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were not put there by her

Citations? Comey didn't offer a break-down... Because it is irrelevant.

were not put there by her - they were sent to her by others.

At her obvious behest. BTW, did you know, you can be prosecuted for possession child pornography, for example, if such is simply found in your e-mail? That you didn't put it there — and it was sent to you by others will not save you...

Y'know, like the one that brought Flynn down

An attempt to change subject detected and crushed.

Lol. Forgot this was /. Should be: like this.

I've heard claims that one in four women will be raped at some point in their lives, and have yet to hear any sort of data-based rebuttal.

Look at the actual crime reporting figures, locally rape convictions stand at around 8 per 100,000. Now let's get crazy and say only one in twenty rapes and or sexual assault charges result in a conviction. Let's get even crazier and say one in twenty people who are raped even report the matter. That leaves us with 3200 per 100,000, or about one in thirty. Still almost an order of magnitude smaller than feminist figures and almost certainly still a gigantic exaggeration.

So where do they come up with these moral panic inducing mountains of statistical tripe?

To understand this we have to look at the methods they use to take these surveys. Look at the technical reports. You'll find lots of stuff like:

Drafting the questionnaire, it was important to avoid terms such as ‘rape’, ‘violence’ or ‘stalking’, because different women might have different preconceived ideas on the types of violence usually associated with these terms, and the types of perpetrators involved.

Terms such as rape are left out of questionnaires and it's left to the researchers (all of whom happen to be feminist trained) to decide whether or not rape took place. So if someone answered that they were verbally abused using a sexual slur or had sex while drunk, it's the researcher who decides if the women was sexually attacked.

And take a look at California's shiny new feminist inspired affirmative consent laws if you want to know whether having sex after a drink is rape or not.

This gets further distorted by the public mouthpieces, who translate these numbers into 25% of all women were raped. No, they weren't. That one in four women in modern western democracies, one in forty was raped is not a prospect that the rational mind can entertain.

This is a technique that was pioneered by Mary Koss, a feminist researcher who decided that the official unbiased government reports weren't giving her the answers she wanted, so she set up her own surveys in order to amend the statistics accordingly.

Post survey examination of the outcomes however revealed that around three quarters of the women she identified as having been raped did not consider themselves victims of rape, and almost half of them had sex with their supposed attackers after the event identified as a rape had occurred, and continued dating them.

So, having internalised that, now you'll have to start asking questions like "how did these flim flam artists manage to pull the wool over everyone's eyes for 40 years" and "why are people in power listening to them" and so on. These are good questions to ponder. While you're pondering them some light reading for you:

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/...

The US greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to about 6 billion metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Each tree you plant offsets about 1 metric ton of CO2 over its lifetime, so that means we need to plant 6 billion trees every year.

If we figure that the trees would be planted at an average stand density of 200 per acre, that comes to 30 million acres of new forest that we'd have to plant every year, or 47,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, this means covering an area the size of Pennsylvania with new forest every year.

On another note: Some people point to algae or plankton. Globally, land plants remove 45-68 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year, compared to 45-50 billion tonnes removed by phytoplankton, so it's not true that plankton remove more carbon than land plants.

The US greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to about 6 billion metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Each tree you plant offsets about 1 metric ton of CO2 over its lifetime, so that means we need to plant 6 billion trees every year.

If we figure that the trees would be planted at an average stand density of 200 per acre, that comes to 30 million acres of new forest that we'd have to plant every year, or 47,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, this means covering an area the size of Pennsylvania with new forest every year.

On another note: Some people point to algae or plankton. Globally, land plants remove 45-68 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year, compared to 45-50 billion tonnes removed by phytoplankton, so it's not true that plankton remove more carbon than land plants.

The US greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to about 6 billion metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Each tree you plant offsets about 1 metric ton of CO2 over its lifetime, so that means we need to plant 6 billion trees every year.

If we figure that the trees would be planted at an average stand density of 200 per acre, that comes to 30 million acres of new forest that we'd have to plant every year, or 47,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, this means covering an area the size of Pennsylvania with new forest every year.

On another note: Some people point to algae or plankton. Globally, land plants remove 45-68 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year, compared to 45-50 billion tonnes removed by phytoplankton, so it's not true that plankton remove more carbon than land plants.

Actually it's about equality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://www.now.org/nnt/03-97/f... http://www.firstpost.com/india... http://www.hindustantimes.com/... http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/... http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/... http://www.weeklystandard.com/... http://douchebagdork.tumblr.co... http://www.ageofconsent.com/co... http://studentactivism.net/201... http://i.imgur.com/Vac0UOk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/aob5k.jpg http://www.law.fsu.edu/journal... http://www.genderratic.net/?ta... http://www.aifs.gov.au/acssa/d... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://www.theguardian.com/com... http://www.saveservices.org/pd... http://www.law.fsu.edu/journal... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://jezebel.com/294383/have... http://anescapedconviction.tum... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://news.nationalpost.com/2... https://imgur.com/zoR6eQ0 https://twitter.com/CodeusaSof... https://twitter.com/FabioFacch... https://twitter.com/DanielleGi... https://twitter.com/ForemanEri... http://theflounce.com/harassme...

Actually it's about equality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://www.now.org/nnt/03-97/f... http://www.firstpost.com/india... http://www.hindustantimes.com/... http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/... http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/... http://www.weeklystandard.com/... http://douchebagdork.tumblr.co... http://www.ageofconsent.com/co... http://studentactivism.net/201... http://i.imgur.com/Vac0UOk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/aob5k.jpg http://www.law.fsu.edu/journal... http://www.genderratic.net/?ta... http://www.aifs.gov.au/acssa/d... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://www.theguardian.com/com... http://www.saveservices.org/pd... http://www.law.fsu.edu/journal... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://jezebel.com/294383/have... http://anescapedconviction.tum... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://news.nationalpost.com/2... https://imgur.com/zoR6eQ0 https://twitter.com/CodeusaSof... https://twitter.com/FabioFacch... https://twitter.com/DanielleGi... https://twitter.com/ForemanEri... http://theflounce.com/harassme...

There's something very wrong with the notion of not researching things that might reflect negatively on your ideology.

Yes, for example the way feminism routinely hides, obfuscates and outright lies about domestic violence figures.

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/...

Oh I'm sorry did you want more? Noted feminist Sandra Harding has described Newton’s great work Principia Mathematica as “a rape manual”. English professor Katherine Hayles’s elaboration of Luce Irigaray’s portrayal of the history of hydrodynamics as distorted by males’ fascination with “rigid bodies” and “linear models” and their association of femininity with fluidity, was marred by a serious misunderstanding of hydrodynamics, according to philosopher of science Noretta Koertge. Another gem from Hayles: “The special theory of relativity lost its epistemological clarity when it was combined with quantum mechanics to form quantum field theory. By mid-century all three were played out or had undergone substantial modification”. This will come as a terrible shock to real physicists.

“Women’s Ways of Knowing” is the title of a widely used text in Womens Studies. It claims that women “have cultivated and learned ways of knowing which are powerful but have been neglected and denigrated by the dominant intellectual ethos of our time”. A second claim is that educators can help women develop their own authentic voices if they emphasise connection over separation, understanding and acceptance over assessment, and collaboration over debate. Daphne Patai, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, comments that like nearly all feminist research in this area, the authors fail to undertake comparative studies to see whether male students fall into similar patterns.

According to Patai, Women’s Ways of Knowing is based on inconclusive research and draws too uncritically on the books of Noddings, Ruddick, and Gilligan. Serious flaws in these books have been repeatedly pointed out in mainstream psychology journals but are not acknowledged. She says that Womens Studies faculty offer the book “as proof of the superiority of women’s wonderfully different and rewarding ways of knowing”.

Or maybe we should start a narrative about the distortion and concealment if not outright fabircation of data by feminist academics. I wonder what vocabulary would emerge to describe those problematic discourses.

And finally in “Words of Power: a Feminist Reading of the History of Logic”, Andrea Nye gives a critique of logic itself, concluding that “logic in its final perfection is insane”.

Yep, how dare those scientists talk back to their ideological superiors.

How about you take your fucked up little religion and fuck off instead hey.

So you accept the notion of widespread persecution, but you think its directed towards men? That is a pretty weird thing to believe in a society where the vast majority of politicians, CEOs, and wealthiest people are men. I just don't see it.

And you've just completely gone and discounted the Duluth model and its horrendous widespread effects while simultaneously repeating the fallacy that rich men care anything for men, and the fact the patriarchy theory is both fatally flawed and destructive.

That took some doing. Not as much as the way you directly contradict yourself next, but still pretty good.

My original post made the exact opposite argument. The 'boys club' is not interested in helping men as a category, its a handful of selfish men (with a handful of women) pissing on everyone else. If you actually thought this is what feminists believed, no wonder you are so confused.

Go read the dictionary definition of feminism. Then take a look at the Duluth model, the Swedish model, Baroness Corsten's report or even good old professor Elizabeth Sheehy who believes that women should have the right to murder men in their sleep as long as they "felt" threatened. Compare and contrast, and there's plenty more where that came from.

It also makes sense in light of the many single mothers out there, and kids being pretty expensive.

Hardly. What it means is men are earning the money then giving it to the women to spend. Patriarchy!

I frankly don't know alot about these things

Really? Maybe you should educate yourself on the actual effects of feminism in the real world before waving fungible postmodern definitions around as if they meant anything otuside a gender studies exam paper.

Men are also raped about as often as women are. Again, the problem is that the windmill you are tilting at is not feminism.

Oops.

Yes, but a dollar figure sets a minimum bar for the cost of the device. If 100 companies when after Apple, all claiming 2.5% of the cost of the device, the device would have to cost at least 2.5 times what it costs. Percentages are an impossible and unfounded way to demand royalties from another group.

Actually, Apple Reality Distortion Field notwithstanding, pretty much all patent royalties are based on a percentage.

This study puts the average royalty rate for a patent in the electronics industry at about 4.5%. The $1/device Apple is requesting would be about 0.2%. As way of comparison, Here are royalty rates other companies are asking for essential LTE patents. They range from 0.8% to 3%. Motorola's 2.25% is a bit on the high end but within the norm. Apple's requested 0.2% OTOH is off the scale at the low end.

Based on what 5 minutes of googling turned up, Apple is going to lose this, and lose it badly.

I was the guy who wrote this article. I have to say, I've had a few stories posted to Slashdot and it's always useful for feedback :) Just to clarify a few points though, in the picture, those little tin cans, Tumino actually did say they were telegraph keys. He had them on display next to an old antique one to show they're not hard to build. I guess the article was a bit babbly. It was written under a new column I started, basically just about people doing cool things with technology. I thought the ham radio guys were pretty cool, and I know that during the Arab Spring, when people were having their Internet shut down by governments, part of the care package released by Anonymous Operations taught people how to access the Internet over radio. So I thought this had some added relevance, since radio still does have some interesting uses when it comes to digital freedom, and you can do some pretty cool stuff with it. Also, sodium clouds do exist. They're pretty cool, actually: http://deep-red.sr.unh.edu/model/io/cloudescr.html

No, it was not the melting of ice in Greenland, it was the record low Arctic sea ice around nearly the whole basin that exposed a lot of extra sea water to the atmosphere that probably helped exacerbate the blocking high by changing the jet stream.

As far as the Greenland summit melting, the 150 year average is over the last 10,000 years but if you look at this chart you'll notice that most of the events were concentrated from 4,000 to 8,000 years ago and before the 1889 event it had been 700 years since the previous one. In fact in the last 2,000 years there have only been 6 of the events, an average of one every 333 years.

The only information that I know about is here...

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/08sep_radioactivemoon/

Out in deep space, radiation comes from all directions. On the Moon, you might expect the ground, at least, to provide some relief, with the solid body of the Moon blocking radiation from below. Not so.

When galactic cosmic rays collide with particles in the lunar surface, they trigger little nuclear reactions that release yet more radiation in the form of neutrons. The lunar surface itself is radioactive!

So which is worse for astronauts: cosmic rays from above or neutrons from below? Igor Mitrofanov, a scientist at the Institute for Space Research and the Russian Federal Space Agency, Moscow, offers a grim answer: "Both are worse."

They are attempting to quantify this effect with CRaTER or Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation. Basically, the CRaTER instrument is aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (which is currently orbiting the Moon). However, I haven't seen any specific reports on their findings on their official website http://crater.sr.unh.edu/, press reports indicate that initial finding aren't good...

In a surprising discovery, scientists have found that the moon itself is a source of potentially deadly radiation.

Measurements taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the number of high energy particles streaming in from space did not tail off closer to the moon's surface, as would be expected with the body of the moon blocking half the sky.

Rather, the cosmic rays created a secondary — and potentially more dangerous -- shower by blasting particles in the lunar soil which then become radioactive.

"The moon is a source of radiation," said Boston University researcher Harlan Spence, the lead scientist for LRO's cosmic ray telescope. "This was a bit unexpected."

While the moon blocks galactic cosmic rays to some extent, the hazards posed by the secondary radiation showers counter the shielding effects, Spence said at a press conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week.

Actually if you look at this graph you find that there was a 700 year gap between the 1889 melt event and the previous one during the MWP. The 150 year average is skewed by high frequency of the events during the earlier Holocene 4,000-8,000 years ago. Admittedly this data is from only one ice core but it is from the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Or for environmental monitoring like this one from the list. http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/design-architecture/are-non-military-drones-flying-into-regulatory-quagmire/4759
Here is my guess of what they are doing http://www.nasaepscor.unh.edu/projs.shtml
Snow melt run off surveys. Those little drones would be a lot cheaper than manned aircraft and safer.
Seems as if the Army Corp of Engineers are using them for none evil tasks.
 

Not that they are the first to figure this out: http://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/projects/2d_flow_vis.html

I can tell it's truly News for Nerds because I can barely understand what it's saying and it drops causal references to advanced mathematics

I recommend you start visiting arXiv then.

Are you suggesting the OP, a self-described interested lay person, learns or even mere follow mathematic research by reading arXiv? If so, WTF!?

arXiv is a pre-print archive of original research articles, not exactly a welcoming place for a non-mathematician (or non-subject specialist, e.g. physics, and computer science also use it). Even with an undergrad degree in mathematics, I find it a difficult (and/or useless) place to try to follow progress in the field, without the editorial assistants to filter the wheat from the chaff. And I've been reading original (first source) research papers since the mid-1990s in multiple research disciplines.

You might as well ask him to read Euclid's Elements in its original Greek. Heck, after the translation, it would be more accessible, as it is intended to be a textbook for learning.

I would rather suggest, try reading some of the mathematics journals that are intended to be more accessible, such as from MAA and AMS societies. Some are aimed at students of two-year and four-year "colleges" (aka polytechs / technical colleges and universities), while others are just interesting yet often accessible, such as Journal of Recreational Mathematics and Mathematics Magazine and online columns such as Kevin Devlin's Devlin's Angle.

In the more general sense, I would recommend popular math writers such as Ian Stewart, Simon Singh, Paul J. Nahin, the recently deceased Martin Gardner (slashdot), and many more authors that I cannot recall.

Unfortunately I can't think of any pop-math books or articles on linear algebra, in the vein of "e: The Story of a Number" (Maor), "An Imaginary Tale" (Nahin), "Flatland" (Abbott), "Flatterland" (Stwart), "A Mathematician's Apology" (Hardy), "Fermat's Last Theorm" / "Fermat's Engima" (US) (Singh), "Does God Play Dice?" (Stewart), "Chaos" (Gleick), and many others.

To wit, mathematics is I believe the only discipline where fourth year undergrad students take third or fourth year courses with "introduction" or "elementary" in their course titles. But I digress. My point is that one "problem" is that given mathematics long history, and that is has fascinated people across cultures throughout history, the subject has accumulated such a vast body of knowledge, so it is difficult to get a firm understanding on every field within mathematics. So feeling overwhelmed with all the facts and fields to learn is normal.

From your link - Women are victims of 85% of all cases of domestic violence. They don't dispute that number. They accept it and assert (with a complete absence of proof or even hinting that there exists any evidence at all) that men are victims of violence but they don't view that violence as a crime.

I guess you didn't follow the footnotes:

[17] Straus MA. The controversy over domestic violence by women: A methodological, theoretical,
and sociology of science analysis. In Arriaga XB and Oskamp S (eds.): Violence in Intimate
Relationships. Sage Publishers, 1999. http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS21.pdf

[18]Stets JE and Straus MA. Gender differences in reporting marital violence and its medical
and psychological consequences. In Straus MA and Gelles RJ (eds): Physical Violence in
American Families, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990. Table 15.

I suspect I found the link talking about the work you're referring to by Dr. Colin Groves: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jel/512/dogs_brains.html

The UNH-IOL is a neutral, third-party laboratory dedicated to testing data networking technologies through industry collaboration.

http://www.iol.unh.edu/

Despite the fact that spousal abusers are just as likely to be women and that the abused are just as likely to be men

Citation needed.

One citation

TWO! Two citations ha ha ha haaaa!

THREE! THREE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CITATIONS! ha ha ha haaaa [looks around as thunder rumbles and lightning flashes]

Lots more citations as well as discussion of the work done by Murray Strauss, Suzanne Steinmetz and Richard Gelles can be found at the domestic violence wiki

This research is decades old, started by the Dept. of Energy in the mid-70's in the wake of the '74 Arab oil embargo. Then there's this group who told me they had most of the hard problems solved and already had successful pilot tests. That was two years ago. So how can scale commercial still be 10 years off?

Because things always look easy and solved when all you have to is produce a lab bench version and then sit back and make claims you'll never be called on to prove. Those with real world experience know full well that making the numbers, as well as the production system, work on an industrial scale is a difficult problem... regardless of what you're producing.

This research is decades old, started by the Dept. of Energy in the mid-70's in the wake of the '74 Arab oil embargo. Then there's this group who told me they had most of the hard problems solved and already had successful pilot tests. That was two years ago. So how can scale commercial still be 10 years off?

I'm wondering if it isn't like the EV-1, GM's electric car. GM didn't want it, oil companies definitely didn't want it, parts manufacturers, mechanics, and state governments faced with losing fuel tax revenues didn't want it (at least right away). On the opposition side of algae oil would be the Saudis, who fund several prominent think tanks in D.C. that tend to be the home of retired politicians and a near endless supply of campaign cash. The oil companies making a lot of money off the status quo and just about anyone in the transportation pipeline.

It will be interesting to see how many players with an interest in the status quo will be inserting themselves into the development of algae oil.

Millions of little smog reducing machines stuck under millions of cars, which have to meet stringent weight/price/space requirements to be practical - or gigantic smokestack scrubbers like algae biofuel this one?

Trying to mop up all the problems from millions of cars is the real problem here.

Instead, let's work on moving to all electric cars. This will centralize the pollution at the power generators and then you can take whatever steps are necessary to minimize it without having to worry about catalytic converters and artificial trees.

I mean really, artificial tree/plants to remove CO2? Come on. There are easier solutions out there. Here's another one: Algae biodiesel.

If you don't like electric, go diesel. Then use algae farms to press for oil. It's a closed-loop CO2 system. Car burns fuel, CO2 goes into air. Biodiesel farm collects CO2 and sunshine in photosynthesis, makes fuel. Lather rinse repeat. Closed loop to CO2, just like mother nature does in a forest.

I applaud these guys for pitching a solution that works with what we have, but if we really want a solution that speaks to the future we need to ditch what we have and try for better. Mopping up the water from the sink overflowing is a temporary solution - we should be working on turning the sink off.

Read that again. $14 a gallon in MAINTENANCE costs, not total cost for fuel production.

Right, that's why petrosun is currently operating an algae-to-biodiesel plant. Because it cannot be made profitable! Clearly you are teh sooper genuis!

Beyond that, we'd need millions of acres of temerate climate or indoor growth facilities, producing hundreds of billions of tons of algae a year in order to meet fuel demands.

Not really. You can grow algae in the desert using saltwater. Don't let the facts interfere with your astroturfing, though. The ponds could be covered with plastic tents, but then you have to circulate air, a non-trivial problem but one which is even harder in "closed" reactor designs.

We're also talking algae being competition for oil at values not less than $800/bbl, given a few more decades of reasearch yet.

Also patently false. Even the US DOE let us know years ago that biodiesel from algae should be profitable by the time diesel fuel hit $3/gallon. Nothing much has changed since, except that the technologies for making biodiesel from algae have improved since then.

If you have any more lies to spread, you could just save them. I can keep coming up with citations all day.

In the more recent US cases, it's only been used on specific prisoners (such as KSM) who were believed to have knowledge of imminent attacks against civilian targets.

Yeah, when the prisoners were innocent the USA hung them by the wrists and beat them to death.

In early versions of Netscape, you could link to a remote font of your own choosing. The font-copyright people were up in arms about this, Microsoft didn't implement it in IE, and it was taken out of Netscape. That's why fonts on the web suck so much. You're either stuck with the lowest common denominator of fonts (Times Roman, Arial, Courier, or Comic Sans MS), or you can put a font into an image, which is silly but standard practice.

That's how we got into this mess.

Here's an example of a page that uses downloadable fonts. Unless you have a very old browser, it will look ugly. There's a more recent attempt to work around the problem with Flash. Wrong answer.

You mean like all those entities currently running it that haven't had accidents?

And that still haven't figured out what to do with the waste?

Waste, safety, weapons proliferation, and fuel sarcity make uranium/plutonium fission a dead end. We should abandon them and put the resources for nuclear into developing fusion and accelerator-driven "energy amplifier" systems, as well as making better use of that large fusion reactor conveniently located 93 million miles away.

What we need is Biodiesel from algae http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html. Doesn't need farm land, helps bioremediate agracultural waste. Doable with technology we have today.

One of the first was the Dodge ESX, which managed 72mpg by the third prototype.

Another promising one is the VW Golf disesl hybrid. Claims to reach just under 70mpg. This one might become commercially available.

And back on topic, I own a 2007 Prius. And I would have been just as happy to buy one of these Ford Diesels. Probably happier, since I believe that gasoline is eventually going away. Biodiesel is the future. Here's my favorite breakdown of a biodiesel future.

Ford is being absolutely positively stupid. Sell your Ford stock ASAP. Any company that makes decisions this poorly is going out of business.

I have not taken the time to really dig up proper citations.

Eivind.

>Because Islam forbids birth control

Um, no it doesn't. http://www.unh.edu/msa/familyp.htm

In fact there are condom factories in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and more or less every other Middle East nation. Now, the attitudes of the people regarding birth control is another matter, but please get your facts straight.

This 21+ year old article basically describes all this, too bad the PI is not old enough to remember. But at least he pushed getting the spacecraft to gather hard data rather than models.

http://space.unh.edu/~rlk/research/reprints/jgr_92_7471_1987_image.pdf

Well these are pilot projects with a very specific function - clean up factory emissions. Other setups will have different net carbon emissions, of course.

Here's an interesting study.

In that, they study open ponds full of salt water to get their numbers. The CO2 comes from the air directly, same way a field of grass works. Different project, different goals - different carbon footprint.

As for the pressed biomass left over, it makes fantastic fertilizer.

Really, the entire algae/biodiesel thing is just organic solar. Same way the rest of nature works, pretty much.

Algae Biodiesel not only will use up CO2, it will
also produce fuel from less than 2% of the surface used
for food.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

We have to reduce consumption regardless.

No, we do not have to reduce consumption. I see this fallacious argument everywhere. What we have to do is either reduce consumption or develop sustainable energy. There is no need to reduce consumption if:
fusion
non-food biofuel
Thermal depolymerization
molten salt
or any other of several technologies, or any combination of the above come to fruiction. Are you seriously proposing that there will never be a source of energy sufficient to maintain the world at first-country usage levels? Wear your mortification-colored glasses if you want, but I say again, we do not need to reduce consumption.

What about piping it through large algae tanks? yea the tank would have to ensure that no leaks would happen, but you could kill two birds with one stone, hell you'd even have all the same old corporate cronies around to

Introduction

The O-Prize is designed to realize the great potential of oil from algae with the lowest risk over the shortest time.

The potential of algae oil is to, in stages:

1) Enhance neurological development via nutritional supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids and,
2) Provide an abundant renewable source of green or environmentally friendly fuel oil.

A fixed dollar amount is withdrawn from the prize fund each month to purchase algae oil from the lowest price source(s) certified for the target market. That quantity of algae oil is then resold to the target market and the funds are added to the prize fund. When the lowest price certified sources can compete with the target market, that stage of the O-Prize has finished.

The O-Prize is designed to let algae cultivation techniques mature in two stages, building both technology and popular support for both environmentally friendly and humanitarian purposes.

Look into BioDiesel and then tell me there's no way to make a dent in it. We could become an energy producing nation if we wanted to.

Here is a really impressive link for Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae that outlines how we could produce enough energy from Biodiesel for the nation.

The operating costs (including power consumption, labor, chemicals, and fixed capital costs (taxes, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and return on investment) worked out to $12,000 per hectare. That would equate to $46.2 billion per year for all the algae farms, to yield all the oil feedstock necessary for the entire country. Compare that to the $100-150 billion the US spends each year just on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries, with all of that money leaving the US economy.

Now, if we could only get our shit together...

"As the authors of the research upon which these numbers are based, we believe these statistics often have been misunderstood. The following points are important caveats that those using or quoting this statistic need to understand in order to avoid further confusion."

Full Text: http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/internet-crimes/1in7Youth.pdf

"Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in" ...much verbiage removed.. "roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals."

From http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

/frank

"Spent fuel" is hardly spent - most of the original fissionables are still in the bundle, waiting for wastes to be removed and new fuel bundles made. There are hundreds of highly-enriched U-235 reactors that can be recycled to make commercial fuel (lightly-enriched with U-235).

Some fairly smart people made very bad decisions in the 70's that haunt us today.

Have a look at the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) http://www.gnep.energy.gov/gnepPublicInformation.html for a plan to get rid of the nuclear waste we have (by burning it in reactors), and supply a lot of energy worldwide.

As an aside, we need to think about multiple sources of energy - Perhaps bio-diesel from algae http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html for transportation. Solar and Nuclear for electricity and heating.

Conservation via insulating, is another great solution. My home has R-46 insulation. Try to get someone to build one of those for ya! "No can do!", says the builder, because he's never done it.

We're between a rock and a hard place with Natural Gas and Propane this winter - demand has outstripped the supply, and (us) idiots in California and other places built Nat Gas fueled electrical plants - the most expensive fuel on planet earth and we use it for base load. Incredibly stupid.

I read an article recently that most of the Sierra Club consists of geezers. Since they kind of missed the point on a lot off issues, drinking bad ju-ju koolaid, it's probably best that they trundle off in their birks to history and leave Environmentalism to those who can think things through. We can use technology (and computer modeling using _all_ of the relevant variables) to peer through the haze and find good solutions for the future.

Yeah - I'ma geezer, too. Let's rock.

The problem with Bush on environmental issues is that he's all talk. The environmental policies he promotes may sound good up front, but as with so much of what he says, things look worse and worse the more you look at them.

In 2003 he proposed a "hydrogen fuel initiative". Sounds good. But what if instead of wasting money on something that won't be feasible for ten or fifteen years we concentrate on high-yield biofuels like algae?

You say in his 2006 state of the union address he heavily promoted biofuels? Sounds good. But Bush and the rest of the government seem to back corn ethanol exclusively. Which is a shame since it's practically the least energy-dense crop possible, and there are questions as the whether or not the energy you get is worth the energy put in.

And let's not even talk about the Bush administration's clear skies initiative and clean water act.

To me it's obvious that the problem is a lack of scientific understanding in the areas of the government responsible for implementing policy. Bush's solution is to throw money at things that sound good but aren't practical (giving him a false image of environmental stewardship), while paving the way for big business. Congress doesn't appear to have any idea of the science behind the mandates they argue about. We need realistic and common sense discourse about what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately this topic is too politicized for that. In the end everyone loses.

good point.
More details about Hydrogen vs Bio-disel here http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

There's another bonus with oil producing algae, it can grow in brackish water and eat sewage.

What algae lacks is a powerful lobby in Washington like the corporate farms and corn sweetener have. It would also threaten a large volume of the petroleum supply chain. Since so much of our foreign policy seems centered around protecting Saudi Arabia's cash flow (when we're not arming Israel), I can't imagine our government getting behind algae production.

Not like energy independence should be a national strategic priority or anything.

It would mean we'd need to put more diesel vehicles on the road but who says we have to have a single source model? With the hydrogen bonus from the algae oil, a little ethanol to keep the farm lobby happy, and oil producing algae we could certainly retire a few of those super tankers in the oil pipeline.

With the right financial incentives and treating it like a strategic priority we could have large scale production online in five years. We could potentially be getting the majority of our transportation fuel from algae in ten years if we really committed to it. I don't mean a Bush commitment, I mean a Kennedy man-on-the-moon commitment.

All LEDs inversely function as light detectors, even while emitting light. All that is really needed is a display controller that is designed to detect this reverse current flow. It would be interesting to see such an application. The only thing I have seen so far is a traditional LED matrix that works like a touch screen to turn each individual LED on and off.

Don't believe me? Here is a primer:

http://mvh.sr.unh.edu/mvhinvestigations/light_inve stigations.htm

Land area isn't really a problem. Problems with agricultural methods usually get in the way long before arable land gets scarce. For example, does this fuel-crop farming require fertilizer? If so, where does it come from? Hopefully not industrially manufactured fertilizer... Perhaps the biggest hurdle that few consider is water for irrigation. Preservation of fresh water reserves is a fairly important topic today, and adding another 10 million acres or so isn't going to improve things.

Perhaps the best long-term solution would be to use or engineer plants that can tolerate salt well, and then you can use seawater for irrigation. Algaes and sea grasses are obviously well suited for this purpose. There is even optimistic calculations to use specially selected, high-oil algae for biodiesel production, which would go a long way towards our energy needs if they ever get that working.
=Smidge=

but for some reason the link didn't work. Maybe I forgot to close a tag.

But algae is still your friend.