I certainly wouldn't rely on any of this for my own health
You would if you had no other choice. I went to several Medical Doctors and seven chiropractors. The doctors all said I just needed to exercise a little. The chiropractors all thought they could help, but they didn't.
Eventually I met an 'old' 10th-degree black belt who thought highly of the Edgar Cayce readings. I started buying books (mostly at used bookstores). This same black belt also thought highly of Donna Eden's system of Energy Medicine. I had a session with one of Donna's oldest T.A.'s. It was the best thing I ever did for myself.
Anyways, to make a long story short, after much research I decided Edgar Cayce would have sent me to an Osteopath for manipulation. I met Robert Zieve, M.D. at a booksigning, and he told me who the best Osteopath in the state was. So I went to that D.O., and he's worked some miracles for me.
See my other post in this thread for links and my wife's experience with the same doctor.
Re:I agree. But that's a different problem
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It's true that "alternative medicine" rakes in billions of dollars. But the "mainstream medicine" championed by skeptical scoffers rakes in hundreds of billions. I'm sure the scoffers are bankrolled by someone.
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I'm a little late to the discussion, but this I have to say...
The other side of the coin is that a person can be feeling pain or discomfort that is "left over" from an injury that has already healed. Perhaps they changed their posture or gait after the injury and never readjusted after it healed.
The body stores trauma from an injury in the fascia. The fascial tissue is the web that holds the body together - most people are familiar with it as the thin tissue that's between the fat and the meat on a steak.
The review mentioned Chiropractic, but didn't say if the book said anything about Osteopathic Manipulation. Both use hands-on treatment. Chiropractors' specificity in treatment is like using a sledgehammer. Basically, chiropractors are taught to 'crack bones', applying pressure to move spinal vertebrae back into place. Some chiropractors learn more advanced techniques after graduation. Proper Osteopathic manipulation is like using a sniper rifle.
The basic premise of Osteopathic Medicine is that structure and function are interrelated. If a bone is out of its proper place the organs affected won't work as optimally as they should. For example, a displaced rib might be exerting pressure on the spleen, which would compromise immune function.
The founder of Osteopathic Medicine, Andrew Taylor Still, said that "Muscles move bones, and nerves control muscles", and taught his students how to use their hands to calm the nerves, thereby improving the body's structure. One of Dr. Still's early students, Dr. Sutherland, advanced Dr. Still's teachings greatly, and others have since built on Dr. Sutherland's work.
There's a lot to cover on this topic, and I can't do the field justice in a short slashdot post. If you'd like more information, Eric Dolgin, D.O.'s site has some excellent information. Also see Chapter 2 of Andrew Weil's book Spontaneous Healing (your library should have a copy).
I will add my anecdote here. I took my then-new girlfriend to my Osteopath after she got back from Mexico in Feb. 2007. It was a class trip, and she'd had a rough time. She could hardly turn her head because of a problem with her neck. Lymph nodes in the neck were swelling up, and she wanted to go to the hospital. I convinced her to hold off for a couple days, so we could get to Dr. Davidson 100 miles away first.
He had a student with him that day. After having her lie face down on her table, he said that a rib or two were out of place. (This was most likely caused by her carrying a heavy sack across the one shoulder for a week or two). He did his thing to put the ribs back in their places, and said that the lymph node should go down over the next couple days. Since she was a new patient, he said that she should get an X-ray if the problem persisted longer than a week, just to cover his ass.
Over the next week, the swollen lymph nodes went away, and her normal ability to turn her head returned.
The chinese government has decided that, in the future, all phones will be required to use the humble USB port for charging.
I have a Motorola phone with the USB port, and was quite distraught to find that it wouldn't charge when I plugged it into my computer. WTF? There's a russian site online that shows how to short a USB cable so it can charge. I eventually found that if I installed Motorola's drivers it'd charge just fine.
Another bad side effect of SIVs is making it much more difficult to be lenient on mortgages.... Much better, therefore, to write off, say, 25% of the mortgage without foreclosing and leave the borrower in possession. But if you have sold off the mortgage in many slices to several other investors, this becomes effectively impossible.
But this also opens a huge legal loophole that is allowing some people to keep possession of their home without making mortgage payments. See Who Owns Your Home? for a link to the Reuters story.
... To understand it, let's get clear on what constitutes a "good" or a "service." In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I babysit your children for free, economists don't count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, "I watched my neighbor's kids this morning, so please give me food." But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a "service." GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier....
Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?
Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.
In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.
The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item....
getting funding for such heretical ideas is not easy.
So true - prions and any other field of scientific inquiry... Funding flows easily to 'safe' experiments, while controversial lines of inquiry get starved. The tokamak & the new collider (LHC?) come to mind, whereas Cold Fusion gets starved for attention & funds... Recent developments (the japanese team's May demonstration of a reproducible cold fusion setup) are making Cold Fusionistas impossible to ignore for much longer.
However, I do believe and hope that the truth of the situation will become apparent and "Science" will have some serious questions to ask itself... how can we have been so wrong about this for so long..?
Western science's accepted theories undergo semi-regular revolutionary revisions - see Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It seems that the world is right on the cusp of another series of dramatic revolutions.
... Mark Purdey was, of course, the British beef farmer who had a different theory about Mad Cow. In the 80's the British government required all cattle to be dosed with an Organo-phostate pesticide, to combat a warble fly epidemic (these bugs punch holes in cattle skin, making the hides less suitable for leather seats).
Purdey was an organic farmer, and sued to protect his right to keep synthetic pesticides away from his herd. He won. A few years later Chernobyl went off, and some time after that the first Mad Cow epidemic occured. Purdey's cows were mostly immune. He had a few mad cows, but these were mostly transplants to his herd which had, presumably, been dosed with the pestacide.
As the years went by, Purdey turned into a scientist himself, doing the research that the british government wouldn't do because of their potential liability in having caused the mad-cow epidemic (by require farmers to poison their herds).
Basically, the pesticide used chellated (removed) copper from the treated body. Somehow manganese substitutes for copper, but it isn't a good subsitute. The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl didn't help things either. It's been years since I first read Purdey's site, so I don't remember the details.
He commented that the Mad Cow in Washington (the northwest state) came from a copper-deficient pasture in Canada, into an area where quite a bit of nuclear weapons research had been done in decades past. The mad deer in Colorado also occupy a site with extensive radiologic environmental poisoning.
So basically, Purdey's theory is that prions are an effect of environmental poisoning, not the cause of Mad-Cow-esque disease.
Purdey is deceased now (brain cancer?), but his site's still live. Definitely recommended reading.
They're both pretty nice compact cars that get fantastic mileage (~34mpg) without any fancy hybrid stuff.
My 1994 Honda Civic VX gets between 32 (worst-ever, uphill one-way) and 62 miles per gallon (470 and 480 freeway miles round-trip). Over the last 29,242 miles, I've averaged 44.66mpg (45.37 if I correct for the larger tires that were on the car when I got it). The car has 162,000 miles, and I'm sure I'd've done better if Arizona wasn't so hilly, and if I hadn't kept the speed below 72mph for so many freeway miles (it really does get better mileage at 75mph vs 71mph, due to the change in the camshaft timing @2500rpm).
I've tried lots of different brainwave stuff, and don't get much of an effect.
But I bought a few of Robert Monroe's Hemisync Gateway Experience discs for my girlfriend, and they work very well for her. Now she's having lucid dreams or OBEs most nights.
They'd work for me too, if only I could relax my physical body. I'm getting close to figuring out how to balance my poor disheveled autonomic nervous system - I expect I'll be able to influence my brainwaves like a normal human...
p.s. Monroe's CDs are also available via Amazon.com's mp3 store, for $2/cd. At prices like those, why not give the first CD a try? Probably ought to get a used copy of Monroe's book, Far Journeys, for a little background.
Wikipedia says that Pons & Fleishman's original Cold Fusion experiment was duplicated, way back when, but not universally. Duplication is tough when you're trailblazing and don't have a map. But now this Japanese guy says he can make it happen every time.
Skip the Volt & expensive batteries - I'm buying a cheap Chevy Suburban, replacing the powertrain with an electric motor, and powering it with a Mr. Cold Fusion. Hah!
The income tax is to pay the interest on the money supply. Nothing more, nothing less. Some radicals say it makes more sense to have the money supply be interest free. Then we'd reward those who want to work and save, and we couldn't have that.
The difference is your government... controls the flow of money and not some mining interests
The Congress has no control whatsoever over the money supply. The Federal Reserve, which is really a quasi-public institution, is totally unaccountable. Its books have never been audited, and all the congress can do is call the governors up for hearings. Wall Street gets to pick which appointees are acceptable and which are not, so even that avenue of control is cut off.
That's why since 1929, we haven't had a catastrophic, systemic banking failure.
Welcome to today. IndyMac went down last week, Fannie & Freddie are on the executioner's block, banks are losing money hand over fist (they've been able to hide it pretty well, for now). Citibank and all the other big banks have lost billions.
Luckily things are getting ugly now, instead of after the election...
I didn't mention it in my original posts because a lot of people believe that Low Energy Nuclear Reactions are unpossible, and they instantly stop thinking when the subject is brought up.
I talked a bit with a scientist who said his doctorate was applicable to Cold Fusion some 5 years ago. Like the article says, there is a core group of scientists who are plugging away at "impossible" technologies, and their discoveries have almost reached the point of commercial implementation. Soon, very soon, we'll be free of the Energy ball & chain.
There are many reasons why people work as much as they do, but the cost of energy has little to do with it.
Think about all the people with boring/repetitive jobs - factory workers who do the same thing all day every day 5 days a week, 50+ weeks a year, fast-food workers, etc. They wage-slave away because they have to, not because they love working on the cardboard box assembly line. If their energy bills, car payments, house payments, food payments, etc, were all a fraction of what they currently pay, what would motivate them to work at Taco Bell or the cardboard box factory for more than 10 hours a week?
Food is provided by nature for free, all we have to do is pay humans to plant the seeds, nurture the plants until they're ready for harvest, pick them, and transport them to market. Energy is a tax at every level of the food-enterprise, and eliminating the energy tax would allow farmers and the other people in the food chain to collect most of the money that gets spent therein.
The democratization of energy portends a seismic shift in the economy. Over the next 5-10 years, energy is going to become cheaply available at small-scales, where small groups of people can pool small amounts of money to create their own energy companies. 1000 ppl x $1500 is $1.5million - enough for a megawatt of NanoSolar's panels, inverters and all. 1kw is not enough to power an average house, but families could buy into the local solar farm as they work & save, a kilowatt at a time...
I don't understand the reasoning for such a restriction, since the possibility of selling more than you buy would encourage wider adoption.
This is the reason. There are three problems with individuals (citizens, if you prefer) persuing their own personal Energy Liberation. One is easily solvable; the other two are not.
Freedom from the electric company is one aspect of Liberation Theology; Valcent Products' technology offers the possibility of a BioDiesel Cooperative, where individuals could buy a "plastic bag" to hang at the local Algae Farm, completely cutting Wall Street out of the transportation energy marketplace. (There are other options coming down the pipe to cut Big Oil out of the picture -- I'm just listing this one because it's the most direct substitution I've yet heard about.)
As the cost of energy plummets from the commodity rate (where you pay for every watt-hour/gallon consumed) to the... investment level (where you pay once, and for irregular maintenance), individuals will have a lot more time on their hands... How will they spend their time, if they don't have to spend so much time to pay for energy (heating, light, transportation - I believe the statistic is 500 calories of energy to get 1 strawberry from California to New York in the winter)?
Government revenues will fall like a rock. With people working less, income taxes receipts will fall like a brick. However will the government motivate us to slave away if we don't have to?
Also, a good chunk (300 billion?) of federal revenue comes from leasing lands containing hydrocarbons to Wall Street. Once we've cut Wall Street out of the picture, there goes that honeypot. How will the U.S. Federal Government finance the interest on the money supply, much less station troops on bases and outposts in 100+ countries?
Utility companies have traditionally paid good dividends. How will we support people whose incomes depend on those dividends? With significantly reduced cost of living, pensioners won't be a big problem. But private golf courses don't mow themselves...
I'm sure there are other problems with Energy Liberation, but these are just the three I've been thinking about...
Thanks for the list. While not biomass, my favorite up-and-coming anti-oil-monopoly device is the microwave that turns plastic back into oil. I guess they're commercially available now.
though if you grew algae in an adjacent tank you could probably use that as your feedstock and harvest CO2 from the air. Valcent has their high density vertical bioreactor... They have a prototype in El Paso, Texas that yields some insane amount of oil.
Standard Oil has finally committed suicide by allowing prices to rise too high. Energy is becoming democratized at last!
When banks collateralized their mortgages into Asset Backed Securities, they usually lost the paperwork. And if they don't have a document trail proving that they own the house, they can't collect on Foreclosure Day.
One of the few things the fed has near total control over is the money supply, and that allow them essentially to prevent deflation under any circumstances. Mish has pointed out that the Fed is a paper tiger. Bernake has promised to print dollars and drop them from helicopters, but he can't do that legally. All the fed can do is lend money out, and there's no longer any more "greater fools" who are interested in taking out speculative loans.
This is how the author makes his living - everyone has to support themselves somehow, you know. If he gave his insights away for free, he wouldn't have nearly as much time to devote to his specialty as he does.
I wrote a diary on k5 a few years back which referenced Shadow Stats, which linked to an interview that links to a fuller interview of John Williams, the guy behind the Shadow Stats site.
My impression is that while Mr. Williams is quite right about the government mangling the statistics, he's wrong about the long-term implications (inflation forevermore). I like Mish of the Global Economic Analysis blog's take: he's been saying for some time that the end-game of current economic developments is massive deflation, as all the loans in the economy go bad one at a time, in a sort of cascading system failure. We're now seeing the deflation prediction come to pass - while Gas & food are skyrocketing, other assets (housing, etc) and prices are dropping fast, as homeowners and businesses struggle to find buyers at any price. This is what you'd expect if the amount of money available in the economy (read: available for the everyday working Joe to spend - the trust fund manager who made $1billion last year doesn't count) was decreasing.
For the record, I don't subscribe to Mr. Williams' newsletter - much too poor for that right now.
Firefly Energy's new advanced Lead-acid battery is suitable for use in Hybrids. Energy capacity of NiMH, without the nickel and a fraction of the lead. The key innovation is replacing the lead plates with carbon foam.
As neat as hybrid/electric cars are, they don't do much to solve the energy dilema, because there are already hundreds of millions of hydrocarbon burners on the road today - 200+ million in the United States alone. Tom Kasmer's Hydristor offers an intriguing potential to retrofit the entire fleet for a few thousand dollars apiece.
As I understand it, the Hydristor is basically a infinitely-variable hydraulic transmission that stores energy in a pressurized oil tank. When the operator wants to accelerate, this stored pressure is drawn down to spin the wheels. In the retrofit configuration, the car's transmission is gutted and the Hydristor replaces the torque converter.
More info on the Wikipedia... Most interesting, to me, is the potential to increase the efficiency of the geothermal heat pump. Tom Kasmer has posted on a continuously variable transmission yahoo! group - check there for more technical details.
(p.s. third time I've written this post - lost the last two versions trying to log in the middle of typing. Whoops! The dynamic login feature needs fixing, methinks - first time I hit 'login' at the top, and the second time I used the 'options' button below which gave me the login dialog.
Like I said, I'm going to look into doing it for myself, but my suspicion is that the reason we're not all already doing this is because it just doesn't work. I think the reason is that the technology is only just now becoming affordable. For example, Nanosolar just started printing their solar panels in December 2007. Their target of $1/watt is a fraction of the $4.60/watt panel you linked to. Suppose you needed 2kilowatts for your home... For a nanosolar panels that's $2000 plus the inverter/etc, whereas your link is $9200 + shipping + inverter/etc.
Solar panels are only good during the day... And Firefly Energy is only just now starting to ship products with their advanced lead-acid battery technology to run your computer at night.
Between Nanosolar's panels and Firefly's batteries, we are now able to get the same size solar system for 1/5 or 1/8th the cost of this time last year. Neverminding that all of Nanosolar's first year of panels have already been purchased, and that Firefly's batteries aren't yet shipping in quantity...
Geothermal heat pumps are another overlooked technology... I'd think a retrofit would be pretty easy: dig a 10 foot hole in your backyard, put in a container of some sort for coolant, and retrofit your AC condenser coils to bathe in pool of continuously circulating geothermally-cooled coolant.
I'd guess that only about half of the human monkeys we see walking around every day have real souls linked up with them. I'm afraid that it's much worse than that. In Power Vs. Force, David Hawkins tells of his findings about being able to rate individual conciousnesses on a scale of 1-to-1000, with 200 ('courage') being the cutoff between animals and those who are more truely human. Somewhere between 82 and 85% of our species don't make the cut. It's not that those bodies aren't animated too, just that their owners have not yet discovered Courage.
In the course of Dr. Hawkins' testing, he determined that a critical watermark of human development was at level 200 on his consciousness scale of one to 1000. Those who calibrated at level 200 or below are oriented in their consciousness to force-related behaviors which is destructive. These are the masses who have been labeled by others as "the walking dead" or "human animals". By comparison, those who have climbed above the 200 mark, begin to work with true power and utilize constructive behaviors. These are the awakening and have earned the designation of being called true human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice post. I do have one thing to say, though:
I certainly wouldn't rely on any of this for my own health
You would if you had no other choice. I went to several Medical Doctors and seven chiropractors. The doctors all said I just needed to exercise a little. The chiropractors all thought they could help, but they didn't.
Eventually I met an 'old' 10th-degree black belt who thought highly of the Edgar Cayce readings. I started buying books (mostly at used bookstores). This same black belt also thought highly of Donna Eden's system of Energy Medicine. I had a session with one of Donna's oldest T.A.'s. It was the best thing I ever did for myself.
Anyways, to make a long story short, after much research I decided Edgar Cayce would have sent me to an Osteopath for manipulation. I met Robert Zieve, M.D. at a booksigning, and he told me who the best Osteopath in the state was. So I went to that D.O., and he's worked some miracles for me.
See my other post in this thread for links and my wife's experience with the same doctor.
It's true that "alternative medicine" rakes in billions of dollars. But the "mainstream medicine" championed by skeptical scoffers rakes in hundreds of billions. I'm sure the scoffers are bankrolled by someone.
I'm a little late to the discussion, but this I have to say...
The other side of the coin is that a person can be feeling pain or discomfort that is "left over" from an injury that has already healed. Perhaps they changed their posture or gait after the injury and never readjusted after it healed.
The body stores trauma from an injury in the fascia. The fascial tissue is the web that holds the body together - most people are familiar with it as the thin tissue that's between the fat and the meat on a steak.
The review mentioned Chiropractic, but didn't say if the book said anything about Osteopathic Manipulation. Both use hands-on treatment. Chiropractors' specificity in treatment is like using a sledgehammer. Basically, chiropractors are taught to 'crack bones', applying pressure to move spinal vertebrae back into place. Some chiropractors learn more advanced techniques after graduation. Proper Osteopathic manipulation is like using a sniper rifle.
The basic premise of Osteopathic Medicine is that structure and function are interrelated. If a bone is out of its proper place the organs affected won't work as optimally as they should. For example, a displaced rib might be exerting pressure on the spleen, which would compromise immune function.
The founder of Osteopathic Medicine, Andrew Taylor Still, said that "Muscles move bones, and nerves control muscles", and taught his students how to use their hands to calm the nerves, thereby improving the body's structure. One of Dr. Still's early students, Dr. Sutherland, advanced Dr. Still's teachings greatly, and others have since built on Dr. Sutherland's work.
There's a lot to cover on this topic, and I can't do the field justice in a short slashdot post. If you'd like more information, Eric Dolgin, D.O.'s site has some excellent information. Also see Chapter 2 of Andrew Weil's book Spontaneous Healing (your library should have a copy).
I will add my anecdote here. I took my then-new girlfriend to my Osteopath after she got back from Mexico in Feb. 2007. It was a class trip, and she'd had a rough time. She could hardly turn her head because of a problem with her neck. Lymph nodes in the neck were swelling up, and she wanted to go to the hospital. I convinced her to hold off for a couple days, so we could get to Dr. Davidson 100 miles away first.
He had a student with him that day. After having her lie face down on her table, he said that a rib or two were out of place. (This was most likely caused by her carrying a heavy sack across the one shoulder for a week or two). He did his thing to put the ribs back in their places, and said that the lymph node should go down over the next couple days. Since she was a new patient, he said that she should get an X-ray if the problem persisted longer than a week, just to cover his ass.
Over the next week, the swollen lymph nodes went away, and her normal ability to turn her head returned.
Just an anecdote, doesn't mean anything. Right?
The chinese government has decided that, in the future, all phones will be required to use the humble USB port for charging.
I have a Motorola phone with the USB port, and was quite distraught to find that it wouldn't charge when I plugged it into my computer. WTF? There's a russian site online that shows how to short a USB cable so it can charge. I eventually found that if I installed Motorola's drivers it'd charge just fine.
Another bad side effect of SIVs is making it much more difficult to be lenient on mortgages. ... Much better, therefore, to write off, say, 25% of the mortgage without foreclosing and leave the borrower in possession. But if you have sold off the mortgage in many slices to several other investors, this becomes effectively impossible.
But this also opens a huge legal loophole that is allowing some people to keep possession of their home without making mortgage payments. See Who Owns Your Home? for a link to the Reuters story.
very interesting anecdote - thanks for posting.
like this, for example.
People used to do most things for free. See Money and the Criss of Civilization:
Thanks for the comment.
getting funding for such heretical ideas is not easy.
So true - prions and any other field of scientific inquiry... Funding flows easily to 'safe' experiments, while controversial lines of inquiry get starved. The tokamak & the new collider (LHC?) come to mind, whereas Cold Fusion gets starved for attention & funds... Recent developments (the japanese team's May demonstration of a reproducible cold fusion setup) are making Cold Fusionistas impossible to ignore for much longer.
However, I do believe and hope that the truth of the situation will become apparent and "Science" will have some serious questions to ask itself... how can we have been so wrong about this for so long..?
Western science's accepted theories undergo semi-regular revolutionary revisions - see Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It seems that the world is right on the cusp of another series of dramatic revolutions.
... Mark Purdey was, of course, the British beef farmer who had a different theory about Mad Cow. In the 80's the British government required all cattle to be dosed with an Organo-phostate pesticide, to combat a warble fly epidemic (these bugs punch holes in cattle skin, making the hides less suitable for leather seats).
Purdey was an organic farmer, and sued to protect his right to keep synthetic pesticides away from his herd. He won. A few years later Chernobyl went off, and some time after that the first Mad Cow epidemic occured. Purdey's cows were mostly immune. He had a few mad cows, but these were mostly transplants to his herd which had, presumably, been dosed with the pestacide.
As the years went by, Purdey turned into a scientist himself, doing the research that the british government wouldn't do because of their potential liability in having caused the mad-cow epidemic (by require farmers to poison their herds).
Basically, the pesticide used chellated (removed) copper from the treated body. Somehow manganese substitutes for copper, but it isn't a good subsitute. The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl didn't help things either. It's been years since I first read Purdey's site, so I don't remember the details.
He commented that the Mad Cow in Washington (the northwest state) came from a copper-deficient pasture in Canada, into an area where quite a bit of nuclear weapons research had been done in decades past. The mad deer in Colorado also occupy a site with extensive radiologic environmental poisoning.
So basically, Purdey's theory is that prions are an effect of environmental poisoning, not the cause of Mad-Cow-esque disease.
Purdey is deceased now (brain cancer?), but his site's still live. Definitely recommended reading.
They're both pretty nice compact cars that get fantastic mileage (~34mpg) without any fancy hybrid stuff.
My 1994 Honda Civic VX gets between 32 (worst-ever, uphill one-way) and 62 miles per gallon (470 and 480 freeway miles round-trip). Over the last 29,242 miles, I've averaged 44.66mpg (45.37 if I correct for the larger tires that were on the car when I got it). The car has 162,000 miles, and I'm sure I'd've done better if Arizona wasn't so hilly, and if I hadn't kept the speed below 72mph for so many freeway miles (it really does get better mileage at 75mph vs 71mph, due to the change in the camshaft timing @2500rpm).
My Civic VX fuel log spreadsheet - there is a graph of MPG on sheet 3.
COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF FUEL ECONOMY IMPROVEMENTS IN 1992 HONDA CIVIC HATCHBACKS, by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
My car has a lean-burn feature, whereas the new Fit doesn't, due to pollution regulations (my car puts out extra nitrous oxides, I guess).
I've tried lots of different brainwave stuff, and don't get much of an effect.
But I bought a few of Robert Monroe's Hemisync Gateway Experience discs for my girlfriend, and they work very well for her. Now she's having lucid dreams or OBEs most nights.
They'd work for me too, if only I could relax my physical body. I'm getting close to figuring out how to balance my poor disheveled autonomic nervous system - I expect I'll be able to influence my brainwaves like a normal human...
p.s. Monroe's CDs are also available via Amazon.com's mp3 store, for $2/cd. At prices like those, why not give the first CD a try? Probably ought to get a used copy of Monroe's book, Far Journeys, for a little background.
Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?
Wikipedia says that Pons & Fleishman's original Cold Fusion experiment was duplicated, way back when, but not universally. Duplication is tough when you're trailblazing and don't have a map. But now this Japanese guy says he can make it happen every time.
Skip the Volt & expensive batteries - I'm buying a cheap Chevy Suburban, replacing the powertrain with an electric motor, and powering it with a Mr. Cold Fusion. Hah!
The income tax is to pay the interest on the money supply. Nothing more, nothing less. Some radicals say it makes more sense to have the money supply be interest free. Then we'd reward those who want to work and save, and we couldn't have that.
The difference is your government ... controls the flow of money and not some mining interests
The Congress has no control whatsoever over the money supply. The Federal Reserve, which is really a quasi-public institution, is totally unaccountable. Its books have never been audited, and all the congress can do is call the governors up for hearings. Wall Street gets to pick which appointees are acceptable and which are not, so even that avenue of control is cut off.
That's why since 1929, we haven't had a catastrophic, systemic banking failure.
Welcome to today. IndyMac went down last week, Fannie & Freddie are on the executioner's block, banks are losing money hand over fist (they've been able to hide it pretty well, for now). Citibank and all the other big banks have lost billions.
Luckily things are getting ugly now, instead of after the election...
For that you need concentrated energy generation capacity
Distributed Nuclear power is on its way too. There was a demonstration of Cold Fusion in Japan in May.
I didn't mention it in my original posts because a lot of people believe that Low Energy Nuclear Reactions are unpossible, and they instantly stop thinking when the subject is brought up.
I talked a bit with a scientist who said his doctorate was applicable to Cold Fusion some 5 years ago. Like the article says, there is a core group of scientists who are plugging away at "impossible" technologies, and their discoveries have almost reached the point of commercial implementation. Soon, very soon, we'll be free of the Energy ball & chain.
There are many reasons why people work as much as they do, but the cost of energy has little to do with it.
Think about all the people with boring/repetitive jobs - factory workers who do the same thing all day every day 5 days a week, 50+ weeks a year, fast-food workers, etc. They wage-slave away because they have to, not because they love working on the cardboard box assembly line. If their energy bills, car payments, house payments, food payments, etc, were all a fraction of what they currently pay, what would motivate them to work at Taco Bell or the cardboard box factory for more than 10 hours a week?
Food is provided by nature for free, all we have to do is pay humans to plant the seeds, nurture the plants until they're ready for harvest, pick them, and transport them to market. Energy is a tax at every level of the food-enterprise, and eliminating the energy tax would allow farmers and the other people in the food chain to collect most of the money that gets spent therein.
The democratization of energy portends a seismic shift in the economy. Over the next 5-10 years, energy is going to become cheaply available at small-scales, where small groups of people can pool small amounts of money to create their own energy companies. 1000 ppl x $1500 is $1.5million - enough for a megawatt of NanoSolar's panels, inverters and all. 1kw is not enough to power an average house, but families could buy into the local solar farm as they work & save, a kilowatt at a time...
I don't understand the reasoning for such a restriction, since the possibility of selling more than you buy would encourage wider adoption.
This is the reason. There are three problems with individuals (citizens, if you prefer) persuing their own personal Energy Liberation. One is easily solvable; the other two are not.
Freedom from the electric company is one aspect of Liberation Theology; Valcent Products' technology offers the possibility of a BioDiesel Cooperative, where individuals could buy a "plastic bag" to hang at the local Algae Farm, completely cutting Wall Street out of the transportation energy marketplace. (There are other options coming down the pipe to cut Big Oil out of the picture -- I'm just listing this one because it's the most direct substitution I've yet heard about.)
Also, a good chunk (300 billion?) of federal revenue comes from leasing lands containing hydrocarbons to Wall Street. Once we've cut Wall Street out of the picture, there goes that honeypot. How will the U.S. Federal Government finance the interest on the money supply, much less station troops on bases and outposts in 100+ countries?
I'm sure there are other problems with Energy Liberation, but these are just the three I've been thinking about...
Standard Oil has finally committed suicide by allowing prices to rise too high. Energy is becoming democratized at last!
When banks collateralized their mortgages into Asset Backed Securities, they usually lost the paperwork. And if they don't have a document trail proving that they own the house, they can't collect on Foreclosure Day.
Who Owns Your Home? has all the links.
Now Presenting: Deflation!
other deflation articles from Mish.
HAND.
This is how the author makes his living - everyone has to support themselves somehow, you know. If he gave his insights away for free, he wouldn't have nearly as much time to devote to his specialty as he does.
I wrote a diary on k5 a few years back which referenced Shadow Stats, which linked to an interview that links to a fuller interview of John Williams, the guy behind the Shadow Stats site.
My impression is that while Mr. Williams is quite right about the government mangling the statistics, he's wrong about the long-term implications (inflation forevermore). I like Mish of the Global Economic Analysis blog's take: he's been saying for some time that the end-game of current economic developments is massive deflation, as all the loans in the economy go bad one at a time, in a sort of cascading system failure. We're now seeing the deflation prediction come to pass - while Gas & food are skyrocketing, other assets (housing, etc) and prices are dropping fast, as homeowners and businesses struggle to find buyers at any price. This is what you'd expect if the amount of money available in the economy (read: available for the everyday working Joe to spend - the trust fund manager who made $1billion last year doesn't count) was decreasing.
For the record, I don't subscribe to Mr. Williams' newsletter - much too poor for that right now.
Firefly Energy's new advanced Lead-acid battery is suitable for use in Hybrids. Energy capacity of NiMH, without the nickel and a fraction of the lead. The key innovation is replacing the lead plates with carbon foam.
As neat as hybrid/electric cars are, they don't do much to solve the energy dilema, because there are already hundreds of millions of hydrocarbon burners on the road today - 200+ million in the United States alone. Tom Kasmer's Hydristor offers an intriguing potential to retrofit the entire fleet for a few thousand dollars apiece.
As I understand it, the Hydristor is basically a infinitely-variable hydraulic transmission that stores energy in a pressurized oil tank. When the operator wants to accelerate, this stored pressure is drawn down to spin the wheels. In the retrofit configuration, the car's transmission is gutted and the Hydristor replaces the torque converter.
More info on the Wikipedia... Most interesting, to me, is the potential to increase the efficiency of the geothermal heat pump. Tom Kasmer has posted on a continuously variable transmission yahoo! group - check there for more technical details.
(p.s. third time I've written this post - lost the last two versions trying to log in the middle of typing. Whoops! The dynamic login feature needs fixing, methinks - first time I hit 'login' at the top, and the second time I used the 'options' button below which gave me the login dialog.
Version #2 was the best of the three...)
Solar panels are only good during the day... And Firefly Energy is only just now starting to ship products with their advanced lead-acid battery technology to run your computer at night.
Between Nanosolar's panels and Firefly's batteries, we are now able to get the same size solar system for 1/5 or 1/8th the cost of this time last year. Neverminding that all of Nanosolar's first year of panels have already been purchased, and that Firefly's batteries aren't yet shipping in quantity...
Geothermal heat pumps are another overlooked technology... I'd think a retrofit would be pretty easy: dig a 10 foot hole in your backyard, put in a container of some sort for coolant, and retrofit your AC condenser coils to bathe in pool of continuously circulating geothermally-cooled coolant.
That's a semi-random link from google; I just have a copy of the book.