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Sorry, bloggers and authors peddling their own books? Sorry, not convinced.

I tried to select sources that referenced actual numbers. Feel free to cite numbers of your own, but this is such a well-known phenomenon at this point that denying it strikes me as highly unusual.

And how convenient, that the most recent disaster is blamed on Bush...

I don't think it's very fair to blame former President Bush for the financial crisis. Though his 2003 tax cuts included a provision eliminating capital gains tax on certain home sales, which created structures that allowed the real estate and financial markets to become corrupted and eventually collapse, assigning blame to him is like blaming the owner of a gun shop when someone commits a crime using a gun purchased at that shop.

Democrats of the late 1990ies are to blame...

The core cause of the financial crisis was the over-leveraging of securities backed by subprime loans. Given that these loans were overwhelmingly not backed by Fannie Mae and/or Freddie Mac, I'm struggling to determine how the author of that article is making the connection between rules regarding affordable housing access for the poor and minorities and the financial crisis (I do like his books, though). After some cursory Googling, I located this, which, while interesting, isn't especially relevant.

...workforce participation...

This is why.

Fetuses don't work against gravity to move their bodies.

Irrelevant.

There's a pressure gradient to be felt across their bodies, but it's small as a consequence of their bodies being small.

Irrelevant.

Do you think the whales will magically be unaffected by a micro gravity environment even though land based mammals clearly are? That the effect of microgravity is confined to needing to find new means of propulsion and pressure differientials in the surrounding media? It has nothing to do with those things .

You have absolutely no data showing that in-utero animal development is affected by gravity.

Absolutely no data?. Feel free to continue to deny science. What's next, will you allude to a conspiracy of science trying to keep down the plucky efforts of the cultists who are trying to establish themselves on Mars - on somone else's dime?

Yet you feel qualified to extrapolate from that zero data to a conclusion that humans can't (or probably can't) reproduce on Mars.

On the basis of available data, yes. Rather than getting all huffy and self righteous, maybe you should provide data to indicate why, against the flow of evidence, we would expect either adults or developing humans to be unaffected by the low gravity on Mars as opposed to the microgravity in LEO. See here, here and here. Don't just quote your religious texts, don't just get angry because there are people who don't believe. We are not condemned due to not being members of the Mars cult.

You say I'm in denial, but you're obviously presenting baseless speculations as if they were established facts.

I say you're in denial, because your tactics so far resemble those of climate denialists:

(a) Shout loudly about how there is no evidence or research, when there is

(b) Bring up irrelevant samples of information (in your case, factoids about buoyancy) and act as if they cancel out fundamental forces

(c) Claim the supposed lack of data supports your side that there a zero long term effects from micro/partial gravity on humans when the lack of data (if there were a lack of data) would allow us to draw no conclusions.

Here's a fact for you: no large animal species has ever been observed during pregnancy in any gravity environment except Earth's.

Once again: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15607544. The reason no large mammals have been transported into LEO or similiar is that we have technology that allows that to happen. Let alone beyond LEO. Yet Mars One justs collected $3.8 MILLION dollars, they do not have a spacecraft, any roadmap to build a spacecraft, or a habitat.

In fact, they do not intend to go to Mars.

What they intend to do, and have in fact done already, is to make money from the gullible.

It's a scam.

There's a fact for you.

They have precisely zero security value. Please see, for a brief introduction:

http://phys.org/news/2011-11-stanford-outsmart-captcha-codes.html
http://cintruder.sourceforge.net/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-brought-to-its-knees/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/04/gone-in-60-seconds-spambot-cracks-livehotmail-captcha/
http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/01/breaking-captcha-with-automated-humans.html

among others.

Nobody who actually understands the nature of the threat would even CONSIDER using captchas at this point.

Now...every now and then some poor naive fool stands up and says "But but but...they're working for us." No. They are not. You are simply not worthy of attack...yet. If you ever become a target, because someone has a grudge against you, or because you have an important resource, or merely because someone is bored, then if they are are at least minimally competent attackers, they will go right through your alleged "captcha" defenses without the slightest problem.

An optical disc will outlive a hard drive by decades.

Only ones you purchase pre-recorded, not ones you write which have a lifetime of 2-5 years. Even then while hard drives may fail it is easy to keep a RAID array up and they are very easy to copy the data to and from. So in 10 years time when the 8TB solid state memory stick or 1000+-year lifetime quartz technology drive is available you can easily copy all the files over to it...unlike your optical discs which you will have to load into the machine individually to copy the data over a speeds well below that of a hard drive.

Not too far it seems. This and this are the most recent news related that google shows. At least it says that could lead to cheap manufacture.

Why would anyone ever voluntarily suffer on behalf of another?

That is a question that hundreds of very smart people have studied for at least a 150 years. In fact, Charles Darwin struggled with it because it was a big hole in his theories. And it is not limited to humans or even mammals.

The simple answer is that it always seems to benefit the individual, somehow.

Nicely done. Except that you spread the 20.6 Mkm^3 over the ENTIRE surface area of the earth.

The oceans cover about 70% of the surface, let's call it 75% (for outslop). Then that would be a sea rise of about 20.6/(510*.75) km or about 54 meters.

Comparison: during the last ice age, seas were as much as 130 meters (~400 feet) lower than they are today. When that ice melted, -high- rates were on the order of 500 years for 9 meters. http://phys.org/news/2012-07-geoscientists-trigger-rapid-sea.html

Or wonder if this is the true cause of aids. Not the barely detectable HIV.

HIV is very well studied and quite detectable when your viral load is high enough.

Pictures of HIV

Pictures of HIV

HIV isn't some exotic particle that scientists theorize *may* exist in some dimension.
It is something that we've observed with our own eyes and can replicate with (far too much) ease.

Don't spread nonsense about HIV not being the cause of AIDS unless you've got some peer reviewed research to back it up.

Net energy loss is what you already have today.

Drive your car down the road, and your exhaust is always hotter than the ambient.
Run your exhaust thru this device, and you can recapture some of that existing loss to power your car's Air Conditioning.

This isn't the only research looking for such technology:
http://phys.org/news/2011-05-high-performance-bulk-thermoelectrics.html

I don't recall anything significant 10 years ago, but CalTech had improvements in Peltiers reported just last year:
http://phys.org/news/2011-05-high-performance-bulk-thermoelectrics.html

Here's another similar plan hatched by a Canadian company .

But, hey, his timeline includes Surrogates [imdb.com] in two years. Probably not something that'll really happen.

Sorry Sam, already happened.

Without volts, amp-hours is completely meaningless. If I have a process that can create a battery that stores 1.2Ah/g at 0.3V and I'm trying to beat a process that stores 0.3Ah/g at 1.2V then I've done nothing useful. Both store 360mWh/g (1296mWh/joules). In fact, if you look at phys.org you'll find that the fourfold increase is not in Ah/g, but in J/g. It actually has an eightfold increase in Ah/g but the voltage drops by half. So the article is right, but does a really bad job of explaining why.

Is this even a new idea?

I've heard this for quite some time now, and I thought this was a prevailing understanding.

No, it's not new at all, but there is at least one "news" story on it every year.

See here for 2012's, or here for 2011's, here for 2010's, etc., etc.

The article cannot make that claim. The raw materials can be shown to have made the trip. The rest is speculation - where there is very compelling reason to speculate.

Take for example this research which is saying that if the average of evolutionary increase of genome complexity approximates to Moore's law, then life would date back ten billion years, necessarily arriving on Earth from elsewhere. Of course, this means that extremely simple microbes would have shown up, but that replication and evolution were already underway.

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html

Radiation? Life support system malfunctions? Launch related problems? Bit more details would make it interesting.

The PhysOrg article has a few snippets information:

The animals on board the Bion-M craft died because of equipment failure or due to the stresses of space, scientists said.....But at the end of the experiment, "less than half of the mice made it—but that was to be expected," Sychov told Russian news agencies. "Unfortunately, because of equipment failure, we lost all the gerbils."

But you're right, we do think so little of mass shootings that we refuse to regulate the access to firearms. And we are absolutely correct to do so. 100 deaths per year in a country of 300 million is negligable.

Although mass shootings get all the headlines, controlling access to firearms will save a whole lot more than 100 lives per year. Most of the savings will come from reduced accidental deaths and suicides.

There is a widespread belief that having a gun in the house makes you safer: this is not true.

In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides. source

(other sources along those lines)

There is also a widespread belief a person who dies from suicide would have done so no matter what method: this also is not true. Most suicide attempts are impulsive acts, and most are unsuccessful. An impulse act with pills or slit wrists is unlikely to succeed: it takes time, the person may have second thoughts, and usually recovers through medical and psychological treatment. A suicide attempt by a gun is much, much more likely to succeed. If that suicidal person did not have ready access to a gun, and had to resort to a different method, the changes are good that most (i.e., more than 50%) of those people would still be with us today.

Funny, as I have colleagues researching alternatives to using rare earth metals in solar cells, as well as colleagues searching for better alternatives to rare earth metals in wind turbines (dysprosium being a rather expensive one). I do not come empty-handed though, I have a reference: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-rare-earth-metals.html

That reference says explicitly that rare earth metals are used in solar cells. But I suppose my colleagues and my reference are "just completely wrong".

Your second paragraph is an ad hominem and a "wisdom of the crowds" statement. So many people believe in Homeopathy, so it must be true. But I guess that is typical for anti-nuke Slashdot crowds.

Yes.

http://phys.org/news115924695.html

This article suggests that this theory is already refuted. Perhaps the Nature article has been several months in the pipeline and isn't up to date.
Any physicists can comment?

Fruit flies too. See also: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-fruit-flies-medicate-larvae-alcohol.html

Interesting, list doesn't include APR, Science, Nature, or any of the science outlets.

Just the MSM, which all get their news from 1-2 sources.

Let's take a look:

APR: what's "APR"? Applied Physics Reviews? Applied Physics Research? The former African Physics Review, now the African Review of Physics?

Science: Higgs Boson Positively Identified

Nature: No story I could find specifically about the Higgs boson, just the "Seven days: 8–14 March 2013" column, which mentions it in an item ("The new particle discovered last year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva continues to behave just like the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics, according to results presented last week at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. The latest data indicate that the boson decays into leptons as predicted, and also dampen earlier hints that the boson decays into pairs of photons more often than the standard model allows. No evidence yet points to theories beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry (see Nature 491, 505–506; 2012).")

and various science outlets:

Science News: nothing at present

LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson

Phys.org: Now confident: CERN physicists say new particle is Higgs boson (Update 3)

and some random organization called "CERN" or something such as that: New results indicate that new particle is a Higgs boson

So a list that does include Science, Nature, and some science outlets does have some articles and, not surprisingly, they largely don't have the "God particle" stuff in the headline.

They would have been masters of the club and hand spear. Creating a barrier to other migrating humans, until the humans developed a throwing ability for spears and ? Then they became the hunted and lost out from a early arms race.
http://phys.org/news151326825.html

What sort of current is in-flowing through those cables?

Will that chassis support batteries which will make the thing function? If so, for how long? What's the recharge time?

Until the robots are running on some sort of power which allows dynamic recharge and sustained off-grid operations, all one has to do is outrun them until their batteries run down.

teen invents compact nuclear reactor

If robodog's internals get smaller and so does this power source...

Why not just out-source the"discovery" aspect to SE Asia? Not like it hasn't been done.

See also: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-false-beliefs-persist-instant-online.html

Just read an interesting article today about using boron as a possible graphene alternative.

We're actually not doing too badly, we have higher income inequality and more poor people but we educate those poor people better than most countries.
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-poor-international-student.html

Until recently I believed the human-induced global warning narrative. On closer inspection of the data there are several aspects that need to be examined:

• * is the World is warmer than it has been for the last two thousand years?
• * is the warning of the last three hundreds years (which is undeniable) human induced?
• * why are scientists who use the Scientific Method and go against the narrative being vilified? and
• * global climate models

Global temperature increase data: The data shows that global warming is correct at least since the 17th Century (when there was a 'mini-ice age', possibly due to volcanic activity). This is undeniable. However, if you go back to data from two thousand years ago it appears that the climate is actually cooler than it was two thousand years ago. Please look at the data (and note that the trend is a very slight cooling over 2000 years):
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-climate-northern-europe-reconstructed-years.html

Human induced warming: The narrative given to us is that human activity in the form of burning fossil fuels has caused the supposed warming. If this was the case then we would examine the data and expect to see a carbon dioxide rise (CO2) from humans burning fossil fuels and then the temperature would rise as a result. In fact we see the opposite, we see that the CO2 rise *follows* the temperature rise, not precedes it. This means there is something wrong with the narrative that human-induced CO2 emission is causing global warming because the data does not support this. Here's the data
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/23/new-research-in-antarctica-shows-co2-follows-temperature-by-a-few-hundred-years-at-most/

Global warming models: Much of the global warming information is based on 'extrapolations' (projections) of short-term trends. Looking over the last hundred or two hundred years and projecting will result in temperature rise estimates that are alarming. Looking at the long-term data results in projections that are far less alarming (which this Slashdot thread is talking about; and I am also trying to inform you about). The other thing about models is that they are iterative and are subject to all sorts of instabilities. From what I know some of the models also were rather crude in the fact they didn't take into account many significant effects, like the eccentricity of our orbit etc, which results in periodic changes in solar radiation levels. Having a model is always better than no model - but that doesn't mean the model you have corresponds to reality, it only corresponds to our best guess. I know, as a astrophysicist turned IT guy used to make scientific models all the time - they are tricky beasts and most people (even those graduate students making them) don't always understand their limitations very well.

Vilification of scientists: scientists who where skeptical of the data are being vilified. Their careers are being destroyed and they are ridiculed for saying, "Hey, the data suggests something else than the human-induced global warming narrative" despite this being not only consistent with, but *required by* the Scientific Method. These scientists are labelled by the media as "climate change deniers" when in fact they agree with recent climate warming, disagree that human-released CO2 as the primary agent for the warming, and disagree that the climate has gotten warmer over the last two thousand years. All of these positions are supported by the data (as far as I can see). The media is especially bad at mocking the scientists who "don't follow the (Liberal) Party Line" despite the courage of those scientists to not cave in (which would be easier) and follow the scientific evidence as they see it. The US mainstream media

>Do you have a source

I... did.

I wish I had bookmarked it now.

I guess you could say "photosynthesis in general" because they all use the same mechanism - chromophores- just different wavelengths and "packaging schemes"

These are related

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120524092932.htm

http://phys.org/news/2012-01-role-quantum-effects-photosynthesis.html

How different wavelengths affect yield:

http://www.plantcell.org/content/early/2012/05/21/tpc.112.097972.abstract

Really, it's that cut and dry?

Of the gun deaths in the USA, 2/3 are suicide, and a bit less than 1/3 are with illegal guns?

Do you have some sort of reference for that?

Because for a long time I've heard that a gun in the home is a greater risk than a benefit, through such things as accident, bursts of anger, and, yes, suicide.

Assuming your numbers come from somewhere a bit more solid than your hat...

How do you count the guns that were purchased legally, were stolen, and were then used for murder and/or other crime? Because - follow me here, I'm not trying any sophistry - that gun would not have been used for a crime had it not been purchased legally. Note that I am not saying the criminal _could_ not have found another gun elsewhere, but in that situation, a gun purchased legally ended up being used illegally.

So, how do you count those guns?

How about guns that are purchased in a jurisdiction with lax gun laws, and driven in a car to a jurisdiction with strict gun laws, then sold to criminals. Those guns were purchased legally, but were later resold illegally. Again - follow me here, I'm not trying to trick you - if national gun laws had prevented the original sale, then that gun would not have been used for crime. So, how do you factor situations where differences in gun laws within the USA are exploited? And again, this is not a hypothetical; this sort of thing happens often, I gather, and the fact of the matter is that gun laws passed by city or state jurisdictions are not comparable to nor should be used in any stats with national gun laws, for the simple reason that cities and states don't have border guards or import controls; in other words, city and state gun laws are largely incapable of being effective, unlike national laws.

And as for suicides, I have heard many times - I could dig up a paper if you would like - that opportunity is a big factor in whether or not someone goes through with it. That is, if there is an easy way to commit suicide, then the set of people who are thinking about it are more likely to go through with it. This is why you see suicide fences on bridges. To say it another way, if someone who is suicidal is denied one easy way of killing himself (gun or bridge), he won't necessarily just go to the next method (some other more painful or uncertain method, or long travel to some other place with a good high bridge). Instead, he _won't do it_, because it's too hard. Surely, all else being equal, you must think it is a good thing to reduce the suicide rate?

The most basic point here and one which otherwise would be put in the 'duh' category is:

Having more guns means more people will die from guns. The details of the breakdown are not that important; if the total supply of guns goes up, then it is easier for a criminal to get one, one way or another.

In Canada we have strict gun laws, but there are still a few private owners of handguns. For some reason these people feel the need to 'target practice' with their pistols, so the law says then can have guns, but must lock them up etc., and can only use them in their club.

Lo and behold, one of the largest sources of guns used in crime is _guns stolen from legal gun owners_. In other words, if these gun club people had forgone their desire to shoot targets, fewer guns would have ended up being used in crime. So, even with a strict set of controls, legal gun ownership increases the risk to the public.

I have to say, arguing this with Americans is a bit like arguing the benefits of the metric system. You claim that the imperial system is OK, it works for you, and point of all sorts of problems that would come with switching to metric. Meanwhile, all I can think is - every other civilized western country uses metric already! It's not theoretical, it's been done, and it works! Gah!

You can turn your clothes into a computer

relevant wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic_computing
A claimed advantage of optics is that it can reduce power consumption, but an optical communication system will typically use more power over short distances than an electronic one. This is because the shot noise of an optical communication channel is greater than the thermal noise of an electrical channel which, from information theory, means that more signal power is required to achieve the same data capacity. However, over longer distances and at greater data rates, the loss in electrical lines is sufficiently large that optical communications will comparatively use a lower amount of power. As communication data rates rise, this distance becomes longer and so the prospect of using optics in computing systems becomes more practical.

and a more interesting article from 2010.
http://phys.org/news199470370.html

Today computer components are connected to each other using copper cables or traces on circuit boards. Due to the signal degradation that comes with using metals such as copper to transmit data, these cables have a limited maximum length. This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other. Today's research achievement is another step toward replacing these connections with extremely thin and light optical fibers that can transfer much more data over far longer distances, radically changing the way computers of the future are designed and altering the way the datacenter of tomorrow is architected.

Putting food stocks in our gas tanks raises the price of those food stocks for everyone. This hits the poor the hardest, of course.
Yes, we can grow plenty. Yes, distribution is often a problem.
The fact is there's still a consequence, and that consequence is price.
You putting corn in your gas tank means the food budget for folks living on a few bucks a day goes up.

Developing countries imported 280 million tons of corn between 2006 and 2011, and spent $6.6 billion more than they otherwise would have because of the U.S. biofuels mandate. Mexico assumed the greatest burden of any countryâ"$1.1 billion more than it otherwise would have, driving up domestic costs for corn and corn products, Wise writes. The cost of tortillas, for instance, has risen 69 percent since 2005. Many Central American countries were equally adversely affected because they feed their growing populations with imported corn. The rising demand for corn that is used to manufacture fuel has spillover effects: prices for other food staples, such as soybeans and wheat, have also gone up, according to the GDAE report.

Source

They're also saying that Apophis will pass within 36,000 km of Earth in 2029. Now that's not missing us by much.

And that'll be about the right time for our space-tech to have caught up enough for us to be able to 'lasso' it. If we miss it then, by it's expected return in 2036 we'd better be able to control it. It seems to keep getting a little closer with each return orbit.

From the above link:

" The asteroid will return to Earth's neighbourhood again in 2036, but quite how close it will come then is uncertain, as the 2029 approach is predicted to alter its orbit substantially. Obtaining improved physical parameters for Apophis and its orbit is thus of great importance in being able to make better predictions of its future trajectory."

  Read more at:

Regarding the Red Meteor that endangers Earth on the 13th of April, 2029 and of which we have already spoken on the 16th of September, I have been asked about certain things and, therefore, would like to know how big that bloke is.
To my knowledge the terrestrial astronomers have already detected it for quite some time and are calling it Apophis or something.
It shall either hit Earth in the year 2029, or only whizzing by very closely.
Should it be the latter case, it (the meteor) would reappear in the year 2036 and its close approach to Earth could really lead to a catastrophe if the scientists undertake nothing against it.
Ptaah
Its size is about 350 meters.
What you are saying regarding the great danger that the Red Meteor represents to Earth: the scientists know about it.
And if there will be no special influence by the outer SOL “trabants” (note by the translator: objects circling around and at great distance from our sun), a catastrophe really threatens the Earth.
In order to avoid it the terrestrial scientists are also urged to undertake every conceivable possibility to ultimately push the meteor from its orbit.
Billy
To my knowledge various models exist for this purpose, but the scientists cannot come to a mutual agreement on this.
You are saying that the fellow shall be pushed from its orbit, and I gather from it that blowing it up is out of question.
Therefore, only a reaction principle could be applied, like e.g. an extremely strong nuclear reaction unit, sun sail principles, or atomic explosions near the meteor.
Ptaah
Whereby atomic explosions near the meteor should be considered, because they are very efficient and produce a strong drift(ing) effect.
However, the explosions may not occur too close to the meteor in order to avoid breaking it up, from which an even greater danger would result.
Such a project must be executed early and not at that time when the real danger is starting to threaten, because otherwise it would be too late for a success.
Therefore working towards it must be started today.
Those who will not listen will find death in exchange, when the meteor begins its work of death and creates a new continent, due to an enormous crack of the Earth, from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from which will spew forth red hot lava, if the prophecy should be fulfilled in its entire proportions which, however, has not been determined in its final consequence.In reference to the event to be expected, and already told you, that this one will part the land portion between the North Sea and the Black Sea.
510. Red hot lava masses and natural gas etc. will, in addition, create from it a deadly sulphurous wall which, drifting westward, will cover the land and with that creates an additional death-zone - http://www.theyfly.com/apophis-are-russians-reading-meiers-warnings

They're also saying that Apophis will pass within 36,000 km of Earth in 2029. Now that's not missing us by much.

And that'll be about the right time for our space-tech to have caught up enough for us to be able to 'lasso' it. If we miss it then, by it's expected return in 2036 we'd better be able to control it. It seems to keep getting a little closer with each return orbit.

From the above link:

" The asteroid will return to Earth's neighbourhood again in 2036, but quite how close it will come then is uncertain, as the 2029 approach is predicted to alter its orbit substantially. Obtaining improved physical parameters for Apophis and its orbit is thus of great importance in being able to make better predictions of its future trajectory." Read more at:

They're also saying that Apophis will pass within 36,000 km of Earth in 2029. Now that's not missing us by much.

I personally have had this idea for about 10-15 years.. But i gave up the idea when Siemens created a small sensor for detecting "bad breath".. And said that one of the reasons was to implement it in a mobile phone so that it should be easy to carry around.. Think it was about 5-10 years ago.. See http://phys.org/news1194.html for one article about this.. Also mentioning "breath" as something interesting to analyze.. It will however have a great sale potential.. Salesmen really would like to know of their breath is ok before visiting a customer.. A young guy would love to know that he has a nice breath before kissing a girl for the first time..;-) Same for the girl of course..

While they are at it let's install fart receptacles so that when a person feels a toot coming on they can plop their own asses on a hole to capture the methane for power plant use.....

You could do that for cows. See this People don't really produce enough to make it worthwhile.

Who might have guessed that climate change is what forced humans to become human. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-fluctuating-environment-driven-human-evolution.html And there's no denying that humankind has prospered in the 20K years of (more or less) continuous warming since the last glacial maximum.

is there a possibility to send some nuclear generator, like submarine one or this famous russian lighthouse? Or maybe 5 of them, it might solve some problems

It's gotten a lot of thought. I regard it as pretty likely.

But, you are still likely to be power limited.

http://phys.org/news/2012-12-rapid-west-antarctic-ice-sheet.html, look at the picture...

This is a better link, and has more info: http://phys.org/news/2012-12-rapid-west-antarctic-ice-sheet.html

Stop spewing CO2 into the air? How do you do that? Mass genocide? People _need_ the energy we get from these sources of CO2 you want to stop in order to live. We cannot support the population of the USA while going back to farming without fossil-based fertilizers and working the land with animals instead of powerful fossil-fueled tractors, or moving the proceeds of that farming with diesel trucks and locomotives to get it to market. We cannot go about our lives at the standard of living you talk about without burning fossil fuels in the only modes of conveyance that we own. The idiotic AGW alarmists were telling us 10 years ago that we had to spend $50 trillion to "mitigate" this problem and the resultant scheme would only have lowererd the temperature increase by a degree or degree and a half by the year 2100, and not really fix the problem. No one has even proposed an actual way to completely fix the problem. But no matter, they want to spend more money than we have to continue their doomed-to-failure schemes.

But geo-engineering such as this approach:

http://phys.org/news199005915.html

goes unpurseud because, if it worked, it'd wreck things for those attempting to gain control of everyone's lives (and money) with their scarecrow. That approach would, if actually developed, give us pre-industrial-revolution levels of CO2. That would be a disaster for the doomsayers, and so we don't hear a peep about making it work. No, lets just get rid of our cars, take public transportation, and go back to living in caves.

Anyone really serious about fixing the problem would get their PHD's in some STEM areas of study, get their butts into some laboratories, and start trying to make things like those work, as well as, politically, stop trying to wreck the world's economies by opposing absolutely everything we try to do to make our lives better and promote the prosperity that will provide the abundance of resources necessary to actually develop ways to stop using CO2 generting energy sources. IOW, we're not going to successfully develop solar electricity, distribute it all over the country, develop the magic battery to make electric cars really viable, and so forth if we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap, and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power, and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't subsidies infinitely into the future, and you take away money for research on how to do the very things you want to do that may actually, maybe, someday be able to solve the problem. Prosperity is our best weapon to combat the problem technologically, but everything the AGW alarmists are doing work to diminish our chances of actually being successful by removing the monetary resources necessary for the research to solve the problem.

I was under the impression that there's virtually no nuclear weapon risk from a thorium reactor

That was the original thinking, but there was a very recent analysis that suggested that a "minor tweak" in the process could be used to produce materials for bombs.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/nuclear/is-the-superfuel-thorium-riskier-than-we-thought-14821644
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-wonder-fuel.html

Not my subject, so I won't venture an opinion on whether this is a real problem, or scare.

and that there's no fear of a catastrophic meltdown.

Seems to be what people are saying. Again, not my subject, although I'd add the caveat is that nothing is ever quite foolproof, since fools are so ingenious.

Actually peak oil has happened. Why do you think you are paying $4 for gas, and we are drilling EVERYWHERE for the last dregs, not to mention trying to process tar sands. And why do you think economic growth worldwide sucks? Why do you think global oil production is in a downtrend?

1960's big freeze - I call bullshit. There was never a scientific consensus that this would happen.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

1970's - Ozone layer was preserved because of a concerted global response to remove the cause of it's shrinkage. Duh.

1980's - Aids has killed 15 million people. Go talk to people living in countries where it is pandemic and then come back and tell me nothing has happened.

http://www.avert.org/aids-impact-africa.htm

2003 - SARS. Please cite a claim that it was going to wipe us all out.

2005 - Avian Flu - ditto

2012 - Oh BS.

Alarmist predictions are made alarmist by news reporters. The actual predictions have been pretty much accurate.

http://phys.org/news/2012-12-pair-global.html

Not the full article, I quit after I got this far. There's a thing called Google out on the internet that often can find you free sources for paywalled material in just a few keystrokes.
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-wonder-fuel.html

Thanks for the great post! See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia
http://phys.org/news/2012-02-classic-ecological-stability-years.html

In general, it seems stability (like of climate) creates diversity of species more than the other way around.

However, like so much of life, there are tradeoffs. Diversity maintained by exchange networks (including sex and migration) helps a species or community be resilient in the face of some threats, while isolationanism (which tends to reduce diversity) helps protect against other sorts of threats.

See also Manuel De Landa on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces":
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Evolution also happens at all levels of all systems (genetic and memetic) all the time across every possible combination -- despite narrow views of what is going on (e.g. "The Selfish Gene").

It would be great to have more FOSS simulations on these themes.

Re: your sig: we had dozens of districts in Philadelphia vote 100% for Obama in the last election. Dozens. You'd think at least one would accidentally vote for Romney. This happened in 2008 as well, in slightly fewer districts. It's over in the USA.

Could you provide a link to district voting reports?

That one in Caucasus region of Russia was totally rigged, as many other districts in that region as well. Polls showed less than 15% turnout at the polling stations, reports show 100% turnout. This is a demonstration of loyalty to the central government by the local government, and of course blatant election rigging. The rissing is obvious in statistical analysis of the polling station data.

That's right, he's back to astroturf Slashdot for cheap page hits again but he won't bother with your questions. For Phil it's all about the money.. the page hits. He wants nothing to do with anyone who isn't shoveling cash into his pockets.
 
For your edification.... A much better source for astronomy news.