What changes genetic changes would anyone expect in plants and animals living in a high radiation environment other than increased resistance to radiation? Nothing else about the environment has changed, so you wouldn't expect natural selection to change anything else - classic examples of evolutionary change evolve as responses to changes in the environment (antibiotic resistant bacteria - moths in england reponding to pollution caussing the bark on trees to darken etc...) there is plenty of natural variation in species to account for changes in the environment already, extra radiation will not "increase" the rate of evolution (whatever that means) - if having extra errors in the DNA copying machinery was somehow beneficial to organisms (in terms of increasing the rate of adaptation) they would already have evolved to have error prone DNA copying machinery without the need for radiation....
yeah, that's why I am afraid to walk the streets of London - they don't have enough guns there! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F03%2F21%2Fnmurd21.xml see huge homicide rate - 61 deaths in a city of 7.5M vs 600 in NYC a city of 8M... oh wait I mean Dallas TX with a homicide rate of 240 in a city of 1.5M oh wait... they must have dracoinian gun control laws in Dallas how about San Antonio uhh.... well there must be city somewhere in the united states without draconian gun control laws and a homicide rate lower than London - I mean the Cato institute can't possibly be wrong.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
There are people who are immune to HIV - they comprise approximately 1% of the general population - researchers have studied the ancestory of these people and concluded that these genes spread during the plague in the middle ages - since the plage attacks the immune system in a similiar way as HIV. Note you must have two copies of the gene to be completely resistant if you have only one you still die but it takes longer. No doubt the reason why everyone does not have two copies of this gene is because there is a cost associated with having it, such as incresed susceptibility to some other disease....
yep M$S is an abusive monopoly that should have been broken up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust it was not because of the Bush justice department from Wikipedia: "The DOJ, now under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty." - being the paragons of constitutionality and fairness that they are (AG firings, torture, illegal wiretaps etc...)
you have to launch the ship from earth - unless you can build a 8M ton ship in space... the good new is H-bombs (fusion) have less fall out unit energy than fission nukes
Or we could work on nuclear propulsion and get there in no time... you can build an 8M ton ship that can go 10% the speed of light using 1960s technology... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
of course it drops H-bombs out the back onto a metal plate so it isn't super eco-friendly...
you are correct PPP for the U.S. is higher than europe, but my point was the quality of life is no better in one industialized country over another just because the U.S. has more billionares than the UK or France does not mean the average person is any better off - at least they don't have to worry about if they have healthcare or decent schools... http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf
Also I agree we need to do more than conserve - I am a physicist an I have nothing against nuclear power - but that is no excuse not to make use of the resources you have in an efficient manner - especially if others are already doing it.
Finally your point about Atlanta is a good one - here we have a huge sprawling mess with a poor water supply to boot - what the heck were we thinking? gee, maybe zoning is a good idea. If we can't rework Altanta it will continue to be an inefficent mess (maybe the water shortage will get them to downsize) you can dream that power will become so cheap that it will not matter and nobody will have to change the way we do anything but there is no guarantee that will happen. They thought nuclear power would make electricity so cheap you will not have to meter it - didn't quite work out that way, power consumption always comes with a cost, and nuclear power has a cost. To design our infrastructure is such an energy intensive way is a bad idea, it assumes energy will always be cheap - future infrastructure should be focused on reducing our dependance on energy, not increasing it.
Those numbers are from 2004, my guess is with the depreciation of the dollar Europe has an even better MJ/$ number than it did then... Also the real metric is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) per person not necissarily GDP/person http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity - PPP tries to level out the exchange rate issue - by the time Bush is through with us I am pretty sure Europe will be ahead as far as I can tell when I visit there they live better than we do but I digress...
If the developing world is inefficient - so what? too bad for them, their economy will suffer even more than ours from high fuel prices and the effects of global warming. The point is that there are inefficiecies in our system that are costing us dearly and destroying our competetive advantage, we are more sensitive to fuel costs than Europe and we devote ridiculous amounts of resources in the name of securing our energy supply ($1 trillion for Iraq) which could be better used to reducing our dependence.
Finally I do think it is useful to compare different developed countries to see how they use energy. There is no reason why the U.S. can't be as efficient as Europe, we just have to have some zoning laws and a gas tax - but nobody wants to hear that. I just don't buy the "U.S. is a big country so we need cars to go anywhere" argument, nobody should have to live 40 miles from work just to live in a community with a decent school district and have get in their car and drive 5 miles to get their groceries - get real - we trashed our cities in the 60s and gutted our public transportation infrastructure and exchanged it for a suburban wasteland of Chili's and WalMarts and crappy houses with asphalt roofs and thin insulation... We have not invested our resources wisely.
I disagree, many countries in Europe are signficantly more efficient in their utilization of energy than the U.S see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity - and their standard of living/quality of life is no worse than the U.S. - 9.8MJ/$ for the US vs 6.5MJ/$ in the UK. Increasing the cost of energy drives efficiency - the U.S has a high GDP per capita but a low value for energy efficiency - if we can become more energy efficent we can still expand the economy w/o increasing energy consumption. Unfortunately the U.S. is structured in such a way to be inefficient in the use of energy and land, with lax zoning (suburbs, exurbs etc...), inexpensive gasoline, little investment in public transport, and multiple indirect subsidies to the oil and gas industry.... I notice that when I go to an american city the first thing I need is a rental car to get around, when I go to europe a car is just an encumberance.
There is another type of nuclear reactor that can burn unprocessed unranium - specifically the CANDU reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU - several have been built around the world. They are more expensive to construct because they are larger and requre heavy water but they can "burn" a variety of nuclear fuels - Plutonium and depleted uranium from light water reactors. The US pushed light water reactors because they are smaller and can be used on submarines and other ships and (cynically) makes other contries dependent on (US)uranium enrichment facilities...
I work for a big conglomerate - the last thing a big company wants is competition, big companies just like to gobble little companies up and then run them into the ground so they can keep selling the same old crap they have been making for the past 20 years. But doesn't this guy work for Microsoft? - isn't that exactly what Microsoft has done to the software industry? I guess he is speaking from his own experience killing innovation...
You know you could get a billion dollars, here is how - set up your own mutual fund of like minded people, use the money to buy media and other corporate properties and then use the influence to promote more resonable behavior - just a thought - might be a better way to use the money sitting in Roth IRAs....
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What changes genetic changes would anyone expect in plants and animals living in a high radiation environment other than increased resistance to radiation? Nothing else about the environment has changed, so you wouldn't expect natural selection to change anything else - classic examples of evolutionary change evolve as responses to changes in the environment (antibiotic resistant bacteria - moths in england reponding to pollution caussing the bark on trees to darken etc...) there is plenty of natural variation in species to account for changes in the environment already, extra radiation will not "increase" the rate of evolution (whatever that means) - if having extra errors in the DNA copying machinery was somehow beneficial to organisms (in terms of increasing the rate of adaptation) they would already have evolved to have error prone DNA copying machinery without the need for radiation....
yeah, that's why I am afraid to walk the streets of London - they don't have enough guns there! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F03%2F21%2Fnmurd21.xml see huge homicide rate - 61 deaths in a city of 7.5M vs 600 in NYC a city of 8M ... oh wait I mean Dallas TX with a homicide rate of 240 in a city of 1.5M oh wait... they must have dracoinian gun control laws in Dallas how about San Antonio uhh.... well there must be city somewhere in the united states without draconian gun control laws and a homicide rate lower than London - I mean the Cato institute can't possibly be wrong.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
There are people who are immune to HIV - they comprise approximately 1% of the general population - researchers have studied the ancestory of these people and concluded that these genes spread during the plague in the middle ages - since the plage attacks the immune system in a similiar way as HIV. Note you must have two copies of the gene to be completely resistant if you have only one you still die but it takes longer. No doubt the reason why everyone does not have two copies of this gene is because there is a cost associated with having it, such as incresed susceptibility to some other disease....
"The only people who are stopped from getting guns by the gun-control laws are the law-abiding" Tell that to all the kids at Virginia Tech...
yep M$S is an abusive monopoly that should have been broken up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust it was not because of the Bush justice department from Wikipedia: "The DOJ, now under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty." - being the paragons of constitutionality and fairness that they are (AG firings, torture, illegal wiretaps etc...)
you have to launch the ship from earth - unless you can build a 8M ton ship in space... the good new is H-bombs (fusion) have less fall out unit energy than fission nukes
Or we could work on nuclear propulsion and get there in no time... you can build an 8M ton ship that can go 10% the speed of light using 1960s technology... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) of course it drops H-bombs out the back onto a metal plate so it isn't super eco-friendly...
you are correct PPP for the U.S. is higher than europe, but my point was the quality of life is no better in one industialized country over another just because the U.S. has more billionares than the UK or France does not mean the average person is any better off - at least they don't have to worry about if they have healthcare or decent schools... http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf Also I agree we need to do more than conserve - I am a physicist an I have nothing against nuclear power - but that is no excuse not to make use of the resources you have in an efficient manner - especially if others are already doing it. Finally your point about Atlanta is a good one - here we have a huge sprawling mess with a poor water supply to boot - what the heck were we thinking? gee, maybe zoning is a good idea. If we can't rework Altanta it will continue to be an inefficent mess (maybe the water shortage will get them to downsize) you can dream that power will become so cheap that it will not matter and nobody will have to change the way we do anything but there is no guarantee that will happen. They thought nuclear power would make electricity so cheap you will not have to meter it - didn't quite work out that way, power consumption always comes with a cost, and nuclear power has a cost. To design our infrastructure is such an energy intensive way is a bad idea, it assumes energy will always be cheap - future infrastructure should be focused on reducing our dependance on energy, not increasing it.
Those numbers are from 2004, my guess is with the depreciation of the dollar Europe has an even better MJ/$ number than it did then... Also the real metric is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) per person not necissarily GDP/person http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity - PPP tries to level out the exchange rate issue - by the time Bush is through with us I am pretty sure Europe will be ahead as far as I can tell when I visit there they live better than we do but I digress... If the developing world is inefficient - so what? too bad for them, their economy will suffer even more than ours from high fuel prices and the effects of global warming. The point is that there are inefficiecies in our system that are costing us dearly and destroying our competetive advantage, we are more sensitive to fuel costs than Europe and we devote ridiculous amounts of resources in the name of securing our energy supply ($1 trillion for Iraq) which could be better used to reducing our dependence. Finally I do think it is useful to compare different developed countries to see how they use energy. There is no reason why the U.S. can't be as efficient as Europe, we just have to have some zoning laws and a gas tax - but nobody wants to hear that. I just don't buy the "U.S. is a big country so we need cars to go anywhere" argument, nobody should have to live 40 miles from work just to live in a community with a decent school district and have get in their car and drive 5 miles to get their groceries - get real - we trashed our cities in the 60s and gutted our public transportation infrastructure and exchanged it for a suburban wasteland of Chili's and WalMarts and crappy houses with asphalt roofs and thin insulation... We have not invested our resources wisely.
I disagree, many countries in Europe are signficantly more efficient in their utilization of energy than the U.S see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity - and their standard of living/quality of life is no worse than the U.S. - 9.8MJ/$ for the US vs 6.5MJ/$ in the UK. Increasing the cost of energy drives efficiency - the U.S has a high GDP per capita but a low value for energy efficiency - if we can become more energy efficent we can still expand the economy w/o increasing energy consumption. Unfortunately the U.S. is structured in such a way to be inefficient in the use of energy and land, with lax zoning (suburbs, exurbs etc...), inexpensive gasoline, little investment in public transport, and multiple indirect subsidies to the oil and gas industry.... I notice that when I go to an american city the first thing I need is a rental car to get around, when I go to europe a car is just an encumberance.
There is another type of nuclear reactor that can burn unprocessed unranium - specifically the CANDU reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU - several have been built around the world. They are more expensive to construct because they are larger and requre heavy water but they can "burn" a variety of nuclear fuels - Plutonium and depleted uranium from light water reactors. The US pushed light water reactors because they are smaller and can be used on submarines and other ships and (cynically) makes other contries dependent on (US)uranium enrichment facilities...
I work for a big conglomerate - the last thing a big company wants is competition, big companies just like to gobble little companies up and then run them into the ground so they can keep selling the same old crap they have been making for the past 20 years. But doesn't this guy work for Microsoft? - isn't that exactly what Microsoft has done to the software industry? I guess he is speaking from his own experience killing innovation...
You know you could get a billion dollars, here is how - set up your own mutual fund of like minded people, use the money to buy media and other corporate properties and then use the influence to promote more resonable behavior - just a thought - might be a better way to use the money sitting in Roth IRAs....