Re:Ozone Depletion not Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
Nope, 3O->O3 is very exothermic also. Although the energy per atom is less than making dioxygen molecules, this still makes three bonds from nothing. Both 2O->O2 and O2 + O -> O3 are quite exothermic (it takes 250 nm UV light to split the ozone after all). As to the plasma question, it's too cold and too dense in the stratosphere to get much plasma IIRC. You do get plasma in the mesosphere (and above), but it's both hotter and much less dense there.
Re:Ozone Depletion not Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
Gas phase reactions are significantly different from reactions in the liquid phase. It is quite rare to get reactions involving more than 3 species of any kind, and the first reaction involves at least 7 (three oxygen atoms, three (!) photons and at least one extra molecule to carry off the excess energy -- think of conservation of energy *and* momentum). At the pressure of oxygen in the stratosphere (a few torr), there would be essentially no ozone production at all. But the second reaction is even worse. O + O --> O2 is an *extremely* exothermic reaction, forming a double bond from no bond at all. The kinetic energy produced will almost always tear the oxygen molecule back apart before it can transfer enough kinetic energy to become stable. O + O2 --> O3 forms only one bond, and at stratospheric pressure, there is a reasonable probability of the ozone molecule not tearing itself back apart before it can contact another molecule to carry off kinetic energy.
Re:Ozone Depletion not Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Huh? Ozone isn't some kind of "magic radiation shield" (?). It simply absorbs some short wavelengths of light (decomposing into an oxygen molecule and an oxygen atom -- O3 + hv --> O2 + O). It is regenerated by oxygen molecules absorbing a shorter wavelength of light and forming oxygen atoms (O2 + hv --> 2O) and the atomic oxygen recombining with other oxygen molecules (O + O2 --> O3). It exists in the stratosphere because that's the highest region where there is a high enough (molecular) oxygen density that the reactions form a balance.
People who studied Chemistry can give you another hint about chemical reactions. If I recall correctly, a mere 1C difference can make such reactions 2 or 3 times faster or slower. Since almost everything in biology is based on reactions, it's plain to see that 7C can mean disaster.
Actually the rule of thumb (which is very rough indeed -- reactions differ markedly in their activation energies) is that reaction rates double for every 10 degrees Celsius temperature change. But since the activation energies of enzyme-mediated reactions are much smaller than reactions with non-specific catalysis or no catalysis at all, reaction rates of some biological reactions are strongly sensitive to changes of even a few tenths of a degree Celsius.
And don't forget...hydrogen ions are raw protons, their positive electrical charge unmediated by electrons...
Not exactly. This is rigorously true if the hydrogen ions are produced in the gas phase, but we're talking about a water solution. In dilute solution, protons in water are tightly associated with four molecules of water, forming basically the "H9O4(1+)" ion, although this is rarely written (but the associate with just one, H3O+, is very common). But H+ is used often as shorthand, unless the context of it being in water is in doubt.
There is serious questions on whether humans could touch down safely on Mars in any case. People who have spent extended time on Mir, for example, need hospitalization and cardiovascular rehab to teach their hearts to pump blood against a gravity well again. And when these astronauts land on the Martian surface, there will obviously not be a vast, healthy medical staff awaiting them.
It's bad because there really isn't much difference between copywritten material in 1790 and copywritten material in 2002. There are someorganizations whose financial status is dependent on ever-increasing copyright extention, but it's always a bad deal to trade rights for all to benefit a small group.
As to the link above, the second amendment has (probably) been curtailed sharply, but I've no idea how you think the third amendment has been abridged at all.
The Too-common Tragedy
on
Creative Commons
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's a tragedy that places like this must exist. Copyrights are so far from their original intent in the United States, they are almost alughable. Almost.
What's even worse is that John Paul Stevens is the oldest person on the Supreme Court (89 if memory serves), and isn't likely to last the remainder of GW Bush's term. So we'll probably get a Thomas/Rehnquist style ultra-conservative to replace him. Blech.
What on earth is a Jewish (or other religious) corporation?! To take your first case, do companies have bar mitzvahs? Do they attend at synagogues? And if you mean every person in the corporation is restricted to be of a particular religion, laws do in fact prohibit discriminatory hiring policies. The problem is that corporations have been so anthropomorphized that people can, with a straight face, speak of a "religious" corporation in the first place.
Now presuming you meant a business that is owned by a person who is a [fill in the religion/lack of religion/etc.], then that person's own First Amendment rights are to be protected. The other examples you give follow the same form (e.g. the unreasonable search and seizure provisions applies because it is seizing one or more people's property).
I think using a perfume bottle and a battery counts as something that can be done cheaply. Proving the value of an electron's charge gives a quick and easy method for calculating Avogadro's number as a bonus. (The Faraday constant was already known, but not the number of electrons necessary to make a coulomb of charge).
Re:The problem with all these equations...
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I would bet dollars to donuts that ANY life in the whole entire universe - at least, "naturally" occuring life and not an artificial intelligence created by something which is itself alive - is based on organic chemistry....
You're right so far.
I read a quote once that stated life may one day be reclassified as a property of the carbon atom, because carbon and carbon alone can form long polymer chains.
Not really. It's very well known that silicon and oxygen together (in -SiOSiO- links) can form high polymers as well. However, the silicons need two more bonds, and invariably the atoms the Si bond to are carbon atoms.
The much weirder example of something that concatenates readily are metal atoms (especially in liquid ammonia). In NH3, one MIGHT conceive of a redox system that has various "living" metal clusters interacting, and solvated electrons would be the general reducing agent. This is the only system I can imagine that would permit a totally non-carbon life to occur (and high metals are much rarer than carbon in the cosmos, which makes this even less probable).
What exactly IS a god/deity anyway? I know some AC will tell me to look it up, but there really isn't a coherent definition of what a "deity" is. Specifically, if you ask a Christian, a Hindu and a person who practices Chinese religion, you will get totally different definitions.
The most common pseudo-definition which tries to avoid most (though not all!) of these pitfalls bizarrely compares a "deity" with a human who lives right now. The critical problem with that position is that, if a person could go back in time with all the technology we have today, at some point in history, she would be called a goddess.
I might add that we will never ``run out of oil''. If it gets expensive enough, we can always synthesize it from biomass.
In the most abstract sense you are correct, but you may not realize how extreme the cost would be. To get hydrocarbons from biomass, one must get methanol and crack it at fairly high temperatures to get CO and H2 (requiring energy input). Then, the Fischer-Tropsch method could in theory give you long-chain completely straight-chain hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately, that's just the beginning of the problem. First, the Fischer-Tropsch method requires tetrakis(triphenylphosphine)rhodium(0) as its catalyst. It lasts a long while, but it does eventually degrade. The primary problem with this is that you have to find a source of phenyl halide (unfortunately, it's a pain to try to convert phenol, which is easy to get from natural sources, to a phenyl halide).
But even worse is the second part, that it produces completely straight-chain hydrocarbons. When internal-combustion engine manufacturers were trying to come up with the ultimate worst fuel possible (the "bottom" of the octane scale), the one that knocked the worst was n-heptane, which is assigned an octane number of 0. In contrast, the best they could come up with then (there are above-100 octane fuels now available -- at fairly steep prices) was given the name "isooctane." However, that is not the isooctane one would get from the later-developed IUPAC standards (which would be 2-methylheptane), but rather 2,3,3-trimethylpentane, which is quite branched. In fact, octane number is quite strongly correlated with high branching; you get no branching at all in the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Re:An *International* problem
on
GeekPAC
·
· Score: 1
The ideals, aims, and motivations that the AOTC represents are global in nature. Whilst they may be presently concerned with the activities of the US government if the AOTC is successful then they will eventually be forced to deal with foreign governments in order to protect the interests of their American members. Therefore I would argue that a national organisation for what is an international problem is foolish.
An international organisation with the same aims would have many advantages, and few disadvantages.
The weird part of this (and what wouldn't necessarily be obvious to someone outside the US) is that, at least formally, the Republican Party is deeply anti-international. An amazing number of US citizens are philosophically opposed to anything that is supragovernmental: "it's our way or the highway" and such.
Of course, since the US electoral system is biased toward creation of a two-party system, once one party is eliminated from consideration the other need not acknowledge your existence (or more precisely, it takes two of those on your side to equal one undecided person, since an undecided could vote for the opponent -- -1 vs +1 -- while the permanent supporter could only protest by staying home -- 0 vs +1).
Is it not enough to argue that reducing emissions, polutants, and generally being more sustainable is beneficial because: i) it would improve air quality; ii) improved water quality; iii) more sustainable use of *local* resources.
If you were arguing for strong(er) air or water pollution standards, I'd be in full agreement. Your argument is flawed to support reduction in CO2, though. (NOTE: I agree CO2 reduction needs to occur; it's much better to argue from a defensible position, though!)
Actually, efforts to increase the relative amount of CO2 release enhances what is normally called "air quality" in two ways: it reduces carbon and CO emissions which have clear negative impacts on human health and less fuel is burned for the same amount of energy (CO2 is more oxidized than C or CO). As to water quality, CO2 is dissolved in all naturally occuring water on Earth in significant quantities; this is why limestone caverns form, for example. As to your third example, there are a lot of places where quality of living would go down markedly if they were unable to import from elsewhere.
So if these are poor arguments, what are some good arguments? Ultimately, fossil fuels will begin to run out. Investment in other methodologies (BTW current solar technology is really not a good idea; the pollution produced in production and disposal is horrific) is necessary for the transition to other energy sources to be as smooth as possible. Most environmental critics don't realize that environmentalists usually don't want the most extreme possible solution; they want one that will cause the least disruption to their own and their children's (and following generations') lives. We really don't want a Gulf of Mississippi!
USA Midewest [sic] will become a dust bowl
Unfortunately, this is going to happen to a significant fraction of the Midwest even if global warming doesn't happen to this degree. The Ogallala is being drained quickly enough that the agriculturally "necessary" water will run out in about a century.
If enough ice melts, the oceans will rise.
Actually, the melting of the ice sheets isn't necessary to cause ocean rise. Even in the nightmare scenario where both Antarctica and Greenland thaw, more of the rise in the ocean comes from thermal expansion of the ocean water than additional water gained by melting glaciers.
If you are looking for "consensus," you aren't looking at the right site.;) But realistically the only thing between this bill and passage is a divided Congress (and the House of Representatives may well go Democratic this cycle). Democrats are beholden to Hollywood's money and Republicans are beholden to shareholders -- and a lot of people own media company stock. As Will Rogers said, "We have the best Congress money can buy."
His work is fully four-dimensional, as is almost all work in loop quantum gravity, so I don't know where this claim of "16 physical dimensions" comes from. This is where I would really appreciate a quote from the Ashtekar paper, because I think you're misunderstanding something.
I misread the quote at the middle of page 12 from the article:
The 'evolution' equation [ref. 3] has other interesting features. To begin with, the [the part I misread] space of solutions is 16 dimensional.
Sorry for the reading error -- when I saw '16 dimensional' 'space' being derived from this, I was hoping there was a convergence between the two theories (say a 26-dimensional boson becoming a fermion in each of 16-dimensions and 10). Thanks for the correction before I got even more excited.;)
Thank you for the link to an interesting article. However, as the paper itself states, (super)string theory does not postulate a background metric a priori either -- it is derived explicitly from the form of the equations themselves.
The astonishing thing to me was noticing that Loop Quantum Gravity describes the Big Bang event as being 16 physical dimensions -- the precise number that are "lost" in string theory by going from a bosonic theory with tachyons (!) to a supersymmetric theory. The exclamation point should be obvious; if these are in fact parts of the same theory (string theory is just bizarre enough that it might be so!), the "tachyons" could describe the connection between the 16-dimensional "initial" event and 10-dimensional superstrings at the present!
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, 3O->O3 is very exothermic also. Although the energy per atom is less than making dioxygen molecules, this still makes three bonds from nothing. Both 2O->O2 and O2 + O -> O3 are quite exothermic (it takes 250 nm UV light to split the ozone after all). As to the plasma question, it's too cold and too dense in the stratosphere to get much plasma IIRC. You do get plasma in the mesosphere (and above), but it's both hotter and much less dense there.
Gas phase reactions are significantly different from reactions in the liquid phase. It is quite rare to get reactions involving more than 3 species of any kind, and the first reaction involves at least 7 (three oxygen atoms, three (!) photons and at least one extra molecule to carry off the excess energy -- think of conservation of energy *and* momentum). At the pressure of oxygen in the stratosphere (a few torr), there would be essentially no ozone production at all. But the second reaction is even worse. O + O --> O2 is an *extremely* exothermic reaction, forming a double bond from no bond at all. The kinetic energy produced will almost always tear the oxygen molecule back apart before it can transfer enough kinetic energy to become stable. O + O2 --> O3 forms only one bond, and at stratospheric pressure, there is a reasonable probability of the ozone molecule not tearing itself back apart before it can contact another molecule to carry off kinetic energy.
Huh? Ozone isn't some kind of "magic radiation shield" (?). It simply absorbs some short wavelengths of light (decomposing into an oxygen molecule and an oxygen atom -- O3 + hv --> O2 + O). It is regenerated by oxygen molecules absorbing a shorter wavelength of light and forming oxygen atoms (O2 + hv --> 2O) and the atomic oxygen recombining with other oxygen molecules (O + O2 --> O3). It exists in the stratosphere because that's the highest region where there is a high enough (molecular) oxygen density that the reactions form a balance.
People who studied Chemistry can give you another hint about chemical reactions. If I recall correctly, a mere 1C difference can make such reactions 2 or 3 times faster or slower. Since almost everything in biology is based on reactions, it's plain to see that 7C can mean disaster.
Actually the rule of thumb (which is very rough indeed -- reactions differ markedly in their activation energies) is that reaction rates double for every 10 degrees Celsius temperature change. But since the activation energies of enzyme-mediated reactions are much smaller than reactions with non-specific catalysis or no catalysis at all, reaction rates of some biological reactions are strongly sensitive to changes of even a few tenths of a degree Celsius.
And don't forget...hydrogen ions are raw protons, their positive electrical charge unmediated by electrons...
Not exactly. This is rigorously true if the hydrogen ions are produced in the gas phase, but we're talking about a water solution. In dilute solution, protons in water are tightly associated with four molecules of water, forming basically the "H9O4(1+)" ion, although this is rarely written (but the associate with just one, H3O+, is very common). But H+ is used often as shorthand, unless the context of it being in water is in doubt.
There is serious questions on whether humans could touch down safely on Mars in any case. People who have spent extended time on Mir, for example, need hospitalization and cardiovascular rehab to teach their hearts to pump blood against a gravity well again. And when these astronauts land on the Martian surface, there will obviously not be a vast, healthy medical staff awaiting them.
Isn't it wonderful to see Microsoft get slapped down for what it has already tried to do: take over common English words for its own use? :)
It's bad because there really isn't much difference between copywritten material in 1790 and copywritten material in 2002. There are some organizations whose financial status is dependent on ever-increasing copyright extention, but it's always a bad deal to trade rights for all to benefit a small group.
As to the link above, the second amendment has (probably) been curtailed sharply, but I've no idea how you think the third amendment has been abridged at all.
It's a tragedy that places like this must exist. Copyrights are so far from their original intent in the United States, they are almost alughable. Almost.
I think they were thinking of the appearance of Darth Sync. Oh well....
Wrong, the longest lived isotope of plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years.
No, YOU are wrong. The longest-lived isotope of plutonium is Pu-244 with a half-life of 80 million years.
What's even worse is that John Paul Stevens is the oldest person on the Supreme Court (89 if memory serves), and isn't likely to last the remainder of GW Bush's term. So we'll probably get a Thomas/Rehnquist style ultra-conservative to replace him. Blech.
I would have modded you up had you included this!
What on earth is a Jewish (or other religious) corporation?! To take your first case, do companies have bar mitzvahs? Do they attend at synagogues? And if you mean every person in the corporation is restricted to be of a particular religion, laws do in fact prohibit discriminatory hiring policies. The problem is that corporations have been so anthropomorphized that people can, with a straight face, speak of a "religious" corporation in the first place.
Now presuming you meant a business that is owned by a person who is a [fill in the religion/lack of religion/etc.], then that person's own First Amendment rights are to be protected. The other examples you give follow the same form (e.g. the unreasonable search and seizure provisions applies because it is seizing one or more people's property).
D'oh, it was Milliken not Thomson; the above poster was right.
I think using a perfume bottle and a battery counts as something that can be done cheaply. Proving the value of an electron's charge gives a quick and easy method for calculating Avogadro's number as a bonus. (The Faraday constant was already known, but not the number of electrons necessary to make a coulomb of charge).
I would bet dollars to donuts that ANY life in the whole entire universe - at least, "naturally" occuring life and not an artificial intelligence created by something which is itself alive - is based on organic chemistry....
You're right so far.
I read a quote once that stated life may one day be reclassified as a property of the carbon atom, because carbon and carbon alone can form long polymer chains.
Not really. It's very well known that silicon and oxygen together (in -SiOSiO- links) can form high polymers as well. However, the silicons need two more bonds, and invariably the atoms the Si bond to are carbon atoms.
The much weirder example of something that concatenates readily are metal atoms (especially in liquid ammonia). In NH3, one MIGHT conceive of a redox system that has various "living" metal clusters interacting, and solvated electrons would be the general reducing agent. This is the only system I can imagine that would permit a totally non-carbon life to occur (and high metals are much rarer than carbon in the cosmos, which makes this even less probable).
What exactly IS a god/deity anyway? I know some AC will tell me to look it up, but there really isn't a coherent definition of what a "deity" is. Specifically, if you ask a Christian, a Hindu and a person who practices Chinese religion, you will get totally different definitions.
The most common pseudo-definition which tries to avoid most (though not all!) of these pitfalls bizarrely compares a "deity" with a human who lives right now. The critical problem with that position is that, if a person could go back in time with all the technology we have today, at some point in history, she would be called a goddess.
In the most abstract sense you are correct, but you may not realize how extreme the cost would be. To get hydrocarbons from biomass, one must get methanol and crack it at fairly high temperatures to get CO and H2 (requiring energy input). Then, the Fischer-Tropsch method could in theory give you long-chain completely straight-chain hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately, that's just the beginning of the problem. First, the Fischer-Tropsch method requires tetrakis(triphenylphosphine)rhodium(0) as its catalyst. It lasts a long while, but it does eventually degrade. The primary problem with this is that you have to find a source of phenyl halide (unfortunately, it's a pain to try to convert phenol, which is easy to get from natural sources, to a phenyl halide).
But even worse is the second part, that it produces completely straight-chain hydrocarbons. When internal-combustion engine manufacturers were trying to come up with the ultimate worst fuel possible (the "bottom" of the octane scale), the one that knocked the worst was n-heptane, which is assigned an octane number of 0. In contrast, the best they could come up with then (there are above-100 octane fuels now available -- at fairly steep prices) was given the name "isooctane." However, that is not the isooctane one would get from the later-developed IUPAC standards (which would be 2-methylheptane), but rather 2,3,3-trimethylpentane, which is quite branched. In fact, octane number is quite strongly correlated with high branching; you get no branching at all in the Fischer-Tropsch process.
An international organisation with the same aims would have many advantages, and few disadvantages.
The weird part of this (and what wouldn't necessarily be obvious to someone outside the US) is that, at least formally, the Republican Party is deeply anti-international. An amazing number of US citizens are philosophically opposed to anything that is supragovernmental: "it's our way or the highway" and such.
Of course, since the US electoral system is biased toward creation of a two-party system, once one party is eliminated from consideration the other need not acknowledge your existence (or more precisely, it takes two of those on your side to equal one undecided person, since an undecided could vote for the opponent -- -1 vs +1 -- while the permanent supporter could only protest by staying home -- 0 vs +1).
Is it not enough to argue that reducing emissions, polutants, and generally being more sustainable is beneficial because: i) it would improve air quality; ii) improved water quality; iii) more sustainable use of *local* resources.
If you were arguing for strong(er) air or water pollution standards, I'd be in full agreement. Your argument is flawed to support reduction in CO2, though. (NOTE: I agree CO2 reduction needs to occur; it's much better to argue from a defensible position, though!)
Actually, efforts to increase the relative amount of CO2 release enhances what is normally called "air quality" in two ways: it reduces carbon and CO emissions which have clear negative impacts on human health and less fuel is burned for the same amount of energy (CO2 is more oxidized than C or CO). As to water quality, CO2 is dissolved in all naturally occuring water on Earth in significant quantities; this is why limestone caverns form, for example. As to your third example, there are a lot of places where quality of living would go down markedly if they were unable to import from elsewhere.
So if these are poor arguments, what are some good arguments? Ultimately, fossil fuels will begin to run out. Investment in other methodologies (BTW current solar technology is really not a good idea; the pollution produced in production and disposal is horrific) is necessary for the transition to other energy sources to be as smooth as possible. Most environmental critics don't realize that environmentalists usually don't want the most extreme possible solution; they want one that will cause the least disruption to their own and their children's (and following generations') lives. We really don't want a Gulf of Mississippi!
A couple of comments:
USA Midewest [sic] will become a dust bowl
Unfortunately, this is going to happen to a significant fraction of the Midwest even if global warming doesn't happen to this degree. The Ogallala is being drained quickly enough that the agriculturally "necessary" water will run out in about a century.
If enough ice melts, the oceans will rise.
Actually, the melting of the ice sheets isn't necessary to cause ocean rise. Even in the nightmare scenario where both Antarctica and Greenland thaw, more of the rise in the ocean comes from thermal expansion of the ocean water than additional water gained by melting glaciers.
If you are looking for "consensus," you aren't looking at the right site. ;) But realistically the only thing between this bill and passage is a divided Congress (and the House of Representatives may well go Democratic this cycle). Democrats are beholden to Hollywood's money and Republicans are beholden to shareholders -- and a lot of people own media company stock. As Will Rogers said, "We have the best Congress money can buy."
I misread the quote at the middle of page 12 from the article:
Sorry for the reading error -- when I saw '16 dimensional' 'space' being derived from this, I was hoping there was a convergence between the two theories (say a 26-dimensional boson becoming a fermion in each of 16-dimensions and 10). Thanks for the correction before I got even more excited.
The astonishing thing to me was noticing that Loop Quantum Gravity describes the Big Bang event as being 16 physical dimensions -- the precise number that are "lost" in string theory by going from a bosonic theory with tachyons (!) to a supersymmetric theory. The exclamation point should be obvious; if these are in fact parts of the same theory (string theory is just bizarre enough that it might be so!), the "tachyons" could describe the connection between the 16-dimensional "initial" event and 10-dimensional superstrings at the present!