No, creationists are naturally resistant to knowledge, they evolved that way. All the creationists that wasn't stopped being creationists. Being smugly confident is one of the mechanisms for this resistance.
The most significant source of potential contamination of groundwater [...] is from human activities on the surface such as agriculture and surface industry [...]
Or oil drilling operations on the surface. Which is my entire point: If an oil or gas well is going to pollute the surrounding area, the pollution will probably originate from the above-ground activity. Focusing on fracking misses the most likely point of pollution.
I don't think shale will work as a cap, it is porous after all. So no, not kilometers of shale, kilometers of significantly harder rock. And why is "millenia old" in scare quotes? To signify that that was not at all what I said? Of course, pointing out your own straw man is a great service, but given that you quote my text in its entirety two lines above, I think it is superfluous.
A lot of things can go wrong, but several kilometers of cap rock cracking is not near the top of that list. If we keep discussing it as if it is, we will not get anything done to the things that are actually likely to happen, hell, that does happen when people frack.
The point is to fracture the bed so the gas can make it to the drilling head. From there, there is a pipe taking it to the surface. It is not supposed to reach the surface on its own, how would you use that?
They didn't fake it, and people didn't lie, but in at least one of the examples in Gasland, the methane have been shown to be naturally occuring, a fact that they somehow forgot to mention in the film. What probably happened is that people have had flammable water for years and years, but have never tested it. How often do you test your water for flammability? After talk started about fracking and water pollution, people in fracking areas have started testing it. They can see that they have flammable water now, and they have never seen it before, what is the natural conclusion? It must be caused by fracking.
Burning water is a red herring in the fracking debate. I understand why people like it, it is very effective demonstration, but problems with fracking is unlikely to show up as flammable water. To keep bringing it up will make it harder to discuss the problems which fracking is likely to cause, and harder to fight the practises which causes these problems.
If I understand it correctly, there are three main components of fracking fluid:
1: Water. Just the carrier, but it is by far the largest part. Under high pressure it forces open cracks in the rock.
2: Sand. It is pressed into the newly formed cracks to stop them closing when the pressure is removed.
3: Surfactants. This is where the toxic chemicals show up. It makes up a very little part of the fracking fluid, but because so much is used, the total amount can become quite large. It is used to make sure the water get into every crack.
It would seem that fracking can be done without surfactants, but it would be less efficient. Surfactants are generally not that good for the environment, so I would be sceptical as to whether sustituting the ones used today would make much of a difference.
However, there is another problem. Some of the fracking fluid comes up again when the pressure is released. This has been in contact with oil, so it is extremely dirty. What to do with this water is a big problem that can't be removed from fracking.
Through kilometers of rock that has held gas for millenia? While "no chance" is extreme, I would say that there are far more relevant concerns with regards to fracking.
They can't leave it down there for fear of it seeping into the water table and when they suck it up, what do they do with it?
Given that it is pumped into oil/gas-carrying rock, it will not seep into the water table. If it could, the oil or gas would be long gone. The problem is that you must pump some of it out to get acces to the oil or gas, and even if it was pure water you pumped down, the water coming up has been in contact with oil and is not clean. With horizontal drilling, you end up with quite a lot of dirty water, and no good way to get rid of it. Another problem is the casing of the pipes going down. It seems to be hard to make sure it is done properly, and if it isn't, you risk the pipe breaking and the fracking fluid running out. As the pipes are necessarily drilled through the aquifer, this is clearly problematic.
We have established it in one case with quite a special geologic profile (the fracking happened much closer to the surface than normal). That is a far cry from it being an established, general problem. It is cause for concern, especially for shallow fracking, but I think the two problems I mentioned first are more acute.
At least for VAT, they have a system in place: The seller has to charge VAT. If his sales to country X is less than a certain amount per year (which I can't find right now), he must pay his countries VAT. If it is more than that amount, he has to pay the recieving countries VAT.
This, combined with the fact that Britain has 0% VAT on books, means you should order your books from small, British internet stores. Amazon.co.uk is no good, as they will be over the limit for most countries.
You comment would be more compelling if women were not underrepresented in the field [...]
So far, so good.
[...] due to sexism. But they are.
Citation needed. How do we know that it is because of sexism?
[...]it's hard work, and why should men do that?
Yes, because men did not work hard in the mid 1800's. We all learned that from the unbiased history book "How men has always oppressed womyn". No man has ever worked.
I think you have gotten this the wrong way around. In USA, quite a large proportion of the voting public claims they will not vote for a candidate simply because the candidate is atheist (the number is significantly higher than the corresponding number for Muslims). I haven't seen any numbers for the proportion of voters who would never vote for a Christian, but I don't think anybody would claim that they are significant, given the proportion of the American public who are Christians. In general, atheists don't mock people for voting for a Christian, they despair at people who think religion is the most important parameter in who to vote for.
You are going to get not just one crate, but multiple crates. Pick one at random, or better yet, pick several at random
Good so far
dump their content off, pick stuff off it,
No, that is not a random sample. You need to make sure that every nutplate in the crate have the same probability of being chosen. In your example, nutplates at the bottom of the plate will end up in the top of the pile, and will have a higher chance of being sampled. You need to either make a stream of plates which you can sample at random intervals, of divide the crate into subsamples, which you then sample randomly. Placing it back in the container in small portions, and randomly selecting some of them for sampling would be a way to do it.
It can never be as perfect as sampling liquid, but it is not impossible or even difficult/cost ineffective.
If you can get it to be a one-dimensional stream, the sampling itself can be as perfect as sampling of liquids. The particles are somewhat larger, so more of them is needed to get a proper sampling, but as GGP pointed out, we don't need to detect ppm levels, percent levels are fine.
Because of the finite speed of light, we can compare half-life 170.000 years ago to half-life today, with the same clock. I don't see how inaccuracies in the clock should change anything? We are not sending the clock back in time and letting running it under the constants at that time.
'm curious as to why so many people seem to be jumping out of the woodwork and complaining about this.
Because it sounds close to what the anti-vaccination lobby is claiming. They have been cherry-picking and distorting scientific evidence for more than a decade, not to mention doing fraudulent and unethical research on children, in order to show that mercury in vaccines cause autism. When thimerosal was taken out of most vaccines, the autism rates failed to drop (indeed, the rise did not even slow down), the smarter ones started blaming undefined "toxins" in vaccines.
So, to put it shortly, cranks have been screaming for years that autism is caused by (specific) environmental factors in order to spread preventable diseases. This (unfairly) makes people skeptical of such claims.
Statistical sampling *works*. You really -can- test the quality of a million-gallon-delivery of whatever by picking a few random samples, and test those.
Only if you can get a representative sample. Getting that from a liquid is easy, getting that from a crate of nutplates isn't. It can be done, but you need to carefully think about how it is done.
It is estimated that Europe wastes around 50% of the food they produce, I assume the same is true for USA. People in the West eat much more meat than is needed. Limiting the amount of meat in the Western diet and limiting the wasted food will give us more than enough food to feed the world. Not that such a solution is easy.
Slashdot Mirror
No, creationists are naturally resistant to knowledge, they evolved that way. All the creationists that wasn't stopped being creationists. Being smugly confident is one of the mechanisms for this resistance.
Normally, 2 = {0,1} = { {} , {{}} }
2 has two members, three has two members and so on.
I'm glad to hear of it.
The most significant source of potential contamination of groundwater [...] is from human activities on the surface such as agriculture and surface industry [...]
Or oil drilling operations on the surface. Which is my entire point: If an oil or gas well is going to pollute the surrounding area, the pollution will probably originate from the above-ground activity. Focusing on fracking misses the most likely point of pollution.
I don't think shale will work as a cap, it is porous after all. So no, not kilometers of shale, kilometers of significantly harder rock. And why is "millenia old" in scare quotes? To signify that that was not at all what I said? Of course, pointing out your own straw man is a great service, but given that you quote my text in its entirety two lines above, I think it is superfluous.
A lot of things can go wrong, but several kilometers of cap rock cracking is not near the top of that list. If we keep discussing it as if it is, we will not get anything done to the things that are actually likely to happen, hell, that does happen when people frack.
The point is to fracture the bed so the gas can make it to the drilling head. From there, there is a pipe taking it to the surface. It is not supposed to reach the surface on its own, how would you use that?
They didn't fake it, and people didn't lie, but in at least one of the examples in Gasland, the methane have been shown to be naturally occuring, a fact that they somehow forgot to mention in the film. What probably happened is that people have had flammable water for years and years, but have never tested it. How often do you test your water for flammability? After talk started about fracking and water pollution, people in fracking areas have started testing it. They can see that they have flammable water now, and they have never seen it before, what is the natural conclusion? It must be caused by fracking.
Burning water is a red herring in the fracking debate. I understand why people like it, it is very effective demonstration, but problems with fracking is unlikely to show up as flammable water. To keep bringing it up will make it harder to discuss the problems which fracking is likely to cause, and harder to fight the practises which causes these problems.
If I understand it correctly, there are three main components of fracking fluid:
1: Water. Just the carrier, but it is by far the largest part. Under high pressure it forces open cracks in the rock.
2: Sand. It is pressed into the newly formed cracks to stop them closing when the pressure is removed.
3: Surfactants. This is where the toxic chemicals show up. It makes up a very little part of the fracking fluid, but because so much is used, the total amount can become quite large. It is used to make sure the water get into every crack.
It would seem that fracking can be done without surfactants, but it would be less efficient. Surfactants are generally not that good for the environment, so I would be sceptical as to whether sustituting the ones used today would make much of a difference.
However, there is another problem. Some of the fracking fluid comes up again when the pressure is released. This has been in contact with oil, so it is extremely dirty. What to do with this water is a big problem that can't be removed from fracking.
Through kilometers of rock that has held gas for millenia? While "no chance" is extreme, I would say that there are far more relevant concerns with regards to fracking.
Congrats! Now you, too, can watch agenda-pushing disguised as documentaries!
They can't leave it down there for fear of it seeping into the water table and when they suck it up, what do they do with it?
Given that it is pumped into oil/gas-carrying rock, it will not seep into the water table. If it could, the oil or gas would be long gone. The problem is that you must pump some of it out to get acces to the oil or gas, and even if it was pure water you pumped down, the water coming up has been in contact with oil and is not clean. With horizontal drilling, you end up with quite a lot of dirty water, and no good way to get rid of it. Another problem is the casing of the pipes going down. It seems to be hard to make sure it is done properly, and if it isn't, you risk the pipe breaking and the fracking fluid running out. As the pipes are necessarily drilled through the aquifer, this is clearly problematic.
It's well known that it contaminates water supply
We have established it in one case with quite a special geologic profile (the fracking happened much closer to the surface than normal). That is a far cry from it being an established, general problem. It is cause for concern, especially for shallow fracking, but I think the two problems I mentioned first are more acute.
CO2(g) + H2O(l) -> H2CO3(aq)
H2CO3(aq) -> H+(aq) + HCO3-(aq)
And it has been known to shoot lasers at earth! And Mars is even worse, it shoots lasers and is clearly a rouge planet! Somebody call Team America!
At least for VAT, they have a system in place: The seller has to charge VAT. If his sales to country X is less than a certain amount per year (which I can't find right now), he must pay his countries VAT. If it is more than that amount, he has to pay the recieving countries VAT.
This, combined with the fact that Britain has 0% VAT on books, means you should order your books from small, British internet stores. Amazon.co.uk is no good, as they will be over the limit for most countries.
Not grant money. Money from trial lawyers who had cases against vaccine manufacturers.
Or perhaps they just don't like discrimination, especially when it is being sold as being anti-descriminatory.
You comment would be more compelling if women were not underrepresented in the field [...]
So far, so good.
[...] due to sexism. But they are.
Citation needed. How do we know that it is because of sexism?
[...]it's hard work, and why should men do that?
Yes, because men did not work hard in the mid 1800's. We all learned that from the unbiased history book "How men has always oppressed womyn". No man has ever worked.
I think you have gotten this the wrong way around. In USA, quite a large proportion of the voting public claims they will not vote for a candidate simply because the candidate is atheist (the number is significantly higher than the corresponding number for Muslims). I haven't seen any numbers for the proportion of voters who would never vote for a Christian, but I don't think anybody would claim that they are significant, given the proportion of the American public who are Christians. In general, atheists don't mock people for voting for a Christian, they despair at people who think religion is the most important parameter in who to vote for.
You are going to get not just one crate, but multiple crates. Pick one at random, or better yet, pick several at random
Good so far
dump their content off, pick stuff off it,
No, that is not a random sample. You need to make sure that every nutplate in the crate have the same probability of being chosen. In your example, nutplates at the bottom of the plate will end up in the top of the pile, and will have a higher chance of being sampled. You need to either make a stream of plates which you can sample at random intervals, of divide the crate into subsamples, which you then sample randomly. Placing it back in the container in small portions, and randomly selecting some of them for sampling would be a way to do it.
It can never be as perfect as sampling liquid, but it is not impossible or even difficult/cost ineffective.
If you can get it to be a one-dimensional stream, the sampling itself can be as perfect as sampling of liquids. The particles are somewhat larger, so more of them is needed to get a proper sampling, but as GGP pointed out, we don't need to detect ppm levels, percent levels are fine.
Because of the finite speed of light, we can compare half-life 170.000 years ago to half-life today, with the same clock. I don't see how inaccuracies in the clock should change anything? We are not sending the clock back in time and letting running it under the constants at that time.
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/constant_evidence.html It seems it wasn't as distant as I remembered, only 170.000 light years.
'm curious as to why so many people seem to be jumping out of the woodwork and complaining about this.
Because it sounds close to what the anti-vaccination lobby is claiming. They have been cherry-picking and distorting scientific evidence for more than a decade, not to mention doing fraudulent and unethical research on children, in order to show that mercury in vaccines cause autism. When thimerosal was taken out of most vaccines, the autism rates failed to drop (indeed, the rise did not even slow down), the smarter ones started blaming undefined "toxins" in vaccines.
So, to put it shortly, cranks have been screaming for years that autism is caused by (specific) environmental factors in order to spread preventable diseases. This (unfairly) makes people skeptical of such claims.
Statistical sampling *works*. You really -can- test the quality of a million-gallon-delivery of whatever by picking a few random samples, and test those.
Only if you can get a representative sample. Getting that from a liquid is easy, getting that from a crate of nutplates isn't. It can be done, but you need to carefully think about how it is done.
It is estimated that Europe wastes around 50% of the food they produce, I assume the same is true for USA. People in the West eat much more meat than is needed. Limiting the amount of meat in the Western diet and limiting the wasted food will give us more than enough food to feed the world. Not that such a solution is easy.