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"This "stuff" has always existed"

Pretty unclear on the whole fission thing, eh?

I'm sorry to differ with you, but I'm afraid that the AC is correct. The first four matches for "natural fission" on Scientific American's website confirm the AC's claim. I've omitted the fourth match below, which was a 2005 article discussing the same subject as the first:

Nature’s Nuclear Reactors: The 2-Billion-Year-Old Natural Fission Reactors in Gabon, Western Africa

Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth’s Heat

Do transuranic elements such as plutonium ever occur naturally? (The answer is "Yes")

My apologies if you were disputing an aspect of nuclear fission not addressed in any of the above articles; your reply was a little bit cryptic. =)

"This "stuff" has always existed"

Pretty unclear on the whole fission thing, eh?

I'm sorry to differ with you, but I'm afraid that the AC is correct. The first four matches for "natural fission" on Scientific American's website confirm the AC's claim. I've omitted the fourth match below, which was a 2005 article discussing the same subject as the first:

Nature’s Nuclear Reactors: The 2-Billion-Year-Old Natural Fission Reactors in Gabon, Western Africa

Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth’s Heat

Do transuranic elements such as plutonium ever occur naturally? (The answer is "Yes")

My apologies if you were disputing an aspect of nuclear fission not addressed in any of the above articles; your reply was a little bit cryptic. =)

"This "stuff" has always existed"

Pretty unclear on the whole fission thing, eh?

I'm sorry to differ with you, but I'm afraid that the AC is correct. The first four matches for "natural fission" on Scientific American's website confirm the AC's claim. I've omitted the fourth match below, which was a 2005 article discussing the same subject as the first:

Nature’s Nuclear Reactors: The 2-Billion-Year-Old Natural Fission Reactors in Gabon, Western Africa

Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth’s Heat

Do transuranic elements such as plutonium ever occur naturally? (The answer is "Yes")

My apologies if you were disputing an aspect of nuclear fission not addressed in any of the above articles; your reply was a little bit cryptic. =)

Does a genetically engineered selectively crippling genetic disease count?

IBM simulates entire cat, mouse and rat brain

"the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste&page=2

Did you see what the editors changed that text from? What the editors are trying to say is that a nuclear plant that is operating properly isn't releasing anything except trivial amounts of tritium and trace amounts of radioactive noble gases that were removed and then filtered from the coolant. The reason they changed the text was because, like you, people assume that the radioactive waste in the plant is less radioactive than coal ash. It is not. It is many, many orders of magnitude different. This means that waste accidents and meltdowns can release substantially more radioactive material than all of the coal that has ever been burned.

Here's a start. Do some research on Portugal's experience. I am pretty sure they have had to close a lot of their gaols due to lack of criminals. I think I read that they had closed eight gaols but couldn't find the link for you.

Actually, whether soy has negative health effects related to chemical similarity to estrogen is still very much up for debate: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=soybean-fertility-hormone-isoflavones-genistein would suggest that it does.

And of course soy-based oils are not the healthiest oils one can consume, and soy-based protein is not as ideal for the body as meat or dairy proteins.

Personally I have no problem with soy as I eat it in relatively small amounts, but I'd be suspicious of eating a soy-based diet. In a world where a day's worth of calories of milk costs like $2, it makes no sense to have a diet heavy in soy.

AreYour Neighbors Republicans? There's a gene test for that too!

Yes, seriously.

But, it could, of course, also check if you're prone to be Democrat too.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-genetics-of-politics

"The researchers’ data on 442 identical and 364 fraternal Add Health twins indicate that genetics underlies 72 percent of differences in voting turnout and roughly 60 percent of differences in other political activity. Fowler, who presented the research at the American Political Science Association meeting in August, claims that preliminary results from the Twins Days festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, also support the findings. Fowler adds that his team’s work does not suggest that genetics can determine whom people will vote for, only whether or not they are likely to vote. He also emphasizes that environment most likely plays a significant role in voting: “There is still a lot we can do to shape political behavior in spite of our genetic tendencies.”"

Well, sir, you obviously must be speaking from experience, since you seem to have been huddled in a freezing cave (or more likely, your mom's basement) for the last 15 years. Welcome to the world of today, where, thanks to continuing technological advancement, it takes less than 4 years for an average solar panel to produce enough energy to create another one (and they last for 20-30 years...) Allow me to quickly run you through some of the milestones you missed while in stasis:
1997: http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/pvpayback.htm
2008: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=solar-cells-prove-cleaner-way-to-produce-power
2012: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Solar_cells_and_energy_payback
2050: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Solar_Breeder_Project
OK, that last one is a bit utopian with current technology, but given better superconductors and/or thermal insulators, and some more hikes in energy prices, I could see it becoming reality. The panels themselves are up to it...

For those who, like I, were curious, here is an article about chicken with teeth:

Mutant Chicken Grows Alligatorlike Teeth.

Some interesting lines:

... Matthew Harris of the University of Wisconsin noticed that the beak of a mutant chicken embryo he was examining had fallen off. Upon closer examination of the snubbed beak, he found tiny bumps and protuberances along its edge that looked like teeth--alligator teeth to be specific.

The mutant chickens Harris studied bear a recessive trait dubbed talpid. This trait is lethal, meaning that such mutants are never born, but some incubate in eggs as long as 18 days.

... a chicken's underlying ability to grow teeth derives from a common ancestor with alligators--archosaurs--that is more recent than the one linking birds and mammals. Nevertheless, the underlying genetic mechanism that produces teeth in mice, alligators and mutant chickens remains the same.

Exactly how the mutation causes the chickens to sprout teeth is unknown, Fallon notes, but a similar effect can be produced in normal chickens. Harris proved this by engineering a virus to mimic the molecular signals of the mutation and caused normal chickens to briefly develop teeth that were then reabsorbed into the beak.

That is approximately true. A 95% reduction in price over 30 years is pretty darn impressive. Not all at once, of course, but the accumulation of dozens of such advances.

the 'photos with text' experience gives us that feeling we get when we read magazines

Obviously the poster is referring to magazines like People: the feeling that it is so vapid, I want to throw it across the room. I am looking for an experience more like that of Scientific American and National Geographic. I'll stick to text, thanks. (Note the relative scarcity of pictures on Slashdot.)

You must be talking about coal ?

Give me 20+ years of climbing temperatures (a mere drop in the bucket considering how old this planet is) and i'll change my mind...wait what?

Would 40ish years do?.

HOWEVER, We are breaking records that were set 40-60+ YEARS AGO PEOPLE! This is a WARM year, nothing more, nothing less.

The issue with temperature records is that in a stable climate, both record warm and record cold temperatures become progressively less likely to occur. The chance is 1/n of setting either record, where n is the number of readings taken. Climate change, however, loads the dice, so far this year we've set 10 times as many warm records as cold records. Now, that could be just one warm year, but 13 of the top 14 warm years occurred in the last 14 years.

The last record high temperature in MY area was set in 1954.

In my area it was set last year, and then again earlier this year, and again last week.

Why did it take almost 60 years to break a high? Oh i know why! Because there is no such thing as global warming! Because we are experiencing a fluke in what is otherwise a cooling of the earth.

That's some fluke, the long term global cooling trend ends around 1900, and a global warming trend takes over.

You mean scientists can't actually PROVE that global warming exists?!?!?!

They already have proved that global warming exists, you just weren't paying attention. Now you seem to refuse to look at the evidence. It's hard to take your protests seriously when you appear to have your eyes shut tight, your fingers stuck in your ears and you're shouting "Nananana - I can't hear you! Nananana - I won't hear you!".

There are at least 4 separate temperature reconstructions that all show long term warming trends, including one funded by the Koch brothers who as owners of a vast fossil fuel empire have vested interests in showing that global warming isn't happening. If the scientists they hired to prove that global warming doesn't exist actually came to the conclusion that it does, why don't you believe them?

As I understand it, the controversy really heated up when this researcher started shouting 'SEXISM!' at the first sign of peer criticism. As Sagan said (paraphrased) "If you're gonna make an extraordinary claim, be prepared to back it up with extraordinary proof!" Not assertions that those mean old boys are picking on you because you're a girl.

Is this really true? What is your source for that?
I believe that one of the biggest critics of the original research was Rosie Redfield (who is female).
Redfield is also a co-author of on the Science papers.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=study-fails-to-confirm-existence
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/12/this_paper_should_not_have_been_published.html

Interesting outcome in Portugal after 5 years and after 10 years - there were warnings of doom if they decriminalised at the time - all the drug addicts in europe were going to move to Portugal apparently. Big difference between decriminalised and legalised (imo) though.

In North Carolina, the rising of sea level is illegal if not following their law. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/05/30/nc-makes-sea-level-rise-illegal/

where that kind of shit is illegal!

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/05/30/nc-makes-sea-level-rise-illegal/

Calling yourself very intelligent isn't helpful, indeed. Citing Plato is way over the top. It doesn't prove a thing. Plato lived 2400 years ago in a rather different culture, invented Atlantis and thought that ideals existed, so what relevance his opinion could have on the discussion is a mystery to me.

And calling science gay doesn't help either. Science is absolutely neutral. Scientists, labs and departments are not, of course, but it just doesn't make sense.

I couldn't access the article, btw, but there is absolutely no reason to trust it. Social studies are flawed, face it. It happened to be my field of work for some 20 years, and the estimation that 50% (Ioannidis) is flawed is benign. It's rather 95% flawed, 50% bogus. An evolutionary psychologist sets out to prove some hypothesis and succeeds. That's enough to make it suspicious.

And the author is not entirely free of writing bogus articles, so it seems: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/05/23/the-data-are-in-regarding-satoshi-kanazawa/

Nonsense. What this implies is that you've many ancestors who were more or less distant cousins.

Incidentally, optimal fertility seems to occur when mating third or fourth generation cousins, aka someone from the nearby area. Some historians and demographers additionally suggest revisiting the idea that family size dropped when wealth increased during the industrial revolution: an alternative explanation, or at least contribution, could be that the increased population mobility led to inoptimal mating patterns.

I agree with you completely

But why do you think your observations have any relevancy to the production and consumption of CHILD pornography?

Increased availability of porn is positively correlated with a reduction in sexual violence. Why exactly would his observation NOT have relevance?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sunny-side-of-smut

frankly we have ZERO idea what those extra strands of alien DNA are gonna do long term.

First, these sequences, they're not alien DNA, they just come from different species. Alien is a technically correct but way-over-the-top term. Please don't use it. If you must, use "foreign" DNA or some such.

Second, we know exactly what these strands are going to do : they're going to evolve and adapt to their environment, just like any other gene. They're no more scary that any other piece of DNA that's loose in nature, in other words, they're no more scary than any other part of nature. Which is to say, they're somewhere between terrifyingly dangerous, like h1n1, and a puppy. But they're no different from any other piece of DNA.

Third, and this one really makes your argument fall apart, humans are not the only ones doing cross-species DNA recombination. And we're not all that good at it compared to our competition at all. Meet the dangerous GMO experimenters that having been pulling a Monsanto for about 3 billion years, maybe more. They're, as the article shows, not doing this randomly, but with the express purpose of preventing the treatment of lethal diseases (which is what nature is trying to do to us). They're also very good at it.

In other words, it's not monsanto that's dangerous, nor their competition, nor is the spreading of a infinitesimal amount of genes in any way dangerous, nor the spreading of large amounts of DNA. It's world-travel, the fact that the world is connected, without millions of totally uncrossable natural obstacles. Tolerance and travel is what's destroying the varieties present in the human species, and import/export is doing the exact same thing to every other species. If you aren't prepared to live your life as a scared medieval peasant, self-sufficient, never even to see products made further away than the next city, and extremely unlikely to ever cross the nearest mountain he/she can see from his home, the only hope we have to survive in the long term as a global group of humans, is to keep outsmarting evolution. The only hope we have, is GMO.

Mind you, I'm not denying that patents on GMO genes are a horribly bad idea, as nature will simply not obey the law, no matter how self-important humans feel. Frankly, this is something I appreciate about "extremists" : they accept that they will bend to the will of the "nature" of the universe. Even if I don't agree with their views of the universe, it is refreshing to see people capable of appreciating that their world is not what they want it to be. In this way, of course, someone like Richard Feynman is far more extremist than most extremist Christians, and he too would have had very little tolerance for this whole attitude of "science is bad", propagated by people the vast majority of which cannot solve a simple equation, and who, of course, do not see the problem in defending ideas without data or theory behind them.

Frankly, you're little better than the original "gaia" worshippers who locked people into huge wooden puppets and set them on fire to appease nature. Except of course, that if you ever get listened to, far greater numbers of people will die.

It somehow fails to amaze me that, like every other party, the greens are the very opposite of what they claim to be, just like there's nothing republican about the republicans, just like there is hardly a trace of democracy in the democrats.

Though there are many clean areas. Air and water pollution isn't exactly known for showing any respect for national boundaries. As sentient parasites, we should take better care of the host. I won't go in the ocean. Fish fuck in it. When I check into in the NoTel Motel, I expect the sheets to be washed at least.

Depending on who you talk to, we already may have computers with enough processing power.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=computers-vs-brains
says that there are super computers with more processing power than humans (tho on a computations per watt humans are still much more efficient).

The Worldâ(TM)s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information by Martin Hilbert and Priscila LÃpez in (
Science 332, 60 (2011); DOI: 10.1126/science.1200970) states that the world had more computational power than a single human brain in 2007, but they basically assumed that every human neuron was operating at once, so their estimate was probably very conservative (unless human brains can somehow do non-neuronal processing).

Aspartame sat sidelined by the FDA because of tests showing it was a carcinogen and neurotoxin

Citation needed. Last I checked none of those concerns turned out to have any scientific merit.

Since recent studies show that you are what you eat and food RNA can effect your genes [discovermagazine.com] the entire genetic modification of base food crops is a little worrying.

Why exactly would you expect a transgenes to be more or less likely to have an effect on you than any other gene? That study made no mention of GE crops and was just used by the anti-GE nutters Read this this or this for a complete take down of the nonsense that was said about that study.

Millions of years of symbiotic evolution is being altered in ways not even fully understood yet.

Do you also oppose every other method of altering plant genetics? Even conventional breeding has produced things that could not be found in nature, like corn (broccoli, strawberries, wheat, and cabbage are other crops created by humans). . And why should it matter that plants are being altered? Farms aren't exactly natural environments. And who says they are not fully understood? They are studied quite extensively, and while it is true that there could always be an unknown unknown, appeals to ignorance are not very strong arguments for rejecting known benefits.

I'm all for scientific advances but rushing to market and forcing this down people's throats is not a good attitude.

I agree that things should not be rushed for the sake of profit, but at this point, that argument holds very little water when applied to GE crops as a whole. Maybe two decades ago that would have been a more reasonable thing to say, but not anymore.

Given China's well known dumping tactics in this market, it made sense for the U.S. to increase tariffs to match it in order to preserve the domestic industry.

But in all honesty, this really doesn't matter a whole lot because the evidence indicates that solar cells have been following an exponential efficiency curve for 30 years. At this rate it won't be too long before solar power becomes a viable alternative for some large scale uses. It already is plenty cheap enough for small scale use.

Or perhaps it is the fiber in the coffee.

Please do name 1 brand that says that.

PROTIP: NONE OF THEM DO! If that was true you would have to do the same every time you opened a couple cans of tuna or catfood.

The packages do all have obscure warnings about the bulb containing mercury, that it should be handled carefully because mercury is harmful, and that "special precautions" should be taken if it is broken. But they do not specify what those precautions are. It stinks of legalese and is annoying to consumers. It's even more annoying that I have to take the bulb somewhere to recycle it: given that the government has essentially mandated that we need to use these things, they should find a way to allow mercury bulb recycling from our homes.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-compact-fluorescent-lightbulbs-dangerous

I don't want an easy-to-break product in my house that requires me to evacuate and vent a room for 15 minutes if I break it. And then I have to worry about the powder? What if I have a pregnant wife or young children in the house? Either take the mercury out of the bulb or armor it so that it can survive a 9 foot drop.

And despite the claims that they last "up to 10x longer" than a regular incandescent, I have found that they last just about as long during normal usage.

It's a scam product that costs more and doesn't work as well, like low-fat cheese. You want to save the environment? Have less children and learn to like a dark house.

It's just all the extra fiber they get from the coffee.

I see your infographic and raise you a Randall:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2011/11/22/xkcd-the-cost-of-electricity/

Here is a link to an article in Scientific American about the guys I mentioned just above.

The exact formula they make from astragalus (and possibly other sources?) they claim is made from several ingredients that they claim to have a synergistic effect. However, it is also astronomically expensive. But the main "active ingredient" is available on the open market at much more reasonable rates.

[Citation needed]

Seriously, if you believe that China and India are trying to get the US to "come to the table" on this, you're swallowing a ridiculous narrative, again put forth typically by AGW proponents who see the US as the villain here, instead of seeing things as they really are — namely, things like the fact that China is set to emit 50% more greenhouse gases than the US by 2015.

Note: It doesn't matter that China has more people in the context of the climate change argument! If you identify some level x of greenhouse emissions as being a "bad" thing, then China emitting far more than the US is an extremely bad thing in terms of the effects that it would cause. You can argue that the US may be in a position to make the most impact, but with China set to significantly outpace the US in emissions and oil consumption, I think you need to take a look at what value the US taking a disproportionate hit in emissions control — and the dramatic impact that would have on our economy — would actually do for climate change that would be positive.

Put it another way: do you think that the evidence supports that China (or India, or any other developing economies) would be a better steward of this responsibility?

What what utter BS. Obviously you have to normalize per person. The US contribution is certainly *not disproportionate* once normalized properly. Or do you believe people in the US have an inherent right to emit more pollution per person than people from other countries?

[Citation needed]

Seriously, if you believe that China and India are trying to get the US to "come to the table" on this, you're swallowing a ridiculous narrative, again put forth typically by AGW proponents who see the US as the villain here, instead of seeing things as they really are — namely, things like the fact that China is set to emit 50% more greenhouse gases than the US by 2015.

Note: It doesn't matter that China has more people in the context of the climate change argument! If you identify some level x of greenhouse emissions as being a "bad" thing, then China emitting far more than the US is an extremely bad thing in terms of the effects that it would cause. You can argue that the US may be in a position to make the most impact, but with China set to significantly outpace the US in emissions and oil consumption, I think you need to take a look at what value the US taking a disproportionate hit in emissions control — and the dramatic impact that would have on our economy — would actually do for climate change that would be positive.

Put it another way: do you think that the evidence supports that China (or India, or any other developing economies) would be a better steward of this responsibility?

It's complicated

tl;dr Maybe yes, maybe no. Likely there is something Prion like in Alzheimer's dementia. Cause or effect is uncertain. More research needed. Stay tuned.

But the problem is not only the plants that cause pollution..... The majority of 'instant' death's related to coal-power is at the coal-plants...

A few references related to coal-power...
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c01.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

Nuclear power is not unsafe... It's just the idiotic laws that are being passed that are blocking the construction of new and safer plants...
Just look at the Chinese... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

Problem with nuclear power is not it's safety but the craze the media has put all the voters in about anything 'atomic' and then the politicians that then don't try to explain what is happening but just goes straight with the idiot-voters that don't have a clue about what is actually a danger...

Just look at why an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) was named that instead of NMRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging).. People are stupid and afraid of anything 'nuclear'... Just hope no one tells them they have about seven billion billion billion atoms inside their person...

So, while the USA and Russia might be able to ruin each other, and France and the UK can each pick out a country at random to nuke if they desire, the majority of the world will read about it in the paper the next day.

Or read it real time on Twitter....

A localized nuclear exchange of sufficient yield would most likely have a severe impact on the remaining global population.

Scientific American published a (currently pay-walled) article on 2009-12-30 entitled "South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering." Quoting the summary:

Nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas in a fight between India and Pakistan would start firestorms that would put massive amounts of smoke into the upper atmosphere.

The particles would remain there for years, blocking the sun, making the earth’s surface cold, dark and dry. Agricultural collapse and mass starvation could follow. Hence, global cooling could result from a regional war, not just a conflict between the U.S. and Russia.

Cooling scenarios are based on computer models. But observations of volcanic eruptions, forest fire smoke and other phenomena provide confidence that the models are correct.

The article is based on a 2007 Rutgers study by the same authors: "Nuclear Winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences."

Three additional papers on these implications, examining the range from nuclear terrorism to global nuclear war are available here: http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/~gera/

In the end, I'm not certain that distinguishing between `honest' and `dishonest' dissent is very fruitful. Whether honest or not, dissent is important to prevent falling into a morbid state of what Feyerabend calls ``conceptual conservatism.''

Attacking someone's motives or character instead of the theories they advance, is a logical fallacy - "ad hominem."

The argument attacks a position by appealing to the despicable qualities, moral turpitude, and over-all lowness and meanness of the people who hold the position..

These examples illustrate classic uses of ad hominem attacks, in which an argument is rejected, or advanced, based on a personal characteristic of an individual rather than on reasons for or against the claim itself.

While trading insults may be fun and invigorating, it doesn't advance the debate.

Only if we continue to use corn-based ethanol rather than cellulosic ethanol that use wood waste products or grasses.

I made an error when I mentioned movie glasses. I did not realize at the time that they were circularly polarized. Implied, but not explicitly stated, is that the filters are linearly polarized.

After step 3 there is no interference pattern. Photos pass through one slit or the other but not both.

In step 4 we're "removing the which-path information" so that we can't tell which path the photon took by it's polarization. Rather than going through one slit or the other, photons pass through both like in Step 1.

Yes, it's weird.

Anyhow, you can read more about the experiment in this Scientific American article from 2007.

Many myths here.

People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels.

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

The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels.

http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.

http://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
http://skepticalscience.com/solar-cycles-global-warming.htm

People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels. The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels. These energies are well intentioned, however they are misplaced.

Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.

People have forgotten their environmental basics and in their zeal have created a self feeding hype machine. Scheduled catastrophes kept turning out to be false alarms. The problem is that this is causing a loss of credibility in scientists and science. People need to be concerned about pollution, for the sake of fighting pollution.

Were spending so much time worrying about whether or not the concrete being poured for a windmill is going to have the proper carbon offset. As a result were forgetting about bigger things like rampant unregulated coal power plants in China and the smelting of old electronics by hand in Africa.

We need to get back to science, back to fighting pollution and away from the hype.

Humans have been eating grains for at least 100,000 years: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/humans-feasting-on-grains-for-at-least-100000-years/

The Taubes book is total shit. It's a joke with people who are into diet & health, even among people who generally agree with low-carb principles. Taubes is a non-expert who doesn't understand science, he takes non-defensible positions and dogmatically refuses to change them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Maybe you're listening to different researchers. Cooking and larger brain/smaller teeth goes back at least several hundred thousand years, and probably much more.

Plus, that 2.6 billion cost estimate was for a "Prime contractor design, test & build based on NASA-provided specs" with NASA insight/oversight. I'd be willing to bet that a wholly private effort could do a similar mission at a cost quite a bit less than that. (I would also point you to the NASA study that stated the cost difference between SpaceX's Falcon 9 and a NASA developed Falcon 9 was more than half.)

I'm pretty sure that a good source of the cost savings comes from building on work that NASA had already done.

They're not going to have the 20% gold problem, anyways. If you had bothered to read the study, you would have known that the asteroids targeted would be C-type, which are full of useful volatiles and organics that can be turned into handy things like water, and hydrogen, and oxygen (which also happen to be pretty good rocket fuels). Any asteroid mining isn't going to be returning stuff to earth. It's going to be using it for other purposes IN ORBIT. That's where the profit comes in: you don't have to launch 500 tons into lunar orbit at today's launch prices.

Plus, that 2.6 billion cost estimate was for a "Prime contractor design, test & build based on NASA-provided specs" with NASA insight/oversight. I'd be willing to bet that a wholly private effort could do a similar mission at a cost quite a bit less than that. (I would also point you to the NASA study that stated the cost difference between SpaceX's Falcon 9 and a NASA developed Falcon 9 was more than half.)

I'll say you're adroit at backpedaling.

You are an idiot. Read again what I wrote. At that point I hadn't claimed anything, which was the point we are dissecting here. Then I looked at the publications, and 80% was pretty good.

Biofuels are not an answer. Massive, well planed society reengineering is, but that is something homo sapiens is not about to do.

Well, I actually thought you were simply pessimistic, but that sounds like polite phrasing for "reducing the excess population". I hope that's not what you meant - this site has too many of those already.

No, that's not what I meant. At least not of the kind, "reducing excess population by killing people" (however, controling population levels is also something we are pretty much unable to do). I meant things like converting the US, and other countries, into places where public transportation is the default (saves lots of oil). Or getting our act together so that we are less wasteful than we are with hydrocarbons. Lifting a sizable portion of the population out of poverty before their numbers explode would also be great. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what we are up to.

I fear that the outcome will simply be that lots of people will die in horrible ways because we simply do not get our act together in time. Biofuels play an important role, as being a good excuse for not doing anything. You know, as in ''we'll just use ethanol instead". If this comes, it will come at the expense of food and consequently will lead to famine.

A bunch of idiots believe that boiling some beans is going to substitute oil.

That statement is a terrible misrepresentation of the current research (and researchers).

No, the research is sound. It is people who believe that this is the solution that are a bunch of idiots. Of course, researchers won't be too open about it, because of grant money and stuff. Same thing BTW with all that smart grid bullshit. That is not going to happen, due to massive NP-hardness and humans being too chaotic for it. Fusion, BTW, is also an illusion: see here. Same thing with hydrogen.

There is simply nothing on the radar that comes even close to being a workable substitute for oil.

Grainger said a pre-existing capacity in the brain may allow them to recognize patterns and objects

That reminds me of a column I read a while ago suggesting exactly that, and offering an evolutionary basis for it, along with an explanation for conspiracy theories. I guess this means that literacy begets superstition?

Ha ha. Fossil fuel companies are even looking at how to convert solar into CO2:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=solar-steam-for-enhanced-oil-recovery

And there are thought experiments about powering oil shale extraction with a nuclear plant in Canada.

In the past all estimates of global warming were conservative (they were technically correct but CO2 emissions were larger than anticipated, except for short negative blips from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the recent recession.) Today the realistic consensus (under BAU) is 4-6C by 2100 and I think that's lowballed too.
My mental state is cynical acceptance now. Watching the weather is like a thriller, but in slo-mo. I can't wait for the next disaster.

I suspect he's going to keep fighting certain urges that make him a homophobe.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=homophobes-might-be-hidden-homosexuals