Thankfully nuclear powerplants tend to be subsidised by the local energy cooperative, and are a shared expense of typically upwards of several thousand simultaneous users.
The major hurdles to the manufacture of one tends to be getting zoning permits, construction contracts, and DoE and AEC certifications for design, construction, and operation. Hurdles to operation, such as sourcing fuel rods and waste disposal come later.
That said, my area is already powered in part by the output of a local fission plant- the WolfCreek nuclear plant, so at least for this potential customer of an electric vehicle, that particular prerequisite is already met.
I will amost certainly be modded down for this, but it seems more and more blatantly obvious that the US public school system exists to benefit teachers, and not students. Students are the necessary catylist for the teacher's paycheck.
Why do teachers get high end 500$ chairs, anyway? I am lucky if my ENGINEERING workstation has a 40$ office chair. What, are their butts made of solid gold or something? In dire risk of developing pressure sores that they need extra choushy padding?
I mean, WTF. (Don't even get me started on the 50 page process to fire a bad teacher.)
Perhaps what is really needed to fix the broken public school system, is to cut-back the power of the teacher's union? I am not suggesting that it get scrapped totally, but like all unions it operates best at equilibrium with the harsh realities of operational costs and requirements-- That means that the current "No, you CANT fire a teacher! If you do, you have to go through this rediculous paperwork first, and expect appeal!" standard practice in public education needs to stop. As long as the schools exist to benefit teachers, and not students, public education will always be lacklustre, no matter how cozy the student's desks are.
A browser agnostic java applet that connects to the server backend over some kind of industry standard protocol, authenticates the user, then pushes the file to server storage + A telephone call/ email with lots of pretty pictures.
We ARE talking 2001 here, NOT 1990. Sun's Java was quite capable of interacting with the local sockets libraries in an agnostic way.
Added bonus-- This would let macs and "unix-like" workstations send files too.
[explanation: Think "encrypted FTP" being obfuscated by the applet, so that it doesnt reveal directory structures etc-- and doesnt look 'scary'.All the "FTP stuff" gets handled by the applet internally, which then presents some industry specific form interface to the user. After that everything else could have been done with the antique CGI perl script methods.]
CON: Would have been doggedly slow compared to ActiveX, since it is non native code running on slow hardware.]
Simply because human brains do not seem to make use of quantum relativistic effects (like entanglement) due to their size, does not mean that a 15 neuron setup with strong evolutionary pressure to do more with less cannot not do so. Many distantly related species make use of "exotic" bochemistries- Photosyhnthesis makes use of entanglement to help direct photonic energy through the molecule, for instance. (look it up!)
Considering the highly specific evolutionary niche that bumblebees inhabit, (VS the hyper-generalized niche that humans inhabit) it is not that unreasonable to assume that they have evolved dedicated processes to solving this problem as efficiently as possible.
Further analysis needs to be conducted to determine just how efficiently they have been able to satisfy this requirement, and if it can be adapted for human use via computing technology.
Outright refusal without due dilligence is outright hubris.
It has been my experience reading talk pages on wikipedia articles, that article maintainers have a nasty habbit of redacting informative changes to documents under their control, for reasons that are not well explained by "notability", "lack of citations", or other perfectly resonable or respectable reasons for such redaction; but rather because the maintainer doesnt LIKE the change.
(Strawman alert! I have not checked this article for this kind of shit happening. It does however follow for other articles I have read. Just substitute "Details on sexuality" for "Details on subject X", and "DiVinci" for "Article Y", and the strawman fits.)
EG, if the maintainer of the article for master DiVinci happened to be a fanboi of his, and didnt like the idea that he could be attacked for being a homosexual by the extreme right wing, he would frantically redact any mention of the subject's sexuality, and claim that it was "Unimportant" to the document, and sternly reject any and all discourse that would support the inclusion of such additional information.
It wouldnt matter how many sources, and if you had a paper trail proving his sexuality with dark age court documents and lists of lovers-- the maintainer would redact the changes, and claim they were "unimportant."
That is why I asked the question the way I did-- How does wikipedia determine what is "Stupid trivia", and what is imporant enough to include?
It WASNT that the article was deleted, it was WHY.
As was pointed out in the talk page for the "malamanteau" article, it BECAME noteworthy because of the controversy that cropped up around it. The "Delete; merge with xkcd article" solution that was riggorously enforced did nothing to address this new noteworthiness, instead effectively scrapping any compromise from that angle. It didnt even get a 2 line paragraph in the XKCD article concerning the controversy. The whole thing was squashed.
So, by what criteria does one determine what piece of trivia is important enough to include, and what piece of trivia is "Stupid"?
Seems to me that there is no really hard-set criteria for this distinction, and as such is left up to a collective decision process, which has an un-restrained "populist" bias, which is totally arbitrary (based on which group of editors happen to be deliberating at any given time.)
Some people might claim that Leonardo DiVinci being a homosexual is stupid trivia. Others might claim it has modern cultural significance in light of modern trends toward embracing alternative sexualities. Who is right? How does Wikipedia decide which is which, and do so in a neutral, productive, and riggorous way?
Last time I checked, I saw what went on with the "Malamanteu" article, and saw LOTS of ego, LOTS of dick waving, and VERY VERY little true compromise or consideration. (It basically boiled down to a hard-line of "No, We wont include it, We dont care about your "supposed" justifications, our decision is final, stop questioning it; any attempt to re-create the article will be met with instant deletion." It wasn't that the article was deleted, it was the mentality as to WHY it was deleted-- A mentaltity that refuses to compromise, and assumes itself correct by default, and unquestionable.)
As such, I find Wikipedia's claims of being unbiased, et al, as being just so much hot air, hubris, and puffery. I might as well take a politician at face value as take such a claim, since it has been repeatedly demonstrated that these claims are false, if you would just pay attention.
Like another person pointed out earlier, due to hubble's constant for the expansion of the universe, the rate of spacetime expansion can exceed C, given a sufficiently large starting distance.
That is to say, the reason it took 13 billion years to reach us, is because the intervening space between it and us is growing consistently to hubble's constant; Literally "New spacetime" is being injected between it and us.
Basically, it is why there is a distinction between the "Observable universe", and "The universe". We cannot see all of the universe, because parts of it are so far away that the rate of expansion exceeds the speed of light, so that the light can never reach us.
Radio is canned music. You cant ask the radio disc jockey to change the key, because you are a baritone instead of a tenor.
That is what OP meant by "Live" music. That it is played live, by a living person, for you, in real time. And yes, the player piano did a grand job of putting corner store pianists out of business. By the same token, the tractor put many farm hands out of business. Technology does that. It reduces the amount of labor invested, and makes things easier; the downside is that it also puts people out of work in the process-- the people that did the jobs the technology replaced. Computers put whole accounting firms under, or at least resulted in huge reductions in the numbers of humans working for those firms.
The tired "Buggy whip" trope used on/. is very apt here.
Sugars come in several varieties, including simple, and complex.
Starches are a kind of sugar, just a very complex one. they get broken down by enzymes in your saliva into maltose, dextrose, and glucose. All simple sugars.
This breakdown process requires time, so starches satisfy longer than a heavy intake of simple sugars would, but they still metabolize mostly into fat if taken in high concentration.
fats on the other hand, require a considerable energy expense to digest. They need bile to help break it down, and acids in the stomach and small intestine are not so effective at digesting them since they are nonpolar, hydrophobic molecules.
Roughly, your body absorbs nutrients in about this order:
1) Simple sugars (these start to hit your bloodstream as soon as they enter your mouth. Literally.) 2) Starches (these take a few minutes to start hitting your bloodstream, but usually are starting to hit it by the time it has been churned in your stomach awhile.) 3) Proteins (These are more effected by acids than fats are, and get absorbed as broken down amino acids in your small intestine for the most part.) 4) Fats (A good portion of these make it out with your feces totally undigested. This is especially true if you eat the recommended amount of fiber, since the fiber sucks up the fat, and keeps it away from your body.)
The biggest things that americans can do to cut down on their bloat and bulk is to eat ALOT more fiber in their diets, and to cut down on the simple sugars and starches. Starches arent so much of a problem if they are eaten sensibly, and eaten with a good source of fiber.
Sadly, "Fast Food" usually comprises of fat (fried in oil), potatoes (starch, little fiber), heavily processed white bread (stripped of almost all fiber, has added simple sugar, high starch, low protein), and excessive protein. Taken together, it allows the fat to stay in the colon unsequestered long enough to be a health risk for both colon cancer and for obesity. the simple sugars present in the bread alter the way digestion happens, and also suppress satiety, making you more likely to supersize; (especially if you follow up with a large soda).
The end result is that your body readily absorbs way more calories than it needs, you poop out very little, and you get fatter.
the reason that the fast food industry removes the fiber from the wheat flour used to make the white bread for use in the fast food industry is because foods that are high in fiber take more time to eat, because you have to chew it more to swallow it, because of the added toughness and bulk that the fiber gives. It also reduces the preparation time radically, allowing a faster turn-around on the production floor.
Americans would drop the pounds radically in just a few years if a few new laws concerning food preparation from processed food companies went into effect:
1) Dont add sugar or high fructose corn syrup to bread dough that is supposed to non-sweet. (I'd bet you a dollar that your loaf of bread sitting in your breadbox contains high fructose corn syrup. "Traditional bread" contains 3 ingredients: Flour, Water, Yeast. What does your bread have in it?)
2) Specify that the maximum fiber removal from white bread flour is 50% of whole wheat flour yields.
3) Dont substitute sugars of any kind for fats.
That would make it so that it is actually POSSIBLE to "Moderate" the sugar consumption in the american diet, since you could actually find food that you didnt have to make yourself (from scratch) that does not contain added sugar. This would go a LONG way toward battling american obesity.
As for bacterial flora; Not exactly bacterial, but a common GI yeast (Candida) will make you crave sugar, and will cause lethargy and nausea if you reduce sugar intake. coupled with insulin's effect in this regard, it can make you into a sugar-holic pretty quickly.
For humans it actually still is relevant. OSHA limits occupational CO2 exposure to.0500PPM, which is a little less than 2x what is in atmospheric concentrations (.0360PPM AVG), because at that level for sustained periods it has been implicated in increased calcification of bodily tissues, and reduced cardiac function.
And your understanding of the problem is obviously limited. At no point did I "Make shit up", or "Lie."
I said that after a certain concentration, CO2 becomes toxic. That range falls between 1% and 8%, afterwhich it stops being toxic, and becomes lethal. YOU were the one that extrapolated that to mean that I was intending the lethal concentration. "serious problems" start happening way before then, especially for organisms that are more sensitive to it than humans are. In fact, Ocean acidification is happening RIGHT NOW, and is killing marine organisms RIGHT NOW.
You dont need to reach the "fatal" dose of 8% concentration to have serious health effects.
Higher CO2 levels have been implicated in increased prevelence of asthma and other resperatory problems as a consequence of it inducing increased pollen yeilds, and increasing soil fungus sporulation, among other health risks.
So, "Kook" my white ass.
Enjoy your health problems and raging global temperatures. It is apparent that you have been warned repeatedly, and have simply refused to listen because you didn't like the message.
I suppose so, but the issues surrounding what would happen if you cut solar input on the earth are quite salient; Putting a reflector in orbit to deflect light away from the earth has the comparble effect that pushing the earth further from the sun has. It would reduce the amount of photosynthesis that happens on the planet, which would do more harm than good in this circumstance.
The carbon that is already up there takes longer to be drawn out, making the effects of anthropogenic climate change more protracted. If you couple that with continued CO2 emission, you end up in an unenviable situation where you have to block more and more of the sun's light to keep the temperature constant.
The technology that they need to REALLY come up with is a means of beaming energy into space, not putting a cap on the rate of inflow. That would have the same desirable effect (reducing global mean temperature), without upsetting the environment. The problem is that it is "Undesirable" politically to blow millions of dollars on a great big array that beams IR radiation into space, when people are spending more and more money for energy. It is more politically rational to "Drill baby, drill", because that increases your chances of being re-elected.
That's the really real problem: Large corporations are in it for the money, and increasing expenses on a problem that has yet to fully rear it's ugly head (especially during a down world economy) is a great way to get investors to invest elsewhere. Politicians who spend money on such projects become wildly unpopular in the polls as people spend more and more of their money for energy. As such, NOBODY really WANTS to actually solve the problem; they want to find clever means of avoiding it, like putting a giant umbrella in space, and ignore the potential (likely) consequences.
The point I was attempting to convey was more along the lines of 'co2 is not harmless', along with 'even if we stop the earth from heating up by using a big umbrella, continuing to release co2 has other adverse effects.' As for the quip about not being able to reach the leathal 8% atmospheric concentration; there actually is enough carbon on the earth to do it, but most of it is sequestered in the lower crust and mantle./pedant
The real issue is that we are living outside our means, and the taxman will show up eventually.
From what I can gather, this "Ban" simply prohibits testing on EARTH.
There happens to be a nearby goldilocks planet (venus) who is DEEP in the throws of runaway greenhouse effects, which would make a PRIME test target, devoid of any bioethical considerations, since it is devoid of life.
We can do all our system tests there, and gather all the crucial data we need without the risk of fuxxoring up our planet even further.
Sunlight is needed to safely remove CO2 from the atmosphere (via photosynthesis. Yes, the oceans can absorb a good deal without the sun, but this results in ocean acidification, which leads to biosphere collaspe, which leads to a spiral of death and destruction in the ocean-- resulting in a massive release of CO2 as all those organisms die from toxic water.)
Continuing to release geologically sequestered CO2 reduces the earth's ability to eliminate waste heat into space as infra-red radiation-- EG, it causes global warming.
Attempting to blot out sunlight (energy in) to compensate for the obstruction on energy out of our planet to regulate global temperature would make the current energy crisis look tame; Plants and animals would be dieing left and right from the reduced energy reaching the earth. this would slow the earth;s ability to re-sequester that carbon, and make a bad problem into an even worse one.
The whole "We need to stop burning fossil fuels!" cry from the scientific community (and from your much derided 'greenie weenies') is non-trivial. It's like saying we need to stop dumping toxic waste in landfills, or stop producing biological weapons of mass destruction; the CO2 itself is dangerous. We need to stop INCREASING it's free levels in our atmosphere, if we intend to continue living on this planet.
It has nothing to do with money, or some insane desire for everyone to live in mud huts; It's a desire for everyone to CONTINUE living.
The problem with that is that the shadow does not always point straight down. It points in the direction normal to the sun; EG, even a geostationary shade would have a shadow that moves around thousands of miles as the angle of incident with the sun changes due to the earth's rotation.
Much more interesting would be to deploy something like this on Venus, to halt the greenhouse effect and cool it down.
Specifically, the specific CAD programs that people are used to, certified in, and do what they need them to do.
Good luck getting EG, BOEING to switch away from CATIA for example. (Yes, older versions of CATIA were made for unix workstations, but now the major development platform is win32/win64, and NOT unix.)
And for smaller shops, good luck getting them away from MasterCAM, or GibbsCam, or Unigraphics, or any other commonly used CAD/CAM package. The functionality that these programs offer is NON TRIVIAL. $Random_GPL_CAD_Offering is unlikely to have the full feature set that they need, and thus is unlikely to be a good fit.
This means you need to get EG, Dassault to start releasing a linux port of Catia, (etc..)-- Something that dassault has outright said they wouldnt do, and listed some reasons. (namely, the predisposition of most linux distros to fall back onto software openGL rendering using MesaGL when using certain hardware, either because of security issues or because of a clash with a company over open documentation.)
Until that kind of problem goes away, CAD developers wont want to support the platform, which is really a shame, since linux really is a nice kernel. (The issue with software rendering is probably a thorn in the side of commercial game makers too.)
*Uses CAD/CAM software at work all the time. Catia in particular; It's intrinsically NURBS modeling, and absurdly powerful. It hungers for GPU acceleration and CPU. Software rendering would kill it dead.
This would only be true if human effluents were reprocessed as fertilizers.
They are not. it is a health and sanitation issue, and is actually ILLEGAL in many parts of the US to use human waste products as fertilizers, even after heavy reprocessing to the point where it is basically refined chemicals.
Then of course, you have all those bodies in metal boxes put beneath the soil, awaiting a magical resurrection. Those resources are effectively out of the natural recycling program; EG, rotting and or being eaten by other things, and scattered about like every other large organism's corpses are.
The evil bastard in me tells me that this only INCREASES the efficiency of the population reduction, since it not only reduces the total number of generation 1 offspring, but exponentially reduces the number of potential generation 2 and latter offspring through reproductive scarcity.
It will cause you to reach your target population cap AHEAD of schedule, at which point you can cease the population control measures.
This is only a problem if you intend to leverage that large population in the intermediate timeframe (like china does--in very large factory cities.)
Multiple drug resistant bacteria are shaping up to be the new black death. Since it isnt stopped by traditional treatments, not even the rich and powerful would be immune. Perfect choice.
Go mother nature.
(And if I happen to catch it, it wouldn't mean a whole lot anyway. I have already decided never to have children, so I'm an evolutionary dead end anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully nuclear powerplants tend to be subsidised by the local energy cooperative, and are a shared expense of typically upwards of several thousand simultaneous users.
The major hurdles to the manufacture of one tends to be getting zoning permits, construction contracts, and DoE and AEC certifications for design, construction, and operation. Hurdles to operation, such as sourcing fuel rods and waste disposal come later.
That said, my area is already powered in part by the output of a local fission plant- the WolfCreek nuclear plant, so at least for this potential customer of an electric vehicle, that particular prerequisite is already met.
I will amost certainly be modded down for this, but it seems more and more blatantly obvious that the US public school system exists to benefit teachers, and not students. Students are the necessary catylist for the teacher's paycheck.
Why do teachers get high end 500$ chairs, anyway? I am lucky if my ENGINEERING workstation has a 40$ office chair. What, are their butts made of solid gold or something? In dire risk of developing pressure sores that they need extra choushy padding?
I mean, WTF. (Don't even get me started on the 50 page process to fire a bad teacher.)
Perhaps what is really needed to fix the broken public school system, is to cut-back the power of the teacher's union? I am not suggesting that it get scrapped totally, but like all unions it operates best at equilibrium with the harsh realities of operational costs and requirements-- That means that the current "No, you CANT fire a teacher! If you do, you have to go through this rediculous paperwork first, and expect appeal!" standard practice in public education needs to stop. As long as the schools exist to benefit teachers, and not students, public education will always be lacklustre, no matter how cozy the student's desks are.
A browser agnostic java applet that connects to the server backend over some kind of industry standard protocol, authenticates the user, then pushes the file to server storage + A telephone call/ email with lots of pretty pictures.
We ARE talking 2001 here, NOT 1990. Sun's Java was quite capable of interacting with the local sockets libraries in an agnostic way.
Added bonus-- This would let macs and "unix-like" workstations send files too.
[explanation: Think "encrypted FTP" being obfuscated by the applet, so that it doesnt reveal directory structures etc-- and doesnt look 'scary' .All the "FTP stuff" gets handled by the applet internally, which then presents some industry specific form interface to the user. After that everything else could have been done with the antique CGI perl script methods.]
CON: Would have been doggedly slow compared to ActiveX, since it is non native code running on slow hardware.]
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "0-day courier."
Are we going to have a digital data mafia next? Oh wait- we already do. My bad.
I think it requires further analysis.
Simply because human brains do not seem to make use of quantum relativistic effects (like entanglement) due to their size, does not mean that a 15 neuron setup with strong evolutionary pressure to do more with less cannot not do so. Many distantly related species make use of "exotic" bochemistries- Photosyhnthesis makes use of entanglement to help direct photonic energy through the molecule, for instance. (look it up!)
Considering the highly specific evolutionary niche that bumblebees inhabit, (VS the hyper-generalized niche that humans inhabit) it is not that unreasonable to assume that they have evolved dedicated processes to solving this problem as efficiently as possible.
Further analysis needs to be conducted to determine just how efficiently they have been able to satisfy this requirement, and if it can be adapted for human use via computing technology.
Outright refusal without due dilligence is outright hubris.
No, the aGNUstic does not know for sure if GNU really is or is not Unix.
Common mistake. ;)
It has been my experience reading talk pages on wikipedia articles, that article maintainers have a nasty habbit of redacting informative changes to documents under their control, for reasons that are not well explained by "notability", "lack of citations", or other perfectly resonable or respectable reasons for such redaction; but rather because the maintainer doesnt LIKE the change.
(Strawman alert! I have not checked this article for this kind of shit happening. It does however follow for other articles I have read. Just substitute "Details on sexuality" for "Details on subject X", and "DiVinci" for "Article Y", and the strawman fits.)
EG, if the maintainer of the article for master DiVinci happened to be a fanboi of his, and didnt like the idea that he could be attacked for being a homosexual by the extreme right wing, he would frantically redact any mention of the subject's sexuality, and claim that it was "Unimportant" to the document, and sternly reject any and all discourse that would support the inclusion of such additional information.
It wouldnt matter how many sources, and if you had a paper trail proving his sexuality with dark age court documents and lists of lovers-- the maintainer would redact the changes, and claim they were "unimportant."
That is why I asked the question the way I did-- How does wikipedia determine what is "Stupid trivia", and what is imporant enough to include?
You missed the point;
It WASNT that the article was deleted, it was WHY.
As was pointed out in the talk page for the "malamanteau" article, it BECAME noteworthy because of the controversy that cropped up around it. The "Delete; merge with xkcd article" solution that was riggorously enforced did nothing to address this new noteworthiness, instead effectively scrapping any compromise from that angle. It didnt even get a 2 line paragraph in the XKCD article concerning the controversy. The whole thing was squashed.
THAT was the point.
So, by what criteria does one determine what piece of trivia is important enough to include, and what piece of trivia is "Stupid"?
Seems to me that there is no really hard-set criteria for this distinction, and as such is left up to a collective decision process, which has an un-restrained "populist" bias, which is totally arbitrary (based on which group of editors happen to be deliberating at any given time.)
Some people might claim that Leonardo DiVinci being a homosexual is stupid trivia. Others might claim it has modern cultural significance in light of modern trends toward embracing alternative sexualities. Who is right? How does Wikipedia decide which is which, and do so in a neutral, productive, and riggorous way?
Last time I checked, I saw what went on with the "Malamanteu" article, and saw LOTS of ego, LOTS of dick waving, and VERY VERY little true compromise or consideration. (It basically boiled down to a hard-line of "No, We wont include it, We dont care about your "supposed" justifications, our decision is final, stop questioning it; any attempt to re-create the article will be met with instant deletion." It wasn't that the article was deleted, it was the mentality as to WHY it was deleted-- A mentaltity that refuses to compromise, and assumes itself correct by default, and unquestionable.)
As such, I find Wikipedia's claims of being unbiased, et al, as being just so much hot air, hubris, and puffery. I might as well take a politician at face value as take such a claim, since it has been repeatedly demonstrated that these claims are false, if you would just pay attention.
Like another person pointed out earlier, due to hubble's constant for the expansion of the universe, the rate of spacetime expansion can exceed C, given a sufficiently large starting distance.
That is to say, the reason it took 13 billion years to reach us, is because the intervening space between it and us is growing consistently to hubble's constant; Literally "New spacetime" is being injected between it and us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble's_law
Basically, it is why there is a distinction between the "Observable universe", and "The universe". We cannot see all of the universe, because parts of it are so far away that the rate of expansion exceeds the speed of light, so that the light can never reach us.
Radio is canned music. You cant ask the radio disc jockey to change the key, because you are a baritone instead of a tenor.
That is what OP meant by "Live" music. That it is played live, by a living person, for you, in real time. And yes, the player piano did a grand job of putting corner store pianists out of business. By the same token, the tractor put many farm hands out of business. Technology does that. It reduces the amount of labor invested, and makes things easier; the downside is that it also puts people out of work in the process-- the people that did the jobs the technology replaced. Computers put whole accounting firms under, or at least resulted in huge reductions in the numbers of humans working for those firms.
The tired "Buggy whip" trope used on /. is very apt here.
Sugars come in several varieties, including simple, and complex.
Starches are a kind of sugar, just a very complex one. they get broken down by enzymes in your saliva into maltose, dextrose, and glucose. All simple sugars.
This breakdown process requires time, so starches satisfy longer than a heavy intake of simple sugars would, but they still metabolize mostly into fat if taken in high concentration.
fats on the other hand, require a considerable energy expense to digest. They need bile to help break it down, and acids in the stomach and small intestine are not so effective at digesting them since they are nonpolar, hydrophobic molecules.
Roughly, your body absorbs nutrients in about this order:
1) Simple sugars (these start to hit your bloodstream as soon as they enter your mouth. Literally.)
2) Starches (these take a few minutes to start hitting your bloodstream, but usually are starting to hit it by the time it has been churned in your stomach awhile.)
3) Proteins (These are more effected by acids than fats are, and get absorbed as broken down amino acids in your small intestine for the most part.)
4) Fats (A good portion of these make it out with your feces totally undigested. This is especially true if you eat the recommended amount of fiber, since the fiber sucks up the fat, and keeps it away from your body.)
The biggest things that americans can do to cut down on their bloat and bulk is to eat ALOT more fiber in their diets, and to cut down on the simple sugars and starches. Starches arent so much of a problem if they are eaten sensibly, and eaten with a good source of fiber.
Sadly, "Fast Food" usually comprises of fat (fried in oil), potatoes (starch, little fiber), heavily processed white bread (stripped of almost all fiber, has added simple sugar, high starch, low protein), and excessive protein. Taken together, it allows the fat to stay in the colon unsequestered long enough to be a health risk for both colon cancer and for obesity. the simple sugars present in the bread alter the way digestion happens, and also suppress satiety, making you more likely to supersize; (especially if you follow up with a large soda).
The end result is that your body readily absorbs way more calories than it needs, you poop out very little, and you get fatter.
the reason that the fast food industry removes the fiber from the wheat flour used to make the white bread for use in the fast food industry is because foods that are high in fiber take more time to eat, because you have to chew it more to swallow it, because of the added toughness and bulk that the fiber gives. It also reduces the preparation time radically, allowing a faster turn-around on the production floor.
Americans would drop the pounds radically in just a few years if a few new laws concerning food preparation from processed food companies went into effect:
1) Dont add sugar or high fructose corn syrup to bread dough that is supposed to non-sweet.
(I'd bet you a dollar that your loaf of bread sitting in your breadbox contains high fructose corn syrup. "Traditional bread" contains 3 ingredients: Flour, Water, Yeast. What does your bread have in it?)
2) Specify that the maximum fiber removal from white bread flour is 50% of whole wheat flour yields.
3) Dont substitute sugars of any kind for fats.
That would make it so that it is actually POSSIBLE to "Moderate" the sugar consumption in the american diet, since you could actually find food that you didnt have to make yourself (from scratch) that does not contain added sugar. This would go a LONG way toward battling american obesity.
As for bacterial flora; Not exactly bacterial, but a common GI yeast (Candida) will make you crave sugar, and will cause lethargy and nausea if you reduce sugar intake. coupled with insulin's effect in this regard, it can make you into a sugar-holic pretty quickly.
For humans it actually still is relevant. OSHA limits occupational CO2 exposure to .0500PPM, which is a little less than 2x what is in atmospheric concentrations (.0360PPM AVG), because at that level for sustained periods it has been implicated in increased calcification of bodily tissues, and reduced cardiac function.
So, No. Not being deceptive either.
And your understanding of the problem is obviously limited. At no point did I "Make shit up", or "Lie."
I said that after a certain concentration, CO2 becomes toxic. That range falls between 1% and 8%, afterwhich it stops being toxic, and becomes lethal. YOU were the one that extrapolated that to mean that I was intending the lethal concentration. "serious problems" start happening way before then, especially for organisms that are more sensitive to it than humans are. In fact, Ocean acidification is happening RIGHT NOW, and is killing marine organisms RIGHT NOW.
You dont need to reach the "fatal" dose of 8% concentration to have serious health effects.
Higher CO2 levels have been implicated in increased prevelence of asthma and other resperatory problems as a consequence of it inducing increased pollen yeilds, and increasing soil fungus sporulation, among other health risks.
So, "Kook" my white ass.
Enjoy your health problems and raging global temperatures. It is apparent that you have been warned repeatedly, and have simply refused to listen because you didn't like the message.
*Shrug*
I suppose so, but the issues surrounding what would happen if you cut solar input on the earth are quite salient; Putting a reflector in orbit to deflect light away from the earth has the comparble effect that pushing the earth further from the sun has. It would reduce the amount of photosynthesis that happens on the planet, which would do more harm than good in this circumstance.
The carbon that is already up there takes longer to be drawn out, making the effects of anthropogenic climate change more protracted. If you couple that with continued CO2 emission, you end up in an unenviable situation where you have to block more and more of the sun's light to keep the temperature constant.
The technology that they need to REALLY come up with is a means of beaming energy into space, not putting a cap on the rate of inflow. That would have the same desirable effect (reducing global mean temperature), without upsetting the environment. The problem is that it is "Undesirable" politically to blow millions of dollars on a great big array that beams IR radiation into space, when people are spending more and more money for energy. It is more politically rational to "Drill baby, drill", because that increases your chances of being re-elected.
That's the really real problem: Large corporations are in it for the money, and increasing expenses on a problem that has yet to fully rear it's ugly head (especially during a down world economy) is a great way to get investors to invest elsewhere. Politicians who spend money on such projects become wildly unpopular in the polls as people spend more and more of their money for energy. As such, NOBODY really WANTS to actually solve the problem; they want to find clever means of avoiding it, like putting a giant umbrella in space, and ignore the potential (likely) consequences.
The point I was attempting to convey was more along the lines of 'co2 is not harmless', along with 'even if we stop the earth from heating up by using a big umbrella, continuing to release co2 has other adverse effects.' As for the quip about not being able to reach the leathal 8% atmospheric concentration; there actually is enough carbon on the earth to do it, but most of it is sequestered in the lower crust and mantle. /pedant
The real issue is that we are living outside our means, and the taxman will show up eventually.
From what I can gather, this "Ban" simply prohibits testing on EARTH.
There happens to be a nearby goldilocks planet (venus) who is DEEP in the throws of runaway greenhouse effects, which would make a PRIME test target, devoid of any bioethical considerations, since it is devoid of life.
We can do all our system tests there, and gather all the crucial data we need without the risk of fuxxoring up our planet even further.
Last I checked, those conditions did not exist on the earth. :D
Unless of course, you intend to move to mercury, and make use of the fact that it is tidelocked to the sun... ;)
the burning of fossil fuels has other issues, and blotting out the sun would only address one of them.
Let's break it down:
CO2 is toxic. Above a certain concentration, CO2 becomes a toxic agent.
Sunlight is needed to safely remove CO2 from the atmosphere (via photosynthesis. Yes, the oceans can absorb a good deal without the sun, but this results in ocean acidification, which leads to biosphere collaspe, which leads to a spiral of death and destruction in the ocean-- resulting in a massive release of CO2 as all those organisms die from toxic water.)
Continuing to release geologically sequestered CO2 reduces the earth's ability to eliminate waste heat into space as infra-red radiation-- EG, it causes global warming.
Attempting to blot out sunlight (energy in) to compensate for the obstruction on energy out of our planet to regulate global temperature would make the current energy crisis look tame; Plants and animals would be dieing left and right from the reduced energy reaching the earth. this would slow the earth;s ability to re-sequester that carbon, and make a bad problem into an even worse one.
The whole "We need to stop burning fossil fuels!" cry from the scientific community (and from your much derided 'greenie weenies') is non-trivial. It's like saying we need to stop dumping toxic waste in landfills, or stop producing biological weapons of mass destruction; the CO2 itself is dangerous. We need to stop INCREASING it's free levels in our atmosphere, if we intend to continue living on this planet.
It has nothing to do with money, or some insane desire for everyone to live in mud huts; It's a desire for everyone to CONTINUE living.
The problem with that is that the shadow does not always point straight down. It points in the direction normal to the sun; EG, even a geostationary shade would have a shadow that moves around thousands of miles as the angle of incident with the sun changes due to the earth's rotation.
Much more interesting would be to deploy something like this on Venus, to halt the greenhouse effect and cool it down.
CAD software
Specifically, the specific CAD programs that people are used to, certified in, and do what they need them to do.
Good luck getting EG, BOEING to switch away from CATIA for example. (Yes, older versions of CATIA were made for unix workstations, but now the major development platform is win32/win64, and NOT unix.)
And for smaller shops, good luck getting them away from MasterCAM, or GibbsCam, or Unigraphics, or any other commonly used CAD/CAM package. The functionality that these programs offer is NON TRIVIAL. $Random_GPL_CAD_Offering is unlikely to have the full feature set that they need, and thus is unlikely to be a good fit.
This means you need to get EG, Dassault to start releasing a linux port of Catia, (etc..)-- Something that dassault has outright said they wouldnt do, and listed some reasons. (namely, the predisposition of most linux distros to fall back onto software openGL rendering using MesaGL when using certain hardware, either because of security issues or because of a clash with a company over open documentation.)
Until that kind of problem goes away, CAD developers wont want to support the platform, which is really a shame, since linux really is a nice kernel. (The issue with software rendering is probably a thorn in the side of commercial game makers too.)
*Uses CAD/CAM software at work all the time. Catia in particular; It's intrinsically NURBS modeling, and absurdly powerful. It hungers for GPU acceleration and CPU. Software rendering would kill it dead.
No, a 99% efficient heat engine is not possible.
The maximum efficiency you can get from any thermally based engine is the Carnot Efficiency.
This would only be true if human effluents were reprocessed as fertilizers.
They are not. it is a health and sanitation issue, and is actually ILLEGAL in many parts of the US to use human waste products as fertilizers, even after heavy reprocessing to the point where it is basically refined chemicals.
Then of course, you have all those bodies in metal boxes put beneath the soil, awaiting a magical resurrection. Those resources are effectively out of the natural recycling program; EG, rotting and or being eaten by other things, and scattered about like every other large organism's corpses are.
The evil bastard in me tells me that this only INCREASES the efficiency of the population reduction, since it not only reduces the total number of generation 1 offspring, but exponentially reduces the number of potential generation 2 and latter offspring through reproductive scarcity.
It will cause you to reach your target population cap AHEAD of schedule, at which point you can cease the population control measures.
This is only a problem if you intend to leverage that large population in the intermediate timeframe (like china does--in very large factory cities.)
This is why I advocate letting nature do it.
Multiple drug resistant bacteria are shaping up to be the new black death. Since it isnt stopped by traditional treatments, not even the rich and powerful would be immune. Perfect choice.
Go mother nature.
(And if I happen to catch it, it wouldn't mean a whole lot anyway. I have already decided never to have children, so I'm an evolutionary dead end anyway.)