Since I'm a geek and not a c\o\n\f\i\d\e\n\c\e\ m\a\n\ politician, do you have any suggestions for getting the facts out there in a form that is easily digestible by the public and tends to make them discount the wackos (preferably the ones on both sides)?
Actually biggest problem is Methane (CH4) and then comes CO2.
Don't forget little man-made beasties like perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6, commonly used as an insulating gas in high-voltage electrical equipment). Pound for pound they are mighty potent, they hang around for a long time due to their stability and we are using (and losing) more and more of them.
If I had an industrial plant on Mars, I'd gear it up to make and dump SF6 and CF4 with any capacity I wasn't otherwise using. That's one way to melt and unlock all that ice!
The Earth actually tends to do it with plankton, fish bones, and shells...creating calcium carbonate on ocean floors.
One problem is that adding CO2 to the ocean shifts the buffer from CO3-- ions to HCO3- ions. As the reef-building organisms need CO3-- to do their job and the addition of carbonic acid also tends to dissolve CaCO3 by shifting it to soluble HCO3, adding CO2 to the water might actually cause less to be sequestered rather than more.
I read a neat little paper on the idea of dropping huge slugs of dry ice into the ocean, where they'd sink like torpedoes and embed themselves deep into ocean-floor sediments. Supposedly they'd eventually turn into clathrates and then chemically combine with the silt to form a stable mineral... but that's not something I'd want to bet on without 20 years of experimental data.
You missed the real joke in there
on
Carbon Sequestration
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· Score: 4, Insightful
(Damn web browser's crashed twice, and the computer once, while trying to write this. Something doesn't want the facts to get out... or maybe it's just Billy boy's crappy excuse for an operating system.)
"More responsible", in this case, is like limiting your speed to 90 MPH on icy streets in a school zone instead of 100 MPH. The hilarity of the Kyoto protocol is that it would only require (some) nations to cut back their greenhouse-gas emissions 10% from the levels of 1990. Never mind that stabilizing the atmospheric levels of CO2 needs something close to a 70-80% reduction. The Kyoto accords are thus exposed as a political mountain superimposed over an ecological molehill.
Ironically, the USA could probably get that 10% in short order and without a lot of hassle. Simply replacing the SUV as a commuter vehicle with something similar to this Volkswagen supercar would cut total vehicular emissions by roughly half, or total emissions by about a quarter. Another large chunk could be slashed off consumption by over-riding state laws on overall truck length and allowing truckers to put aero gear (boat tails and such) on their rigs and trailers; streamlining can cut drag (and power requirements) by more than 75% over what it takes to drag a square-cornered box through the air.
We could take other large pieces out of fuel consumption (and emissions) using technology such as co-generation; wherever heat is required, burn fuel in an engine instead of a furnace and use the engine's heat emissions for the original purpose, while diverting the engine's power output to some other purpose and replacing the fuel that would have gone to that. As an example, if you need 100 KWH of heat (I'm using KWH throughout here; if you want to convert to BTU, consult an engineering book) you could burn 103 KWH worth of gas in a 97% efficient furnace. Or you could burn gas in a co-generator; if it yielded 30% out the crankshaft and 3% heat losses, you'd burn 149.3 KWH of gas to get your 100 KWH of heat, and also yield 44.8 KWH of work out the crankshaft. If you turned a generator, your 44.8 KWH output for the extra 46.3 KWH of input is 97% efficiency compared to a typical 30% at the average steam-cycle powerplant or 60% at the best combined-cycle gas turbine powerplants. The electric load could be supplied with between 1/3 and 2/3 the fuel, at least while heat was required.
To the dyed-in-the-wool cynics and curmudgeons, the insistence of our "America First" regime that more oil is still The Way To Go, and the technophobia of the opposition, are screamingly funny. Neither one of them has even half a clue, and neither one is ever going to get where they claim to want to go unless they're dragged, kicking and screaming, against the special interests who keep them in office.
Fifteen thousand years ago the Sahara was a lush forest. It's been bone-dry for most if not all of recorded history. The current droughts, whatever their cause, are just a wiggle on top of what's undeniably a mostly natural trend.
One issue that people seem not to have considered is the ability of third parties to use the webcam data for purposes not intended by the webcam owner. Such as, seeing when the occupants of the house go to bed for the purpose of stalking or harassing them, or looking for sudden changes in those habits to tell if they've gone on vacation (and that it's safe to rob the house).
C'mon, we're geeks here. We should all be aware of the untoward possibilities of "feature creep".
Hashing the address and other information sounds really good, at first blush. However, what happens when someone makes a typo in a house number or mis-spells the street name? Will you ever get the hashes to match again, and how do you verify that the customer is who she says she is once you've got an error like that in your system?
All in all it sounds great, but you'd have to be really specific about what you use to generate hash keys and other crucial data in such a scheme.
The populations which are wealthy enough to afford to use this technology are the ones which have already controlled their birthrate to below replacement levels. It's the nations which can't produce much more than babies which are doing what they can.
The problem is an easy one to solve: sell the shit as fertilizer to farmers that grow crops.
Transportation isn't free. Given that the nutrients are carried by a very large amount of water, I expect that such fertilizer would quickly become more expensive than e.g. phosphate rock and anhydrous ammonia by the time it gets to the point of use.
In some ways, the confinement systems are better for the environment than normal feedlots.
Maybe. I think the problem is more related to scale; the bigger the operation, the more distance the feed has to travel to the operation and the further you'd have to pump effluent to use it as fertilizer.
Changing the subject slightly, one of the reasons we have problems with E. Coli in our beef is because we are feeding the cattle a human-like food supply (corn) rather than what they are evolved to eat (grasses). What I understand is that this causes the cattle to acidify their digestive systems to compensate, making them fit hosts for the same pathogenic bugs which infect people. One way to get rid of most of this is to feed the cattle on a more normal diet (hay) for a week before sending them off, which changes their GI tract environment towards normal (for them) and makes them inhospitable for human pathogens; apparently this reduces levels of bugs like E. Coli by 90%. However, the bulk of feeds like hay and the scale of modern feedlot operations makes this utterly impractical. I don't see a way to fix this other than to split up the big feedlots into many more smaller ones, which would help solve many of the nutrient recycling issues at the same time.
You have a good point there; the various chemicals in livestock waste need to be kept on the farm. The problem is that these huge feedlot operations are of totally unprecedented size, regardless of how "natural" they claim they are. Perhaps we'd be best served by not allowing the beef, turkey and pork operations to run off more waste than would be made by the number of animals they could raise on feed grown on the farm itself; they should have to treat, reclaim and recycle everything else.
That's going to be a mighty tough thing to ram past the factory-farm lobby, and I doubt it can be done this decade. However, if it does, I think we'll see some huge advances in technologies like manure digestion, ozone treatment and/or carbon filtering (I haven't heard of the steroid or antibiotic which can survive a heavy ozone assault). If such treatment systems also yield enough gaseous fuel to run the rest of the farm, they might pay for themselves. The ideal future is one where the farmers can't see themselves doing it any other way, because "we respect the environment on which our farms depend".
The problem is that the farms leave this stuff in huge piles or (if liquid) open lagoons, where it stinks to high heaven. I wonder why so few farms are using anaerobic digesters on the manure? Bacteria in the environment convert a lot of the organic matter to methane and carbon dioxide; the methane can be burned for fuel, or potentially processed for some other use. The CO2 is pretty harmless unless you need a hot flame, and the traces of H2S and the like can be removed pretty easily (a pass through a column of iron filings supposedly converts H2S to FeS and H2). Do that, and you get rid of the stink too.
Still, this is a very uncommon procedure. It is so rare that the new energy bill has specific tax incentives to do it. Why has it taken so long? This technology has been the subject of experiments since the 60's and 70's; it's not like nobody knew.
If you're a double-E you must either have studied or be going to study differential equations. You also have to understand conservation equations (conservation of energy is a sine qua non in EE, and though you may not have cause to have studied conservation of angular momentum in EE it shouldn't be that foreign a concept to you).
Your equations are pretty simple: energy (0.5 * mass * speed) is conserved, and angular momentum (mass times the cross-product of the velocity vector and the radius vector from your point of reference, which is simplest if you make it the mutual center of mass) is conserved. If you work this out even without vector math you get a very simple quadratic equation that anyone with junior-high algebra should be able to solve.
So. You have two objects approaching each other from a very long distance, with any third body a much further distance away (reducing it to what is effectively a two-body problem). If nothing is changed by the encounter, the track of the two bodies going away from each other will look just like the track of the bodies approaching each other: a parabola or hyperbola. Something has to happen near the point of closest approach to alter the energy, the angular momentum, or both in order to change the solution of your equation from a parabola or hyperbola into an ellipse. I think the cleverest explanations involve collisions, because the inelasticity of the collision neatly explains how energy is lost. However, the probability of collisions may not be sufficient to explain the number of paired bodies out there (and that's a job for statisticians).
I'm a double-E myself, so I shouldn't have any big educational advantage in this regard. Either you can peg the mechanism for producing two bodies in mutual orbit, or you can't. If you can't even appreciate the question (which I've been trying to explain here), you don't really have any business dismissing the whole issue with hand-waving. You wouldn't accept a hand-waving explanation for the current flow in a transistor or the resonant frequency of an LC circuit, and you shouldn't accept one here either - especially not from yourself.
Two boides are attrackted while spinning in orbit around another, larger body. They start to co-orbit. That's physics people.
Two bodies approach each other from "infinity", and somehow they lose enough energy and/or angular momentum in their encounter to wind up in mutual orbit. How's that? What's the mechanism for dissipating energy, or transferring angular momentum from motion of the bodies around their center of mass to spin of the bodies themselves (Earth and Luna are doing this in reverse, but very slowly; far too slowly to capture anything).
Since you've set yourself up as the physics expert, perhaps you'd like to explain that to all of us. You'll probably get a publishable paper out of it too, so it's not like it isn't worth the work.
Perhaps it is you who should take a little time to think before posting; The concept of a sectored parabolic dish that expands when it deploys is not a new concept. If you do that now you're down to an 18m long component. If you're willing to send it up and have a crew assemble it instead of have it self-deploy en route to its destination you can get that number down MUCH smaller.
For the cost of getting it into orbit and assembled you could probably re-construct the entire Deep Space Network from the ground up and put together a number of big radiotelescope arrays and interferometers as well. With that you could not only track Voyager to several times its present distance, but you could communicate with every other functioning bird in space and do a hell of a lot of radioastronomy and SETI work too.
Compare that to a very expensive, single-purpose mission. Just because something might be feasible (notice that we've never done anything of the sort before) doesn't mean that it makes any sense to try to do it.
Suppose that a probe could be placed halfway between Voyager and Earth. To get the same signal/noise ratio that we get on the ground (atmospheric effects ignored), that probe would need a receiving antenna about half the diameter of the ones we use here.
The Deep Space Network has some 70 meter dish antennas. Can you imagine trying to get a 35-meter dish antenna even so far as low-earth orbit, let alone on a solar-escape trajectory? Get real. I wish the editors would do a little thinking before posting.
I would not take Mims seriously speaking as a creationist or Intelligent Designer or whatever they are going to call it next week.
You might not, but others are not so discriminating. The problem SciAm had was that some of Mims' promoters were using his association with SciAm to try to make creationism look "scientific". SciAm couldn't allow that to continue.
I fail to see the relevance of his unscientific beliefs with regards to biology if he's writing a column of hands-on science projects.
The relevance appears quickly when people are using the name of Scientific American magazine to promote Mims' creationist beliefs. Which happened. SciAm did not want their name to be so used, and couldn't stop Mims' promoters from doing so even if Mims would never do so himself. Ergo, Mims could not work for SciAm.
It was all soy-based stuff for me, along with peanut buttered-rice cakes.
I think you'll find that the rice cakes are processed to a degree very similar to white bread.
The thing I do not see explained in the article is why the parts of the world where rice is a huge part of the diet don't have a high incidence of myopia. If the bran layer effectively neutralizes the starches, switching from wheat bread to brown rice would be simple for most people. I wonder if anyone's getting ready to do a longitudinal study?
You are, of course, correct. I was too hurried to see that I had forgotten to multiply by 4. (Damn, does pi ever suck in the typeface on this lousy computer!)
By the way, you can get the omega character with the sequence ω, and the superscript 2 with ². This doesn't require much extra typing and really adds to your clarity.
If I remember my high school physics, centripedal acceleration was a = v^2/r. If we assume the 58 feet mentioned in the article is the radius of the thing, we get 364.4 ft for the diameter.
No, the diameter would be 116 feet. The circumference would be 364.4 feet.
But if you really remembered your physics you'd know that a = r. From r and a you can calculate directly, or vice versa.
They mention 15 rev/min, which is 0.25 rev/s, making the velocity of the people compartment 91.1 ft/s. Doing the math, (91.1^2/58) gives you 4.47 G, right?
.25 * 58 feet *.3048 meter/ft = 1.10 m/sec². I'd assume that there's an error in the article or in your analysis (I'm being booted off and don't have time to check now).
If ICANN doesn't get a whole lot more money, the empire-building ambitions of the bureaucracy cannot be brought to fruition. Of course, you and I are expected to pay for this.
It's time to opt out of all functions administered by ICANN and turn to alternate institutions (AlterNIC?). If ICANN is rendered irrelevant and people stop sending it money, it will collapse. Of course, we will have to fight any effort to give it tax money or a legal monopoly on domain-naming services or there will no longer be an option.
It makes you wonder if those same idiots would rip the cardiac monitoring electrodes off of a heart patient because they found his EKG monitor/recorder/defibrillator "suspicious".
Of course, this isn't much compared to the abuse some other people take. Innocent people regularly get sodomized by security who "know" they are drug mules, and verbally abused and humilitated despite being clean. (I call it sodomy, because what else would you call it when someone shoves their fingers up your bodily orifices against your will?)
That said, I wonder if Canada's legal system is as hot on violations of rights as the USA's once was. Somehow I think it's not, and the deterrent effect of lawsuits isn't likely to change the practice.
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Since I'm a geek and not a c\o\n\f\i\d\e\n\c\e\ m\a\n\ politician, do you have any suggestions for getting the facts out there in a form that is easily digestible by the public and tends to make them discount the wackos (preferably the ones on both sides)?
If I had an industrial plant on Mars, I'd gear it up to make and dump SF6 and CF4 with any capacity I wasn't otherwise using. That's one way to melt and unlock all that ice!
I read a neat little paper on the idea of dropping huge slugs of dry ice into the ocean, where they'd sink like torpedoes and embed themselves deep into ocean-floor sediments. Supposedly they'd eventually turn into clathrates and then chemically combine with the silt to form a stable mineral... but that's not something I'd want to bet on without 20 years of experimental data.
"More responsible", in this case, is like limiting your speed to 90 MPH on icy streets in a school zone instead of 100 MPH. The hilarity of the Kyoto protocol is that it would only require (some) nations to cut back their greenhouse-gas emissions 10% from the levels of 1990. Never mind that stabilizing the atmospheric levels of CO2 needs something close to a 70-80% reduction. The Kyoto accords are thus exposed as a political mountain superimposed over an ecological molehill.
Ironically, the USA could probably get that 10% in short order and without a lot of hassle. Simply replacing the SUV as a commuter vehicle with something similar to this Volkswagen supercar would cut total vehicular emissions by roughly half, or total emissions by about a quarter. Another large chunk could be slashed off consumption by over-riding state laws on overall truck length and allowing truckers to put aero gear (boat tails and such) on their rigs and trailers; streamlining can cut drag (and power requirements) by more than 75% over what it takes to drag a square-cornered box through the air.
We could take other large pieces out of fuel consumption (and emissions) using technology such as co-generation; wherever heat is required, burn fuel in an engine instead of a furnace and use the engine's heat emissions for the original purpose, while diverting the engine's power output to some other purpose and replacing the fuel that would have gone to that. As an example, if you need 100 KWH of heat (I'm using KWH throughout here; if you want to convert to BTU, consult an engineering book) you could burn 103 KWH worth of gas in a 97% efficient furnace. Or you could burn gas in a co-generator; if it yielded 30% out the crankshaft and 3% heat losses, you'd burn 149.3 KWH of gas to get your 100 KWH of heat, and also yield 44.8 KWH of work out the crankshaft. If you turned a generator, your 44.8 KWH output for the extra 46.3 KWH of input is 97% efficiency compared to a typical 30% at the average steam-cycle powerplant or 60% at the best combined-cycle gas turbine powerplants. The electric load could be supplied with between 1/3 and 2/3 the fuel, at least while heat was required.
To the dyed-in-the-wool cynics and curmudgeons, the insistence of our "America First" regime that more oil is still The Way To Go, and the technophobia of the opposition, are screamingly funny. Neither one of them has even half a clue, and neither one is ever going to get where they claim to want to go unless they're dragged, kicking and screaming, against the special interests who keep them in office.
Fifteen thousand years ago the Sahara was a lush forest. It's been bone-dry for most if not all of recorded history. The current droughts, whatever their cause, are just a wiggle on top of what's undeniably a mostly natural trend.
C'mon, we're geeks here. We should all be aware of the untoward possibilities of "feature creep".
All in all it sounds great, but you'd have to be really specific about what you use to generate hash keys and other crucial data in such a scheme.
The populations which are wealthy enough to afford to use this technology are the ones which have already controlled their birthrate to below replacement levels. It's the nations which can't produce much more than babies which are doing what they can.
Changing the subject slightly, one of the reasons we have problems with E. Coli in our beef is because we are feeding the cattle a human-like food supply (corn) rather than what they are evolved to eat (grasses). What I understand is that this causes the cattle to acidify their digestive systems to compensate, making them fit hosts for the same pathogenic bugs which infect people. One way to get rid of most of this is to feed the cattle on a more normal diet (hay) for a week before sending them off, which changes their GI tract environment towards normal (for them) and makes them inhospitable for human pathogens; apparently this reduces levels of bugs like E. Coli by 90%. However, the bulk of feeds like hay and the scale of modern feedlot operations makes this utterly impractical. I don't see a way to fix this other than to split up the big feedlots into many more smaller ones, which would help solve many of the nutrient recycling issues at the same time.
That's going to be a mighty tough thing to ram past the factory-farm lobby, and I doubt it can be done this decade. However, if it does, I think we'll see some huge advances in technologies like manure digestion, ozone treatment and/or carbon filtering (I haven't heard of the steroid or antibiotic which can survive a heavy ozone assault). If such treatment systems also yield enough gaseous fuel to run the rest of the farm, they might pay for themselves. The ideal future is one where the farmers can't see themselves doing it any other way, because "we respect the environment on which our farms depend".
Still, this is a very uncommon procedure. It is so rare that the new energy bill has specific tax incentives to do it. Why has it taken so long? This technology has been the subject of experiments since the 60's and 70's; it's not like nobody knew.
Your equations are pretty simple: energy (0.5 * mass * speed) is conserved, and angular momentum (mass times the cross-product of the velocity vector and the radius vector from your point of reference, which is simplest if you make it the mutual center of mass) is conserved. If you work this out even without vector math you get a very simple quadratic equation that anyone with junior-high algebra should be able to solve.
So. You have two objects approaching each other from a very long distance, with any third body a much further distance away (reducing it to what is effectively a two-body problem). If nothing is changed by the encounter, the track of the two bodies going away from each other will look just like the track of the bodies approaching each other: a parabola or hyperbola. Something has to happen near the point of closest approach to alter the energy, the angular momentum, or both in order to change the solution of your equation from a parabola or hyperbola into an ellipse. I think the cleverest explanations involve collisions, because the inelasticity of the collision neatly explains how energy is lost. However, the probability of collisions may not be sufficient to explain the number of paired bodies out there (and that's a job for statisticians).
I'm a double-E myself, so I shouldn't have any big educational advantage in this regard. Either you can peg the mechanism for producing two bodies in mutual orbit, or you can't. If you can't even appreciate the question (which I've been trying to explain here), you don't really have any business dismissing the whole issue with hand-waving. You wouldn't accept a hand-waving explanation for the current flow in a transistor or the resonant frequency of an LC circuit, and you shouldn't accept one here either - especially not from yourself.
Since you've set yourself up as the physics expert, perhaps you'd like to explain that to all of us. You'll probably get a publishable paper out of it too, so it's not like it isn't worth the work.
Compare that to a very expensive, single-purpose mission. Just because something might be feasible (notice that we've never done anything of the sort before) doesn't mean that it makes any sense to try to do it.
The Deep Space Network has some 70 meter dish antennas. Can you imagine trying to get a 35-meter dish antenna even so far as low-earth orbit, let alone on a solar-escape trajectory? Get real. I wish the editors would do a little thinking before posting.
The thing I do not see explained in the article is why the parts of the world where rice is a huge part of the diet don't have a high incidence of myopia. If the bran layer effectively neutralizes the starches, switching from wheat bread to brown rice would be simple for most people. I wonder if anyone's getting ready to do a longitudinal study?
They serve blackened toast. <rimshot>
(Shamelessly stolen from Garrison Kiellor's fine joke show last weekend.)
² works to get the superscript, as in . Here's to clarity and accuracy.
By the way, you can get the omega character with the sequence ω, and the superscript 2 with ². This doesn't require much extra typing and really adds to your clarity.
But if you really remembered your physics you'd know that a = r. From r and a you can calculate directly, or vice versa.
"John Marshal has made his decision; now let him enforce it." - President Andrew Jackson, 1832
It's time to opt out of all functions administered by ICANN and turn to alternate institutions (AlterNIC?). If ICANN is rendered irrelevant and people stop sending it money, it will collapse. Of course, we will have to fight any effort to give it tax money or a legal monopoly on domain-naming services or there will no longer be an option.
Of course, this isn't much compared to the abuse some other people take. Innocent people regularly get sodomized by security who "know" they are drug mules, and verbally abused and humilitated despite being clean. (I call it sodomy, because what else would you call it when someone shoves their fingers up your bodily orifices against your will?)
That said, I wonder if Canada's legal system is as hot on violations of rights as the USA's once was. Somehow I think it's not, and the deterrent effect of lawsuits isn't likely to change the practice.