Perhaps women are simply better able to see that the field has no earning potential? I hear that there's some part of the brain that does that, and that (computer science) boys don't have one.
Haha, where did you manage to find a lot of land less than an hour commute from anything? =) I found a 3600 sqft loft space which I share with others, so I have lots of space inside, but places to raise horses sounds hard to come by anywhere I could find a job!
How come some of your chickens look like ducks? =) Congrats on the eggs, I would be thrilled to be able to produce my own real food. We have a tiny communal garden in the city, but it's mostly just herbs.
Here is my website for my artwork. I started the project in January, and now I'm in the process of installing 8 zigbee controlled light fixtures in my art gallery for a show in three weeks. Cost a pretty penny in parts, but they are extremely awesome looking, and there's definitely no commercially available fixtures which are anywhere near the color flexibility (I have red, orange, amber, green, cyan, blue, royal blue, and UV LEDs, so I can select lots of different pigments to make reflect), and mine are really well suited to illuminating art.
For what it's worth, I live in Somerville, just outside of Boston. It's not exactly Cambridge or the Back Bay, but we're not talking rural Kansas.
I think it's a pointless flame fest to argue about whether $850/month is a reasonable amount. I have roomates, I take measures to insulate my house. My electric bill works out to around $30/month, which I suppose I didn't include, but the details of the budgetary analysis wasn't exactly the point.
With my taxed income of $25249 (which ends up being about $1900/month after taxes, as I said), I am able to afford to spend a pretty large chunk of that on building what I consider to be pretty expensive electronics (LED light fixtures that cost me about $300/each to make) for my artwork, while still saving money each month (I build them gradually, and sell one from time to time).
If I wasn't spending money on projects, I would definitely have enough to pay for an iPhone. I don't think my situation is all that much different than many people. Some people in the $25k-$50k bracket, sure, they may have a family of four to feed and not have any disposable income. Personally, I think once you're in that income range, it's a matter of prioritizing luxuries, not demoting necessities. Some people prioritize toys like iphones and gaming rigs. I instead prioritize electronics projects. But we're not exactly on food stamps here, and having a low income can frequently be by choice instead of due to being too poorly educated to know what "credit" means. The original post was patronizing, and the idea that someone is irresponsible just because they choose to prioritize a neat toy phone is moronic.
My other statements about the statistics being meaningless without context stands. I suspect there are just as many people like me as there are "poor people buying bling" as was said elsewhere.
Perhaps they don't have all of the costs you describe because they live within their means. $25k per year is over $2k per month. In my case, for example, I make $1900 per month, spend $850 on {mortgage, utilities, property taxes, maintenance} (I live in an expensive area), $400 on food, nothing on a car, nothing on gas, nothing on tuition, next to nothing on clothes, and minimal amounts on entertainment.
Which means each month of my $1900, I have $650 of overhead that either goes to savings, or electronics projects.
We don't all have your expenses. If I wanted to afford $70/month for a phone (I already pay $30/month for just a regular cell phone, so only a $40/month marginal increase, btw).
I'm also going to throw out there that undergraduates are definitely in the poor brackets according to actual income. A low income bracket doesn't necessarily mean no disposable income. I am in this income bracket, and due to the way I live, would not have have any serious hardship imposed by having an iphone. Now, I happen to not want one, so it's not a problem, but statistics are always suspect until proven meaningful.
Besides, aren't the over $100k per year still addicted to blackberries? That only leaves hte $50-100k income group left to compete for iphones, and they all already have one, right?
They avoid them as much as possible, as you say. I meant by "lesser extent" that they aren't as big of a deal because we avoid them.
In rare situations they are necessary, and the limiting factor is one of standard magnetic materials ceasing to function as expected at very high frequencies. You wouldn't necessarily have them patterned into a circuit, but say for instance you want to use an inductor to transformer-couple AC signals into an analog to digital converter.
I have to reach a bit to find a real reason for them, but I just thought I'd throw it out there that current magnetic materials aren't suitable for high frequency applications, but that some neat new nanoscale alloys are able to reach very high frequencies.
Tunneling electrons and other quantum effects are already in effect in current devices. We just design around those effects instead of taking advantage of them currently. When we really get the ability to make reliable 5nm size scale parts, we'll just switch to quantum dot based transistors (single electron transistors).
Brownian motion isn't relevent here.
A big issue is that sharp features are thermodynamically unstable (lots of dangling surface bonds), so edges tend to "soften" over time due to surface diffusion. Also, at ohmic contacts you can get pits forming which can eventually degrade features.
Another issue is that at the size scales we're talking about, current insulators stop working. They're looking at switching to a variety of new materials for this purpose (for example, IrO2), but these are tricky. This is what they mean when they say "high dielectric constant" materials. Every MOS transistors has a this oxide layer (between the Metal and the Semiconductor), and that layer's thickness defines many of the physical properties of the device.
Finally, you have to worry about inductors to a lesser extent. Current inductors aren't quite good enough, but we're working on that too =) Nanoscale metallic alloys are definitely the way to go.
In any event, this article is sort of sensationalist (surprise!). I was able to make 20nm features using physical embossing (stamping metal liquid precursors with a plastic stamp and then curing them) back in 2002. Making features of small size scale is easy, it's keeping error rate, making interconnects, etc that's hard and annoying. Plasmonics is very neat though, I can imagine it working with time.
Besides, hard disks already have magnetic domains of ~ only a few nanometers anyway.
I don't believe you need swap if you have enough RAM that you never run out. For me, this amount is about 2GB, even running VMware with windows.
HOWEVER:
If you are on a laptop and want to be able to hibernate your computer, by default it will copy the RAM into your active swap partition and copy it back to the RAM when you restart your computer!
So, if you are on a laptop, your swap should *always* be at least the size of your RAM or else hibernate won't work (although suspend is still pretty good)!
The paper is published in a peer reviewed journal. It's patented, not secret.
They used ITO glass as an electrode with a neutral KPi electrolyte with 0.5mM Co^{2+} at 1.29V. They tried it with CoSO4, Co(NO3)2, and Co(OTf)2 as the cobalt source. It also works on FTO glass, as well as with a NaPi electrolyte.
The description of the processing method is extremely detailed. I would have little difficulty duplicating this experiment. (YIAAS)
Indeed, Nocera has been working on this for what must be at least 15 years by now. I remember he had some catalysts four or five years ago that worked using only the ambient intensity of sunlight, but were far too expensive to be practical (so I heard).
I also work in catalysis, and one of my friends is doing water splitting, so I've read a few papers on the topic. The materials used don't surprise me, cobalt is approximately as good as you can find. Also, I would note that this catalyst (I downloaded the paper) is releasing oxygen and gradually producing HPO4, which can then later be oxidized to (presumably) release energy. I'm not familiar with using phosphoric acid as a fuel, but the paper sounds extremely plausible.
I would also suggest that, based on my reading of the paper, any real world applications would be 5-15 years away, depending on how well they're able to coat their electrodes.
Yes, current through resistance is where power is lost, so higher voltage means less current through your load at the same power.
DC to DC converters do exist, but they're trickier technologically than AC transformers. Instead of relying on basic physical principles of magnetic fields, they use switched outputs, feedback, and filters.
An example of a step down converter is the buck converter. An example of a step up converter is the flyback converter. They generally are based on switching the input voltage on and off over a capacitor + inductor filter so that the average voltage is correct, and the filter smooths the output voltage so it is close to DC.
They are frequently ~90-98% efficient depending on the operating frequency, and can be an order of magnitude smaller than a 60 Hz transformer because they don't need a large inductive core to deal with saturation issues. Not needing an inductive core frequently means they are cost competitive with AC transformers per unit power despite being far more sophisticated (all that raw iron is pricey).
I live in this district, and must say that as much as I love this idea, it would be tough to sway me (as a social libertarian and economic moderate) to vote out Capuano. His voting record is very consistently exactly in line with what I would want.
To whit, the ACLU ranks him at 94% voting the way they advocate and 100% by LBGT advocates (I'm also gay). He's in favor of affirmative action, which I have some minor objections to, but generally think isn't particularly evil. He voted against expanding criminal prosecutions for minors and is rated "soft on crime" (which I approve of, having been harassed by the police and FBI several times despite having committed no crimes). He is generally not in favor of the war on drugs. I don't think he's as savvy on energy and the environment as I'd like, but he probably is better informed that an average group of citizens...
I dunno, I'm not sure I'd trust my neighbors in general to be as sensible as Capuano has been. I've seen my neighbors believe some pretty stupid crap. I'd have to see a very sensible plan before I'd vote to change.
i think you should use a different term then... "oil reserves" is defined as ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves ) "the estimated quantities of crude oil that are claimed to be recoverable under existing *economic* and operating conditions." (emphasis mine)
it is true that exploration and new tech has led to higher reserves -- but that exploration wasn't economical, nor the new tech worth the cost, until the prices rose. if oil still cost $20/bbl, people wouldn't be investing in horizontal drilling, and so those fields wouldn't be considered to be reserves.
i have read the history of this extensively, as well as all the current available data i can get my hands on. i think that this time it is substantially different -- but then again, so did the people before me. i would bet a lot of money (as have many old oil barons not to mention the wall street journal) that it will never get below $100/bbl again. i hope that i am wrong, but the saudis, russians, and the majority of investors seem to think i am right (or else the price wouldn't be going up from speculation).
sorry about the lower case, i don't mean to be inappropriately informal; i literally blew up my hand and can't type easily right now.
well, honestly a metric buttload. it's not going to be easy, but it has several thing going for it:
-can be farmed using existing technology (vs algae) -high biomass growth rate in wild strain (10%+ of algae, i believe) -- GE strains may offer substantial route to improvements -needs comparably (to corn, soy, palm, etc) low soil quality, so good yields can be achieved even with suboptimal fertilizer/water availibility.
i think algae is the best long term solution (only 60M acres estimated land usage, and mostly salt water), but the tech is hugely epensive because of:
-state of the art growing methods (photobioreactors, bacteria digesters + fischer tropsch, etc) -high maintenance costs (need an engineer on site to manage the equipment)
because of this, algae is impossible on a local scale, where with miscanthus you can have people grow it at their homes and send it to a nearby gasification plant (or just burn it) without many manhours of attention.
(sorry about the lower case, i blew up my left hand last week and am still getting used to one handed typing)
It also seems irresponsibly dangerous. The solution will involve (at a minimium) an extremely high energy projectile that could land anywhere on earth (though most likely in your neighborhood), which also involves a large amount of stored energy being transferred -- either with high explosives, or massive capacitors if they manage a rail gun solution (although iirc, the military railguns don't even get fast enough for this yet).
The mylar balloon solution is cute =) I wonder if they prohibit it, because it seems against the spirit of the competition to lower the effective force of gravity to make "orbit" a trivial solution.
I think this competition either needs to offer free high quality system safety review as a prerequisite for winning (before launch), or it will be sued into oblivion (although it's not in the US, so perhaps what I see as horribly irresponsible is seen differently in the UK).
you have to understand how reserves are defined. they are a function of price. at $140/bbl, we have more reserves than at $20/bbl, because more is economical to extract.
the bigger issue is that the actual energy (ignoring economics because energy is more fundamental) ratio for oil has dropped from 100+:1 in the 70s to 10-18:1 now. cellulosic ethanol and this technology as well (because it uses the whole plant) are likely ~20:1!
very soon, it will be a better thermodynamic investment to use biofuels than to use dug up oil. digging and exploring take energy -- more and more as we use the easy energy. it's just a matter of the economy (subsidies, infrastructure) catching up to the physics.
luckily, this doesn;t need to be grown on farmland (we have 450M acres of farmland in the US), but for comparison, doing this with corn would take about twice as much land, and much more nutritional fertilizer.
algae is another possible way to sustainably grow that much biomass, but having researched it extensively, it;s too expensive, and requires a lot of labor. miscanthus only requires normal farming techniques, so is very cheap to produce (maybe cheaper than shipping the amazon up here?)
there are many studies which give similar numbers. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3810 gives an overview of the existing literature. as you can see, all of the post-2000 eroi on oil are in the ballpark of 10-18:1. the *economy* puts about 7% of the yields from the oil back into oil right now in order to sustain our current usage levels.
(sorry for all lower case, i exploded my left hand and shift key is hard).
I agree with you that sexuality should have no place in the Boy Scouts. However, there is a big difference between trying to encourage open-mindedness about sexuality, and having to hide all aspects of your personal life that might indicate that you're LBGT. By your logic (and I know you didn't intend to mean this, but it is the "fair" conclusion), it should be fair game to kick out scoutmasters for bringing their wives to scout functions.
I agree that the Boy Scouts is not the place to advocate for LBGT rights. However, I don't see my sexuality as alternative to the norm -- I view is as yet another minor detail about my personality. That it is viewed as anything other than a minor part of my life is unfortunate, and causes a great deal of very sad things to go on.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps women are simply better able to see that the field has no earning potential? I hear that there's some part of the brain that does that, and that (computer science) boys don't have one.
Or, at least, it worked great until everyone started typing in "flu outbreak" in google to find the page they created!
Second order effects, huzzah!
Haha, where did you manage to find a lot of land less than an hour commute from anything? =) I found a 3600 sqft loft space which I share with others, so I have lots of space inside, but places to raise horses sounds hard to come by anywhere I could find a job!
How come some of your chickens look like ducks? =) Congrats on the eggs, I would be thrilled to be able to produce my own real food. We have a tiny communal garden in the city, but it's mostly just herbs.
Here is my website for my artwork. I started the project in January, and now I'm in the process of installing 8 zigbee controlled light fixtures in my art gallery for a show in three weeks. Cost a pretty penny in parts, but they are extremely awesome looking, and there's definitely no commercially available fixtures which are anywhere near the color flexibility (I have red, orange, amber, green, cyan, blue, royal blue, and UV LEDs, so I can select lots of different pigments to make reflect), and mine are really well suited to illuminating art.
http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/artwork/
I haven't taken any updated pictures in a while, unfortunately, but I will when I get my gallery all assembled for the show!
-Brian
For what it's worth, I live in Somerville, just outside of Boston. It's not exactly Cambridge or the Back Bay, but we're not talking rural Kansas.
I think it's a pointless flame fest to argue about whether $850/month is a reasonable amount. I have roomates, I take measures to insulate my house. My electric bill works out to around $30/month, which I suppose I didn't include, but the details of the budgetary analysis wasn't exactly the point.
With my taxed income of $25249 (which ends up being about $1900/month after taxes, as I said), I am able to afford to spend a pretty large chunk of that on building what I consider to be pretty expensive electronics (LED light fixtures that cost me about $300/each to make) for my artwork, while still saving money each month (I build them gradually, and sell one from time to time).
If I wasn't spending money on projects, I would definitely have enough to pay for an iPhone. I don't think my situation is all that much different than many people. Some people in the $25k-$50k bracket, sure, they may have a family of four to feed and not have any disposable income. Personally, I think once you're in that income range, it's a matter of prioritizing luxuries, not demoting necessities. Some people prioritize toys like iphones and gaming rigs. I instead prioritize electronics projects. But we're not exactly on food stamps here, and having a low income can frequently be by choice instead of due to being too poorly educated to know what "credit" means. The original post was patronizing, and the idea that someone is irresponsible just because they choose to prioritize a neat toy phone is moronic.
My other statements about the statistics being meaningless without context stands. I suspect there are just as many people like me as there are "poor people buying bling" as was said elsewhere.
Perhaps they don't have all of the costs you describe because they live within their means. $25k per year is over $2k per month. In my case, for example, I make $1900 per month, spend $850 on {mortgage, utilities, property taxes, maintenance} (I live in an expensive area), $400 on food, nothing on a car, nothing on gas, nothing on tuition, next to nothing on clothes, and minimal amounts on entertainment.
Which means each month of my $1900, I have $650 of overhead that either goes to savings, or electronics projects.
We don't all have your expenses. If I wanted to afford $70/month for a phone (I already pay $30/month for just a regular cell phone, so only a $40/month marginal increase, btw).
I'm also going to throw out there that undergraduates are definitely in the poor brackets according to actual income. A low income bracket doesn't necessarily mean no disposable income. I am in this income bracket, and due to the way I live, would not have have any serious hardship imposed by having an iphone. Now, I happen to not want one, so it's not a problem, but statistics are always suspect until proven meaningful.
Besides, aren't the over $100k per year still addicted to blackberries? That only leaves hte $50-100k income group left to compete for iphones, and they all already have one, right?
They avoid them as much as possible, as you say. I meant by "lesser extent" that they aren't as big of a deal because we avoid them.
In rare situations they are necessary, and the limiting factor is one of standard magnetic materials ceasing to function as expected at very high frequencies. You wouldn't necessarily have them patterned into a circuit, but say for instance you want to use an inductor to transformer-couple AC signals into an analog to digital converter.
I have to reach a bit to find a real reason for them, but I just thought I'd throw it out there that current magnetic materials aren't suitable for high frequency applications, but that some neat new nanoscale alloys are able to reach very high frequencies.
Tunneling electrons and other quantum effects are already in effect in current devices. We just design around those effects instead of taking advantage of them currently. When we really get the ability to make reliable 5nm size scale parts, we'll just switch to quantum dot based transistors (single electron transistors).
Brownian motion isn't relevent here.
A big issue is that sharp features are thermodynamically unstable (lots of dangling surface bonds), so edges tend to "soften" over time due to surface diffusion. Also, at ohmic contacts you can get pits forming which can eventually degrade features.
Another issue is that at the size scales we're talking about, current insulators stop working. They're looking at switching to a variety of new materials for this purpose (for example, IrO2), but these are tricky. This is what they mean when they say "high dielectric constant" materials. Every MOS transistors has a this oxide layer (between the Metal and the Semiconductor), and that layer's thickness defines many of the physical properties of the device.
Finally, you have to worry about inductors to a lesser extent. Current inductors aren't quite good enough, but we're working on that too =) Nanoscale metallic alloys are definitely the way to go.
In any event, this article is sort of sensationalist (surprise!). I was able to make 20nm features using physical embossing (stamping metal liquid precursors with a plastic stamp and then curing them) back in 2002. Making features of small size scale is easy, it's keeping error rate, making interconnects, etc that's hard and annoying. Plasmonics is very neat though, I can imagine it working with time.
Besides, hard disks already have magnetic domains of ~ only a few nanometers anyway.
I don't believe you need swap if you have enough RAM that you never run out. For me, this amount is about 2GB, even running VMware with windows.
HOWEVER:
If you are on a laptop and want to be able to hibernate your computer, by default it will copy the RAM into your active swap partition and copy it back to the RAM when you restart your computer!
So, if you are on a laptop, your swap should *always* be at least the size of your RAM or else hibernate won't work (although suspend is still pretty good)!
The hydrogen is stored on the phosphate. The oxygen is irrelevant, plenty in the atmosphere.
A very cheap and effective desalination/solar cogeneration style plant is to simply use solar thermal as the heat inputs to a desalination plant.
We do solar thermal exceedingly well without any particularly novel tech. Issue is, electricity is still insanely cheap, so no one cares yet.
The paper is published in a peer reviewed journal. It's patented, not secret.
They used ITO glass as an electrode with a neutral KPi electrolyte with 0.5mM Co^{2+} at 1.29V. They tried it with CoSO4, Co(NO3)2, and Co(OTf)2 as the cobalt source. It also works on FTO glass, as well as with a NaPi electrolyte.
The description of the processing method is extremely detailed. I would have little difficulty duplicating this experiment. (YIAAS)
Indeed, Nocera has been working on this for what must be at least 15 years by now. I remember he had some catalysts four or five years ago that worked using only the ambient intensity of sunlight, but were far too expensive to be practical (so I heard).
I also work in catalysis, and one of my friends is doing water splitting, so I've read a few papers on the topic. The materials used don't surprise me, cobalt is approximately as good as you can find. Also, I would note that this catalyst (I downloaded the paper) is releasing oxygen and gradually producing HPO4, which can then later be oxidized to (presumably) release energy. I'm not familiar with using phosphoric acid as a fuel, but the paper sounds extremely plausible.
I would also suggest that, based on my reading of the paper, any real world applications would be 5-15 years away, depending on how well they're able to coat their electrodes.
duh, i obviously meant the line resistance, not the load. obviously the power dissipated in the load is constant.
Yes, current through resistance is where power is lost, so higher voltage means less current through your load at the same power.
DC to DC converters do exist, but they're trickier technologically than AC transformers. Instead of relying on basic physical principles of magnetic fields, they use switched outputs, feedback, and filters.
An example of a step down converter is the buck converter. An example of a step up converter is the flyback converter. They generally are based on switching the input voltage on and off over a capacitor + inductor filter so that the average voltage is correct, and the filter smooths the output voltage so it is close to DC.
They are frequently ~90-98% efficient depending on the operating frequency, and can be an order of magnitude smaller than a 60 Hz transformer because they don't need a large inductive core to deal with saturation issues. Not needing an inductive core frequently means they are cost competitive with AC transformers per unit power despite being far more sophisticated (all that raw iron is pricey).
I live in this district, and must say that as much as I love this idea, it would be tough to sway me (as a social libertarian and economic moderate) to vote out Capuano. His voting record is very consistently exactly in line with what I would want.
To whit, the ACLU ranks him at 94% voting the way they advocate and 100% by LBGT advocates (I'm also gay). He's in favor of affirmative action, which I have some minor objections to, but generally think isn't particularly evil. He voted against expanding criminal prosecutions for minors and is rated "soft on crime" (which I approve of, having been harassed by the police and FBI several times despite having committed no crimes). He is generally not in favor of the war on drugs. I don't think he's as savvy on energy and the environment as I'd like, but he probably is better informed that an average group of citizens...
I dunno, I'm not sure I'd trust my neighbors in general to be as sensible as Capuano has been. I've seen my neighbors believe some pretty stupid crap. I'd have to see a very sensible plan before I'd vote to change.
Hmm, I dunno... McCain didn't vote in favor of the bill. Isn't he the one that was saying how critical it is to our national security?
Make Obama look all the more a fool to me for supporting it.
neat. sorry, i'm extra safety conscious after an accidentally explosion in my lab the other day. and that was less than 10mg of material...
i think you should use a different term then... "oil reserves" is defined as ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves ) "the estimated quantities of crude oil that are claimed to be recoverable under existing *economic* and operating conditions." (emphasis mine)
it is true that exploration and new tech has led to higher reserves -- but that exploration wasn't economical, nor the new tech worth the cost, until the prices rose. if oil still cost $20/bbl, people wouldn't be investing in horizontal drilling, and so those fields wouldn't be considered to be reserves.
i have read the history of this extensively, as well as all the current available data i can get my hands on. i think that this time it is substantially different -- but then again, so did the people before me. i would bet a lot of money (as have many old oil barons not to mention the wall street journal) that it will never get below $100/bbl again. i hope that i am wrong, but the saudis, russians, and the majority of investors seem to think i am right (or else the price wouldn't be going up from speculation).
sorry about the lower case, i don't mean to be inappropriately informal; i literally blew up my hand and can't type easily right now.
well, honestly a metric buttload. it's not going to be easy, but it has several thing going for it:
-can be farmed using existing technology (vs algae)
-high biomass growth rate in wild strain (10%+ of algae, i believe) -- GE strains may offer substantial route to improvements
-needs comparably (to corn, soy, palm, etc) low soil quality, so good yields can be achieved even with suboptimal fertilizer/water availibility.
i think algae is the best long term solution (only 60M acres estimated land usage, and mostly salt water), but the tech is hugely epensive because of:
-state of the art growing methods (photobioreactors, bacteria digesters + fischer tropsch, etc)
-high maintenance costs (need an engineer on site to manage the equipment)
because of this, algae is impossible on a local scale, where with miscanthus you can have people grow it at their homes and send it to a nearby gasification plant (or just burn it) without many manhours of attention.
(sorry about the lower case, i blew up my left hand last week and am still getting used to one handed typing)
It also seems irresponsibly dangerous. The solution will involve (at a minimium) an extremely high energy projectile that could land anywhere on earth (though most likely in your neighborhood), which also involves a large amount of stored energy being transferred -- either with high explosives, or massive capacitors if they manage a rail gun solution (although iirc, the military railguns don't even get fast enough for this yet).
The mylar balloon solution is cute =) I wonder if they prohibit it, because it seems against the spirit of the competition to lower the effective force of gravity to make "orbit" a trivial solution.
I think this competition either needs to offer free high quality system safety review as a prerequisite for winning (before launch), or it will be sued into oblivion (although it's not in the US, so perhaps what I see as horribly irresponsible is seen differently in the UK).
you have to understand how reserves are defined. they are a function of price. at $140/bbl, we have more reserves than at $20/bbl, because more is economical to extract.
the bigger issue is that the actual energy (ignoring economics because energy is more fundamental) ratio for oil has dropped from 100+:1 in the 70s to 10-18:1 now. cellulosic ethanol and this technology as well (because it uses the whole plant) are likely ~20:1!
very soon, it will be a better thermodynamic investment to use biofuels than to use dug up oil. digging and exploring take energy -- more and more as we use the easy energy. it's just a matter of the economy (subsidies, infrastructure) catching up to the physics.
there's a really cool terrestrial (as oppose to aquatic) plant called misanthus giganteus which has biomass growth rates ~6 dry tons/acre. ( http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/miscanthus/miscanthus.html )
dry biomass contains ~17GJ/ton ( http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html ), so if you assume no loss of energy in conversion, you get a maximum energy production there of ~100GJ/year per acre.
The US fuel consumption is ~20,687,000 barrels/day ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html ), which is 460 million acres of land.
luckily, this doesn;t need to be grown on farmland (we have 450M acres of farmland in the US), but for comparison, doing this with corn would take about twice as much land, and much more nutritional fertilizer.
algae is another possible way to sustainably grow that much biomass, but having researched it extensively, it;s too expensive, and requires a lot of labor. miscanthus only requires normal farming techniques, so is very cheap to produce (maybe cheaper than shipping the amazon up here?)
no, the eroi of ~15 includes paying employees.
there are many studies which give similar numbers. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3810 gives an overview of the existing literature. as you can see, all of the post-2000 eroi on oil are in the ballpark of 10-18:1. the *economy* puts about 7% of the yields from the oil back into oil right now in order to sustain our current usage levels.
(sorry for all lower case, i exploded my left hand and shift key is hard).
I agree with you that sexuality should have no place in the Boy Scouts. However, there is a big difference between trying to encourage open-mindedness about sexuality, and having to hide all aspects of your personal life that might indicate that you're LBGT. By your logic (and I know you didn't intend to mean this, but it is the "fair" conclusion), it should be fair game to kick out scoutmasters for bringing their wives to scout functions.
I agree that the Boy Scouts is not the place to advocate for LBGT rights. However, I don't see my sexuality as alternative to the norm -- I view is as yet another minor detail about my personality. That it is viewed as anything other than a minor part of my life is unfortunate, and causes a great deal of very sad things to go on.