK, climate sceptics: here's the raw data you wanted

Here's some recent articles on the topic of shaping light beams so it curves or has extended focal range or dark spots

by the way the "lightning" redirection problem we originally of interest not as a weapon but to create virtual lightning rod arrays in the air to discharge destructive lightning harmlessly. Why? well back then there had been a few great arpanet outages and people realized how vulnerable we were ebcoming to lightning stikes as we depending on the ubiquitous internet to always be able to route around problems. turned out this was a weak point. I suspect it may have become less of one now in part because optical fiber now carries stuff. But I don't know. But it was the utility companies paying for the research at the time.

lightning weapon using self filamentation:
http://www.army.mil/article/82262/Picatinny_engineers_set_phasers_to__fry_/

curving light "beams"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16936-curved-laser-beams-could-help-tame-thunderclouds.html

forming a pseudo non-diffrating "beam" --- which is a totally wrong way to describe this.
http://www.mtu.de/en/technologies/engineering_news/others/Menges_Forming_non-diffracting_beams_en.pdf

that too was applied to the lighning problem

even a slashdot articlee referencing that:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/04/15/0147234/curved-laser-beams-could-help-tame-lightning

a patent:
http://www.google.nl/patents/US6937791

actually, its pretty safe to say that, barring unusual circumstances or "defects" (like one of you being tetrachromatic or colorblind), what everyone sees is pretty much the same. Nevermind that emotional states, mood, state of mind, etc, can actually influence what you see because of how it gets interpreted/processed, thats more an "illusion" caused by the brain, and while fundamental to the human experience (since there's no way to not be affected), its still just an illusion.

This technology has revealed that, among all humans, there is some sort of "universal language" in how the brain encodes data (or at least a minimum baseline that is conserved through the species that can be used as a 'universal' 'starting point') -- at least for sensory (visual) data, that is.

Hopefully the "Universality" won't be too extensive though, since that opens up possibilities en masse for mind reading, mind control (as nudges, if not outright), "induced" psychosis (voices in your head, visual and auditory hallucinations, etc) and possibly even "possession" (hijacking somebody's body, or at least immobilizing them), unless the inter-personal differences are enough to require a period of "adjustment" or "learning" to sync a person and device.

There's a great book covering some of the science on this topic; reviewed here on NewScientist; very much worth the read. Actually what happens is that the crust "rebounds" in two phases. You can use the first phase to weigh the ice sheet as they are doing in Greenland. Then, the athenosphere (the molten layer, 15-150km deep which the crust/lithosphere sits atop) slowly slops in there and supplies extra heat and magma; generally quite a slow process, with some rebound from the last ice age still occurring.

Upshot: it's certainly possible that the events are related.

Well, until the trend of oceans sinking up the carbon dioxide ends, it will become more and more acidic, killing all the marine life. Then, after it begins to heat up, much of the life will have already gone extinct. Just like when someone cooks your dinner, and then cools it down before it gets to your plate, it that doesn't reverse the process of cooking it.

Here is another link describing what AC is talking about! http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20413-warmer-oceans-release-co2-faster-than-thought.html

Love that cartoon! Yep, chalk another one up. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24195-nasa-says-voyager-1-has-left-the-solar-system-honest.html#.UkyGRYYk-ZA

or to have them ritually mutilated.

(1) that more widespread and severe weather extremes aren't related to an global change in weather patterns (i.e. climate change), and

(2) and that this global change is related to human activity

Well, that's an improvement on earlier positions taken in this debate in that you implicitly acknowledge that there are measurable and impactful weather changes. That used to be denied too (and still is by people who don't follow the news and by people who's thinking is faith-based rather than fact-based).

As to whether climate change is happening, the successive IPCC reports are remarkably consistent. It is.

As to the linkage between human activity and climate change, it's just the paragraphs aimed at the public and policy makers have been rephrased. Not the underlying observations and thought.

New Scientist has a readable and accessible discourse on how people deal with the message.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929360.200-climate-science-why-the-world-wont-listen.html

Most deserts around the world are situated in the subtropical zones where the dry air from the Hadley cells descends, around 30 degrees north and south. Global warming appears to be expanding the Hadley cells somewhat which will move the desertified zones a little further toward the poles without necessarily shifting the other edges of those zones further from the equator thus expanding the desert area. For example there is evidence that southern Europe is getting drier but the southern edge of the Sahara Desert shows no signs of shifting northward.

These articles seem to disagree:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8150415.stm
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2811
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/16/highereducation.climatechange
http://www.co2science.org/subject/d/summaries/desertification.php

I used to have a hand-made mercury laboratory thermometer that was accurate to 0.1 degree. (In fact, fever thermometers have a nominal accuracy of 0.1 degree.) That's accurate enough to measure the difference between a weather station that was painted black or white.

Here's a graph that shows a 0.8 degree rise. http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn11639/dn11639-2_808.jpg

Are you saying that if in 1900 they had thermometers with greater accuracy, they would have only gotten a 0.7 degree rise?

It sounds like work is already being done on this.

There was an article in the August 14, 2013 The New Scientist about just such a thing.

it was never able to perform to original specifications.

I thought the 2008 upgrade made it better than originally designed?

With its new instruments, Hubble will be 90 times as powerful as it was supposed to be when first launched - it will be like having 90 of the original Hubble Space Telescopes, astronomers say. The improvement comes from a combination of increased sensitivity and wider fields of view, allowing Hubble to see 900 galaxies where its original instruments would have revealed only 10. HST will be about 60% more powerful than it was right after the third servicing mission, before ACS and STIS failed.

I would prefer that you back up your own claims. To rely on my doing so will invariably lead to me doing independent research that is likely different than yours; likely leading to a different opinion. A quick Google search using your terms points to a number of articles - some say that natural gas could release an increased amount of methane. There are many articles on politically charged sites that I tend to discount on principle. One more promising one summarizes a Cornell study linking natural gas to increased methane, and the authors state "We do not intend for you to accept what we reported on today as the definitive scientific study with regard to this question. It is clearly not. We have pointed out as many times as we could that we are basing this study on in some cases questionable data". The study was more a commentary on policy than actual science.

Anyway, I can only assume that this is the science that you're referring to. If this is the case, your claims sound (at best) presumptive.

Reaction-less thrust would appear to be not only possible, but something that's in active development!

Here's the site for the group that's working on it: http://www.emdrive.com/
And here's the relevant research paper: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/shawyertheory.pdf

It does happen in nature... For example the sea slug learned to incorporate plant DNA and thereby became photosynthetic.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16124-solarpowered-sea-slug-harnesses-stolen-plant-genes.html#.UfVDwY1wqPA

The GMO head in sand types vastly underestimate the mobility of DNA in nature.

But kids CAN play with things like this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929275.800-kindergarten-coders-can-program-before-they-can-read.html

"As for the proposed Indian thorium reactors they are basically standard PWRs and heavy-water BWRs fuelled with a mixture of thorium, medium-enriched uranium and plutonium derived from conventional low-enriched uranium nuclear reactors of the sort in operation around the world today."

I didn't try to claim it was a molten-salt reactor. It still makes use of the thorium energy cycle and is demonstrably safer than current designs.

Further, they have been planning to use thorium as a primary fuel since the 1950s.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051

Well, NEXT produces 236 milliNewtons of thrust, according to this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12709-nextgeneration-ion-engine-sets-new-thrust-record.html#.UcxBsfmcf4o

NEXT + nuclear reactor ~ 5000kg* (wag)
Fuel 1000kg
Voyager = 722kg

If we take our mass as an average to simplify the math, and ignore relativity (which I'm betting we can),
6222kg avg mass at 0.236N is 4.22x10-5 m/s2 acceleration. And for 50,000hx3600s/h = 7600 m/s delta V
So in 6 years, we will have accelerated from 11,100 m/s to 18,700 ms, or from 0.000037c to 0.000062c

People may say physics is a bitch, but based on these numbers, it looks more we are physic's bitch. (insert Soviet Russia joke here).

*a goal in the above article is to create a small, portable reactor of 5Mg to produce 40kW, which would actually power almost 6 of these thrusters. For the sake of argument I scaled it down to 4Mg to allow for 1Mg of thruster and fuel tank hardware, but that's still a pretty wild guess.

[Facial recognition software] will probably NEVER achieve the reliability standard of a fingerprint, let alone DNA.

Fingerprint matching has no "reliability standard" to speak of, and is likely far less reliable than you may have been led to believe.

Actually, its far more reliable than you have been led to believe.

Whereas I gave you the benefit of the doubt, (and provided a source to support my position,) you've somehow definitively assessed the reliability of fingerprinting, and conclusively determined that I've been misled. As such, I provide the following sources discussing the poor reliability of fingerprinting (in chronological order, 2001-2013) so that others can steer clear and avoid being misled like I was:

Fingerprinting's Reliability Draws Growing Court Challenges
Will Fingerprinting Stand Up in Court?
Investigation: Forensic evidence in the dock
The Real Crime: 1,000 Errors in Fingerprint Matching Every Year
Study questions reliability of fingerprint evidence
Forensic Tools: What’s Reliable and What’s Not-So-Scientific
Deeper into forensic bias
Fingerprint [Validity]

Its just that the numbering system was only intended to allow a computer sort of likely
candidates for manual inspection, but because manual inspection takes some time
and training, some jurisdictions will go just by the numeric analysis, and further
they will accept fewer and fewer actual features to match, especially when partial
prints are all they have.

It's "just that," hm? Sounds legit — though I fail to see how this demonstrates that fingerprinting is "far more reliable than [I've]have been led to believe."

Defense lawyers delight in bringing in their own fingerprint expert and showing up
the state, especially when its as easy as showing the jury two full sets of
prints. Things become very obvious very quickly.

What has this got to do with the reliability of fingerprinting? You wanna know what I'd delight in, is you providing some evidence that supports your claim that fingerprinting is far more reliable I've been led to believe.

I'd have to disagree, we are just as violent (how can we not be it's in our nature) think we aren't go and watch two children playing and see how long before they physically start fighting. That is a genetic feature programmed into us for survival. Now granted as we've grown older as individuals we have suppressed that side of our nature.

Just look at the facts. Steven Pinker wrote a book on this subject. I don't expect you to take just his word for it, or accept him automatically as an authority, but what he says makes sense to me.

I also hope you didn't type "much more productive" with a straight face. Are you blind to how lazy we've become? I'd say people were far more productive 100 - 50 - even just 25 years ago than we are today. We may produce more, but long gone are the days we have to grind our own wheat to make flour...

Well, "productive" refers to how much we produce, not the amount of effort we put into it.

Could you remind me again, won't this be the 15th year since global warming stopped?

There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998

No, no, no.

Patented in Australia 2001

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html

Actually, I don't know what's new about this.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16215-meteor-impacts-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth.html

"Yoshihiro Furukawa... used a high-velocity propellant gun to simulate the impacts of ordinary carbon-containing chondrite meteorites .... recovered a variety of organic molecules, including fatty acids, amines, and an amino acid."

There was a multi-part Nova episode called "Origins" where they also demonstrated this. I can't remember the scientist or laboratory, but they put some simple organic compounds inside a metal plug and then fired a high speed projectile into it (or maybe they fired the plug into a target?). When they opened the container, they found that they had created more complex compounds like amino acids. It looked like a translucent liquid at first, and came out looking like dark slime.

No, they were not vegetarians. We have all sorts of archaeological evidence showing early man ate animals. The fact that most other primates don't is irrelevant.

Yeah chimps TOTALLY don't eat meat, no meat at all. Thats indisputable.

Oh wait... http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~stanford/chimphunt.html

Neither do orangutan.

Oh wait... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21364-vegetarian-orangutans-eat-worlds-cutest-animal.html

And surely not gorillas.

Oh wait... http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100305-first-proof-gorillas-eat-monkeys-mammals-feces-dna/

And of course gibbons don't eat meat. Being omnivores.

No so impressed the only articles I can find seem to be either un peer reviewed or if they are the peer appears to have a conflict of interest. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829173.500-commercial-quantum-computer-leaves-pc-in-the-dust.html

IEEE Spectrum apologised for that article:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/hardware/big-win-for-the-losers-at-dwave

It's a quantum computer all right, just not a universal quantum computer. But it should still show quantum speedups for discrete optimization problems.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/04/further-proof-for-controversial-quantum-computer.html

So far, tests have been very promising:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829173.500-commercial-quantum-computer-leaves-pc-in-the-dust.html

If it continues to speed up like this, there are some very exciting times ahead of us!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/8054771535/ (Rose's Law, the quantum computer equivalent of Moore's Law)

The New Scientist article -- whoops, guest editorial -- is titled "Psychiatry divided as mental health 'bible' denounced", but 'denounced' is a ridiculous overstatement. NIH/NIMH are simply announcing a new cross-category funding program that will step back and question the field's traditional assumptions.

Yes. They are finally applying science to the field, as none has been employed before.

The New Scientist article -- whoops, guest editorial -- is titled "Psychiatry divided as mental health 'bible' denounced", but 'denounced' is a ridiculous overstatement. NIH/NIMH are simply announcing a new cross-category funding program that will step back and question the field's traditional assumptions.

Either the guest editorialist didn't RTFA, or else is just using the occasion to inject their personal views into public sight.

Or else just trolling.

I was dissapointed in the audio specs. A mic and a DSP/Noise filter. I was hoping for a phased array of microphones that could be focusted on a single sound source to isolate a single speaker in a crowd.

Somewhat like they use in pro sports but on a smaller scale.

http://broadcastengineering.com/audio/new-microphone-audioscope-1022
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19541-audio-zoom-picks-out-lone-voice-in-the-crowd.html

Just hope they aren't using excel to do the budget.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23448-how-to-stop-excel-errors-driving-austerity-economics.html

Also, frist poot.

"May the BEST MAN, win..."? I seriously suspect that THAT is a BIG PROBLEM in the world today, what-with all the scumbag cheats & shenanigans out there (much of it in "the world of business", especially).

Just plain dead-up DISHONORABLE bullshit, to be blunt about it!

* I mean, what - Did those FOOLS *think* they'd "get away with it"? Come on...

There's ALWAYS someone who will "let the cat outta the bag" with b.s. like that, a prime example(s) being:

---

The Chinese Water Army:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/12/chinese-water-army-hijacks-onl.html

OR

HBGary:

http://www.naturalnews.com/033490_Facebook_infiltration.html

---

(Both being caught doing pretty much the same thing, albeit by using MULTIPLE trolling accounts/sockpuppets).

Samsung, were I they (or their board of directors but perhaps MORE IMPORTANTLY, their shareholders)? I'd find out WHO put their "John Hancock" on that order, & can his ass, fast... if only for "damage control", before they damage themselves further!

These people are no better than our OWN "trolling scumbag" Jeremiah Cornelius who now has to face the music on pretty much the same crap!

(I.E./E.G.-> JC spammed posts about myself here by the MANY 100's all March 2013 last month, only to BLOW IT, accidentally submitting one as his "registered 'luser'" account here instead of his USUAL ac ones -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 )

He pissed the entire forums here off royally trying to 'crap on me' & lmao, only ended up crapping on himself (and yet the punk had the NERVE to 'complain' about it, here too -> http://slashdot.org/~Jeremiah+Cornelius/journal/360681 later... no class, no honor, & certainly NO BALLS! )

I can't stand people like that. I really can't. Nice part is though, they ALWAYS screw up & get caught (like any up to no good idiot usually does, if only eventually).

APK

P.S.=> Now, they're going to have to "live it down", & find out that though you MAY do 1,000 great things now or in the past, all it takes is 1 'blackmark' to mess you up for years-to-decades into the distance... & "oh sure", the business types figure "Ah, customers are STUPID - they'll 'fuggit bout it'", right? WRONG... for example above, the ones I pointed out in the 2 links above (I, for one, will NEVER forget that, & I am certain I am NOT alone in that sentiment)...

... apk

Climate can change and it will change but predicting these kinds of trends to 2050 with any kind of accuracy is ludicrous at best, since they cannot even predict whats the weather next weekend.

Again, the above is a perfect example of bullshit, or if you want a more polite term, "poppycock" or "humbug". Quoting from the above link...

Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.

"bullshit" can be sometimes be distinguished from lying...

"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions.

The parent poster seems to implicitly (and deliberately?) confuse climate and weather. There are numerous quality discussions about chaotic systems, the differences between climate and weather, and how climate is predictable farther into the future than weather. The existence of these arguments, and the poster's seeming ignorance of them seems to indicate to me that the poster simply does not care about the truth, but cares rather only to appear to be truthful to those less well-read in science. As such, he falls nicely under Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshiter given in his 2005 monograph 'On Bullshit':

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

We need food crops? Is the easiest way to produce what our body needs, at least that don't need high technology, but is the most efficient? We could have genetic engineered bacteria to do that job (if patents don't get in the middle, that is part of the trouble we are getting into).

Regarding the other fisiological problems I'm not sure if we can't get artificial G thru rotation (at least in an efficient way, at that point), but radiation could be a problem (that may have a shitty solution).

It would seem that scientific publishing in the current model is on the way out. Let's look at some of the problems.

Tenure and status are influenced [highly] on publication. Thus, there is an incentive to publish trivial results, to publish results using shaky statistical reasoning, and to publish erroneous and fraudulent results. (Example)

Because of the emphasis on "quantity" instead of "quality", few results are independently verified. (Example)

Journals demand that scientists turn over the rights of publication in order to get published. The journals, in turn, charge outrageous fees to view the work - so high, that most of the work is inaccessible to the general public. (Example)

The fees are growing so large that smaller universities can no longer afford journal subscriptions. (Example)

The journals do not pay for peer review, or editing, or (in the modern age) even printing and binding. So far as anyone can tell, they are rent-seekers; they provide no services of note to the scientists, their readers, or the community in general. (Example)

It is entirely possible to masquerade as a scientific journal. In fact, journal quality is a spectrum that contains completely bogus, slightly spurious, mostly useful, and high quality. Being published by a notable company such as Elsevier is no guarantee of quality. (Example)

There is enormous monetary value in published papers which validate the particular positions or opinions. (Example)

These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure people can find other problems with the current system. Sadly, I can't think of any way to fix the current system. It has so many inherent problems that we should probably transition to a different model, but I don't know what should be.

The "British billion = 10^12" went out of use in the 1970's. The Brits use the same billion=10^9 as everyone else.

No a billion is still 10^12. That has never changed. But because Americans usually get it wrong, the British now uses the American billion when speaking about money, but the real billion when speaking about everything else. Of course billions are rarely used for anything other than money.

I think you are a little out of date:

• The Times counting people
• New Scientist counting years
• The Daily Telegraph counting YouTube viewers

The Economist Pocket Style Book recommended 10^9 for "billion" back in 1986.

Yes, the life argument was bad, but so were the arguments supporting a Martian origin.

You have been misled in how well supported they are.

"While the claim remains highly controversial" http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8004

"At first ALH84001 was misclassified, so it wasn't until 1993 that researchers even realized the rock came from Mars. That was interesting enough, because at the time fewer than a dozen Martian meteorites were known to science. But ALH84001 also turned out to be much more ancient than the other known Martian meteorites. At 4.5 billion years old, it dates from a period of Martian history when liquid water — a requirement for the presence of life — probably existed at the now barren planet's surface. It made sense to ask: Could there be fossils of ancient Martian microbes, or maybe traces of them, preserved in the cracks and pore spaces of ALH84001? The NASA scientists proffered four reasons to support their view that the answer to that question is "Yes."" http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-08-06-mars-life_x.htm

Sorry to say, the both the life and the Martian origin hypotheses reek of frivolous science and sadly, they stink.

That's something we already know. It's how humans got viral genes, how cows got snake genes, how a sea slug got algae genes, and how a pea aphid got fungal genes, among other known examples. It's pretty rare unless you're giving things an evolutionary time frame, and has little to do with genetic engineering, either in terms of scientific or patent related concerns.

Now let's first use it on our politicians.

Thats actually not a bad idea, considering that previous research has found support for a link between degree of activity in amugdala and the anterior cingulate cortex, and wether or not people will keep their promises.

That doesn't address my comment on the nature of the "demand".

There's a demand for substances, because people like to get "high";
There's a demand for guns, because people are afraid of other people with guns.

Disarm everyone, and you stem the demand. The problem is when each side tries to out-arm the other, and you just end up with a big lethal mess with everyone's finger on the trigger (literally).

The belief that possessing a firearm makes you safer is a fallacy.

For comparison, the homicide rate per capita is 5x higher in the US than in the UK. (source, UN)

If I were to have a confrontation with somebody, my chances would be far better than if we were faced with an "I'll shoot you before you shoot me" situation.
American Journal of Public Health:

people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher.

(source)

And it's not even a case of law abiding UK citizens being defenceless. Because of the tight restrictions, there are less guns in circulation, and because less people are armed, crimes are far less lethal.
If a shop keeper were to be targeted here, no one would get shot, the perp'd just get hit upside the head with a chair & chased down the street.

To get an idea, consider the energy output of a windmill and divide it by the span of the prop to get the amount of energy removed per centimetre of length, assuming the width is about the same all the way is good enough. That puts it at the scale of a small fragile bat. The number you get is very small because it is less than the pressure of the prevailing wind on an area the size of a bat since you can't get all the energy out of the wind due to bearing friction etc.
Now do you see why I am dismissing the "bats killed by pressure drop" stupid bullshit as the PR campaign lie it is? It's the sort of thing that sounds OK initially due to technical terms thrown in to hide the really stupid lie, but if you think about how a windmill works the audacious lie is apparent. People caught out with it are also likely to be embarrassed that they fell for something so stupid so it's hard to talk them out of it.

I don 't know if the length is directly proportional to the amount of energy captured by wind mills. I bet the area of the blade, as well as it's pitch, is more important. Oh, and obviously the height. The bottom of the blades are supposed to be higher than the tallest thing that can block the wind. That includes trees. And I bet that that is higher than most bats will be flying.

And no I don't expect your explanation as to why you dismiss the "bats killed by pressure drop" as stupid bullshit. For all I know what you said was bullshit. More of the NIMBY shit delaying wind farms, even off the coast. You still did not provide evidence which is what I asked for. Can you provide scientific studies supporting your position? That is what I'm looking for.

Now here are some of the things I found:

• Wind turbines make bat lungs explode
• The Wind Turbine Interactions with Birds, Bats, and their Habitats: A Summary of Research Results and Priority Questions [pdf] section "What is the effect of barotrauma injuries to bats" says
  "While direct collision is thought to be responsible for most of the bat fatalities observed at wind facilities (Horn et al. 2008), recent work by Baerwald et al. (2008) suggests that some of the observed bat fatality may be due to barotrauma (i.e., injury resulting from suddenly altered air pressure). Fast- moving wind turbine blades create vortices and turbulence in their wakes, and bats may experience rapid pressure changes as they pass through this disturbed air, potentially causing internal injuries leading to death. The occurrence of barotrauma in bats, the proportion of individuals that succumb immediately versus those that fly away injured, and the associated influences on the estimation of bat fatalities are uncertain."
• Adirondack Bats: Wind Turbine Bat Threat says there are 2 causes of death to bats found at wind generators, blunt-force trauma and barotrauma.
• On a Wing and Low Air: The Surprising Way Wind Turbines Kill Bats says "It is the pressure change--not the blades--that wipe out thousands of bats annually at wind farms".
• Bats' Lungs Burst When They Fly Close to Wind Turbines

That's 5 links to science to your zero links. I found those by Googling

It's actually more like 92lbs/ mi^3. http://www.webelements.com/gold/ quotes sea water values at 10 nanograms/Liter.

No, the page you reference just pulls that number out of thin air, and even admits to doing so by saying that "perhaps" that is the concentration. Much more detailed information is here: Gold in Seawater, which quotes a figure about a thousand times less.

This article states that people used to think seawater has much more gold than is estimated today, so that my explain your estimate.

But if you want to extract gold (or anything else) from seawater, you would probably start with the effluent brine from a desalination plant. That way it is already partially concentrated, and may already be pumped up above sea level so you could use gravity to move it through your extraction mechanism.