I've done the math on heated driveways and sidewalks a few times in Slashdot posts. I'm not going to go through it all over again. I'm just going to note that I've done the math before and I would switch to a heated driveway right now and, ignoring the installation costs, it would save me time and money. It would cost less per month in energy costs than having it ploughed or doing it myself. So, nope, that application for energy wouldn't make energy a scarce resource again. It would take some other technological great leap forward: teleporters, matter replicators, personal space travel, etc.
Everyone seems to forget that we've had far better than breakeven fusion for ages. The first hydrogen bomb was successfully tested over 60 years ago. We can clearly manage breakeven fusion, the key part is _sustained_ breakeven fusion. Gravity makes a lousy fusion containment field from a technological standpoint. You can't turn it on and off at will so you're burning off your fuel all the time, even when you don't need it. The initial startup is a pain. Then there's the shear amount of matter required to make it work. It takes 5000 tons of sun to produce 1 kilowatt. Ridiculously impractical from a technological point of view. From the point of view of a natural resource we can extract power from at a distance a star is great, but it wouldn't make much sense to ever build one.
I think the point is that it's not an elegant solution from a technological standpoint. We've been able to duplicate the pressures and temperatures of the core of the sun with devices quite a lot smaller than our nearly million mile wide star. Only in very small areas and for very brief time scales of course.
Certainly uses for energy could arise that might make it scarce in the long term. But it's hard to come up with new uses for it that would count as actual _needs_. There's only so much energy that you need to survive and live in comfort. Nearly everything you might want to do would, for the conceivable future, be constrained by other resources, not by energy. As has been pointed out, there are certain thermodynamic limits on how much energy you can actually produce and use before we parboil ourselves on our own planet. If we're capable of producing that much power, then we're done for a while until another paradigm shift comes along (really big planet-wide air conditioning system beaming waste heat into space, cheap, practical mass transit into space, etc.) My point was that, if we suddenly had cheap and, for all practical purposes, unlimited energy, it would no longer be a scarce resource until such time as we came up with some new practical purposes.
What I feel sorry for is any researcher who wants to do some genuine research into cold fusion.
When Soddy and Rutherford first identified nuclear transmutation, Soddy later recalled that Rutherford said: "For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists." The exact same thing goes on now. Pretty much anyone doing cold-fusion research avoids that term like the plague or their funding would probably be pulled in a second. They study "low energy nuclear reactions" instead.
But stars fuse plain hydrogen to plain hydrogen (the chain reactions are a bit more complicated than that, but the basic fuel of stars like our sun is plain hydrogen and not isotopes of hydrogen, which don't survive very long at the core of a star) while most of our fusion attempts go after much easier isotopes to fuse. There's also no reason you have to continuously sustain the internal pressures of the sun to produce useful fusion any more than you need to provide continuous pressure to force a nail into a piece of wood.
There isn't much legitimate research because cold fusion violates some very well-established laws regarding energy requirements: You need to put energy into fusion to get more energy out, and that energy in is rather a lot.
If you could actually be a bit more specific about exactly what laws are being violated, we might be able to take you a bit more seriously. Just waving around the idea that large energies are involved doesn't tell us anything. Let's use tritium-deuterium fusion as an example. You need something like.1 MeV to break through the Coulumb barrier and release about 170 times that much energy..1 Mev is about 1.6 X 10^-14 joules. In other words 1 watt of power could, at some close to perfect level of fusion efficiency, produce over 170 watts in return by fusing tritium to deuterium something like 62.5 trillion times a second. Hmm, the numbers don't seem intuitively correct there. I was expecting the energies involved to be quite small, but that seems too small. It works out to about 327 gigajoules per gram of tritium-deuterium fuel which is very close to the published numbers I can find, however, so I guess they're correct.
So, one joule of energy is, in principle, enough energy to produce fusion 62.5 trillion times (admittedly in the easiest two atoms to fuse). In practice it isn't since you'd have to have some Heisenberg principle violating particle cannon to actually produce those collisions. To actually produce fusion, you have to find ways to confine that energy so that you can try over and over again to produce those collisions, really really fast before the energy leaks away. That's why high-energy also tends to mean _lots_ of energy and massive equipment but it doesn't necessarily have to. It can also mean really high energy intensity, but not a whole lot of actual energy. For example, a really, really brief, but really intense laser pulse. In practical engineering, that still tends to equal lots of energy and equipment. I don't think there are any physical laws that anyone has proven that say that has to be the case, however. You certainly haven't cited any.
There are plenty of things we don't really know about physics. We don't even have a very good idea about what really is or isn't knowable yet. As such, we really are not yet able to discount the idea that a particular arrangement of matter might promote fusion (or other nuclear reactions we don't properly understand) inside itself. It might come down to some particular way of concentrating energy really intensely at certain points in the structure of the material. Or it might come down to somehow promoting quantum tunnelling, or some other quantum effect that somehow railroads particles into the collisions you want. We don't know enough about physics yet to really discount such possibilities.
The poster you're replying to was replying to another poster who was specifically asking how a hypothetical situation would work. So, sarcastically mocking him for the hypothetical situation in his reply is a little disingenuous, don't you think?
There will still be a limited amount of energy production, from a finite number of devices, so it will still be a scarce resource. Read an economics book!
Well, if I had a finite number of devices, that I paid a reasonable amount for, that could reliably produce more than enough power to run my home and my transportation needs and could last decades, I would have to come up with some really ingenious new needs to make energy a scarce resource again.
You would have to change it a bit to: "If cold fusion -clean, with sufficiently high energy density, (maybe) portable, cheaply constructable and from materials with sufficient supply- were invented tomorrow everything changes, world politics, anything involving oil or energy production, the environment, space travel, food production, basically everything."
As long as the conditions were true, it really would change a lot of things. World politics would change because we wouldn't rely on oil for energy any more, therefore a lot of political interests that maintain todays status quo would alter. An example would be Saudi Arabia, which simply couldn't exist as it does now without oil revenues. We would still need petrochemicals for chemical feedstocks for plastics, fertilizers, etc. but, with cheap, clean energy from easy sources, the necessary energy could be extracted from all kinds of other places. All those tar sands would suddenly become more practical to extract, for example. For that matter, synthesis from biomatter or even directly from air might become practical. If it's portable, electric cars would become the norm, you would just throw in a cold fusion generator (whether or not you could dump most of the batteries depends on how high the energy density would actually be). Jet planes don't have a ready electric replacement waiting in the wings that I know of, but I could be wrong. Just the cars and trucks and trains and ships switching from fossil fuels would cause some pretty big changes. The environmental changes should be obvious with less burning of fossil fuels, and less extraction going on. Launching rockets would still surely be the norm for space travel for quite some time, but, once things actually get into orbit there would be some big changes. Getting anything anywhere in space would become a matter of getting it into low orbit and boosting it with an ion engine of some kind from there. Large parts of the problem of building space colonies and even refueling using in situ resources in space would also be solved. Food production would be altered because sunlight would no longer be as vital. You could grow crops indoors in stacked shipping containers if you wanted to.
Subject to a few provisions, a plentiful new energy source really would change a lot of things. Many for the better. It would also obviously collapse some industries and entire economies and perhaps entire nations. Humans, sadly, are not very good at handling rapid change. We tend to structure our world in such a way that change, even for the better, creates chaos. Maybe if we didn't have financial systems based on castles in the air things wouldn't be so bad.
Change his argument?! Are you joking? I may have misread the analogy, but the poster I replied to seemed to be implying either that there were no forces in the universe that would cause galaxies to go into collision courses or, alternately, that the universe isn't expanding. That's what I got from the stilted baseball analogy, anyway. My point was that there are more forces in play in the Universe than his little model/analogy accounts for. That's not changing his argument, that's just telling him that his model is broken and incomplete.
Galaxies are collections of stars (and their satellites and interstellar dust and gas, etc.) bound together by gravitational forces (and maybe other forces we don't understand yet). When galaxies collide, they can merge without their stars physically colliding. The forces that bind the separate galaxies and allow us to think of them as discrete objects will bind the two galaxies into one discrete object without requiring that the individual stars merge. For your objection to make sense, galaxies would have to consist of only one giant black hole with no stars.
Well, if the baseballs have elastic cords stuck to them, it certainly becomes possible. If we're doing some sort of analogy to galaxies colliding here we can call the elastic cords: "gravity".
My point is that if I had said that automatic=machine gun, someone would have been all over me telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about and that the term "machine gun" only applies to certain guns which are a subset of automatics.
A great example I have seen showing processed vs non-processed foods is to simply put the food in a bowl of water. A lot of processed food will within a matter of minutes puff up to a multiple of their size, and when stirred will simply break up into a liquid solution. Natural (unprocessed, even minimally processed) foods will generally stay together for a lot longer.
That's not exactly a surprising observation. Same thing is true of most particleboard vs. unprocessed wood as well. You've failed to demonstrate at all why this would be a problem. Try your test on some chicken flesh compared to an identical piece of chicken flesh that's been chewed, swallowed, then chemically processed by enzymes and stomach acids in a human stomach. After you've tried that test, you may understand why your argument is easily dismissed by most people when you put it that way.
That said, there are reasons more heavily processed foods may be worse for you than unprocessed. One of those reasons is that the processed foods often simply come from poorer base materials than the unprocessed foods, which is why they needed to be processed in the first place. If the unprocessed food is a nice cut of chicken breast and the processed food is ground up chicken cartilage with a little bone and other otherwise less than usable bits of the chicken after everything is else is stripped off, then the processed food typically won't be as good. That's not universally true though. The hydroxyl-apatite in ground bone can actually be an ideal source of bio-available calcium, for example, and various organ meats which people typically shun in low-processed form are full of great nutrition. The majority of what goes into the processed chicken patty, however, is crap. Figuratively and also, to some degree, literally. Processes get developed to extract the maximum nutrition from food. This should be a good thing in a hungry world. Unfortunately, it's a hungry world with marketing departments and a heavy profit motive.
Processing of food isn't inherently evil. People have been processing food to extract more nutrition from it for millennia. Grinding bones to make your bread (bone cakes are full of calcium and nutritious bone marrow) is just one example. Another set of great examples are demonstrated by Pellagra and Kwashiorkor which are two medical conditions. You may not have heard of Pellagra, but just think of a typical portrayal of leprosy and you won't go far wrong. Kwashiorkor you have probably seen in ads for hunger-relief charities: swollen ankles, distended belly, hair loss, loss of teeth, dermatitis. These conditions are specialized forms of malnutrition that can occur in individuals who may actually be getting enough food to survive (although they may frequently be generally malnourished as well), but are suffering from niacin or protein deficiencies. They both tend to show up among people who live essentially exclusively on corn (poor Italian peasants in the case of Pellagra, and mostly African children living on food aid for Kwashiorkor). The all-corn diet might be providing enough calories, but is deficient in some vital nutrients. As it turns out, South American natives living on the same diet weren't suffering from these same issues. The reason comes down to food processing. Traditional preparation of corn involves nixtamalizing it, which basically means boiling it in a lime (the mineral, not the fruit) solution. The resulting processed food, called nixtamal is more nutritious (technically, it has fewer calories, but it provides a wider variety of nutrients) and people using it as a staple food are less likely to develop extreme nutritional disorders.
Going back to the downsides of processing food, there's the issue of preservation. Some processing, of course, preserves much of the nutritive value of the food for a very long time. Examples of this are salting, dehydrating and pickling. The processing does, however, often destroy some of the nutrients in the food as well and it typically involves p
People use pod coffee machines because they... produce better tasting coffee
Better than fresh ground coffee? I don't actually drink coffee myself. I actually feel slightly nauseated when the aroma is particularly strong. But it seems fairly obvious that coffee that has already been ground up and left to sit in a packet for weeks or months is not going to taste as fresh as a bean that has just been ground up.
I crossed on one when I was little. Maybe nine or ten. Fairly choppy weather. I remember I was reading a disney comic of some sort. One of the stories definitely involved Mickey Mouse holding some people at gunpoint with a machine gun, but it turned out the guns had no firing pins. Odd the things you remember. Anyway, I didn't get sick at all. It's sort of odd that. I used to get carsick when I was younger, but then I suddenly reached a point where I never seemed to get any sort of motion sickness at all any more.
The whole point behind any form of insurance is supposed to be to eliminate the gamble. If it worked out for you and eight other people, but a tenth person got raked over the coals trying the same thing, you can't claim that the strategy works based on your own anecdotal example.
Why is it that people who have no knowledge at all, people who don't know the difference between a machine gun and a pistol, want to decide on gun regulations? This is a fact - anti-gunners, including congress-critters, REGULARLY confuse an automatic (machine gun) with a semi-automatic (pistol).
Why is it that in the past whenever I've confused a machine gun with a gun that's merely an automatic I've always been corrected and told that a machine gun is an automatic, but automatic doesn't mean machine gun? I've long come to the conclusion that guns are one of those subjects where, unless you're part of the club, you're always wrong because the actual facts and definitions dance in some mysterious pattern. It's like using some group's slang if you're not part of the group. Even if you get the meaning just right, you're still wrong.
The problem with not having patents is that it encourages people to keep things secret to stop others from copying. This then leads to great ideas being lost when the business fails or the inventor dies.
That's a nice theory but, in practice, the majority of patents are complete nonsense. There's the obvious stuff either from patent trolls looking to lurk until they can make a quick buck off someone who is actually doing something productive. Then you have your inventors who create something neat and marketable, but whose invention doesn't really fit the definition required to get a patent (that fact doesn't stop the patent being issued of course). A good example of the latter can be found in that late-night commercial for patent services where their example is an inflatable carwash for kids. It's a neat toy, but it's all made of obvious parts. There's absolutely no contribution to human technology there. Any engineer or, for that matter, home tinkerer could sit down with the raw materials and make an equivalent "invention" based on their knowledge of what has come before. Then there are the patents granted to the quacks and loonies. Then there's the patents on unpatentable scientific discoveries granted to, for example, biotech firms who isolate a particular gene/protein/biowhatever, figure out what it's for, then write up a blanket patent or set of patents claiming all possible therapeutic uses for the discovery they can think of based on what it naturally does.
Then, there's the minority of patents that are actually for what could be considered real inventions. All well and good except that, if you actually read them or talk to anyone who writes them for a living, they're intentionally written to dance around the actual "secret sauce" of the invention. The intention is to obtain patent protection, but obfuscate the patent enough that trade secret protection is maintained as well. Anyone trying to recreate the invention from the patent will typically have more luck either re-inventing it themselves or reverse-engineering it from an extant example of the invention.
It didn't seem particularly crass. Frankly, to me it's just a mild typical opinion. Even if it had been what I consider crass, I would like to think that I wouldn't have considered it when evaluating the actual content of his post.
I don't actually do a whole lot of modding. That may make me a bad Slashcitizen. Unless I come across something that's clearly been modded unfairly, I will generally post into a discussion rather than mod. Whether I take it in good humour or not, however, I've known myself to agree, and say so, with people despite bitter words that may have passed. Suddenly changing your opinion of what you considered to be a good argument because you spotted a sig that changed your opinion of the poster seems to me to be, as you say, taking the Internet a little too seriously.
The depression I was talking about was over the apparent human tendency to split up into sides by region, language, political affiliation, devotion to particular sports teams, etc. then hate the other side and all their works and deeds regardless of what they happen to be. If someone is part of a different group, their opinions are wrong, their foibles are proof of their monstrous nature, while the same issues are forgiven in own group members. They aren't even truly capable of things like loving their children. That's how humans often seem to think, and it seems to be so automatic.
But the part that you read to begin with and gave a mod to was on-topic for the thread and generally for the whole article. Sigs, except in rare cases, aren't relevant to the discussion at hand. Basically, you're saying that you changed your opinion of whether or not what the poster wrote was relevant and useful based on his unrelated opinions. It's your right to do so, by all means, but I find it a bit funny. I have to find it funny, you see, because otherwise I look at it as a sad and accurate example of typical human nature. Then I just get depressed.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done the math on heated driveways and sidewalks a few times in Slashdot posts. I'm not going to go through it all over again. I'm just going to note that I've done the math before and I would switch to a heated driveway right now and, ignoring the installation costs, it would save me time and money. It would cost less per month in energy costs than having it ploughed or doing it myself. So, nope, that application for energy wouldn't make energy a scarce resource again. It would take some other technological great leap forward: teleporters, matter replicators, personal space travel, etc.
Everyone seems to forget that we've had far better than breakeven fusion for ages. The first hydrogen bomb was successfully tested over 60 years ago. We can clearly manage breakeven fusion, the key part is _sustained_ breakeven fusion. Gravity makes a lousy fusion containment field from a technological standpoint. You can't turn it on and off at will so you're burning off your fuel all the time, even when you don't need it. The initial startup is a pain. Then there's the shear amount of matter required to make it work. It takes 5000 tons of sun to produce 1 kilowatt. Ridiculously impractical from a technological point of view. From the point of view of a natural resource we can extract power from at a distance a star is great, but it wouldn't make much sense to ever build one.
I think the point is that it's not an elegant solution from a technological standpoint. We've been able to duplicate the pressures and temperatures of the core of the sun with devices quite a lot smaller than our nearly million mile wide star. Only in very small areas and for very brief time scales of course.
Certainly uses for energy could arise that might make it scarce in the long term. But it's hard to come up with new uses for it that would count as actual _needs_. There's only so much energy that you need to survive and live in comfort. Nearly everything you might want to do would, for the conceivable future, be constrained by other resources, not by energy. As has been pointed out, there are certain thermodynamic limits on how much energy you can actually produce and use before we parboil ourselves on our own planet. If we're capable of producing that much power, then we're done for a while until another paradigm shift comes along (really big planet-wide air conditioning system beaming waste heat into space, cheap, practical mass transit into space, etc.) My point was that, if we suddenly had cheap and, for all practical purposes, unlimited energy, it would no longer be a scarce resource until such time as we came up with some new practical purposes.
What I feel sorry for is any researcher who wants to do some genuine research into cold fusion.
When Soddy and Rutherford first identified nuclear transmutation, Soddy later recalled that Rutherford said: "For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists." The exact same thing goes on now. Pretty much anyone doing cold-fusion research avoids that term like the plague or their funding would probably be pulled in a second. They study "low energy nuclear reactions" instead.
But stars fuse plain hydrogen to plain hydrogen (the chain reactions are a bit more complicated than that, but the basic fuel of stars like our sun is plain hydrogen and not isotopes of hydrogen, which don't survive very long at the core of a star) while most of our fusion attempts go after much easier isotopes to fuse. There's also no reason you have to continuously sustain the internal pressures of the sun to produce useful fusion any more than you need to provide continuous pressure to force a nail into a piece of wood.
There isn't much legitimate research because cold fusion violates some very well-established laws regarding energy requirements: You need to put energy into fusion to get more energy out, and that energy in is rather a lot.
If you could actually be a bit more specific about exactly what laws are being violated, we might be able to take you a bit more seriously. Just waving around the idea that large energies are involved doesn't tell us anything. Let's use tritium-deuterium fusion as an example. You need something like .1 MeV to break through the Coulumb barrier and release about 170 times that much energy. .1 Mev is about 1.6 X 10^-14 joules. In other words 1 watt of power could, at some close to perfect level of fusion efficiency, produce over 170 watts in return by fusing tritium to deuterium something like 62.5 trillion times a second. Hmm, the numbers don't seem intuitively correct there. I was expecting the energies involved to be quite small, but that seems too small. It works out to about 327 gigajoules per gram of tritium-deuterium fuel which is very close to the published numbers I can find, however, so I guess they're correct.
So, one joule of energy is, in principle, enough energy to produce fusion 62.5 trillion times (admittedly in the easiest two atoms to fuse). In practice it isn't since you'd have to have some Heisenberg principle violating particle cannon to actually produce those collisions. To actually produce fusion, you have to find ways to confine that energy so that you can try over and over again to produce those collisions, really really fast before the energy leaks away. That's why high-energy also tends to mean _lots_ of energy and massive equipment but it doesn't necessarily have to. It can also mean really high energy intensity, but not a whole lot of actual energy. For example, a really, really brief, but really intense laser pulse. In practical engineering, that still tends to equal lots of energy and equipment. I don't think there are any physical laws that anyone has proven that say that has to be the case, however. You certainly haven't cited any.
There are plenty of things we don't really know about physics. We don't even have a very good idea about what really is or isn't knowable yet. As such, we really are not yet able to discount the idea that a particular arrangement of matter might promote fusion (or other nuclear reactions we don't properly understand) inside itself. It might come down to some particular way of concentrating energy really intensely at certain points in the structure of the material. Or it might come down to somehow promoting quantum tunnelling, or some other quantum effect that somehow railroads particles into the collisions you want. We don't know enough about physics yet to really discount such possibilities.
The poster you're replying to was replying to another poster who was specifically asking how a hypothetical situation would work. So, sarcastically mocking him for the hypothetical situation in his reply is a little disingenuous, don't you think?
There will still be a limited amount of energy production, from a finite number of devices, so it will still be a scarce resource. Read an economics book!
Well, if I had a finite number of devices, that I paid a reasonable amount for, that could reliably produce more than enough power to run my home and my transportation needs and could last decades, I would have to come up with some really ingenious new needs to make energy a scarce resource again.
and how would that work ?
You would have to change it a bit to: "If cold fusion -clean, with sufficiently high energy density, (maybe) portable, cheaply constructable and from materials with sufficient supply- were invented tomorrow everything changes, world politics, anything involving oil or energy production, the environment, space travel, food production, basically everything."
As long as the conditions were true, it really would change a lot of things. World politics would change because we wouldn't rely on oil for energy any more, therefore a lot of political interests that maintain todays status quo would alter. An example would be Saudi Arabia, which simply couldn't exist as it does now without oil revenues. We would still need petrochemicals for chemical feedstocks for plastics, fertilizers, etc. but, with cheap, clean energy from easy sources, the necessary energy could be extracted from all kinds of other places. All those tar sands would suddenly become more practical to extract, for example. For that matter, synthesis from biomatter or even directly from air might become practical. If it's portable, electric cars would become the norm, you would just throw in a cold fusion generator (whether or not you could dump most of the batteries depends on how high the energy density would actually be). Jet planes don't have a ready electric replacement waiting in the wings that I know of, but I could be wrong. Just the cars and trucks and trains and ships switching from fossil fuels would cause some pretty big changes. The environmental changes should be obvious with less burning of fossil fuels, and less extraction going on. Launching rockets would still surely be the norm for space travel for quite some time, but, once things actually get into orbit there would be some big changes. Getting anything anywhere in space would become a matter of getting it into low orbit and boosting it with an ion engine of some kind from there. Large parts of the problem of building space colonies and even refueling using in situ resources in space would also be solved. Food production would be altered because sunlight would no longer be as vital. You could grow crops indoors in stacked shipping containers if you wanted to.
Subject to a few provisions, a plentiful new energy source really would change a lot of things. Many for the better. It would also obviously collapse some industries and entire economies and perhaps entire nations. Humans, sadly, are not very good at handling rapid change. We tend to structure our world in such a way that change, even for the better, creates chaos. Maybe if we didn't have financial systems based on castles in the air things wouldn't be so bad.
Change his argument?! Are you joking? I may have misread the analogy, but the poster I replied to seemed to be implying either that there were no forces in the universe that would cause galaxies to go into collision courses or, alternately, that the universe isn't expanding. That's what I got from the stilted baseball analogy, anyway. My point was that there are more forces in play in the Universe than his little model/analogy accounts for. That's not changing his argument, that's just telling him that his model is broken and incomplete.
Some people have memories that reach back before whatever happens to be in the news right now.
Galaxies are collections of stars (and their satellites and interstellar dust and gas, etc.) bound together by gravitational forces (and maybe other forces we don't understand yet). When galaxies collide, they can merge without their stars physically colliding. The forces that bind the separate galaxies and allow us to think of them as discrete objects will bind the two galaxies into one discrete object without requiring that the individual stars merge. For your objection to make sense, galaxies would have to consist of only one giant black hole with no stars.
Well, if the baseballs have elastic cords stuck to them, it certainly becomes possible. If we're doing some sort of analogy to galaxies colliding here we can call the elastic cords: "gravity".
My point wasn't about automatic vs semi-automatic. It was automatic vs machine gun.
My point is that if I had said that automatic=machine gun, someone would have been all over me telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about and that the term "machine gun" only applies to certain guns which are a subset of automatics.
A great example I have seen showing processed vs non-processed foods is to simply put the food in a bowl of water. A lot of processed food will within a matter of minutes puff up to a multiple of their size, and when stirred will simply break up into a liquid solution. Natural (unprocessed, even minimally processed) foods will generally stay together for a lot longer.
That's not exactly a surprising observation. Same thing is true of most particleboard vs. unprocessed wood as well. You've failed to demonstrate at all why this would be a problem. Try your test on some chicken flesh compared to an identical piece of chicken flesh that's been chewed, swallowed, then chemically processed by enzymes and stomach acids in a human stomach. After you've tried that test, you may understand why your argument is easily dismissed by most people when you put it that way.
That said, there are reasons more heavily processed foods may be worse for you than unprocessed. One of those reasons is that the processed foods often simply come from poorer base materials than the unprocessed foods, which is why they needed to be processed in the first place. If the unprocessed food is a nice cut of chicken breast and the processed food is ground up chicken cartilage with a little bone and other otherwise less than usable bits of the chicken after everything is else is stripped off, then the processed food typically won't be as good. That's not universally true though. The hydroxyl-apatite in ground bone can actually be an ideal source of bio-available calcium, for example, and various organ meats which people typically shun in low-processed form are full of great nutrition. The majority of what goes into the processed chicken patty, however, is crap. Figuratively and also, to some degree, literally. Processes get developed to extract the maximum nutrition from food. This should be a good thing in a hungry world. Unfortunately, it's a hungry world with marketing departments and a heavy profit motive.
Processing of food isn't inherently evil. People have been processing food to extract more nutrition from it for millennia. Grinding bones to make your bread (bone cakes are full of calcium and nutritious bone marrow) is just one example. Another set of great examples are demonstrated by Pellagra and Kwashiorkor which are two medical conditions. You may not have heard of Pellagra, but just think of a typical portrayal of leprosy and you won't go far wrong. Kwashiorkor you have probably seen in ads for hunger-relief charities: swollen ankles, distended belly, hair loss, loss of teeth, dermatitis. These conditions are specialized forms of malnutrition that can occur in individuals who may actually be getting enough food to survive (although they may frequently be generally malnourished as well), but are suffering from niacin or protein deficiencies. They both tend to show up among people who live essentially exclusively on corn (poor Italian peasants in the case of Pellagra, and mostly African children living on food aid for Kwashiorkor). The all-corn diet might be providing enough calories, but is deficient in some vital nutrients. As it turns out, South American natives living on the same diet weren't suffering from these same issues. The reason comes down to food processing. Traditional preparation of corn involves nixtamalizing it, which basically means boiling it in a lime (the mineral, not the fruit) solution. The resulting processed food, called nixtamal is more nutritious (technically, it has fewer calories, but it provides a wider variety of nutrients) and people using it as a staple food are less likely to develop extreme nutritional disorders.
Going back to the downsides of processing food, there's the issue of preservation. Some processing, of course, preserves much of the nutritive value of the food for a very long time. Examples of this are salting, dehydrating and pickling. The processing does, however, often destroy some of the nutrients in the food as well and it typically involves p
People use pod coffee machines because they ... produce better tasting coffee
Better than fresh ground coffee? I don't actually drink coffee myself. I actually feel slightly nauseated when the aroma is particularly strong. But it seems fairly obvious that coffee that has already been ground up and left to sit in a packet for weeks or months is not going to taste as fresh as a bean that has just been ground up.
I crossed on one when I was little. Maybe nine or ten. Fairly choppy weather. I remember I was reading a disney comic of some sort. One of the stories definitely involved Mickey Mouse holding some people at gunpoint with a machine gun, but it turned out the guns had no firing pins. Odd the things you remember. Anyway, I didn't get sick at all. It's sort of odd that. I used to get carsick when I was younger, but then I suddenly reached a point where I never seemed to get any sort of motion sickness at all any more.
The whole point behind any form of insurance is supposed to be to eliminate the gamble. If it worked out for you and eight other people, but a tenth person got raked over the coals trying the same thing, you can't claim that the strategy works based on your own anecdotal example.
Why is it that people who have no knowledge at all, people who don't know the difference between a machine gun and a pistol, want to decide on gun regulations?
This is a fact - anti-gunners, including congress-critters, REGULARLY confuse an automatic (machine gun) with a semi-automatic (pistol).
Why is it that in the past whenever I've confused a machine gun with a gun that's merely an automatic I've always been corrected and told that a machine gun is an automatic, but automatic doesn't mean machine gun? I've long come to the conclusion that guns are one of those subjects where, unless you're part of the club, you're always wrong because the actual facts and definitions dance in some mysterious pattern. It's like using some group's slang if you're not part of the group. Even if you get the meaning just right, you're still wrong.
The problem with not having patents is that it encourages people to keep things secret to stop others from copying. This then leads to great ideas being lost when the business fails or the inventor dies.
That's a nice theory but, in practice, the majority of patents are complete nonsense. There's the obvious stuff either from patent trolls looking to lurk until they can make a quick buck off someone who is actually doing something productive. Then you have your inventors who create something neat and marketable, but whose invention doesn't really fit the definition required to get a patent (that fact doesn't stop the patent being issued of course). A good example of the latter can be found in that late-night commercial for patent services where their example is an inflatable carwash for kids. It's a neat toy, but it's all made of obvious parts. There's absolutely no contribution to human technology there. Any engineer or, for that matter, home tinkerer could sit down with the raw materials and make an equivalent "invention" based on their knowledge of what has come before. Then there are the patents granted to the quacks and loonies. Then there's the patents on unpatentable scientific discoveries granted to, for example, biotech firms who isolate a particular gene/protein/biowhatever, figure out what it's for, then write up a blanket patent or set of patents claiming all possible therapeutic uses for the discovery they can think of based on what it naturally does.
Then, there's the minority of patents that are actually for what could be considered real inventions. All well and good except that, if you actually read them or talk to anyone who writes them for a living, they're intentionally written to dance around the actual "secret sauce" of the invention. The intention is to obtain patent protection, but obfuscate the patent enough that trade secret protection is maintained as well. Anyone trying to recreate the invention from the patent will typically have more luck either re-inventing it themselves or reverse-engineering it from an extant example of the invention.
It didn't seem particularly crass. Frankly, to me it's just a mild typical opinion. Even if it had been what I consider crass, I would like to think that I wouldn't have considered it when evaluating the actual content of his post.
I don't actually do a whole lot of modding. That may make me a bad Slashcitizen. Unless I come across something that's clearly been modded unfairly, I will generally post into a discussion rather than mod. Whether I take it in good humour or not, however, I've known myself to agree, and say so, with people despite bitter words that may have passed. Suddenly changing your opinion of what you considered to be a good argument because you spotted a sig that changed your opinion of the poster seems to me to be, as you say, taking the Internet a little too seriously.
The depression I was talking about was over the apparent human tendency to split up into sides by region, language, political affiliation, devotion to particular sports teams, etc. then hate the other side and all their works and deeds regardless of what they happen to be. If someone is part of a different group, their opinions are wrong, their foibles are proof of their monstrous nature, while the same issues are forgiven in own group members. They aren't even truly capable of things like loving their children. That's how humans often seem to think, and it seems to be so automatic.
But the part that you read to begin with and gave a mod to was on-topic for the thread and generally for the whole article. Sigs, except in rare cases, aren't relevant to the discussion at hand. Basically, you're saying that you changed your opinion of whether or not what the poster wrote was relevant and useful based on his unrelated opinions. It's your right to do so, by all means, but I find it a bit funny. I have to find it funny, you see, because otherwise I look at it as a sad and accurate example of typical human nature. Then I just get depressed.