if it became subsidized by government money (at some point in the future), then I would then be forced to have an opinion on it because then I become responsible for paying for it.
It seems like in pretty much every case where the public would have to pay for this, the alternative drawn-out death would also need to be paid by the public. At a rough estimate, the long drawn-out death would probably cost around two orders of magnitude more than the physician assisted suicide. So, the economic argument of "I don't want to pay for this" falls flat. The _emotional_ argument of "I don't want to pay for this", where people feel that, by paying for it with public money they become somehow responsible for the death, still has some legs. Personally I still find it pretty weak.
There is a black book at the oval office that explains why the world will end if the people are not watched by a benign dictator that knows what's best.
I know this was a joke, but that line of reasoning seems to be blindly followed by many people. Not the belief in a black book, but many people buy into the argument that the President is privy to special top-secret intelligence information. Due to such special information, the argument goes, the President _has_ to make the horrible choices he does in order to protect life, liberty, blah, blah. If only the doubters could see that special information, they too would agree absolutely with the President's actions, but, alas, it has to be kept secret or the heavens will fall.
Of course, anyone who has ever looked back, once all the top secret information has been declassified, knows that theory largely a load of nonsense. Perhaps the President is sometimes told all kinds of things that make certain actions seem necessary, but most intelligence analysis falls far, far short of the omniscience some people seem to think the intelligence agencies posses.
By and large I'm with you on the cynical lying thing. It breaks my heart that he's still probably a better choice than the other guy and that the electoral system is so utterly broken that voting for anyone else is essentially a wasted vote. Simple plurality voting has to go.
First of all: Villagers use pitchforks. Gods use tridents.
A trident is actually a fisherman's tool. Unlike a pitchfork, the tines on a trident are usually barbed or angled so as to trap prey, whereas the tines on a pitchfork are designed so that things will slip off easily when they're being pitched. There's no need to compare the tridents some gods are depicted with to pitchforks when comparing them to regular old human tridents will work just fine.
I think the odds of something more aggressive developing from existing influenza virus are a lot lower if you've essentially wiped it out through a vaccination program.
Pity they didn't have Gonzo as Yoda. That would have been a neat head-twisting meta-reference since they were both muppets with the same original voice actor.
That's a good argument... for when we can actually design effective anti-virals. We have made some pretty neat strides in that direction. There's the anti-retrovirals that could probably cure HIV if it couldn't shelter in immune cells. Then there's that anti-flu stuff that actually works to significantly shorten and weaken a flu infection... provided you start taking it long before any flu symptoms present.
And imagine what the Nazis of Germany could have done during WWII - a virus designed to kill off everyone that wasn't pure Arian.
That would be pretty hard to do since the "Aryan" race is just some crazy idea they came up with based on a wacky mythical/religious/philosophical fusion. They got the actual name of their supposed "race" from Iran, for crying out loud.
I did address that, cost. Every step in the process has a cost. That cost may be in manpower, energy, materials, or legal costs like tariffs and taxes. There are other means to produce liquid fuels. There are other means to convert solar power into liquid fuels. Algal fuels have to compete with them to be viable.
Every step in every process has a cost. You haven't actually given any reason why the cost of using algal fuel in that process _must_ be greater than using some other method. You are certainly right that there are other methods to convert solar power to liquid fuels and that algal fuels would need to compete with them. On the other hand, they might also have a niche in which they are better than other alternatives. I'm certainly not saying that algal fuel production has to use algal fuel to power it, merely that there isn't any proven principle I'm aware of that requires other power sources (except, obviously, the sun) for it.
Then we are just going to have to agree to disagree. I've done the math, I've seen others do the math, it's just going to take unfathomable amounts of land to collect enough solar power to keep the world running. Like I said before I may be wrong.
It takes unfathomable amounts of land to feed us, yet we still manage it. Unfortunately, it also takes a lot of fossil-fuel and other fossil material at present. The fact that we're using that material faster than it's being replaced is worrying. How dilute the power from sunlight is comes down to a matter of perspective. Certainly the power density is a lot, lot lower than, for example, the interior surface of an engine cylinder in an internal combustion engine. When you consider how low the power production from fusion actually is by unit volume in the core of the sun , it's actually pretty remarkable how much power we get per unit of area on our planet. Also, the sun seems to keep the parts of the world that aren't us running just fine. All that wind, and weather, and life, and wave action (except that caused by tides), etc.
I agree. This is why I believe that we, meaning the entire human race, need to transition to nuclear power. I believe that solar power and bio-fuels are not viable and will not be in the foreseeable future. Right now nuclear power is cheap, reliable, safe, and domestically sourced. I got no problem with research in algal fuels, I believe it may prove beneficial. The problem I have is too many people placing the eggs of our economic future all in the bio-fuels basket. Despite what can be argued as centuries of research in bio derived energy we have not yet found one that can replace nuclear and fossil energy.
Nuclear power doesn't always seem to be as cheap as you make it out seeing as how far over budget most nuclear power plant projects seem to go. It may well be a better alternative, but there are problems too. The number of aging reactors out there may make nuclear look less appealing than it could. However, unless people get more comfortable with plutonium 238 (which is actually pretty safe stuff) and we start making hybrid cars with Stirling engines with PU238 as a heat source, nuclear power is only going to be good for centralized power production. Without significantly better battery technology (which may be coming in the form of air-breathing rechargeables) we're still going to need portable fuels and we're going to need to get them from somewhere. I certainly agree with you that we shouldn't put all of our eggs in one basket.
As far as bio-derived energy that can replace fossil fuels or nuclear energy, we actually do have that to a degree. Good old fashioned trees harvested as firewood work pretty well. Properly designed cities surrounded by cultivated forests could quite practically be run, and in a carbon-neutral fashion, by wood-fueled power plants. It would take a lot of planning and decades of lead-time, and would be unpopular with various groups (on very different areas of the political
Cost. It's the same reason that ethanol brewers don't burn their own ethanol for distillation. This heat can be obtained more cheaply with coal or natural gas. Barring some technological breakthrough in the production of algal fuels I find it very unlikely that it would be able to compete with coal, nuclear, and natural gas in the production of the electricity required to keep the lights on, the computers running, and so on.
Coal and natural gas are only cheap on the short term. Completely aside from all the eternalized costs that are ignored in extracting and burning them, there's the fact that they'll run out. Even if the algal fuels are mildly energy negative and you're using some other form of power, such as nuclear to power refining facilities, once you have the refined fuel, there's no magical reason you can't use that as the power source for the rest of the algae production process. If you can make it energy positive, then there's likewise no reason you can't use the algal fuel to power the algae production process.
If ethanol brewers aren't using their own ethanol for distillation, it's probably because, as you say, it's cheaper to do it other ways at present. A big part of that is probably that most groups producing ethanol for fuel are energy negative, probably mostly because they're using corn. They're using corn mostly for political reasons.
Also, my original question of "why" was specifically asking why you couldn't use algal fuel to power the algae farms out at sea as opposed to something like running power lines to shore. You haven't really addressed why shipping refined algal fuel from shore would be impractical as opposed to other methods.
I was under the impression that the waste water was desirable because it contained nutrients that the algae needed. If it needs only seawater and sunshine then that certainly simplifies the logistics. Putting the algae farm next to a dried up oil rig at sea would allow the use of the existing pipes to pump the bio-diesel to shore, simplifying the logistics further.
Ok. I wasn't thinking of that. I was just thinking of wastewater in terms of cheap non-potable water. If we're talking outright sewerage or other industrial slurry that algae will grow well in, then you could still ship it out to sea, but there might be some environmental issues. In any case, the waste clearly isn't absolutely vital, just helpful. Algae clearly already grows at sea, and a practical infrastructure for refining it might lead to an industry harvesting it from sources where it grows (and is sometimes a huge nuisance) such as bays at the end of large rivers where all the fertilizer runoff causes huge blooms.
Re-using oil-gathering infrastructure also seems like a very good idea.
I mention the losses because I know that the energy source, the sun, is inherently dilute and unreliable. With something like nuclear, coal, petroleum, wind, and others the losses are minimal compared to the energy density of the source. That is why these energy sources have been shown to be profitable. I've seen some of the numbers with other means to collect solar power, like photovoltaics and ethanol, and the numbers are not good. People are even arguing whether or not ethanol is energy positive. I see the same argument over algal fuels.
I don't really agree with you on how dilute the sun us. The average insolation for a square meter of the earth's surface is higher than the heat output of an average human being. As for the sun being unreliable, weather may get in the way sometimes, but the sun itself has operated without interruptions for a few billion years, so I'm not sure where that's coming from.
Over the long run, coal and petroleum are a very unreliable source of power. We're using them faster than they're being replenished, so we'll run out in a very short time-frame historically speaking and it will be a very bad thing if we don't have replacem
Civil engineering is the cause of most flooding in the first place. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but it invariably makes it worse. It's one of the reasons that 100-year flood levels can be almost worthless as predictors of future flood levels.
The reason I say this is simple. On any building site, something any engineer worth their salt is concerned about is drainage. Everything is built to channel water away. That's all very well and good for the site. The problem is, what _used_ to happen to that water is that some of it would drain, and the reset would soak into the ground and end up slowly travelling underground to streams and rivers, etc. The results was slower and longer-lasting floods that were also smaller. Thanks to all the development, floods come faster and are much bigger, although the actual duration may be reduced.
Depends on where your water comes from. If it comes from your own well, then, unless it's a flowing artesian well, you'll need power to run your pump. If your water comes from municipal service, then it still depends. If you're below a large water source like a reservoir, then you probably won't lose power. If, however, your water is pumped into a water tower, then flows down to you then the pumps will stop working if the power goes out and the water tower may run out fairly quickly. Even if you have a reservoir uphill, the water may end up contaminated, or inlets may end up clogged from material dumped into the reservoir from the storm. Aside from that, flooding in some areas may damage or outright wash away buried water mains.
Some of the same arguments apply to gas supply. Washed away lines, insufficient pressure in some areas from pumps going down. Also, if your gas stove also uses electricity to light, you may suddenly discover that you have no matches or lighters in your home. I don't know about you, but many people these days lack the basic skills to make fire without special tools. Also, most gas stoves these days have electric thermostats, so the oven probably won't work, even if the elements on top will.
I disagree. Who are the people who hate the "spoilers"? They're fans of the two-party system, or one of those two parties.
Generally true, but I also saw plenty of it from people who really dislike both the Republicans and Democrats, but hate the Republicans (or at least Bush) more.
I'm pretty sure that if we had some better voting system (like Condorcet or Borda) when Perot and Nader were running, the result would have been the same: the winner would have been either a Democrat or a Republican.
If it were suddenly introduced that year, then you're probably right. After a number of election seasons in a row, however, it would dramatically alter the landscape.
It's just like all the Ron Paul voters complaining about the Republican primaries
The key thing I need to address in that sentence is the existence of Democrat/Republican primaries. They demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Democrats and the Republicans recognize that the system doesn't really work. In a working system, there would either be primaries for all candidates for all parties, followed by additional rounds of voting, or just one round of voting in which every candidate from every party participates. The purpose of the primaries is clearly to avoid "splitting the vote". Under the currently used system, if the Democrats ran one candidate and the Republicans ran two (let's imagine that they're literal clones of each other, complete with a complete mind copy), and the Republicans captured 60% of the vote, then the Democrat single candidate would obviously win. The Democrat and Republican parties recognize the flaws in the system and they support those flaws 100% because they result in the Democrat/Republican hegemony.
I'm not arguing that design patents shouldn't be allowed.
I'll do it. Design patents shouldn't be allowed. They're the bastard child of trademarks and patents. The justification given for their existence seems to be that they help prevent customer confusion, but that's the domain trademark protection, not patent protection.
Solar power isn't really all that dilute, you just get that impression because you were using it to drive a relatively compact, low surface area, ton or so of steel at high speeds through an atmosphere. You are at least somewhat aware of that since you noted that the algae farm doesn't need to fit on the roof of a car.
Given that the power the sun provides is dilute there is going to have to be some other source of power to drive the processing of the algae into fuel.
Not really. Once you've actually set up the infrastructure, you can use algae-based fuel to power the processing of the algae into fuel. You have to bootstrap it first, of course.
This power is going to have to come from something else.
Once again, why?
Out at sea, as you propose, the ability to tap into a land based power grid may be difficult. Not impossible but certainly expensive. Then there are losses in the processing of the algae into fuel. I have no idea of how much is lost in each step but just the distances that have to be crossed in getting the algae fuel to shore where it is wanted will add to those losses.
Why do you need to tap into a land-based power grid? Even if you process the algae on land rather than at sea, why can't you ship fuel from land in a tanker? As for the losses at every stage of the process, those exist in all other forms of power. Heck, they exist in everything. Citing their existence isn't really an argument for anything. Hard numbers and comparisons to other options would be a good argument.
This sea based algae farm is going to need the waste water carried by ships or brought by pipes to it. Even if it was attached to shore there is going to be considerable distances that have to be crossed, even if only to get from one side of the farm to the other because the power from the sun is so dilute.
Waste water only comes into it when you need a local source of water on land and you don't want to waste fresh water. At sea, there's an abundance of seawater.
I have to wonder if this would only come to the point, after all the losses are added in, where this becomes less of a means to collect the power of the sun and more of a means to convert the power of coal, nuclear, or wind into liquid fuel.
That's a good point. Even if the process can't be made energy positive, the liquid fuel you can make this way might be an effective power-storage medium. For coal or any other fossil fuel it doesn't make much sense because there are better ways. With nuclear and wind, however, it might be an effective idea. Also, starting out as an energy-negative, but useful, fuel generation process, might allow the construction of the physical base required to bootstrap into an energy positive process over time.
That's just not really the case. The simple plurality voting system used in virtually all elections in the US is the perfect voting system... for two or fewer options. If you need a yeah or nay vote, it's ideal. In all cases with 3+ choices, it's the worst voting system (unless you make up something silly that isn't really a voting system like throwing darts). The reason is the spoiler effect, which can be summed up by the simple example: "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush". Or, if you prefer: " a vote for Perot is a vote for Clinton". The popularity of "third party candidates" who "split the vote" in both of those elections led to the election of the candidate the voters voting for those "third party" candidates least wanted (support for Perot was more mixed, but still leaned heavily in favor of those who would have otherwise voted for Bush). Remember all the hatred for Nader for daring to run and thereby disrupting the election? It was completely misdirected. The fury should have been at the completely broken system that forces people to compromise their votes and settle on the lesser of two evils.
You wrote: "they invariably want one of the main two (nearly identical) candidates, and that's who gets elected". That's not really what people actually want, it's just what they get stuck with.
Maybe some freshman physics books would gloss over this, but it is an example in just about every introductory thermal physics and statistical mechanics book I've seen.
Okay, but those aren't books that a medical doctor or an archaeologist would need to crack open during the course of their educations. For them, temperature is just a physical property of matter, and the temperature of electromagnetic radiation is an abstract concept.
The code in question is basic code, but it's basic code that loads assembly instructions into memory at 16384, 16385, and 16386, then hands the cpu over to the program inserted at 16384. The 76 is a jmp command and the next two memory addresses contain 64 (0x40) and 0 (0x00) combining to 0x4000, which translates to 16384. In other words, it's assembly code for an infinite loop.
There is no context in modern science where "only matter can have temperature" is correct.
Common definitions of temperature typically define it as a property of matter. Given those kinds of definitions being presented, believing that "only matter can have temperature" is perfectly reasonable. Referring to the temperature of electromagnetic radiation is a convention and not everyone is going to be familiar with this convention.
Remember, not all science is physics. Well, ok, everything actually is ultimately physics, but many other sciences don't focus that way. Medical science, for example, mostly deals with temperature just as a property of matter.
When the someone is sincerely questioning or just confused, then I make every effort not to be. When the someone is themselves being an arrogant jerk, calling a PhD in astronomy stupid because of their own ignorance, I see no reason to be anything else.
You do have a point there. Although, I'm not sure it's Phil Plaitt himself who wrote the title that the original poster was referring to. Journalistic titles often need to be taken with a big grain of salt anyway.
Anyway, the Socratic method may be a traditional way of educating people. On the other hand, they ended up making him drink hemlock, so maybe it isn't always so endearing.
P.S. I thought I'd written a bit more in my original post in this thread, but I just looked back in the history and I somehow managed to clip off the end of that post.
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if it became subsidized by government money (at some point in the future), then I would then be forced to have an opinion on it because then I become responsible for paying for it.
It seems like in pretty much every case where the public would have to pay for this, the alternative drawn-out death would also need to be paid by the public. At a rough estimate, the long drawn-out death would probably cost around two orders of magnitude more than the physician assisted suicide. So, the economic argument of "I don't want to pay for this" falls flat. The _emotional_ argument of "I don't want to pay for this", where people feel that, by paying for it with public money they become somehow responsible for the death, still has some legs. Personally I still find it pretty weak.
There is a black book at the oval office that explains why the world will end if the people are not watched by a benign dictator that knows what's best.
I know this was a joke, but that line of reasoning seems to be blindly followed by many people. Not the belief in a black book, but many people buy into the argument that the President is privy to special top-secret intelligence information. Due to such special information, the argument goes, the President _has_ to make the horrible choices he does in order to protect life, liberty, blah, blah. If only the doubters could see that special information, they too would agree absolutely with the President's actions, but, alas, it has to be kept secret or the heavens will fall.
Of course, anyone who has ever looked back, once all the top secret information has been declassified, knows that theory largely a load of nonsense. Perhaps the President is sometimes told all kinds of things that make certain actions seem necessary, but most intelligence analysis falls far, far short of the omniscience some people seem to think the intelligence agencies posses.
By and large I'm with you on the cynical lying thing. It breaks my heart that he's still probably a better choice than the other guy and that the electoral system is so utterly broken that voting for anyone else is essentially a wasted vote. Simple plurality voting has to go.
First of all: Villagers use pitchforks. Gods use tridents.
A trident is actually a fisherman's tool. Unlike a pitchfork, the tines on a trident are usually barbed or angled so as to trap prey, whereas the tines on a pitchfork are designed so that things will slip off easily when they're being pitched. There's no need to compare the tridents some gods are depicted with to pitchforks when comparing them to regular old human tridents will work just fine.
I think you have L. Ron Hubbard and Heinlein mixed up.
Yes, it's bad that IP laws have been violated. Yes, it's bad that DEC won't see a dime from any of their work being used.
If the chip in question came out in 1995 and the supercomputer is scheduled to come online in 2015, what exactly is the problem?
I think the odds of something more aggressive developing from existing influenza virus are a lot lower if you've essentially wiped it out through a vaccination program.
Pity they didn't have Gonzo as Yoda. That would have been a neat head-twisting meta-reference since they were both muppets with the same original voice actor.
Oh. Seriously? I was just joking since Yoda is already a muppet.
There's also Muppet-Star Wars items like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew-R2D2 and Beaker-C3PO.
And which muppet do they have playing Yoda?
That's a good argument... for when we can actually design effective anti-virals. We have made some pretty neat strides in that direction. There's the anti-retrovirals that could probably cure HIV if it couldn't shelter in immune cells. Then there's that anti-flu stuff that actually works to significantly shorten and weaken a flu infection... provided you start taking it long before any flu symptoms present.
And imagine what the Nazis of Germany could have done during WWII - a virus designed to kill off everyone that wasn't pure Arian.
That would be pretty hard to do since the "Aryan" race is just some crazy idea they came up with based on a wacky mythical/religious/philosophical fusion. They got the actual name of their supposed "race" from Iran, for crying out loud.
I did address that, cost. Every step in the process has a cost. That cost may be in manpower, energy, materials, or legal costs like tariffs and taxes. There are other means to produce liquid fuels. There are other means to convert solar power into liquid fuels. Algal fuels have to compete with them to be viable.
Every step in every process has a cost. You haven't actually given any reason why the cost of using algal fuel in that process _must_ be greater than using some other method. You are certainly right that there are other methods to convert solar power to liquid fuels and that algal fuels would need to compete with them. On the other hand, they might also have a niche in which they are better than other alternatives. I'm certainly not saying that algal fuel production has to use algal fuel to power it, merely that there isn't any proven principle I'm aware of that requires other power sources (except, obviously, the sun) for it.
Then we are just going to have to agree to disagree. I've done the math, I've seen others do the math, it's just going to take unfathomable amounts of land to collect enough solar power to keep the world running. Like I said before I may be wrong.
It takes unfathomable amounts of land to feed us, yet we still manage it. Unfortunately, it also takes a lot of fossil-fuel and other fossil material at present. The fact that we're using that material faster than it's being replaced is worrying. How dilute the power from sunlight is comes down to a matter of perspective. Certainly the power density is a lot, lot lower than, for example, the interior surface of an engine cylinder in an internal combustion engine. When you consider how low the power production from fusion actually is by unit volume in the core of the sun , it's actually pretty remarkable how much power we get per unit of area on our planet. Also, the sun seems to keep the parts of the world that aren't us running just fine. All that wind, and weather, and life, and wave action (except that caused by tides), etc.
I agree. This is why I believe that we, meaning the entire human race, need to transition to nuclear power. I believe that solar power and bio-fuels are not viable and will not be in the foreseeable future. Right now nuclear power is cheap, reliable, safe, and domestically sourced. I got no problem with research in algal fuels, I believe it may prove beneficial. The problem I have is too many people placing the eggs of our economic future all in the bio-fuels basket. Despite what can be argued as centuries of research in bio derived energy we have not yet found one that can replace nuclear and fossil energy.
Nuclear power doesn't always seem to be as cheap as you make it out seeing as how far over budget most nuclear power plant projects seem to go. It may well be a better alternative, but there are problems too. The number of aging reactors out there may make nuclear look less appealing than it could. However, unless people get more comfortable with plutonium 238 (which is actually pretty safe stuff) and we start making hybrid cars with Stirling engines with PU238 as a heat source, nuclear power is only going to be good for centralized power production. Without significantly better battery technology (which may be coming in the form of air-breathing rechargeables) we're still going to need portable fuels and we're going to need to get them from somewhere. I certainly agree with you that we shouldn't put all of our eggs in one basket.
As far as bio-derived energy that can replace fossil fuels or nuclear energy, we actually do have that to a degree. Good old fashioned trees harvested as firewood work pretty well. Properly designed cities surrounded by cultivated forests could quite practically be run, and in a carbon-neutral fashion, by wood-fueled power plants. It would take a lot of planning and decades of lead-time, and would be unpopular with various groups (on very different areas of the political
Cost. It's the same reason that ethanol brewers don't burn their own ethanol for distillation. This heat can be obtained more cheaply with coal or natural gas. Barring some technological breakthrough in the production of algal fuels I find it very unlikely that it would be able to compete with coal, nuclear, and natural gas in the production of the electricity required to keep the lights on, the computers running, and so on.
Coal and natural gas are only cheap on the short term. Completely aside from all the eternalized costs that are ignored in extracting and burning them, there's the fact that they'll run out. Even if the algal fuels are mildly energy negative and you're using some other form of power, such as nuclear to power refining facilities, once you have the refined fuel, there's no magical reason you can't use that as the power source for the rest of the algae production process. If you can make it energy positive, then there's likewise no reason you can't use the algal fuel to power the algae production process.
If ethanol brewers aren't using their own ethanol for distillation, it's probably because, as you say, it's cheaper to do it other ways at present. A big part of that is probably that most groups producing ethanol for fuel are energy negative, probably mostly because they're using corn. They're using corn mostly for political reasons.
Also, my original question of "why" was specifically asking why you couldn't use algal fuel to power the algae farms out at sea as opposed to something like running power lines to shore. You haven't really addressed why shipping refined algal fuel from shore would be impractical as opposed to other methods.
I was under the impression that the waste water was desirable because it contained nutrients that the algae needed. If it needs only seawater and sunshine then that certainly simplifies the logistics. Putting the algae farm next to a dried up oil rig at sea would allow the use of the existing pipes to pump the bio-diesel to shore, simplifying the logistics further.
Ok. I wasn't thinking of that. I was just thinking of wastewater in terms of cheap non-potable water. If we're talking outright sewerage or other industrial slurry that algae will grow well in, then you could still ship it out to sea, but there might be some environmental issues. In any case, the waste clearly isn't absolutely vital, just helpful. Algae clearly already grows at sea, and a practical infrastructure for refining it might lead to an industry harvesting it from sources where it grows (and is sometimes a huge nuisance) such as bays at the end of large rivers where all the fertilizer runoff causes huge blooms.
Re-using oil-gathering infrastructure also seems like a very good idea.
I mention the losses because I know that the energy source, the sun, is inherently dilute and unreliable. With something like nuclear, coal, petroleum, wind, and others the losses are minimal compared to the energy density of the source. That is why these energy sources have been shown to be profitable. I've seen some of the numbers with other means to collect solar power, like photovoltaics and ethanol, and the numbers are not good. People are even arguing whether or not ethanol is energy positive. I see the same argument over algal fuels.
I don't really agree with you on how dilute the sun us. The average insolation for a square meter of the earth's surface is higher than the heat output of an average human being. As for the sun being unreliable, weather may get in the way sometimes, but the sun itself has operated without interruptions for a few billion years, so I'm not sure where that's coming from.
Over the long run, coal and petroleum are a very unreliable source of power. We're using them faster than they're being replenished, so we'll run out in a very short time-frame historically speaking and it will be a very bad thing if we don't have replacem
That's the kind of reasoning that works in the short term, but in the long run means no more beer.
Civil engineering is the cause of most flooding in the first place. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but it invariably makes it worse. It's one of the reasons that 100-year flood levels can be almost worthless as predictors of future flood levels.
The reason I say this is simple. On any building site, something any engineer worth their salt is concerned about is drainage. Everything is built to channel water away. That's all very well and good for the site. The problem is, what _used_ to happen to that water is that some of it would drain, and the reset would soak into the ground and end up slowly travelling underground to streams and rivers, etc. The results was slower and longer-lasting floods that were also smaller. Thanks to all the development, floods come faster and are much bigger, although the actual duration may be reduced.
Depends on where your water comes from. If it comes from your own well, then, unless it's a flowing artesian well, you'll need power to run your pump. If your water comes from municipal service, then it still depends. If you're below a large water source like a reservoir, then you probably won't lose power. If, however, your water is pumped into a water tower, then flows down to you then the pumps will stop working if the power goes out and the water tower may run out fairly quickly. Even if you have a reservoir uphill, the water may end up contaminated, or inlets may end up clogged from material dumped into the reservoir from the storm. Aside from that, flooding in some areas may damage or outright wash away buried water mains.
Some of the same arguments apply to gas supply. Washed away lines, insufficient pressure in some areas from pumps going down. Also, if your gas stove also uses electricity to light, you may suddenly discover that you have no matches or lighters in your home. I don't know about you, but many people these days lack the basic skills to make fire without special tools. Also, most gas stoves these days have electric thermostats, so the oven probably won't work, even if the elements on top will.
I disagree. Who are the people who hate the "spoilers"? They're fans of the two-party system, or one of those two parties.
Generally true, but I also saw plenty of it from people who really dislike both the Republicans and Democrats, but hate the Republicans (or at least Bush) more.
I'm pretty sure that if we had some better voting system (like Condorcet or Borda) when Perot and Nader were running, the result would have been the same: the winner would have been either a Democrat or a Republican.
If it were suddenly introduced that year, then you're probably right. After a number of election seasons in a row, however, it would dramatically alter the landscape.
It's just like all the Ron Paul voters complaining about the Republican primaries
The key thing I need to address in that sentence is the existence of Democrat/Republican primaries. They demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Democrats and the Republicans recognize that the system doesn't really work. In a working system, there would either be primaries for all candidates for all parties, followed by additional rounds of voting, or just one round of voting in which every candidate from every party participates. The purpose of the primaries is clearly to avoid "splitting the vote". Under the currently used system, if the Democrats ran one candidate and the Republicans ran two (let's imagine that they're literal clones of each other, complete with a complete mind copy), and the Republicans captured 60% of the vote, then the Democrat single candidate would obviously win. The Democrat and Republican parties recognize the flaws in the system and they support those flaws 100% because they result in the Democrat/Republican hegemony.
I'm not arguing that design patents shouldn't be allowed.
I'll do it. Design patents shouldn't be allowed. They're the bastard child of trademarks and patents. The justification given for their existence seems to be that they help prevent customer confusion, but that's the domain trademark protection, not patent protection.
Solar power isn't really all that dilute, you just get that impression because you were using it to drive a relatively compact, low surface area, ton or so of steel at high speeds through an atmosphere. You are at least somewhat aware of that since you noted that the algae farm doesn't need to fit on the roof of a car.
Given that the power the sun provides is dilute there is going to have to be some other source of power to drive the processing of the algae into fuel.
Not really. Once you've actually set up the infrastructure, you can use algae-based fuel to power the processing of the algae into fuel. You have to bootstrap it first, of course.
This power is going to have to come from something else.
Once again, why?
Out at sea, as you propose, the ability to tap into a land based power grid may be difficult. Not impossible but certainly expensive. Then there are losses in the processing of the algae into fuel. I have no idea of how much is lost in each step but just the distances that have to be crossed in getting the algae fuel to shore where it is wanted will add to those losses.
Why do you need to tap into a land-based power grid? Even if you process the algae on land rather than at sea, why can't you ship fuel from land in a tanker? As for the losses at every stage of the process, those exist in all other forms of power. Heck, they exist in everything. Citing their existence isn't really an argument for anything. Hard numbers and comparisons to other options would be a good argument.
This sea based algae farm is going to need the waste water carried by ships or brought by pipes to it. Even if it was attached to shore there is going to be considerable distances that have to be crossed, even if only to get from one side of the farm to the other because the power from the sun is so dilute.
Waste water only comes into it when you need a local source of water on land and you don't want to waste fresh water. At sea, there's an abundance of seawater.
I have to wonder if this would only come to the point, after all the losses are added in, where this becomes less of a means to collect the power of the sun and more of a means to convert the power of coal, nuclear, or wind into liquid fuel.
That's a good point. Even if the process can't be made energy positive, the liquid fuel you can make this way might be an effective power-storage medium. For coal or any other fossil fuel it doesn't make much sense because there are better ways. With nuclear and wind, however, it might be an effective idea. Also, starting out as an energy-negative, but useful, fuel generation process, might allow the construction of the physical base required to bootstrap into an energy positive process over time.
Sigh. Need to start previewing a little better. I suppose I'm just too pretty.
That's just not really the case. The simple plurality voting system used in virtually all elections in the US is the perfect voting system... for two or fewer options. If you need a yeah or nay vote, it's ideal. In all cases with 3+ choices, it's the worst voting system (unless you make up something silly that isn't really a voting system like throwing darts). The reason is the spoiler effect, which can be summed up by the simple example: "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush". Or, if you prefer: " a vote for Perot is a vote for Clinton". The popularity of "third party candidates" who "split the vote" in both of those elections led to the election of the candidate the voters voting for those "third party" candidates least wanted (support for Perot was more mixed, but still leaned heavily in favor of those who would have otherwise voted for Bush). Remember all the hatred for Nader for daring to run and thereby disrupting the election? It was completely misdirected. The fury should have been at the completely broken system that forces people to compromise their votes and settle on the lesser of two evils.
You wrote: "they invariably want one of the main two (nearly identical) candidates, and that's who gets elected". That's not really what people actually want, it's just what they get stuck with.
I'm pretty the poster just meant medical doctors and dentists, as stated. You know, doctors who work on human beings.
Maybe some freshman physics books would gloss over this, but it is an example in just about every introductory thermal physics and statistical mechanics book I've seen.
Okay, but those aren't books that a medical doctor or an archaeologist would need to crack open during the course of their educations. For them, temperature is just a physical property of matter, and the temperature of electromagnetic radiation is an abstract concept.
The code in question is basic code, but it's basic code that loads assembly instructions into memory at 16384, 16385, and 16386, then hands the cpu over to the program inserted at 16384. The 76 is a jmp command and the next two memory addresses contain 64 (0x40) and 0 (0x00) combining to 0x4000, which translates to 16384. In other words, it's assembly code for an infinite loop.
There is no context in modern science where "only matter can have temperature" is correct.
Common definitions of temperature typically define it as a property of matter. Given those kinds of definitions being presented, believing that "only matter can have temperature" is perfectly reasonable. Referring to the temperature of electromagnetic radiation is a convention and not everyone is going to be familiar with this convention.
Remember, not all science is physics. Well, ok, everything actually is ultimately physics, but many other sciences don't focus that way. Medical science, for example, mostly deals with temperature just as a property of matter.
When the someone is sincerely questioning or just confused, then I make every effort not to be. When the someone is themselves being an arrogant jerk, calling a PhD in astronomy stupid because of their own ignorance, I see no reason to be anything else.
You do have a point there. Although, I'm not sure it's Phil Plaitt himself who wrote the title that the original poster was referring to. Journalistic titles often need to be taken with a big grain of salt anyway.
Anyway, the Socratic method may be a traditional way of educating people. On the other hand, they ended up making him drink hemlock, so maybe it isn't always so endearing.
P.S. I thought I'd written a bit more in my original post in this thread, but I just looked back in the history and I somehow managed to clip off the end of that post.