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Carl Panzram killed 20 people, and escaped jail on many occasions. He grew tired of the police trying to gather evidence for him, and killed his 21st person, in prison, in front of an audience. The jury took 45 minutes to sentence him to death. His comment to reporters was "I am satisfied with the verdict."

As Carl sat on Death Row, an anti-death penalty group tried to get him a stay of execution. Carl was pissed off about this and sent them a letter asking them to stop.

"I look forward to a seat in the electric chair or dance at the end of a rope just like some folks do for their wedding night. The only thanks you and your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it... I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me, and I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill 'em!"

The anti-death penalty group stopped petitioning.

Do you think that this person doesn't deserve death? Do you think that prison is a waste of resources?

Here is the letter - penned in his own hand (the last one, for obvious reasons, https://library.sdsu.edu/scua/...). "I do not want another trial. Neither do I want the sentence changed in any way." His last words were "Hurry up you Hoosier bastard, I could kill ten men while you're fooling around!"

To go carbon neutral, California would have to shut down much of its agriculture

False. They're called offsets, and they work. Further, California is already instituting emissions controls on agricultural machines, so long as Cheeto Mussolini doesn't put the kibosh on our right to control our own emissions standards. That opens the door to require that they be zero-emissions vehicles in the future. Farm implements are ideal candidates for battery-swap technology, because they are so very simple in construction; thus battery access can also be simple. And of course, we can mandate zero-emissions fertilizers. We could use AIWPS to produce that fertilizer from our human waste.

"Organic" means nothing except less pesticide use,

As the term is used by governments, it doesn't even mean that. It means no synthetic pesticide use, and no synthetic fertilizer, but it doesn't mean anything about the quantities of approved pesticides and fertilizers.

As the term was envisioned by the people who coined it, however, organic meant cyclical systems in which it was recognized that community health is related to soil health. It was a time when produce was overwhelmingly produced locally, so this was an insightful observation. The concept included the waste (both food waste, and human waste, as well as animal waste) being returned to the fields where the food came from. Otherwise, you deplete soil and eventually render it incapable of food production, and also reduce the mineral content of foods.

USDA (for example) organic is ever so much bullshit, but actual organic farming is a legitimate concept. Sadly, the government got involved in a corrupt fashion.

The good news is that sewage sludge is being used as fertilizer, and my understanding is that it is now recovered from the majority of sewage treatment facilities in America. It could be done more efficiently using AIWPS, but at least it's being done.

An even bigger problem comes with feedlots; currently the majority of animal waste from such facilities is transferred into open holding ponds where it cooks slowly and releases methane into the atmosphere in the process, and is often released into rivers while insufficiently aged causing serious biological problems. It can instead be put into so-called "bio-bags", which are basically flexible water tanks with methane capture equipment connected to them. The methane can be compressed and used as fuel, or (more conveniently) burned in a generator in realtime and used to produce electricity. This process is becoming more popular, and it can produce over 100% of the electricity needed to operate such facilities, with the rest being sold to the electric company. Putting the crap in a bag also maintains higher temperatures, which makes it "cook" faster. The resulting sludge is then biologically safe and can be directly applied as fertilizer — and it's wholly organic by either definition.

In that case, consider https://ponce.sdsu.edu/aiwps.h...

We do have a problem though when it comes to the CAFOs which are terribly bad for the environment and I think we'd rather they keep their nasty effluent on their factory (it can't be called a farm or ranch by any reasonable definition).

What's really pathetic is that their nasty effluent is actually highly valuable and they are incompetent morons throwing away money. You literally put the shit into a bag or tank and do nothing to it and it will emit methane (aka natural gas) and turn into the best compost money can buy. The only places it is convenient to get enough concentrated shit to make this a viable business are feedlots. (We can do this with all of our sewage sludge and slash our sewage processing costs as well using AIWPS, a proven and frankly primitive[ly elegant] solution which requires no changes in behavior on the part of the population.)

Instead, we're using hydraulic fracturing with refinery wastes to break open pockets of natural gas which would otherwise remain in the ground against actual need for who knows how long. Whee!

You put the sewage into a bag, you tap the bag, you use a membrane to separate the methane, you compress it and it has many uses.

For a fancier bag, use AIWPS.

To replace gasoline, use Butanol.

To replace diesel fuel, use "green diesel" — not transesterified biodiesel, but you actually use a fractional distillation column to "crack" waste fats as you would petroleum. It has none of the usual problems of biodiesel, namely acidity or a high gel point.

HTH, HAND

10 million people live in, say, around Los Angeles. But to supply those 10 million people with water a fair percent of the watershed of California is tapped.

Yes, and that is especially wrong because it is unnecessary. Believe it or not, Los Angeles receives enough rainfall to account for more than 90% of its water use. But about 99% of that water runs straight into the ocean (where it causes brackishness during rains, because so much water is shed so quickly!) because Los Angeles has been paved all to hell, and has no ability to retain water. It's like a runner that's skipping salt.

In, say, parts of New York of the south, water is more abundant. But to feed 10 million people anywhere takes land to grow food, to find a place to dispose of their sewage and trash, etc. etc.

Sewage is a big issue. At best you need enough room to compost the poop, and since nobody here wants to be a night soil man we have a whole expensive infrastructure for piping the shit around... using water. A lot of water. And then, the water is maybe used for irrigation. But we could at least be using AIWPS and getting clean water out of the other end of the system, albeit at some cost in space. Which brings us back to what you were saying, of course.

Food is actually a much smaller issue. Vertical gardening on aeroponics can produce a whole lot of produce in a very small space with very little resources. There are dozens if not hundreds of such operations across the country so far, and they are reproducing rapidly.

Trash is a huge issue, but it should be a lot smaller. Notably, all packaging should be recyclable, and what isn't recyclable should be compostable. It should be outright illegal to sell anything that comes in a non-recyclable package. That would go a long way towards solving this problem.

one of the key benefits of GMO is increased crop yield

Only if you use the farming methods which are already devastating our cropland. Contrary to popular belief, organic farming doesn't mean that you only use stuff on the USDA approved list. It means a cyclical system in which feces gets returned to the fields. This is a perfectly safe thing to do if you observe basic safety standards, and if you're not overmedicating your population so severely that their waste becomes a health hazard on that basis; crap left to sit around for a year turns into dirt. It can happen much more quickly if you add a little compost and stir it occasionally, but that's not strictly necessary. Or you can use systems like AIWPS to permit the use of ordinary flush toilets and sewer architecture.

Tilth is not in itself inherently harmful, although it is unnecessary and a waste of energy input. Monocropping is inherently harmful, especially when it is done continuously, without the benefit of crop rotation. This has become more and more common in factory farming. This is essentially hydroponic farming in a soil medium. Everything that the plant needs has to be supplied manually, and it's done using synthetic fertilizers made from petroleum.

It's not that GMO is inherently bad. It's that the majority of it is controlled by untrustworthy assholes who use it to no good end. They're patenting life and selling it back to us.

We seem to have a vocabulary problem here. Doing nothing is not a "solution." Doing nothing is choosing to not solve the problem. This is indeed an option which should be considered, but you can't call it is a "solution"-- saying "we don't have to solve this problem" is not a solution.

Indeed we have a vocabulary problem. "We do nothing" only means that government does nothing because the "we" in that phrase refers to collective action by society. You erroneously believe that "we do nothing" amounts to nothing being done at all.

Indeed, we do have a vocabulary problem. When, in your original post, you said "do nothing," I assumed that you meant "do nothing." There was no "we" in what you posted. Now what you're saying is to do something, but in a distributed system, where your "do nothing" does not mean do nothing, but means to not take in a directed, organized action.

OK. You're saying that people will decrease their use of fossil fuel because it's expensive. I'd like to see some numbers here. But, actually, I can analyze it trivially. Fossil fuel usage increases directly in proportion to GNP. Overall, the gross world product is increasing-- the poor are getting less poor (despite all the doomsaying). This is despite the face that, in your belief, fossil fuels are "expensive". So, the net result is that fossil fuel consumption is increasing.

Gross world product here: http://stats.areppim.com/stats...
Fossil fuel use here: http://worldhistoryforusall.sd...

Going up. Not down. Nope, that does not solve the problem.

But, you wouldn't expect it to. Since the piece doesn't reflect externalities, there's no reason in the world to expect usage to decrease to account for the fact that the planet is growing warmer. That isn't part of the market calculation.

I don't know of any real-world economist who says that the only way to discourage fossil fuel use is to properly account for externalities.

You could have stopped typing after "I don't know any real-world economists".

In fact, most economists simply say that the more expensive you make fossil fuel, the less people will be using it and the more they will be incentivized to look for alternatives.

Exactly! You got it! Gold star!

"incentivized to look for alternatives." Exactly. That's called "substitution of resources". That's how markets work.

So what should we do? Live in mud huts as masses of unwashed hippies struggling to get crops to grow?

Well, almost. Live in dirt bag houses as masses of washed humans of whatever persuasion, not struggling to get crops to grow because it is not as difficult nor does it require so much water as you imagine.

Dirt bag houses? Is that what it sounds like? Yes. Yes it is. But once they're plastered up, the only way you can necessarily tell that they're any different from any other houses is that they're better. They're much like an adobe structure. They're low cost in the way that adobe is low cost, but they're even lower-labor because you don't have to press any bricks. They have greater tensile strength because they're held together with barbed wire in between the courses of bags, which are like sand bags and which can be natural or synthetic as you like. The ultimate effect is like that of rammed earth, but without the forms and without the ramming. I can go on about this at some length, but it should not be necessary. Northern California is currently on fire like a motherfucker, so a building style which is non-flammable is particularly attractive to me right now. However, it's not ideally suited to earthquake country. Luckily, it's not the only option.

In fact, there's loads of "alternative" building styles which we could be using which would have lower environmental impact and energy costs, most of which have been used with broad success for at least dozens of years, often hundreds of years, sometimes thousands.

Do you realize how much more farmland we'll need to sustain the current population if we don't have those fossil fuel based fertilizers?

Oh, stop. Just stop. This is such a boring, stupid, wrong thing to say. The highest per-acre yields come either from vertical container gardening or, in a more "natural" setting, from organic intensive gardening using guilds. And your fertilizer is shit, just shit. As a society, we in the west have long thrown away our shit, and only recently have we become any good at saving it again. Many if not most municipal sewage treatment plants are now cooking their treated sewage sludge until it can be used for compost. And they even can produce natural gas from the process!

But there are even lower-impact ways to do this, using far less water and energy. For low-density populations, the Bason Toilet (sorry for PDF) refines the composting toilet into a simple and friendly device which won't stink up your home. Within a year, crap becomes rich compost that can be directly applied without risk, toxic medications aside. For higher-density populations, Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond Systems (or, obviously, AIWPS) permits a larger-scale version of the same operation but tapped off of the typical municipal sewage line system, and with methane capture. You get to keep your flush toilet.

I still vote for limiting population growth, especially in countries that depend on international aid.

Sure, I'm not against it, but the best way to do that is to educate people and give them free birth control. Then you also have an educated society. That's got to be a good thing, although in itself it doesn't fix all the world's problems or anything. That should go without saying but I want to eliminate some of the obvious responses which might descend upon this comment.

We should also attempt bootstrapping a stable industry in space before things do get too scarce.

Now you're speaking my language. The only way out is through.

You are co-opting the term organic to mean something extra.

Well, no, no I am not. Here we go:

"In the late 1930s and early 1940s Sir Albert Howard and his wife Gabrielle Howard, both accomplished botanists, developed organic agriculture. [...] In the United States another founder of organic agriculture was J.I. Rodale." OK, so now we have decided who might get to define terms, yes? Let us continue. "Howard observed and came to support traditional Indian farming practices over conventional agricultural science. Though he journeyed to India to teach Western agricultural techniques he found that the Indians could in fact teach him more. One important aspect he took notice of was the connection between healthy soil and the villages' healthy populations, livestock and crop. Patrick Holden, Director of the UK Soil Association quoted Howard as saying "the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible." The maintenance of the soil is critical. Guess what they do with poop in India? Anyway, moving on. "To Rodale, agriculture and health were inseparable. Healthy soil required compost and eschewing poisonous pesticides and artificial fertilizers. Eating plants grown in such soil would then help humans stay healthier, he expounded." Now, where you do you think compost comes from?

Anyway, as usual, even a quick scan of Wikipedia would have proved my point. And in fact, that's what I did. But this idea was based on a conversation I had with my lady some years ago. She doesn't remember it at all, and I don't remember it very well, so I don't remember precisely what she stated at the time, so I had to go to WP. I didn't even use google. Why not quickly glance at the readily available materials which cost you nothing, before claiming that someone is wrong? While you're reading WP, you could also look up Biodynamic Agriculture, a sort of spiritually-guided precursor to organic gardening which is gaining traction today. I think some of their rituals are a bit hilarious, but the basic fundamental principles basically cover all the original founding principles of "organic" gardening. Agriculture is a cyclical system.

My understanding is that these days many if not most sewage plants are actually cooking their wastes for maximum methane production, capturing it and selling it or burning it on site for power production, where they used to try to minimize it and then flare off the unwanted product. The sludge is sold on for agricultural use. There's an "organic" version of this process known as Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond Systems (AIWPS) which also produces algae, which can be used as a fuel feedstock... and clean water, even separating out heavy metals. And all it takes to make it is some piping. If you want to also capture the methane, then you also need some other goodies including a sheet of plastic, and you'll probably want a liner for catching the heavy precipitates, but there's not a whole lot to it. And of course, we could be making a whole lot more use of composting toilets, for example the Bason (sorry for PDF, but it's really the best link I know so far. Someday I will build one, and then I will make a nice page on it... even if it is full of shit)

We have alternatives, people! Tap water is good for us, good for the environment, stunningly cheap and tastes pretty good.

Time for you to google "tap water amoeba death"

Also, tap water is absolutely fucking horrible for the environment. Here's how it works: we take water out of waterways and process it with chemicals, then when you're done you flush it down the toilet and then we process it with some more chemicals. Very little of this is necessary; country-dwellers can crap in a hole and process their drinking water with a RO membrane, using the waste water for irrigation, or via distillation, while city-dwellers' effluent can be processed with ponds.

"There were also some torn open cool aid packets in said area where the dead bodies were"
Assistant Commisioner Cecil Robert's testimony

"Tests were carried out on the syringes and the half steel drum of cool aid"
Senior Pathologist Cyril Mootoo

"Doctor Shacke and Joyce Touchette came into the kitchen and collected a half steel drum and had with them boxes of cool aid and two containers containing brown liquid...There had been a previous occassion when there was a suicide drill in which Cool Aid was placed in container"
Survivor Stanley Clatton

From first half of the Guyana Inquest, while keeping the spelling and capitalisation as writ.

Also in the documentary you can see both flavor-aid and kool-aid stored on site. Wonder if the push towards not saying Kool-Aid is an attempt to claim special knowledge, or a campaign by Kraft to 'clear their name'. Either way, it not definite there was not kool-aid involved.

That said, I don't know where the OP got the idea diesel was cleaner than gasoline.

Diesel is still a bit more efficient overall, start to finish. It takes less energy to produce, and you do still get more mileage from a diesel even though TGDIs are closing the gap. They thus produce less CO2/mile, though they do produce more NOx. However, they also release fewer unburned hydrocarbons, because the basic function of a diesel is to run lean all the time (hence the NOx.) They also tend to produce torque at low RPMs, where there's less loss due to friction. All this still arguably adds up to diesels being less polluting than gasoline vehicles, now that we know that the gassers produce just as much soot as the diesels.

The cleanest fuels of which I'm aware overall are butanol and methane. Butanol can be made by bacteria from any organic material, and is a 1:1 replacement for gasoline. The other stuff that comes out of the same process (ethanol and acetone) can be used to adjust octane. Butanol produces less emissions than gasoline when used as a motor fuel. Acetone is already commonly used as an octane booster and to reduce emissions during testing, although it takes quite a bit to make a significant difference. Methane is a common byproduct of decomposition in nature as is, and when you burn a gas like methane or propane in a combustion engine you substantially reduce both emissions and wear not just to the engine parts themselves (you'll never wash the walls of the combustion cylinder with methane or propane) but also to the crankcase lubricant. Since the fuel burns cleaner, the blow-by is cleaner, and the oil lasts longer. With simple and relatively minor hardware changes (mostly the addition of solenoid valves and spray nozzles, plus probably an additional computer module) engines can be made to run on both fuels, including startup.

Where does the methane come from? AIWPS. Ah, we can dream of a world gone sane.

It takes a much oil to make bio-fuel as you get back out of it. The entire process produces far more air pollution than simply burning the fossil fuels in your car.

Ethanol is now typically at least 15% energy-positive. That's not very good, of course, but it's still energy-positive. Your numbers are far out of date.

However, there are lots of very good reasons why ethanol is rotten from stem to stern. In the interest of brevity I'll spare all the reasons why ethanol is a bad motor fuel and just move straight to environmental impact. Virtually all fuel ethanol is made from corn and virtually all of that corn is grown continuously, which is to say without crop rotation or even letting fields lie fallow. This depletes the soil of everything that makes it soil and not just dirt. Thus, virtually all fuel ethanol production is actually selling out the future of food production for short-term profit.

One thing that would be a really great motor fuel is methane. What we do is we stop cooking our shit in open ponds and then feeding it into waterways. Instead, we cook it in a closed (or at least effectively closed) reactor, it turns into soil, and then we can use it to grow food. While it cooks in an anaerobic environment it releases a lot of its carbon in the form of methane, which we can separate with a membrane and capture for later use anywhere we currently use natural gas or propane. It's really quite trivial on a mechanical level to convert literally any gasoline vehicle to run on methane. They get less mileage per unit of mass, but the output is of course vastly cleaner, the crankcase lubricant lasts longer, and so on. The fuel can be stored in relatively inexpensive tanks compared to hydrogen, or of course compared to the energy density of batteries. Propane conversions are common in off-roading. Range becomes an issue, but I see a lot of Jeeps with conversions up here in the sticks. Gas will work at any right-side-up angle even when the tank is mostly empty, unlike gasoline.

I'm sure they believed they were defending freedom.

I'm sure they a) didn't care and b) didn't think about it. The two go hand in hand.

Because freedom's just another word for nothing left to abuse.

You think freedom sucks for the environment? Try its absence for something even worse. Free people care about the environment far more than slaves.Classic example is the difference between the West and Communism during the Cold War. The Aral Sea is just about gone because way back when, some central planning group decided to turn a bunch of desert into farmland without considering the consequences. Bad stuff happens in the developed world too, but you can't be stopped from caring about it. And as a result, those sort of decisions have a lot more push back and don't go as far.

The US-equivalent is the Salton Sea which was made by an epic mistake, the accidental redirecting of the entire Colorado River into Imperial Valley for a couple of years at the beginning of the 20th Century. Neither the US or Mexican governments (the flooding actually originated on the Mexican side of the border) contributed much to the effort of restoring the previous state. It took the regional railroad (which was greatly impaired by the flood waters to stop the flooding.

Freedom kept the Imperial Valley from just being the Salton Sea. Lack of freedom damned the Aral Sea.

It took one or two guys on 4wd offroad vehicles, after tearing down and shooting up the private property signs and fences, then doing donuts and running all over the site one day, to destroy all the work I'd done terracing and replanting the site, and turn much of it into gravel and gullies in the next rains.

If a couple of off-roaders can set you back to square one, then you are doing it wrong. Nature is not all-enduring, but it can take a beating (such as the forest fire, which was much worse). I also see this sort of flawed thinking in environmental science fiction all the time where there is some fragile terraforming ecosystem that requires constant human attention. Bonus cliche points, if their animal companion/mascot looks on as they toil away desperately trying to save the gimpy tree for the future of their new world.

My view is that this is not ecosystem restoration or the terraforming equivalent, but landscaping. Its private property and if you want to make it look pretty, that's fine with me. Off roaders in that situation were committing a variety of crimes in trespassing on the property and vandalizing it. Too bad you didn't catch them. But it would have taken more than that to derail a proper land restoration project. Sorry.

I'm the last author on the paper and it was discovered in my bioinformatics lab in the CS department at SDSU ...

It was named after our analysis software, crAss (cross assembly) for comparing DNA sequences from different samples (called metagenomics). Here is the crAss article that was published in 2012. Everyone else had missed this virus that was in their DNA samples, most of which have been published (many in high profile journals like Science and Nature). However, it wasn't until we used crAss that we recognized the virus was abundant and everywhere. When we looked at the NCBI database of nucleotide sequences the virus is there and scientists had seen it before in fragments but not been able to piece it together to a whole genome.

We only find the phage in poo samples (they usually call them fecal samples...) from people (oh, and very occasionally on the skin of people, but we suspect they don't have great hygiene). We haven't been able to find it anywhere else that we have looked, and so we don't know what its range is beyond the intestine.

This is one of those situations where the computational biology is really driving the question and the biologists. You often head that bioinformatics is just a support science for "real biology" - that's not true. In this case, based on the questions the bioinformatics group came up with, the biology was supporting the bioinformatics analysis. The biologists were able to determine that the assembly of DNA fragments was correct, and confirm, using PCR, that it is indeed a whole genome.

We (and others) are working on isolating the phage and designing experiments to test exactly what it does in our guts. That doesn't mean we can't speculate!

A couple of answers to comments:
1. Everyone (including the scientists that write grants and papers) confuses gut and fecal samples (sometimes deliberately). To be clear, almost all the samples we have are feces because it is everyone has it, it is easy to get, and everyone seems to want to share it. To get samples other than feces you need surgery, and so the non-fecal samples tend to be associated with other issues that require surgical intervention (and thus are complicated).
2. Noriko (Nori) Cassman is a graduate student (and so doesn't have tenure yet)
3. We were not responsible for the wikipedia page (or the twitter account)
4. phages are viruses that attack bacteria only. There is no evidence or suggestion that this virus does anything to human cells.

I'm the last author on the paper and it was discovered in my bioinformatics lab in the CS department at SDSU ...

It was named after our analysis software, crAss (cross assembly) for comparing DNA sequences from different samples (called metagenomics). Here is the crAss article that was published in 2012. Everyone else had missed this virus that was in their DNA samples, most of which have been published (many in high profile journals like Science and Nature). However, it wasn't until we used crAss that we recognized the virus was abundant and everywhere. When we looked at the NCBI database of nucleotide sequences the virus is there and scientists had seen it before in fragments but not been able to piece it together to a whole genome.

We only find the phage in poo samples (they usually call them fecal samples...) from people (oh, and very occasionally on the skin of people, but we suspect they don't have great hygiene). We haven't been able to find it anywhere else that we have looked, and so we don't know what its range is beyond the intestine.

This is one of those situations where the computational biology is really driving the question and the biologists. You often head that bioinformatics is just a support science for "real biology" - that's not true. In this case, based on the questions the bioinformatics group came up with, the biology was supporting the bioinformatics analysis. The biologists were able to determine that the assembly of DNA fragments was correct, and confirm, using PCR, that it is indeed a whole genome.

We (and others) are working on isolating the phage and designing experiments to test exactly what it does in our guts. That doesn't mean we can't speculate!

A couple of answers to comments:
1. Everyone (including the scientists that write grants and papers) confuses gut and fecal samples (sometimes deliberately). To be clear, almost all the samples we have are feces because it is everyone has it, it is easy to get, and everyone seems to want to share it. To get samples other than feces you need surgery, and so the non-fecal samples tend to be associated with other issues that require surgical intervention (and thus are complicated).
2. Noriko (Nori) Cassman is a graduate student (and so doesn't have tenure yet)
3. We were not responsible for the wikipedia page (or the twitter account)
4. phages are viruses that attack bacteria only. There is no evidence or suggestion that this virus does anything to human cells.

I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term.

I imagine you meant the long term? Or for the short term?

it seems that some politicians want to save the world, at the expense of the people, especially the poor.

We all breathe. Reducing pollution actually means more jobs. Doing things right is harder.

just 10 years ago I could get 300 miles on 10 bucks, now that same 300 miles costs me 64 bucks.

Driving on petrofuel is unsustainable. You haven't done anything to change your habits on your own, so now you're being forced.

but we have more oil flowing now than anytime in the past, there is no excuse for it to cost as much as it does

Yes there is, and the excuse is that you have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's a good idea to be burning oil as fuel. It's too valuable to burn, and the secondary effects are harmful to our very existence. We have no need to burn it. For example have the technology (and have at least since the 1980s) to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption with biofuels in a way which is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative. As ever, I refer you to this DoE report and information on AIWPS, as well as on Butanol.

I'm tired of your the dichotomy between economic development and ending the wasteful, harmful, and completely unnecessary refining and subsequent combustion of oil. By all means, make plastic out of it. It saves an enormous amount of energy as compared to making plastics from other sources, and the plastics can be recycled. You're repeating this logical fallacy solely to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions, and you're only impressing others suffering from the same brand of cognitive dissonance. In fact, it is wholly possible to reduce and perhaps even eliminate harmful emissions, or at least account for them (e.g. by carbon-fixing schemes) such that there is effectively zero negative impact to human health and biosphere persistence, the latter currently being an absolutely irreplaceable requirement for the former. We have numerous (one might even be tempted to say innumerable) solutions which we are not putting into place for political-economic reasons which boil down to protection of profit for a privileged class of self-entitled robber barons.

The singularity is a fascinating idea that ain't going to happen. Vernor Vinge himself did a much better treatment on what happens in this case.

We're already living in the Age of Failed Dreams. Advancements in technology, aside from computing, have all but halted. Flying cars? We can barely improve planes; yes, that IS your fathers airframe. Cheap and limitless energy? Nope. Life extension? John Adams died at 90 over 200 years ago, and he wasn't THAT unusual; many more live that long today, but few live much longer. Progress on stopping disease has even stopped and regressed. And most notably for the purposes of the singularity, strong general AI hasn't progressed much.

Oh, wait, you say that isn't an option in the cities. Well, cities, yes, well, there's your problem.

Yes, yes it is. Not in the cities, but while living in the cities, via AIWPS. The short explanation is that your shit is pumped into the bottom of ponds with a methane-capturing plastic liner protected from UV damage by virtue of being submerged. Eventually the ponds fill up and they're left to cook momentarily before being sludged out for compost. Heavy metals settle to the bottom and microbes destroy virtually all pathogens and most other contaminants.

Cities are not the problem. Where cities are located is the problem; there's no good reason for them to be in the same place as seaports any longer, for one. And what we choose to do with our technology is a massive problem as well. We have the technologies to solve the problems, but the current "solutions" to these problems are highly profitable. For a tiny slice of the population, of course. And they are maintaining the situation quite aptly.

I would definitely include: The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era by Vernor Vinge
https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/fac...

People -> Sewer -> AIWPS -> Power Plant

This does produce some byproducts... namely methane and algae. Which are both useful.

A bit of a preview for the future: Rainbow's End.

Oh, here, you can read some of the ideas and thoughts from this presentation he made.

It doesn't only seem plausible at this point, it seems practically guaranteed to arise.

... and by that logic, the real problem is not the Green Revolution, but agriculture itself.

All you need do is look to Africa to see that improper use of agriculture is hazardous to biostasis. Or, you could take a swift peek at the Amazon, probably already past the point of collapse. You could examine the American West, which has only a tiny fraction of the carbon-fixing biomass that it had two hundred years ago, and which is rapidly becoming desertified.

What is missing in our modern societies is cyclical resource utilization. We keep trying to throw things "away", but there is no "away". The only "away" we can access so far is still on this planet. We pump water out of a river, shit in it, semi-treat it, and then put it back in the river for someone else downstream to drink. We need to put the crap back into the soil in order to replenish what has been lost. We could do this without even abandoning the sewer infrastructure by using AIWPS.

We must stop wasting our crap.

You make it sound like any fertilizer will work in any situation as a "one size fits all" position. That isn't how you grow plants, which needs a much more balanced approach and several different kinds of chemicals.

You're right and you're wrong. In theory, you're right. You look at what the plant needs and you give it that. But in proper practice, you're wrong. You simply return the shit to the soil and the system works cyclically, if you plant guilds. It's monocultural so-called "green revolution" farming (which turns nations and indeed whole continents brown) which causes soil depletion. Most of these crops aren't even rotated any more!

In fact, in earlier times people would literally sell their cess pool contents (not really septic tanks, but the same general construction) to Nitrate manufacturers for the purpose of extracting the Nitrogen compounds to be used in explosives. Cheaper ways of getting that accomplished can be had today, but in theory you could use the stuff that is flowing out of your toilet if you cared.

We could be using AIWPS to convert our waste into fertilizer, algae as a fuel feedstock, and methane gas, while cutting our water use. Or we could use composting toilets to turn crap into soil directly without any special facilities. By adding compost to your crap and letting it sit for a year (with occasional aeration) you turn it into soil that you can lift out of the digester by hand if you choose, it's that well-cooked.

The simple fact is that we only need to produce industrial fertilizers with an explosion risk because we are engaging in inherently destructive farming practices instead of employing a cyclical system which existed before we did.

The publisher is upset that someone called them Scientologists. Well, they're absolutely not Scientologists. They're Moonies. Yes, really.

This could well render California's wine industry economically unsustainable with only a few degrees change

So one state's booze production qualifies as a national security issue? Ha ha, that's rich! :D 'Mericaaa FUCK YEAH!

Also how do you like hurricanes? Because increased surface temperature and sea level moisture directly drive stronger storms in the American "hurricane ally"

The world's leading predictor of hurricanes, Dr. William Gray has his well educated opinion. You have yours. Hmmm, a Ph.D who has been accurately predicting hurricane frequency and intensity for decades... or some AC preaching about disease, famine, and plagues of locutus? Sorry mate, but you sound a bit religious to me.

So allow me to pull a play out of the climate cult's playbook. Coorelation equals causation: In this graph we show the last 10000 years of human population. And in this one we show the global mean temperature over the same period. Population increases with temperature, therefore we can conclude warmer weather is resulting in more people. Obviously, there's no flaw in the logic, and we have a consensus among scientists regarding these two facts. So it is true. Global warming is good for the human race. Any argument about this point means you are a "denier."

Care to argue? Of course you do. That's the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. Yet, if you exchange population with CO2, it is the exact argument you are presenting.

It blows my mind how many people believe warming is such a dangerous thing. Far more people are killed by the cold each year. Give me warming any day.

soon-to-be-living-with-reduced-vision

Maybe read this first before spreading disinformation? http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/vision/Galileo.html

Put your eye against even a replica Galilean telescope which is pointing at the sun and I'll challenge you to read it again if you like.

soon-to-be-living-with-reduced-vision

Maybe read this first before spreading disinformation? http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/vision/Galileo.html

You cannot go blind looking at the sun.

Not entirely true, and taken partially out of context.

Yes, the sun will hurt and be uncomfortable but not likely induce blindness. However, I have seen a telescope aimed at the sun during broad daylight focus the energy and ignite a piece of paper placed a few inches from the eyepiece. I do not possess a medical degree, but I will go out on a limb and say that it can cause blindness.

You cannot go blind looking at the sun.

However we continue to recommend gloves to prevent blindness.
  And if you continuously cross your eyes -Yes they will stay like that.

What money?

WW1 aces would look into the sun with no eye protection whatsoever, because the best place to attack from was with the sun at your back.

You cannot go blind looking at the sun.

Yes, staring for several minutes can cause some damage, even sometimes permanent damage. But a few seconds at a time? Doesn't happen. And it's much less likely to happen if you're nearsighted to begin with and don't correct your vision (don't wear glasses or contacts) - the light simply will not focus.

Many kinds of composting toilet exist, you have to get slightly fancier for those intended for use in the city, but it's no big deal.

For those in the country, if you need one with more capacity, you just make the vault taller, so that's easy as can be.

For those WAY out in the country, you can dig holes and shit in them via an outhouse, then plant trees in the holes when they're about full. Plant a food tree; it won't start producing in less than a year anyway, and your crap will be dirt by then.

Cities can continue to use their existing toilets and still have waste composting, if we use AIWPS to close the loop. Short form, sewage becomes algae, methane, and clean water. Everybody wins.

The problem is most water on the planet is full of salt. You can't use salt-laden "grey water" to grow things.

What year is it?

See also AIWPS.

Basically, at the point where you might consider it on a large scale, it's generally just easier to use fresh or drinking quality recycled water.

Easier is not the issue here, sustainability is. There's no question that if you continually pump more from aquifers than goes in you will have problems.

Death to SHE!

Don't know if you will find this surprising, but Newton really did stare the Sun unprotected...
http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/vision/others.html

The point that is often made is that a single volcanic eruption absolutely dwarfs mans CO2 emissions such that they become irrelevant.

That is not factually true.

Volcanic eruptions can enhance global warming by adding CO2 to the atmosphere. However, a far greater amount of CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by human activities each year than by volcanic eruptions. T.M.Gerlach (1991, American Geophysical Union) notes that human-made CO2 exceeds the estimated global release of CO2 from volcanoes by at least 150 times.

According to the USGS, volcanic eruptions emit 130 M ton of CO2. According to newscientist, human CO2 emissions are in the 26.4 G ton range in 2007.

http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/themes/keytheme1.htm

http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/themes/keytheme1.htm

Obviously not the same thing . . .

Eating is NOT the problem. Pooping is the problem, but only when your poop is wasted and indeed inefficiently (and probably incompletely) treated. Solution? AIWPS. (For country dwellers, a Bason composting toilet is an even easier answer.)

Are you sure? I've been here a while, and every second article is full of Slashdotters claiming that we can all live like kings off of each others' waste products in a giant mouth-to-anus daisychain.

Due to entropy, the only way that can work is to involve the sun. Conveniently, there are numerous ways to actually accomplish this. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be are more interested in making as much money per acre as possible while dodging any and all responsibility for any damage done.

Just to beat this particular mangled pile of horseflesh a bit more, two of my favorite ways to effectively insert the sun between anus and mouth are Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond Systems and biodiesel from algae (which ties in nicely with AIWPS.) And of course, if we could find a way to get past BP, we could be making Butanol. Though if we are very lucky, the problem may sort itself out anyway via the wonders of diversity.

Of course, you're also ignoring the fact that Mt Saint Helens put more CO2 into the atmosphere than all of mankind before that point, so we really aren't making that big of a dent.

CHECK THE FACTS befor posting bullshit. Human activities generate 150 times as much CO2 as volcanos.

It seems to me that algae is the better long term solution-- but eventually, the human population is going to lock up all the phosphorus and other trace minerals. The larger the population, the sooner that happens.

you get phosphorous by composting poop. this produces some of the highest-quality compost possible and all but eliminates the need for sewers. mass "composting" is possible in the form of Advanced Integrated Wastewater Pond Systems (AIWPS) through the use of existing sewer systems, and producing methane and algae.

Ummm... we don't throw it away. From the wikipedia article on sludge:

Sludge is not a safe fertilizer. It contains significant quantities of heavy metals and other contaminants. More of it is burned or landfilled than is used for fertilizer, which isn't safe anyway. We could use AIWPS to provide safe, centralized sewer systems which produce clean water and clean fertilizer, but we don't.

Also, why do you say that human feces is "our best compost"? I'd be curious to see a reference for that assertion, if you have one.

Sorry, can't find anything online right now because of all the dipshits who say it's not safe to compost human waste clogging google. It does require more care than a normal compost pile, but you can use a composting toilet (for example, a bason toilet — scroll down to "PROJECT BASON IN PRAINHA DO CANTO VERDE" — incompetent web design, no named anchors) makes it a triviality.

Hey, if you've got another method that was cost competitive, and further reduced the risks I'd be glad to hear it.

AIWPS is my favorite. There's some company I thought was called bio-bags but maybe not which makes big sacks that are cheaper and take up less space, but AIWPS is an effective long-term solution. It takes vastly more space, however, so it's not appropriate for all situations.

15 minutes is a looooong time. For how long would you be able to make out a jet air-liner?

Since the meteor was making multiple sonic booms (realistically that's really bits breaking off and making their own booms), we're looking at a minimum of mach 1. That means it'll cover an absolute minimum distance of 306 km from the time it was first seen as standing still until it disappeared. Now, obviously the object needs to be at a fair distance already, for that to be the case. It can't start overhead, as that will mean it's moving.

And how far can you really see?

[The record] belong to the report of the expedition led by Korzenewsky (1923), who reliably reported seeing snow-capped peaks of a mountain range 750 km away.

Also, 306 km is a HUGE distance. The smallest detail we can make out are about 1 arc minute. At 306 km that is 89 meters. Granted, it's glowing/burning, so that should help, but how much? 10 fold? Would you be able to make out a 9 meter fireball at 300 km?

And I'm rather curious to know, just how far a meteor would actually travel during those 15 minutes.

Um. No.

For an observer at 6ft from sea level, the distance to the horizon is 3.25 miles.

If you want to see a distance of 100 miles, then you need an altitude of 6660 feet.

More detail here

I'm to late for good karma whoring but..

There is a man created sea in California called the Salton Sea. Originally freshwater, it was fed from the runoff of the central valley farmers. Eventually the salt levels in the sea rose enough that it went full salt.

Every year there is an algae bloom, as well as a talipia die off. Both of which are currently being investigated for use as biofuel.

Sources:
http://www.saltonsea.ca.gov/ss101.htm
http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/SaltonSeaHomePage.html

It's all smoke and mirrors anyway. Here are (some of) the researchers publications:

http://www.psychology.sdsu.edu/new-web/FacultyLabs/twenge/TwengePublications.htm

In the most recent one, they selected a set of questions from the overall data set and then assigned scores to the various responses to those questions, and then analyzed the scored responses for correlations. The results are on the last page of this pdf:

http://www.psychology.sdsu.edu/new-web/FacultyLabs/twenge/MTFself-views508.pdf

I don't really have the knowledge to have much of an opinion about the statistical significance of the changes, but even in the case where the results are extremely statistically significant, they don't appear to be particularly meaningful (that is, given the results, you still wouldn't have much reason to predict that someone from the beginning of the study was less narcissistic than someone from the end, the differences within the groups are much larger than the differences between them).

So assuming a similar methodology, the information presented in the article isn't anywhere near enough to draw any conclusions about whether the ideas presented are interesting, or simply the researchers personal axe.