I've personally seen a squirrel eating a dead bird. It held the wing in its mouth the same cute way they hold a nut. Rather creepy.
Back to rodent pets: I had a friend a long time ago who was doing experiments feeding caffeine to mice and observing the effects on their behavior. They refused to drink their water with the (bitter) caffeine in it at first, so he had to sweeten it. He steadily increased their dose, and then suddenly cut it off. The next morning, he came out and two of them had killed and were eating a third.
The fridge is where the ripe ones with damaged skin or cracks go. They normally turn into sauce, but occasionally go to other uses. The wicker basket on the kitchen table is where the ones without damage go. I can't store ones with damage there because they'll rot. I also dehydrate some.
I find that the fridge's affect on tomatoes depends strongly on the type. The juicier the tomato, the less they become mealy.
Hey, I doubt anyone on Slashdot has more tomatoes in their house right now than me. Between a huge shelf full of canned tomatoes, the large stack of ripe ones in the fridge, or the two paper grocery bags each half full of green tomatoes picked before the frost....
Hey -- I'm a vegetarian, too. You *can* win friends with salad;)
(not that salad makes up any sizable fraction of your average vegetarian's diet... that's a silly stereotype from people who've never really given much thought to what vegetarians would eat)
For example, spider mites. Infestations of them are frustratingly difficult to get rid of. They're so tiny that it stretches the bounds of human vision to spot them -- although their webbing is generally easily visible when infestations are bad. Their mouthpieces are designed to cut open individual plant cells. Since they're not insects, many conventional insecticides don't work on them -- for example, acetamiprid.
Of course, then there are the predatory mites that eat the spider mites...
Indeed. Mammatus aren't too common, but they're really creepy when you do see them in person; it's a whole, "clouds aren't supposed to look like that!" feeling. There's some great photos here. And yes, they actually do look that unreal.
The best li-ion batteries can release 5 kilowatts per kg (the titanates). Six orders of magnitude would mean 5 gigawatts per kilogram. Sorry, but not going to happen. A kilogram of copper wire couldn't carry a small fraction that much current without vaporizing.
Six orders of magnitude more power than current batteries wouldn't be a battery; it'd be a bomb.
Yep. Synfuels are more expensive (the cost largely depending on the feedstock). But as oil becomes harder to get, we're not going to have a choice but to rely on them more until we can switch off oil as a transportation fuel.
First off, even if they do have particle filters, then it's at best the equivalent of a coal power plant which also has filters. Secondly, saying it has enough rainfall that they don't need to water yet there's no sort of runoff is pretty much contradictory; if it's raining that much, there's going to be need for surplus water to flow away. Third, "surplus straw" is ridiculous. For one, straw left on the fields helps prevent erosion. For another, straw is livestock feed and bedding. If they weren't making use of it before, then they were just being wasteful; that's hardly an excuse for them to choose a bad use for it.
The natural gas doesn't consume vast amounts of habitat per person, lead to massive dead zones near estuaries, or drain rivers of their water, either.
Switching from natural gas home heating to biomass is like trying to reduce your lighting bills by burning candles. Natural gas is an abundant, low-carbon fuel that has literally several orders of magnitude less air quality degradation than biomass. If you want to tackle global warming, it's coal that you need to fight, not natural gas.
Indeed indeed. Too few people realize that you can *make* hydrocarbons, from almost any source of carbon. Just burn it with insufficient oxygen for full combustion, and you have your (pick a name): "wood gas", "town gas", "water gas", "coal gas", etc. The challenges are when you want to use biomass for that source of carbon. You can just mine or pump up fossil carbon sources. Growing fuel crops takes a ton of land (habitat), water, leads to runoff, and all sorts of other problems.
But, if we end up in that situation, we may not have a choice. Humans are not going to choose a stone-age existence. If it comes down to either doing actions with major adverse environmental consequences or tossing society in the gutter, humans can be counted on to choose the former every time.
Yes, why don't we all go back to a middle age existence. We can enjoy their wonderful quality of life and have a planet carrying capacity a fraction of what we have now.
Why do people pine for this mythical "good old days" before all that pesky modern technology? Between starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor, pre-industrial life sucked.
1. Wood pollution problems can happen anywhere, even at low population densities, and even without an inversion. Wood stoves pump out two to three orders of magnitude more particulate matter than oil and gas furnaces. 2. Inversions can happen anywhere -- for example, from warm fronts. They're more common in some areas, certainly (central Alaska being one of them), but everywhere gets them. 3. Very little energy is wasted in natural gas extraction and transportation compared to the energy in the fuel. The straw almost certainly takes a larger percent to grow, harvest, and transport.
A pellet stove still emits two orders of magnitude more PM than an oil or gas stove; see the above graphic.
Wood is dirty, dirty, dirty. And no, wood gas is not "smoke". Smoke is particulate matter. Wood gas is a toxic mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
1) Other pollutants are very relevant as well, esp. in terms of human and wildlife health. 2) Other pollutants have a profound effect on climate as well. For example, carbon black has been shown to be a significant cause of global warming. 3) I'd *imagine* that straw has a pretty good ratio of fossil fuels in -> energy out, but there still is going to be some input. 4) Land use changes can have a profound impact on global climate, and using land for growing crops for heating (capturing only a small fraction of the light that hits the land as energy) means a *lot* of land. It also means consuming land for farming that would otherwise be wildlife habitat. And there's the whole water issue. And the runoff issue. And so forth.
To put the amount of pollution into perspective, here's the particulate matter emissions from different types of home heating.
The uncertified wood stove puts out several *pounds* of fine particulate matter each day of winter operation. Even the proportionally clean pellet stove dwarfs the emissions from oil and gas heating.
"Nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces"? Given that wood-burning has a pollution profile as bad as coal burning (the exact amount of different pollutants in each case varying depending on pollution controls), I seriously doubt straw burning is all that clean.
They misspoke or were written down wrong. Six orders of magnitude more power density than chemical batteries wouldn't be a battery. It'd be a bomb. Further evidence toward a mistake is that they were just talking about "high energy density".
I've read about tritium health effects before. Its average residency in the body, when ingested as water, is about ten days. For something with as low energy decay as tritium, that's not much. It's not good for you, but it's not as bad as many other things we get exposed to.
I wonder how well it does if you don't give it realistic shapes (say, if you just draw a circle for everything)? If so, it'd be neat to have it draw elements from an RSS news feed, broken down into noun phrases and verbs, with descriptor-less nouns being combined with the verbs. I.e., it'd be a "Guess which news story gave you this crazy picture?" program.
"Surprised, humbled Obama awarded Nobel Peace Prize" -> "surprised, humbled Obama" "awarded" "nobel peace prize" "Obama's Nobel: The Last Thing He Needs" -> "Obama's nobel" "last thing" "he needs" "NASA probes hit moon twice; few pictures yet" -> "NASA probes" "hit" "moon" "few pictures" "UCLA student's throat slashed in chem lab" -> "UCLA student" "throat slashed" "chem lab" "2 die, 19 overcome at Arizona retreat sweat lodge" -> "2 die" "19 overcome" "Arizona Retreat sweat lodge"
IF they're talking about an RTG, I'd rule that right out. I'm not fond of the idea of every car in the country carrying hundreds of kilograms of highly radioactive isotopes around when manufacturing defects are inevitable and there are 6.3 million car crashes and 260,000 car fires every year.
On the other hand, it sounds like what they're describing is actually betavoltaics (God, I hate it when science articles are this vague...). If that's the case, no big deal. Betavoltaics use tritium as the fuel, and tritium is less dangerous than, say, the lead in your lead-acid battery. It's a very weak radiation (can't penetrate skin, doesn't go very far through air), and when ingested, the tritium (generally being in the form of water) has a very short residency in the body.
The problem with scaling up betavoltaics is supply. How can you supply that much tritium in any remotely affordable manner? It just doesn't seem plausible.
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I'll do you one better: deer that eat the skulls of their live victims.
I've personally seen a squirrel eating a dead bird. It held the wing in its mouth the same cute way they hold a nut. Rather creepy.
Back to rodent pets: I had a friend a long time ago who was doing experiments feeding caffeine to mice and observing the effects on their behavior. They refused to drink their water with the (bitter) caffeine in it at first, so he had to sweeten it. He steadily increased their dose, and then suddenly cut it off. The next morning, he came out and two of them had killed and were eating a third.
The fridge is where the ripe ones with damaged skin or cracks go. They normally turn into sauce, but occasionally go to other uses. The wicker basket on the kitchen table is where the ones without damage go. I can't store ones with damage there because they'll rot. I also dehydrate some.
I find that the fridge's affect on tomatoes depends strongly on the type. The juicier the tomato, the less they become mealy.
And I'd imagine vegetarian spiders would agree.
Hey, I doubt anyone on Slashdot has more tomatoes in their house right now than me. Between a huge shelf full of canned tomatoes, the large stack of ripe ones in the fridge, or the two paper grocery bags each half full of green tomatoes picked before the frost....
I guess it's time for Italian food tonight! :)
Yeah! In what sort of crazy species would the males help care for the young? :P
To protect the colony from predators.
Hey -- I'm a vegetarian, too. You *can* win friends with salad ;)
(not that salad makes up any sizable fraction of your average vegetarian's diet... that's a silly stereotype from people who've never really given much thought to what vegetarians would eat)
For example, spider mites. Infestations of them are frustratingly difficult to get rid of. They're so tiny that it stretches the bounds of human vision to spot them -- although their webbing is generally easily visible when infestations are bad. Their mouthpieces are designed to cut open individual plant cells. Since they're not insects, many conventional insecticides don't work on them -- for example, acetamiprid.
Of course, then there are the predatory mites that eat the spider mites...
DarkRoastedBlend is awesome. Did you see the page on Socotra?
Indeed. Mammatus aren't too common, but they're really creepy when you do see them in person; it's a whole, "clouds aren't supposed to look like that!" feeling. There's some great photos here. And yes, they actually do look that unreal.
The best li-ion batteries can release 5 kilowatts per kg (the titanates). Six orders of magnitude would mean 5 gigawatts per kilogram. Sorry, but not going to happen. A kilogram of copper wire couldn't carry a small fraction that much current without vaporizing.
Six orders of magnitude more power than current batteries wouldn't be a battery; it'd be a bomb.
Yep. Synfuels are more expensive (the cost largely depending on the feedstock). But as oil becomes harder to get, we're not going to have a choice but to rely on them more until we can switch off oil as a transportation fuel.
First off, even if they do have particle filters, then it's at best the equivalent of a coal power plant which also has filters. Secondly, saying it has enough rainfall that they don't need to water yet there's no sort of runoff is pretty much contradictory; if it's raining that much, there's going to be need for surplus water to flow away. Third, "surplus straw" is ridiculous. For one, straw left on the fields helps prevent erosion. For another, straw is livestock feed and bedding. If they weren't making use of it before, then they were just being wasteful; that's hardly an excuse for them to choose a bad use for it.
The natural gas doesn't consume vast amounts of habitat per person, lead to massive dead zones near estuaries, or drain rivers of their water, either.
Switching from natural gas home heating to biomass is like trying to reduce your lighting bills by burning candles. Natural gas is an abundant, low-carbon fuel that has literally several orders of magnitude less air quality degradation than biomass. If you want to tackle global warming, it's coal that you need to fight, not natural gas.
Indeed indeed. Too few people realize that you can *make* hydrocarbons, from almost any source of carbon. Just burn it with insufficient oxygen for full combustion, and you have your (pick a name): "wood gas", "town gas", "water gas", "coal gas", etc. The challenges are when you want to use biomass for that source of carbon. You can just mine or pump up fossil carbon sources. Growing fuel crops takes a ton of land (habitat), water, leads to runoff, and all sorts of other problems.
But, if we end up in that situation, we may not have a choice. Humans are not going to choose a stone-age existence. If it comes down to either doing actions with major adverse environmental consequences or tossing society in the gutter, humans can be counted on to choose the former every time.
Yes, why don't we all go back to a middle age existence. We can enjoy their wonderful quality of life and have a planet carrying capacity a fraction of what we have now.
Why do people pine for this mythical "good old days" before all that pesky modern technology? Between starvation, plagues, and endless manual labor, pre-industrial life sucked.
1. Wood pollution problems can happen anywhere, even at low population densities, and even without an inversion. Wood stoves pump out two to three orders of magnitude more particulate matter than oil and gas furnaces.
2. Inversions can happen anywhere -- for example, from warm fronts. They're more common in some areas, certainly (central Alaska being one of them), but everywhere gets them.
3. Very little energy is wasted in natural gas extraction and transportation compared to the energy in the fuel. The straw almost certainly takes a larger percent to grow, harvest, and transport.
A pellet stove still emits two orders of magnitude more PM than an oil or gas stove; see the above graphic.
Wood is dirty, dirty, dirty. And no, wood gas is not "smoke". Smoke is particulate matter. Wood gas is a toxic mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
They exchange energy back and forth with the mainland.
Even if that's what they mean:
1) Other pollutants are very relevant as well, esp. in terms of human and wildlife health.
2) Other pollutants have a profound effect on climate as well. For example, carbon black has been shown to be a significant cause of global warming.
3) I'd *imagine* that straw has a pretty good ratio of fossil fuels in -> energy out, but there still is going to be some input.
4) Land use changes can have a profound impact on global climate, and using land for growing crops for heating (capturing only a small fraction of the light that hits the land as energy) means a *lot* of land. It also means consuming land for farming that would otherwise be wildlife habitat. And there's the whole water issue. And the runoff issue. And so forth.
To put the amount of pollution into perspective, here's the particulate matter emissions from different types of home heating.
The uncertified wood stove puts out several *pounds* of fine particulate matter each day of winter operation. Even the proportionally clean pellet stove dwarfs the emissions from oil and gas heating.
"Nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces"? Given that wood-burning has a pollution profile as bad as coal burning (the exact amount of different pollutants in each case varying depending on pollution controls), I seriously doubt straw burning is all that clean.
They misspoke or were written down wrong. Six orders of magnitude more power density than chemical batteries wouldn't be a battery. It'd be a bomb. Further evidence toward a mistake is that they were just talking about "high energy density".
Why do so many people confuse energy and power?
I've read about tritium health effects before. Its average residency in the body, when ingested as water, is about ten days. For something with as low energy decay as tritium, that's not much. It's not good for you, but it's not as bad as many other things we get exposed to.
I wonder how well it does if you don't give it realistic shapes (say, if you just draw a circle for everything)? If so, it'd be neat to have it draw elements from an RSS news feed, broken down into noun phrases and verbs, with descriptor-less nouns being combined with the verbs. I.e., it'd be a "Guess which news story gave you this crazy picture?" program.
"Surprised, humbled Obama awarded Nobel Peace Prize" -> "surprised, humbled Obama" "awarded" "nobel peace prize"
"Obama's Nobel: The Last Thing He Needs" -> "Obama's nobel" "last thing" "he needs"
"NASA probes hit moon twice; few pictures yet" -> "NASA probes" "hit" "moon" "few pictures"
"UCLA student's throat slashed in chem lab" -> "UCLA student" "throat slashed" "chem lab"
"2 die, 19 overcome at Arizona retreat sweat lodge" -> "2 die" "19 overcome" "Arizona Retreat sweat lodge"
IF they're talking about an RTG, I'd rule that right out. I'm not fond of the idea of every car in the country carrying hundreds of kilograms of highly radioactive isotopes around when manufacturing defects are inevitable and there are 6.3 million car crashes and 260,000 car fires every year.
On the other hand, it sounds like what they're describing is actually betavoltaics (God, I hate it when science articles are this vague...). If that's the case, no big deal. Betavoltaics use tritium as the fuel, and tritium is less dangerous than, say, the lead in your lead-acid battery. It's a very weak radiation (can't penetrate skin, doesn't go very far through air), and when ingested, the tritium (generally being in the form of water) has a very short residency in the body.
The problem with scaling up betavoltaics is supply. How can you supply that much tritium in any remotely affordable manner? It just doesn't seem plausible.