A much better explanation why there is helium in gas wells is because 1) there is a trap and 2) there is alpha decay of radioactive isotopes.
However the hydritic earth hypothesis is possible. It is possible petroleum (at least some of it) derives from the mantal. It actually might make sense to sink a well into the Peace River Arch in Alberta and test to see if there are hydrocarbons under the tar sands. If there are then there may be a trap with incredible quantities. So far the hypothesis has not been tested. C Warren Hunt and partners partly drilled a well but it did not reach target amid a great deal of controversy. That hole can be re-entered and deepened.
This happened frquently and I had to teach her to just be persistant and keep phoning until they listened. Her mom was very ill. Crap like this does happen and often they don't get it right.
I have been saying this for a long time and sometimes I get opposition - but the problem is that the telecommunications industry has morphed into an intellectual property distribution industry and they are not paying royalties for what they distribute.
This has happened in other areas as well - with Cable Television being an example. In this case, the industry felt they could distribute other people's signals without paying royalties and the situation continued for a substantial period of time before the problem was resolved.
Very simply, the OpenBSD project should be recieving a fee for every copy of OpenBSD downloaded from its servers and from its mirrors. When I pay my ISP I pay for this service. There would be no reason for me for instance to pay my ISP if they did not have any content available for me to look at on the web and to download. My ISP connects to a large telco and they have to pay the telco for access to the content. Why they telco feels they should not have to pay the content creators is a matter to be addressed.
In fact in this case the telco in question pays substantial amounts of money to American insterests to gain access to the internet content that flows from the USA. These payments are for connections to the POP's run by the US backbones. Why a Canadian company is willing to pay Americans for access to internet content while at the same time is unwilling to pay Canadian's for access is a question I would really like them to answer.
The last time I spoke with members of the OpenBSD group they indicated the bandwidth costs a substantial amount of money. If this has changed and they now have a peering arrangment and are being paid for access to the servers then I will shut up. However I think this is quite unlikely and until this happens I am going to remain vocal.
First off the malting barley is probably not organic. Even if it is organic, it is farmed with tractors driven by petrol. I have yet to see a commercial farm tractor or combine for that matter driven by a non-oil fuel source. However - it is possible in spite of the bad energy economics cited by Dr. David Pimethal which is still being quoted.
Having been harvested, the grain is hauled by petrol fueled trucks to elevators and then hauled by petrol fueled rail to the maltsters.
The malting plant is probably not green - however it again probably could do better.
Now - as others have pointed out - energy is fungible. In order to be off petrol they would have to work only when the wind blows. Or they would have to harness the exothermic reaction called brewing.
The reason the brewing process gives off CO2 is because a hydrocarbon - eg sugar - is being partially oxidized by the yeast.
Essentually we are going from a polymer based on (CH2O)n into an alcohol which is CH3CH2OH or C(n)H(2n+1)OH where n=2 for ethanol (C2H6O which is really C2H5OH just written differently).
To be more specific we have a series of reactions by alpha and beta amylase which are created during the malting process which is exothermic. During mashing which is also exothermic the starches are broken down into simpler sugars, principally maltose which is a disaccharide made from two glucose molecuals.
So very specifically we have C12H22O11 + H2O -> 2 C6H12O6 followed by C6H12O6 -> 2 C2H6O + 2CO2 + heat.
The point I am making is that with all these exothermic reactions they are still consuming a great deal of energy so they are not nearly as green as they might like to be seen as.
Next - of the wastewater.
Well - most of this would contain either nothing of much value or yeast which is very high in protein being a fungus and all... fungus are more closely related to animals than to plants. They are an excellent form of nutrition.
Rather than flushing the yeast down the sewer or putting it into holding tanks where it can be degraded by another micro-organism producing methane - it makes more sense to collect it and ship it off for food.
Of course the spent brewer's grains are typically shipped off for cattle fodder since they are high in proteins. Another use for them is as a nitrogen suppliment in synthetic substrates for mushroom production.
--------------
The thing about organics is that plants are basically a polymer of simple sugars. These are built into complex sugars then into starches, cellulose, pentosans and lignin. Fungus digest these. There are many fungus which can do this and some examples are Pleurotis spp, Lentinula spp, Flamulina spp, and I'll not go on. From these three genus we have the common Oyster mushrooms, Shiitaki and Enoki.
Other fungus which are cellulose digesters include Trichoderma spp. T. reesei is used to produce stone washed blue jeans for instance because it is easy to culture and partially digests the cotton. So they are really fungus washed blue jeans not stone washed and here we have another example of people lying to us!!!
There are some who are attempting with some success to use T. reesei to digest wood and produce alcohols. I suspect T. Reesei is being used because it is available and not because it is particularly good at this job.
The economics of this process are actually quite simple.
We start with a polymer made of (CH2O)n
We transform it via enzymes excreted by fungi into C(n)H(2n+1)OH
If we note that the alkane series is C(n)H(2n+2) where for n=8 we get octane then what we see is that our alcohols are simply a slightly oxydized alkane.
The reaction from sugar to ethanol for instance is:
I'm an inventor and I have invented a very simple product that I would like to put in the market. In many respects the product is obvious and the best way to do it is a little more expensive than a poor boy solution and has been used for probably 1000's of years. However I'm afraid that some dumb ass will think that its non-obvious and the patent office will of course have agreed so if I create the product and hense create some jobs I'm afraid I'll be sued.
OTOH there is a poor boy solution that probably is patentable and probaby has not been patented and is actually easy to do but not quite obvious. If I spend my time and money and get a patent then I cannot defend a patent attack.
Purely and simply the system acts as a restraint on trade. The consequence is that people who are aware of the legalities may choose to not do business and the obvious consequence of this is higher prices and fewer jobs. A not so obvious consequence is that the product I am looking at is really a very effective saftey measure and without it people can get injured!
Why should a fsck like this surprise anyone? I just purchased a high quality surgical stainless steel 8" caliper on the weekend. Its a vernier - imperial and metric.
On the imperial scale there are five (5) subdivisions between 0 and 0.1", four (4) subdivisions between 0.1-0.2, 0.2-0.3, 0.3-0.4 and THREE (3) between 0.4-0.5
This manufacturer has gone to the trouble of setting up a full assembly line to machine calipers. They spend probably over $100,000 on the injection mold for the plastic case probably.
Then after all this they hire a person to mark the damn thing who cannot count to 4 and it passed QA and all the distribution people including the retailer who sold it to me.
Should I presume the marks on the damn thing are in the right place?
hahahahahaha
Well - they do actually seem to be in the right place but it sure is funny that they were too incompetant to get the labling right after spending probably at least several million on an assembly line and tooling to manufacture calipers. They even went to the effort of using a laser to ingrave a serial number on it.
Suppose you were driving on an ice road - would you wear a seat belt? I wouldn't! I don't care how safe they say it is there is no way I'll wear a seat belt when driving on ice.
Similarly I am cautious enough that rather than waste my time with anti-virus software - which can only be retroactive - I simply avoid the hasle and use linux.
Computers are so cheap these days that pretty much anyone who uses windows to surf the net is IMHO pretty much an idjot. I routinely instruct the consultants and professionals I hire that they are not to put any of my files on a windows machine that is connected to the net. Of course - I know some ignore me - and I have had confidential technical drawings worth $1000's of bux published on the net! Its pretty bad when the people you hire figure they should charge the client and then give away the clients work... but like I said - a large percentage of people are totally clueless.
I just found the whole issue pretty funny! To be honest I don't even feel sorry for them. Maybe this will cause a few to wake up and smell the coffee eh?
Suppose you genetically engineered a form of chlorophyl which produced hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates.
SOme plants which produce hydrocarbons are called "oilseeds". Some Algae do it also. As for the waste - its CO2 and if ppl don't notice plants use it for food.
As for the presumed negative effects of CO2... well - the paleoclimate record shows that CO2 more than 13x higher than now did not cause global warming during the Ordovician... and in fact did not prevent the planet from plunging into an ice age. So about the only effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is actually beneficial because it increases crop yeilds.
What I really love about this is that the struggling recoding artists have to pay the levy to get blank CD's on which they record their own music for sale.
Having paid the levy it will eventually go to the record lables who refuse to sign them or have otherwise onerous contractual requirements.
It is just so wonderful to have a system that taxes the struggling artists and at the same time justifies it with a lie.
Europe and Japan are reprocessing and simply stuffing the Pu back into the reactors as MOX fuel. While the USA is not doing reprocessing yet - they will.
What you might consider "waste" is another reactor design's fuel. Mankind will need all the energy we can get from this and the day of reconing is a lot closer than most people realise. While the price of oil and gas may be down a little at the moment - this is quite temporary.
IMHO the world will see the peak of world oil production in about a year. It certainly will happen within a decade. When this happens we can expect oil and gas prices to skyrocket well past $100 bux and possibly past $300 per barrel.
There will be wide spread layoffs, recessions and people will be wondering how they are going to heat their houses. The oil crisis of the 70's will look like a picnic and the comming crisis will be permenant.
In al liklihood it is already too late and we have to embark on every energy conservation program and every energy source available. Even with a consorted effort it is probably too late. There are going to be some mightly lean decades just around the corner.
I believe in the stupidity of people. Get real. The last ice age lasted 10.000 years. Plutonioum takes 500.000 years to become harmless. What kind of storage facility do you think will outlast that? Who will warrant a 500.000 year commitment?
There are so many factual errors in your post that I am not even going to start pointing them out. Pretty much everything you state is simply worng.
Your comment about believing in the stupidity of people however is on the mark and your post serves as a good example.
To suggest that global warming is going to change the environment is the same as suggesting that there will be no future ice ages. Since there have been around 20 in the past 2 million years on something like a 110,000 year cycle - this would mean that the last has come and gone. Please note that 5 million years ago there were trees north of the Arctic circle.
If we believe in irreversable Global Warming, then we can expect the planet will revert to the warm phase which is about 20 degrees F (10C) on average warmer than now and which the planet enjoyed for oh about +85% of the last 500+ million years. This will melt the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
There is no evidence to suggest this will happen. Most likely we are simply in an interglacial and there will be another glacial cycle just as there has been in the past.
If we reject the idea of the Global Warming, then this senerio - if the planet warms up a little for a short while then it will just delay the onset of the next ice age.
During the last ice age there were glaciers as thick as the Matterhorn in Switzerland is high. Toronto was covered by more than a mile of ice. That is a lot of ice and it wouldn't be very nice to live in a world like this.
The thing is that whoever is correct, there is little that mankind can do about it. If we have a warming trend for a while then some islands may be flooded and Florida might need to hire some Dutch engineers. Britain may once again be able to tend vinyards. If we have global cooling for a while as occured during the little ice age then we may find that we won't have enough food to eat.
A far more pressing problem is that mankind is buring fossil fuels at a totally unsustainable rate. IMHO we are going to be facing the peak of world oil production within a couple years and when this happens, $70 oil is going to look real cheap.
So I would suggest that rather than worry about global warming, we should instead prepare for a world with less oil and gas. This will probably have the side effect of reducing CO2 emissions. If anyone considers this a positive outcome then fine.
North America peaked in natural gas production in 2001. Since that time - what has the population of North America done to cope?
The answer is pretty much nothing. A huge part of the fertilizer industry has been shut down. Now part of the plastics industry will follow suit. The price of Natural Gas goes up and up (and temporarily down for now - yes I DO know about gas in storage levels) and still people talk about building more gas fired electricity stations. Ontario is still thinking there is no issue and they can have all the gas they want and I read New York State is also imbued with a high level of polyanna thinking.
The last major company to think this way was Calpine. They are in bankruptcy now. If we look at their history we will find that a few years back their shares were trading at $45 bux. They had more gas turbines on order than could be built in the USA. They were planning on burning most of the North American gas supplies all by themselves. The market LOVED THEM.
I do not subscribe to the fears of Global Warming. However I will say again - those who do should get off their butts and do something about it. Insulate your homes. Shut off your furnaces. Stop driving your cars.
Do something that counts, something that will reduce your demand for fossil fuels. If you want to justify it by citing Global warming then be my guest. But however you justify it - DO SOMETHING. Tear a wall down in your house and use some spare time to put R50 insualtion into it. That alone will accomplish far more than wasting your time worrying about something you can do nothing about.
IMHO BP has embarked on their "Beyond Petroleum" advertising campaign is in part because they realise they are in trouble and are running out of oil. If we check their filings we find the amount they have spent on non-oil energy is insignificant. The amount of energy they supply from non-petroleum energy sources is also insignificant.
I called their public relations people and asked them what they were proposing for an energy source other than oil and gas. This was when I first saw the commercial of a brightly lit gas station - fueled by what? I dunno?
Their response was that the commercial should not have been broadcast in my area.
Yup - heads in the sands.
Part of this is so that when they make their massive profits having shut down much of their Exploration part of the business (which is quite expensive) people will think they are developing a replacement energy source.
About the only viable alternative in the short term is nuclear.
However - people can and should insulate their homes to about R50 in the walls and R70 in the ceilings. Also insulating shutters which close automatically at night (when nobody is looking out the windows anyway) can be installed.
Those people who are most worried about CO2 emissions and global warming should lead the way by (1) re-insulating their homes (2) shutting off their furnaces and (3) stop driving their cars.
They might also want to look into placing their office in their homes so that we don't have to have two (2) heated buildings to do what can be done with one. Since I have personally had an office in my house for the last 25 years and I don't drive a car at the moment I do happen to know it can be done.
Also - I make more money than most people. And I don't have to waste 2-3 hours a day commuting in rush hour traffic. Its also very nice to be able to pop out any time I want for a coffee with a friend or to run an errand when all the businesses I need to deal with are open.
In the long run I'll probably live longer too since I don't have the daily stress most people think is "normal".
While I am on the subject... I was able to walk my kids to school and spend time with them when they were little. Now they are young adults. I never experianced any of the problems I hear in the news that people experiance with teenagers. There was no rebellion, no drugs, no drinking. Instead I was treated to seeing the kids getting scholerships, developing businesses, hiring other kids, creating employment and yes - paying lots of taxes too.
It is much easier to be involed with your family when you have an extra 2-3 hours per day that most people don't have and the simplest difference was not having to make a daily commute.
Given my latest experiances with the moderations around here I will not be surprised if your very excellent well thought out and well written post gets moderated as a "troll"
New Orleans has also been experiancing rising sea levels for the last several 100 years.
Er...
The Mississippi rive delta has been experiancing rising sea levels for the last several 100 thousand years and oil companies routinely drill oil wells into it.
Could it be the built the city on the River Delta? Could it be the river delta is sinking? Could it be some low lying islands are sinking?
Could it be that sea level is actually lower at the height of an ice age?
Could it be that the planet moved out of an ice age about 10,000 years ago?
IMHO when we get a measurable change over a few million years then maybe we have an inkling something is going on. Besides which - the planet is cold now and has been for about 30 million years.
IF the planet warms up soon - and this is a really big IF because we have had over 20 ice cycles in the last 2 million years and are presently in an interglacial - then IF the glacial maximum we just left is the last one (I think this is very unlikely) then we will be better off for it!
As fossil fuels run out we will have to move to a sustainable energy economy. One of the consequences of this is that oil and gas will not be available to heat our homes.
Each and every one of our Global Warming folks should lead the way to sustainability by shutting off their furnaces. Next they should stop driving their cars.
There must be something we can do about the shitty moderation taking place around here. Over the last few weeks I've seen more instances of downright BAD moderation than in the past several years.
This post is actually quite good. The writer could have gone into more depth but he certainly is correct in his assesment that we are currently in an inter-glacial phase. However if we are going to go back into a glacial period then a better guesstimate might be that it is more than 5,000 years away.
The simple fact is that we have gone through at least 20 ice cycles in the last 2 million years and that the earth has been cold for about the last 20-30 million years. Prior to this recent cooling - earth was warm continuously throughout the Triassic, Jurasic and Cretaceous which is a period of over 200 million years. By warmer I mean an average global temperature of about 20 degrees warmer.
It should be noted that the poles were not ice covered until the present cooling which seemed to get going during the miocene.
At some point the planet in all likelihood will warm up. The reason is that for over 85% of the history of the planet since the end of the Precambrian - the planet was warm (say about 570 million years). There have only been a couple of times in the geological past when it has been as cool as now - so it does make sense that at some time the planet will probably revert back to normal.
Furthermore, if one compares the Ordovician ice age to the present, one finds that CO2 levels were about 13x to 17x higher than now and still the planet cooled into an ice age - then warmed back up. So it would appear that CO2 levels back then were not the deciding factor. If CO2 was not the deciding factor back then - then one would be wise to question if it has any significance today. In fact the Ordovician cooling is correlated with the Taconic orogeny just as the present cooling is correlated with the mountain building which has occured since the end of the Cretaceous. This includes the Rockies, Pyrannenes, Andies, Himalain, two hellenic mountain ranges, the tibetian and colorado plateaus... Ie - a large amount of land pushed to high elevation. It is perfectly obvious that mountain tops reflect energy back into space just as it is perfectly obvious that moist air at sea level tends to hold solar energy.
This is ESPECIALLY so when one checks the absolute humidity (H2O) which we KNOW is responsible for the earth being about 30 degrees warmer than it would be were the water vapour not in the atmosphere. Compared the the 50,000 to 80,000 PPM of H2O in the atmosphere at sea level in the tropics, the change of 70 PPM in CO2 over the last few hundred years is totally negligable. One cannot even add the CO2 measurements to the water vapour measurements because the uncertanty of the water vapour measurments masks the total CO2 by several times.
What is truely amasing is that H2O is not even counted as a green house gas by many of the folks who are most conserned about global warming. Yet we literally would be freezing our butts off were it not for H2O in the atmosphere.
The oceans have a moderating effect on a thousand year time scale. Since it was warmer during the medieval warm period by this guestimate it makes sense that earth would warm up now.
People who really want to know what is going on mind you should study paleoclimatology. The geological record of climate does shed light on how the earth functions.
Another thing that is truely amasing is how little perspective most climate change people have of the scale of geological time. If we were to map say the Encyclopeadia Britannic to the time since the beginning of the Cambrian - then each book in the set would represent something like 30 million years and each page would represent about 3,000 years. On this scale the climate warming people are looking at day usually contained on the last page and normally within the last couple paragraphs of the lsat page of the last book. Meanwhile they ignore
Fugus attacking insects is pretty common actually. Cordyceps spp do this. We get some fine [herbal chinese] meds from a few such as C. senensis. Another that is really interesting is C. subsessilis which is also known as Tolypocladium inflatum from which we get cyclosporin.
This is a whole new field actually - fungal control of insects. There are a few patents out and undoubtably this will be a nice growth area. Perhaps we can even get rid of the nasty pesticides we have used in the past under the mis-idea that chemistry will pave the way to a brave new world devoid of human pathogens. Our hospitals have been busy breeding a whole raft of really nasty critters by following this mantra.
This is just so F8ing stupid. I was in Dallas in 1985 and I dumped printouts in Alaska from Sun Oil's office (I had the routing codes wrong). This was on the IBM mainframe system.
Over 5 years before Lynes United Services in Calgary (who I worked for at the time) sent wireless messages. We didn't call it an "email" at the time but we did send messages. The company was working on oil field monitoring.
We had systems working back then.
In addition I personally used the Fidonet system here in Calgary and it had wireless packet radio and we did send messages back and forth - that was the 1985 time frame.
How much F8ing prior art do we need?
The PHONE COMPANY commonly ran wireless communcations on their ATM system because they have had wireless links in place for DECADES
------------
All this illustrates is that lawyers and juries and Judges do not make good engineers. What we have here is totally f8ing obvious!
Huge amounts of the telecomunications industry were doing wireless transmissions in many different ways. That email caught on and ran on existing technologies does not make it innovative in any way.
What we need is a cartoon of a lap top mod that connects a 60 AMP HOUR deep cycle battery. This would be so funny and you can get DAYS and DAYS of service from it. haha.
These batteries are about the size of a lunchbox so they are totable.
Slashdot Mirror
A much better explanation why there is helium in gas wells is because 1) there is a trap and 2) there is alpha decay of radioactive isotopes.
However the hydritic earth hypothesis is possible. It is possible petroleum (at least some of it) derives from the mantal. It actually might make sense to sink a well into the Peace River Arch in Alberta and test to see if there are hydrocarbons under the tar sands. If there are then there may be a trap with incredible quantities. So far the hypothesis has not been tested. C Warren Hunt and partners partly drilled a well but it did not reach target amid a great deal of controversy. That hole can be re-entered and deepened.
It has no "rest" mass. IE E0 is zero.
Massive particals have a rest mass. Particals that travel at the speed of light have no rest mass.
This happened frquently and I had to teach her to just be persistant and keep phoning until they listened. Her mom was very ill. Crap like this does happen and often they don't get it right.
I have been saying this for a long time and sometimes I get opposition - but the problem is that the telecommunications industry has morphed into an intellectual property distribution industry and they are not paying royalties for what they distribute.
This has happened in other areas as well - with Cable Television being an example. In this case, the industry felt they could distribute other people's signals without paying royalties and the situation continued for a substantial period of time before the problem was resolved.
Very simply, the OpenBSD project should be recieving a fee for every copy of OpenBSD downloaded from its servers and from its mirrors. When I pay my ISP I pay for this service. There would be no reason for me for instance to pay my ISP if they did not have any content available for me to look at on the web and to download. My ISP connects to a large telco and they have to pay the telco for access to the content. Why they telco feels they should not have to pay the content creators is a matter to be addressed.
In fact in this case the telco in question pays substantial amounts of money to American insterests to gain access to the internet content that flows from the USA. These payments are for connections to the POP's run by the US backbones. Why a Canadian company is willing to pay Americans for access to internet content while at the same time is unwilling to pay Canadian's for access is a question I would really like them to answer.
The last time I spoke with members of the OpenBSD group they indicated the bandwidth costs a substantial amount of money. If this has changed and they now have a peering arrangment and are being paid for access to the servers then I will shut up. However I think this is quite unlikely and until this happens I am going to remain vocal.
First off the malting barley is probably not organic. Even if it is organic, it is farmed with tractors driven by petrol. I have yet to see a commercial farm tractor or combine for that matter driven by a non-oil fuel source. However - it is possible in spite of the bad energy economics cited by Dr. David Pimethal which is still being quoted.
Having been harvested, the grain is hauled by petrol fueled trucks to elevators and then hauled by petrol fueled rail to the maltsters.
The malting plant is probably not green - however it again probably could do better.
Now - as others have pointed out - energy is fungible. In order to be off petrol they would have to work only when the wind blows. Or they would have to harness the exothermic reaction called brewing.
The reason the brewing process gives off CO2 is because a hydrocarbon - eg sugar - is being partially oxidized by the yeast.
Essentually we are going from a polymer based on (CH2O)n into an alcohol which is CH3CH2OH or C(n)H(2n+1)OH where n=2 for ethanol (C2H6O which is really C2H5OH just written differently).
To be more specific we have a series of reactions by alpha and beta amylase which are created during the malting process which is exothermic. During mashing which is also exothermic the starches are broken down into simpler sugars, principally maltose which is a disaccharide made from two glucose molecuals.
So very specifically we have C12H22O11 + H2O -> 2 C6H12O6 followed by
C6H12O6 -> 2 C2H6O + 2CO2 + heat.
The point I am making is that with all these exothermic reactions they are still consuming a great deal of energy so they are not nearly as green as they might like to be seen as.
Next - of the wastewater.
Well - most of this would contain either nothing of much value or yeast which is very high in protein being a fungus and all... fungus are more closely related to animals than to plants. They are an excellent form of nutrition.
Rather than flushing the yeast down the sewer or putting it into holding tanks where it can be degraded by another micro-organism producing methane - it makes more sense to collect it and ship it off for food.
Of course the spent brewer's grains are typically shipped off for cattle fodder since they are high in proteins. Another use for them is as a nitrogen suppliment in synthetic substrates for mushroom production.
--------------
The thing about organics is that plants are basically a polymer of simple sugars. These are built into complex sugars then into starches, cellulose, pentosans and lignin. Fungus digest these. There are many fungus which can do this and some examples are Pleurotis spp, Lentinula spp, Flamulina spp, and I'll not go on. From these three genus we have the common Oyster mushrooms, Shiitaki and Enoki.
Other fungus which are cellulose digesters include Trichoderma spp. T. reesei is used to produce stone washed blue jeans for instance because it is easy to culture and partially digests the cotton. So they are really fungus washed blue jeans not stone washed and here we have another example of people lying to us!!!
There are some who are attempting with some success to use T. reesei to digest wood and produce alcohols. I suspect T. Reesei is being used because it is available and not because it is particularly good at this job.
The economics of this process are actually quite simple.
We start with a polymer made of (CH2O)n
We transform it via enzymes excreted by fungi into C(n)H(2n+1)OH
If we note that the alkane series is C(n)H(2n+2) where for n=8 we get octane then what we see is that our alcohols are simply a slightly oxydized alkane.
The reaction from sugar to ethanol for instance is:
(CH2O)6 -> 2(C2H5OH) + 2CO2
From a molecular weight standpoint we have:
(12+2+16)*6 -> 2*(24+5+16+1) + 2*(12+32)
30*6 -> 2*46 + 2*44
180 -> 92 + 88
Now agricultural products have some moisture even if they are "dry"
I'm an inventor and I have invented a very simple product that I would like to put in the market. In many respects the product is obvious and the best way to do it is a little more expensive than a poor boy solution and has been used for probably 1000's of years. However I'm afraid that some dumb ass will think that its non-obvious and the patent office will of course have agreed so if I create the product and hense create some jobs I'm afraid I'll be sued.
OTOH there is a poor boy solution that probably is patentable and probaby has not been patented and is actually easy to do but not quite obvious. If I spend my time and money and get a patent then I cannot defend a patent attack.
Purely and simply the system acts as a restraint on trade. The consequence is that people who are aware of the legalities may choose to not do business and the obvious consequence of this is higher prices and fewer jobs. A not so obvious consequence is that the product I am looking at is really a very effective saftey measure and without it people can get injured!
THe moderation is so fscking bad around here that it is surely discouraging people from making a comment or even dropping by to read comments!
Why should a fsck like this surprise anyone? I just purchased a high quality surgical stainless steel 8" caliper on the weekend. Its a vernier - imperial and metric.
On the imperial scale there are five (5) subdivisions between 0 and 0.1", four (4) subdivisions between 0.1-0.2, 0.2-0.3, 0.3-0.4 and THREE (3) between 0.4-0.5
This manufacturer has gone to the trouble of setting up a full assembly line to machine calipers. They spend probably over $100,000 on the injection mold for the plastic case probably.
Then after all this they hire a person to mark the damn thing who cannot count to 4 and it passed QA and all the distribution people including the retailer who sold it to me.
Should I presume the marks on the damn thing are in the right place?
hahahahahaha
Well - they do actually seem to be in the right place but it sure is funny that they were too incompetant to get the labling right after spending probably at least several million on an assembly line and tooling to manufacture calipers. They even went to the effort of using a laser to ingrave a serial number on it.
Suppose you were driving on an ice road - would you wear a seat belt? I wouldn't! I don't care how safe they say it is there is no way I'll wear a seat belt when driving on ice.
Similarly I am cautious enough that rather than waste my time with anti-virus software - which can only be retroactive - I simply avoid the hasle and use linux.
Computers are so cheap these days that pretty much anyone who uses windows to surf the net is IMHO pretty much an idjot. I routinely instruct the consultants and professionals I hire that they are not to put any of my files on a windows machine that is connected to the net. Of course - I know some ignore me - and I have had confidential technical drawings worth $1000's of bux published on the net! Its pretty bad when the people you hire figure they should charge the client and then give away the clients work... but like I said - a large percentage of people are totally clueless.
I just found the whole issue pretty funny! To be honest I don't even feel sorry for them. Maybe this will cause a few to wake up and smell the coffee eh?
right - you have the worng title.1 42018161/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/103-2099874-5925405?n =283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1841154350/qid=1
Amazon has both books.
The computers you talk about won't be concious if they run winders.
Suppose you genetically engineered a form of chlorophyl which produced hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates.
SOme plants which produce hydrocarbons are called "oilseeds". Some Algae do it also. As for the waste - its CO2 and if ppl don't notice plants use it for food.
As for the presumed negative effects of CO2... well - the paleoclimate record shows that CO2 more than 13x higher than now did not cause global warming during the Ordovician... and in fact did not prevent the planet from plunging into an ice age. So about the only effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is actually beneficial because it increases crop yeilds.
What I really love about this is that the struggling recoding artists have to pay the levy to get blank CD's on which they record their own music for sale.
Having paid the levy it will eventually go to the record lables who refuse to sign them or have otherwise onerous contractual requirements.
It is just so wonderful to have a system that taxes the struggling artists and at the same time justifies it with a lie.
Europe and Japan are reprocessing and simply stuffing the Pu back into the reactors as MOX fuel. While the USA is not doing reprocessing yet - they will.
What you might consider "waste" is another reactor design's fuel. Mankind will need all the energy we can get from this and the day of reconing is a lot closer than most people realise. While the price of oil and gas may be down a little at the moment - this is quite temporary.
IMHO the world will see the peak of world oil production in about a year. It certainly will happen within a decade. When this happens we can expect oil and gas prices to skyrocket well past $100 bux and possibly past $300 per barrel.
There will be wide spread layoffs, recessions and people will be wondering how they are going to heat their houses. The oil crisis of the 70's will look like a picnic and the comming crisis will be permenant.
In al liklihood it is already too late and we have to embark on every energy conservation program and every energy source available. Even with a consorted effort it is probably too late. There are going to be some mightly lean decades just around the corner.
I believe in the stupidity of people. Get real. The last ice age lasted 10.000 years. Plutonioum takes 500.000 years to become harmless. What kind of storage facility do you think will outlast that? Who will warrant a 500.000 year commitment?
There are so many factual errors in your post that I am not even going to start pointing them out. Pretty much everything you state is simply worng.
Your comment about believing in the stupidity of people however is on the mark and your post serves as a good example.
To suggest that global warming is going to change the environment is the same as suggesting that there will be no future ice ages. Since there have been around 20 in the past 2 million years on something like a 110,000 year cycle - this would mean that the last has come and gone. Please note that 5 million years ago there were trees north of the Arctic circle.
If we believe in irreversable Global Warming, then we can expect the planet will revert to the warm phase which is about 20 degrees F (10C) on average warmer than now and which the planet enjoyed for oh about +85% of the last 500+ million years. This will melt the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
There is no evidence to suggest this will happen. Most likely we are simply in an interglacial and there will be another glacial cycle just as there has been in the past.
If we reject the idea of the Global Warming, then this senerio - if the planet warms up a little for a short while then it will just delay the onset of the next ice age.
During the last ice age there were glaciers as thick as the Matterhorn in Switzerland is high. Toronto was covered by more than a mile of ice. That is a lot of ice and it wouldn't be very nice to live in a world like this.
The thing is that whoever is correct, there is little that mankind can do about it. If we have a warming trend for a while then some islands may be flooded and Florida might need to hire some Dutch engineers. Britain may once again be able to tend vinyards. If we have global cooling for a while as occured during the little ice age then we may find that we won't have enough food to eat.
A far more pressing problem is that mankind is buring fossil fuels at a totally unsustainable rate. IMHO we are going to be facing the peak of world oil production within a couple years and when this happens, $70 oil is going to look real cheap.
So I would suggest that rather than worry about global warming, we should instead prepare for a world with less oil and gas. This will probably have the side effect of reducing CO2 emissions. If anyone considers this a positive outcome then fine.
North America peaked in natural gas production in 2001. Since that time - what has the population of North America done to cope?
The answer is pretty much nothing. A huge part of the fertilizer industry has been shut down. Now part of the plastics industry will follow suit. The price of Natural Gas goes up and up (and temporarily down for now - yes I DO know about gas in storage levels) and still people talk about building more gas fired electricity stations. Ontario is still thinking there is no issue and they can have all the gas they want and I read New York State is also imbued with a high level of polyanna thinking.
The last major company to think this way was Calpine. They are in bankruptcy now. If we look at their history we will find that a few years back their shares were trading at $45 bux. They had more gas turbines on order than could be built in the USA. They were planning on burning most of the North American gas supplies all by themselves. The market LOVED THEM.
I do not subscribe to the fears of Global Warming. However I will say again - those who do should get off their butts and do something about it. Insulate your homes. Shut off your furnaces. Stop driving your cars.
Do something that counts, something that will reduce your demand for fossil fuels. If you want to justify it by citing Global warming then be my guest. But however you justify it - DO SOMETHING. Tear a wall down in your house and use some spare time to put R50 insualtion into it. That alone will accomplish far more than wasting your time worrying about something you can do nothing about.
IMHO BP has embarked on their "Beyond Petroleum" advertising campaign is in part because they realise they are in trouble and are running out of oil. If we check their filings we find the amount they have spent on non-oil energy is insignificant. The amount of energy they supply from non-petroleum energy sources is also insignificant.
I called their public relations people and asked them what they were proposing for an energy source other than oil and gas. This was when I first saw the commercial of a brightly lit gas station - fueled by what? I dunno?
Their response was that the commercial should not have been broadcast in my area.
Yup - heads in the sands.
Part of this is so that when they make their massive profits having shut down much of their Exploration part of the business (which is quite expensive) people will think they are developing a replacement energy source.
About the only viable alternative in the short term is nuclear.
However - people can and should insulate their homes to about R50 in the walls and R70 in the ceilings. Also insulating shutters which close automatically at night (when nobody is looking out the windows anyway) can be installed.
Those people who are most worried about CO2 emissions and global warming should lead the way by (1) re-insulating their homes (2) shutting off their furnaces and (3) stop driving their cars.
They might also want to look into placing their office in their homes so that we don't have to have two (2) heated buildings to do what can be done with one. Since I have personally had an office in my house for the last 25 years and I don't drive a car at the moment I do happen to know it can be done.
Also - I make more money than most people. And I don't have to waste 2-3 hours a day commuting in rush hour traffic. Its also very nice to be able to pop out any time I want for a coffee with a friend or to run an errand when all the businesses I need to deal with are open.
In the long run I'll probably live longer too since I don't have the daily stress most people think is "normal".
While I am on the subject... I was able to walk my kids to school and spend time with them when they were little. Now they are young adults. I never experianced any of the problems I hear in the news that people experiance with teenagers. There was no rebellion, no drugs, no drinking. Instead I was treated to seeing the kids getting scholerships, developing businesses, hiring other kids, creating employment and yes - paying lots of taxes too.
It is much easier to be involed with your family when you have an extra 2-3 hours per day that most people don't have and the simplest difference was not having to make a daily commute.
Given my latest experiances with the moderations around here I will not be surprised if your very excellent well thought out and well written post gets moderated as a "troll"
http://science.slashdot.org/~cdn-programmer/
"Mod parent up! Friday February 10, @06:32PM 1 2, Troll"
This of course is done in the interest of suppressing ideas and information and is done by people who cannot handle critisisms.
My tag line should read "If you want to win the argument then pick the right side before you open your mouth".
New Orleans has also been experiancing rising sea levels for the last several 100 years.
Er...
The Mississippi rive delta has been experiancing rising sea levels for the last several 100 thousand years and oil companies routinely drill oil wells into it.
Could it be the built the city on the River Delta? Could it be the river delta is sinking? Could it be some low lying islands are sinking?
Could it be that sea level is actually lower at the height of an ice age?
Could it be that the planet moved out of an ice age about 10,000 years ago?
IMHO when we get a measurable change over a few million years then maybe we have an inkling something is going on. Besides which - the planet is cold now and has been for about 30 million years.
IF the planet warms up soon - and this is a really big IF because we have had over 20 ice cycles in the last 2 million years and are presently in an interglacial - then IF the glacial maximum we just left is the last one (I think this is very unlikely) then we will be better off for it!
As fossil fuels run out we will have to move to a sustainable energy economy. One of the consequences of this is that oil and gas will not be available to heat our homes.
Each and every one of our Global Warming folks should lead the way to sustainability by shutting off their furnaces. Next they should stop driving their cars.
I read that worng the first time around!
20 minutes ago this post was modded "interesting". Now it is modded "troll".
Clearly we have some bastard maderators who SHOULD BE BANNED.
Is there any way to address this? This crap is just unnaceptable.
There must be something we can do about the shitty moderation taking place around here. Over the last few weeks I've seen more instances of downright BAD moderation than in the past several years.
This post is actually quite good. The writer could have gone into more depth but he certainly is correct in his assesment that we are currently in an inter-glacial phase. However if we are going to go back into a glacial period then a better guesstimate might be that it is more than 5,000 years away.
The simple fact is that we have gone through at least 20 ice cycles in the last 2 million years and that the earth has been cold for about the last 20-30 million years. Prior to this recent cooling - earth was warm continuously throughout the Triassic, Jurasic and Cretaceous which is a period of over 200 million years. By warmer I mean an average global temperature of about 20 degrees warmer.
It should be noted that the poles were not ice covered until the present cooling which seemed to get going during the miocene.
At some point the planet in all likelihood will warm up. The reason is that for over 85% of the history of the planet since the end of the Precambrian - the planet was warm (say about 570 million years). There have only been a couple of times in the geological past when it has been as cool as now - so it does make sense that at some time the planet will probably revert back to normal.
Furthermore, if one compares the Ordovician ice age to the present, one finds that CO2 levels were about 13x to 17x higher than now and still the planet cooled into an ice age - then warmed back up. So it would appear that CO2 levels back then were not the deciding factor. If CO2 was not the deciding factor back then - then one would be wise to question if it has any significance today. In fact the Ordovician cooling is correlated with the Taconic orogeny just as the present cooling is correlated with the mountain building which has occured since the end of the Cretaceous. This includes the Rockies, Pyrannenes, Andies, Himalain, two hellenic mountain ranges, the tibetian and colorado plateaus... Ie - a large amount of land pushed to high elevation. It is perfectly obvious that mountain tops reflect energy back into space just as it is perfectly obvious that moist air at sea level tends to hold solar energy.
This is ESPECIALLY so when one checks the absolute humidity (H2O) which we KNOW is responsible for the earth being about 30 degrees warmer than it would be were the water vapour not in the atmosphere. Compared the the 50,000 to 80,000 PPM of H2O in the atmosphere at sea level in the tropics, the change of 70 PPM in CO2 over the last few hundred years is totally negligable. One cannot even add the CO2 measurements to the water vapour measurements because the uncertanty of the water vapour measurments masks the total CO2 by several times.
What is truely amasing is that H2O is not even counted as a green house gas by many of the folks who are most conserned about global warming. Yet we literally would be freezing our butts off were it not for H2O in the atmosphere.
The oceans have a moderating effect on a thousand year time scale. Since it was warmer during the medieval warm period by this guestimate it makes sense that earth would warm up now.
People who really want to know what is going on mind you should study paleoclimatology. The geological record of climate does shed light on how the earth functions.
Another thing that is truely amasing is how little perspective most climate change people have of the scale of geological time. If we were to map say the Encyclopeadia Britannic to the time since the beginning of the Cambrian - then each book in the set would represent something like 30 million years and each page would represent about 3,000 years. On this scale the climate warming people are looking at day usually contained on the last page and normally within the last couple paragraphs of the lsat page of the last book. Meanwhile they ignore
Fugus attacking insects is pretty common actually. Cordyceps spp do this. We get some fine [herbal chinese] meds from a few such as C. senensis. Another that is really interesting is C. subsessilis which is also known as Tolypocladium inflatum from which we get cyclosporin.
This is a whole new field actually - fungal control of insects. There are a few patents out and undoubtably this will be a nice growth area. Perhaps we can even get rid of the nasty pesticides we have used in the past under the mis-idea that chemistry will pave the way to a brave new world devoid of human pathogens. Our hospitals have been busy breeding a whole raft of really nasty critters by following this mantra.
This is just so F8ing stupid. I was in Dallas in 1985 and I dumped printouts in Alaska from Sun Oil's office (I had the routing codes wrong). This was on the IBM mainframe system.
Over 5 years before Lynes United Services in Calgary (who I worked for at the time) sent wireless messages. We didn't call it an "email" at the time but we did send messages. The company was working on oil field monitoring.
We had systems working back then.
In addition I personally used the Fidonet system here in Calgary and it had wireless packet radio and we did send messages back and forth - that was the 1985 time frame.
How much F8ing prior art do we need?
The PHONE COMPANY commonly ran wireless communcations on their ATM system because they have had wireless links in place for DECADES
------------
All this illustrates is that lawyers and juries and Judges do not make good engineers. What we have here is totally f8ing obvious!
Huge amounts of the telecomunications industry were doing wireless transmissions in many different ways. That email caught on and ran on existing technologies does not make it innovative in any way.
Arrgghhhh!
What we need is a cartoon of a lap top mod that connects a 60 AMP HOUR deep cycle battery. This would be so funny and you can get DAYS and DAYS of service from it. haha.
These batteries are about the size of a lunchbox so they are totable.