All the radioactive material we could be using to turn water into steam to power electrical generators is already sitting there burning at the same rate underground right now, it's just heating the surrounding rocks in a more diffuse spread than if it was all stuck into a reactor together.
Actually, that's not true. In a reactor, we bring that diffuse fuel much more closely together and then we get criticality, which increases the burn rate dramatically.
Noncritical U235 has a half-life of 700 million years and is primarily an alpha-emitter, but in a reactor the rare neutron emissions become a cascade of decay events, and the "half-life" is only constrained by the reactor's fuel load and energy output. An exceptionally designed reactor may be able to burn 87% of it's primary fuel in 25 or 30 years (fuel half-life of 8-10 years). In the detonation of a nuclear bomb, the half life concept doesn't even make sense because the bomb is designed to get as close as possible to every U235 atom breaking down in the insignificant fraction of a second before the bomb flies apart.
Th232 is an even more likely long-term nuclear fuel. It's half life is about 10 billion years, but in reactors, the earth could burn up the supplies found in Norway and India in about 5000 years (assuming continuous exponential growth of energy demand).
As you noted, tofu and yuba are treated differently. I didn't put them on that list of safe soy foods because I wasn't exactly sure how much of the phytates and other stuff the salt-treatment eliminated. It's my understanding that tofu and yuba still have some of the defensive chemicals, just a lot less than when they started.
One thing I noted when I was in Japan and China is that soy foods are eaten much more sparingly than westerners assume.
Most of my information on the downsides of soy started from The Whole Soy Story. I have followed up with pubmed to critically verify the claims made about soy. Also, there have been a number of recently completed studies appearing in the news lately that corroborate the information in that book.
Meat should only be cooked enough to be safe to eat. Anything more than that is just burning the flavor and texture of the meat away.
For a steak from an FDA-approved source, that means red or possibly pink in the middle. For ground beef from an FDA-approved source, pink in the middle (because the grinding process mixes the outside surface into the middle of the beef, so it needs to be cooked more). If you personally trust the source of the meat (was the animal healthy) and the slaughterhouse to have kept the meat uncontaminated, there's no need to cook meat at all (steak tartar).
Meat does not require cooking to be 100% digestible by the human gut. Nor do fruiting plants where the fruit is a deliberate part of the seed-propagation strategy (most of what's called fruits and berries). Cooking may still be useful to minimize the risk of biological contamination. On the other hand, most starchy vegetables (tubers, grains, pulses) have more bioavailable calories after cooking. Like 100-1000% more calories.
Further, whenever you consume the actual seed of a plant (grains, pulses, nuts, etc.), you often also have to overcome the defensive toxins that the plant was using to prevent the loss of reproductive potential (they don't propagate if every animal can consume the whole ovary). Drying and cooking are the most effective way, by far, to eliminate and defuse the risks of those chemicals.
Sometimes, like with soy (phytates and phytoestrogens/isoflavones), cooking isn't good enough, and you need fermentation or another process to eliminate the toxins before they're safe to eat. Too bad most soy-food processing doesn't do that, so the defensive toxins end up in most of the processed crap made from soy protein and soy oil on the supermarket shelves. Soy sauce, miso, tempeh, and natto are safe. Most other soy-based foods are not.
These are hard to get, expensive I hear...and you basically sign away most of your rights to privacy or search and seizure as I've been led to believe.
A class III license is actually easy to get (as long as you don't live in the wrong state), and they have a one time cost of $200. Want to own a sawed-off shotgun? A GE minigun like Jesse Ventura carted around in Predator? A silencer for your subsonic rifle or handgun? A 40mm grenade launcher with a few grenades? No problem. Just go through the background check, submit your fingerprints, a fee of $200 per device (one per grenade, and another for the launcher), and viola! As for signing away rights to private or search and seizure, well, it does get complex.
The 1934 National Firearms Act was written to dissuade people from owning certain classes of weapons without prohibiting that ownership and running afoul of the 2nd Amendment. Licensing and documenting those owners who chose to follow the rules was an explicit and deliberate part of that. Also, in 1934, $200 was about half a year's salary. Finally, you have to lock the devices up unless you have them on your person. And you have to be able to demonstrate this security when properly challenged. Pretty impressive disincentives.
But you don't have any fewer rights than someone who didn't pay the fee or fill out the forms. If a cop takes your class III guns/silencers/etc., there's a process to recover your property from the police. And since you have a legally obtained federal license to own that gun/silencer/etc., you're a lot more likely to get it back than if you don't. Judges are impressed by people who go through the motions and who have the right paperwork.
About those inspections. You can require that the inspections happen by appointment. The BATF doesn't come around at 2:00am pounding on the door to see if your silencers are locked up properly. They've got a lot of things to do with their time, and you're pretty much not on their radar. I have no idea where BATF agents spend their time, but I know five people with class III licenses, and in the past twenty years, only one of them had to show any federal agents his properly locked up gun safe. Which he did, by appointment, at his place of work, first thing on a Monday morning.
So, yes, the NFA is an infringement on your privacy, because the government has a file on you and knows where some guns and gun parts are stored. So I'm against it and if someone wanted to run for Congress on a plarform of rolling that back, I'd think about voting for them. But in the here and now, it's just not that hard to own a machine gun or a sawed-off shotgun if I really wanted one. And it certainly seems like less trouble to get the right paperwork than to risk getting into very serious legal problems by owning one without the paperwork.
The trick would be the substantial start-up time in the mornings. Due to the heat levels involved, you'd be wasting a lot of energy each day heating the equipment up again.
What you need is a thermal storage system and good insulation of your hot gear. Since they're talking about using molten salt as well as other substances like hard pitch (incredibly high boiling point) as thermal storage to allow solar power plants to produce power over 24 hours, I'd say the solution to the problem is at hand.
And you're 100% correct that you should keep the solar power in thermal form. Thermal solar is much lower cost and you don't have the transformation losses that you mentioned. All you need is glass with aluminum/glass coatings for the mirrors along with an efficient thermal transfer/storage system and you're off to the races.
Oil prices are high due primarily to Speculators who have bid up the market price, in anticipation of domestic supply shortages. The mere mention of offshore drilling off our coasts caused speculators to drop the barrel price by $10 in ONE DAY.
This is false. Futures trading smooths out commodity pricing and reduces volatility. As long as investors are not creating stockpiles large enough to influence the market, futures trading can not cause increased volatility or sustain a non-market price deviation for very long (more than a few days).
I'm sorry for your plight, but you make it worse on yourself by not educating yourself on issues upon which you choose to comment.
I'm reminded of a parable about glass houses and stones... Hmm... It will come to me.:)
Oil prices are high primarily due to the devaluation of the dollar. The dollar has been under strong inflationary pressure because the US Government has been creating more of them lately. Specifically, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been funded entirely by deficit spending (creating new US Dollars in the form of Treasury Bills) and not by taking tax revenue away from existing programs.
These new Treasury Bills are fungible with USD notes in foreign reserve banks, and are the same as cash for those banks. So a few months ago (last time I knew the amount spent), there was at least $480 Billion in shiny new USD floating around, which devalues all of the other USD that you and I have. By extension, it dilutes the value of everything measured in USD, including the value of our bank accounts.
All commodities are increasing in price. Oil reacts the fastest because that market is the most international. Precious metals are the next fastest commodity to move because they're not consumable and there are processes that allow for easy transfer of ownership without possession (everyone expects the trade to happen very quickly and the actual gold to eventually follow). Consumables like food follow a little more slowly, but the futures markets make sure that they're not too far behind (except for onions, which has no futures market, so prices are all over the place).
It is Bush's fault, but it's much simpler than people think. There's no need to bring in grand conspiracies or nefarious neocon meddlers in back rooms. If you try to fund expensive projects by printing money, your money loses value. That's what we're doing, and that's what's happening.
Actually, there's no need to put it into a geosynchronous orbit. There are lots of circumsolar orbits that are more favorable (and safer) than a circumterran orbit.
Bringing large, potentially unstable masses close to the earth is a mistake. You wouldn't want the asteroid to fragment during a maneuver and accidentally impact something important. Like the Mediterranean Sea, for instance.
Do your mining out near the earth-sun L4 or L5 point and bring the packaged extraction products into earth orbit via solar sail. And the L4/L5 points aren't really necessary either. There are all sorts of AAA orbits that will give you regular, low-cost payload transfers from the asteroid to the earth-moon system. The L4/L5 points might be attractive because they would be convenient places for habitats or other space industries (and therefore be resource concentrations for solving problems, etc.)
Moving an asteroid from an earth impact orbit to a "close call" orbit is a major undertaking, but not impossible or even particularly complex. Having a space-based resource extraction industry in operation would make it a LOT easier to get done. You'd have engines, fuel, solar sails, large solar furnaces, equipment to stabilize a poorly cemented asteroid: all of the things needed to get the job done. And the space-based resource industry could also solve several other pressing needs: orbiting solar panels are not economical to launch (they never pay back the power required to launch them), but they are economical to build from material in space, advanced battery chemistries needed for mass adoption of electric vehicles are running into resource shortages in cobalt, nickel, tantalum, etc.
Interesting analysis of the drive for electronic voting. I label myself a moderate (I am a registered Republican). I wanted change after Florida. Change to a simpler paper ballot.
As a software developer, I was and remain strongly against electronic voting, unless the protections in place are equivalent or stronger than the state protections put on regulated slot machines.
When I look at where Sequoia and Diebold executives contributed their money, they mostly supported the campaigns of local Republican candidates who then advocated for and approved the purchase of their voting machines. There were a few Democrats bought off in the same way, but not nearly as many.
No need to blame the liberals, dude. Republicans have been more than self-serving enough to be corrupted in the pursuit of change.
The rich can only horde wealth if the amount of wealth in the world is fixed.
I don't think this limitation exists.
I agree that the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed, but it's my belief that the rules will be changed such that the immortal oligarchy will acquire control over the monetary system (how we measure wealth) and then maintain control through various means (including force), with substantial barriers keeping the young separate from any ability to control the wealth they create.
You mention reactors and orbital solar power, my two favorite future energy sources. But who will be the owner of record of those devices? Who will have been the investor? Who will have controlled the permit board that approved the construction of the reactor or the launch of the equipment needed to build the solar array?
Anyone with wealth and immortality will first use their wealth to protect the future of both. The difficult balance will be how to keep the young from threatening the position of the wealthy without instigating a successful revolution.
Because it's going to be hard. Damned Hard. We have picked the low lying fruit (clean water, decent nutrition, vaccination, appropriate lifestyle)
Actually, I think we still have a long way to go on nutrition and lifestyle.
Low fat foods tend to trade carbs for fat, leading to all sorts of chronic dysfunction. People are gradually becoming aware that low-fat dietary advice is likely responsible for the obesity epidemic it correlates with, but it will probably take decades before the authorities finally get around to checking Ancel Keys's work and realizing that he fudged his results.
On lifestyle, we're playing the Red Queen's game and we're losing. Running faster and faster just to stay in place. In the US, we work longer hours than any other country for a lifestyle that's less satisfying than that found in most other developed countries (only partly because of the poor work/life balance). That stress has a cost on our bodies and only a few will be able to be above the churning competition if biological immortality really occurs.
IMHO, immortality will be disastrous for humanity. The arrival of immortality will signal the last generation with upward mobility as the wealthy will move quickly to secure themselves a future they can depend on. The only hope is a selfish one: already be one of the wealthy when the rules change.
I live in LA. I was a little suprised when I moved here five years ago to discover that the normals outnumber the wierdos by a dramatic margin.
Except for the huge variety of ethnic food of all varieties, the ridiculous amount of very high quality live theater going on every night, the excellent surfing and scuba diving, the easy access to mountains (15 minutes), ocean (10 minutes), and desert (90 minutes), I might think that I was just in any old town in the USA.
Then there is the true and enduring blight called Hollywood right up the road. *shudder* Thank goodness for me it's actually difficult to get to Hollywood from where I live (Santa Monica).
If the army decides to move in, it will do so with howitzers, mobile rocket launchers and bomb-proof APCs. After the USAF has carpet-bombed the place.
A few thoughts.
First, the US military is currently in the process of using it's "howitzers, mobile rocket launchers, and bomb-proof APC's" in Iraq. And we're not going to win that fight. In fact, the military is wearing out and destroying those fancy toys so quickly that current procurement rates aren't close to keeping up.
Second, the US culture would have to change pretty radically before the military would attack a populated area in the United States. Go after a person or a group in violation of Posse Comitatus? That's actually fairly likely if things continue. Go after a town? Part of a state? Call me skeptical. Not in the next ten years, anyway. Eighteen years if Obama is elected.
I think you'll find it very difficult to motivate the human beings in the military to actually carry out your mission. Under the scenarios where a substantial part of a region would take up arms against the government, I suspect, but do not know for sure, that the rebels would find a number of military personnel and their gear available to them.
And the guns that are in civilian hands right now? You clearly haven't understood the problems of Vietnam and Iraq wrt counterinsurgency. Semiautomatic rifles are more than enough to hold off the US Army long enough to secure a supply of Stingers and Javelins. At which point, the military would be well and truly fucked. In multiple post-battle accounts, armies with semi-automatic weapons were slightly more effective than armies with fully automatic weapons. The difference was entirely one of logistics (less ammo to resupply). The lower rate of fire is basically an even trade-off against better aimed shots. Most M16's only shoot three round bursts for exactly that reason. You think that an otherwise identical AR15 that only shoots one round per pull is really less effective as a weapon?
There's a lot more fear-mongering and radical changes to privacy, surveillance and gun control laws before the government would dare any direct attack against the civilian population of the United States. IMHO, that's a very good thing.
California requires registration of all handguns, and registration of all firearms transfers. If you were to buy a gun at a flea market in California, you are not permitted to have possession of the gun until after you have applied for and been cleared for the transfer by the California Department of Justice.
Historically, the hazard rate is higher (the cost of injuries was more severe), but once that's controlled for, the average lifespan of most indigenous populations on their own diet was longer than modern Americans and with better quality of life in later years.
Given the fact that too much will cause cancer and an equally alarming rate.
In case you're curious, that not a fact at all.
Repeated mild sun exposure is associated with basal cell carcinoma. Uncommon, not aggressive, rarely metastasize, very rarely fatal.
Repeated severe sun exposure is associated with malignant melanoma. Rare, highly aggressive, commonly metastasize, accounts for most skin cancer mortalities.
And since getting out in the sun (without burning) helps to prevent and fight malignant melanoma? Yeah, regular mild sun exposure decreases your overall risk of dying from cancer. So put your man-pants on and get back in the sun.
Sunscreen blocks most the UVB needed by your body to endogenously synthesize vitamin D3. Also, repeated sun exposure without burning is not associated with malignant melanomas, only basal cell carcinomas.
Unless vitamin D is delivered in oil, it's pretty much not bioavailable. Very few multis, even the good ones, have a gelcap in the daily mix.
Vitamin D from food is an even bleaker picture. It's basically not found in unprocessed, whole foods and the amount found in supplemented food is still so small as to be worthless. This is the fault of the US RDA for Vitamin D, which appears to be too low by a factor of 5 or more.
If you want Vitamin D, take a gelcap or get outside for 15-20 minutes a day with lots of skin exposed. In the northern US, 15-20 minutes will not be sufficient.
...so we either go out into the big blue room to avoid dying sooner, but risk getting cancer that could kill us too.
Actually, there are two important forms of skin cancer: basal cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma. The differences between these two forms of cancer are so significant as to be "critical knowledge for humans", and yet they tend to be lumped together under "skin cancer".
Basal cell carcinomas are pretty low grade, tend to be very easy to treat, and are not associated with very many mortalities. They are unlikely to metastasize (spread) and don't grow very quickly. Basal cell carcinomas are associated with repeated mild sun exposure, so getting out in the sun and tanning increases your risk of basal cell carcinoma. This is also the most common form of skin cancer by a long stretch.
Malignant melanomas tend to be higher grade cancers, are much more likely to metastasize, and are responsible for most of the mortalities from skin cancer. Malignant melanomas are associated with extreme sun exposure, so staying out in the sun too long and getting a severe sunburn increases your risk of malignant melanoma.
So once you discriminate between kinds of skin cancer, there's a strong case to be made that tanning is a low risk activity, while burning is a high risk activity. Further, as this study showed, levels of vitamin D are inversely associated with malignant melanoma, and vitamin D is naturally produced through repeated mild sun exposure without sunscreen (sunscreen blocks the UVB needed to endogenously synthesize vitamin D3).
So, being in the sun without sunscreen long enough to get a tan but not to burn is not only low risk, but actually reduces your overall risk of dying from cancer.
I for one would rather bath in the cool non-skin roasting rays of my flat panel monitor and just increase my intake of once a day vitamins!
There are other benefits to regular exposure to direct sunlight. It can help with mild depression, sleep disorders, eye problems, and a whole host of other benefits. Tough to get all of that in a one-a-day vitamin (joking, vitamin D that's not suspected in oil is only marginally bioavailable, so if you're not taking a vitamin tablet and you're not going outside, you're not actually getting any vitamin D).
Besides, is getting outside for 15-20 minutes a day really that tough? Go for a walk for chrissakes.
If you are a bit aloof, and difficult...they for the most part won't leave you alone.
I have my own theory about that: the change in attitude you observe is due to a lack of perceived desperation.
Women intensely dislike any hint of desperation, and many women mislabel direct or frank interest as desperation.
When you act aloof, or at least more relaxed, you're not triggering her desperation detection circuit, and things have the possibility of heading down a very different path. I met my wife online after 13 horrible first dates, and I was basically completely checked out and ready to take a break from the dating scene. So I went to the date with nothing to lose and feeling very relaxed about getting a second date. The rest is history.
Do you have any idea how much easily accessible Thorium there is in India? There's enough black thorium sand on the beaches of Kerala to supply the earth's power needs for 500 years. Including other surface deposits, there's enough for 3000 years. Also, the waste products from the thorium reaction (which starts with) Th232 -> U233 have very short half lives. The bulk waste is less radioactive than coal ash within 50 years, and less radioactive than most dirt in 300 years.
There is one significant downside to the thorium reaction. It's a breeder reaction. Further, the Uranium that's produced in the "molten salt reactor" is easily accessible as nearly pure uranium hexafluoride gas (UFl6) just by bubbling fluorine gas through the core material. Luckily for those who don't want the Uranium used for bombs, the U233 that's produced is contaminated with U234 (a strong gamma emitter). The presence of the U234 wouldn't stop the production of a dirty bomb, but does make the uranium you get from the process unsuitable for a nuclear weapon. The U234 also makes the resulting Uranium especially visible to the detectors that are located at the US border and those operated by the Coast Guard.
The problem with tapping the earth's heat near volcanoes is putting a big enough heat exchanger in the right spot. Eventually we might be able to build some sort of core tap, putting a heat tap directly into the mantle, near a volcano so that the crust thickness was less of an issue. For now, though, the areas around active volcanoes are far too unstable to mess with.
Nuclear power is a highly viable means of getting us out of the current power jam. As for renewable power, mining asteroids for the materials to build orbiting solar panels is a viable long-term fix. Nuclear power could give us the time to develop the in-space industry needed to do that sort of construction. Another upside of building the space industry is that the asteroids closest to hitting the earth are the best targets for capture and extraction and the whole industry would provide the capability to intercept and divert any others that we determined to be risky.
When they can read a separation of church and state into the first amendment meaning that the public can't fathom the mention of religion
Um, something is confused in what you wrote. The separation of church and state is simply a convenient restatement of the prohibition against an established (state supported) religion in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. By deciding not to favor any one set of beliefs over all others, you prevent the state (with it's force and ability to tax away) from choosing people's religion for them.
As for "mentioning religion", I have no problem if an elected official is religious and uses that fact as a part of his/her campaign. But I do get very upset if I hear that elected official voting for laws that favor one set of beliefs over another, or using his personal religious justification to argue for a law (gay marriage, anyone?). If a law is really that good of an idea, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with an argument that doesn't rely on a religious dogma.
the second amendment means your right to hunt because it was never meant for a modern world
No, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution does not protect the right to hunt. Never has, never will. The Second Amendment guarantees the individual right to be responsible for defense of community (and by extension, yourself).
As for "never meant for a modern world", that's also false. If you owned property in or near the LA riots of 1992, or in Southern Louisiana for about three months after Katrina, or were in one of the wrong classrooms at Virginia Tech, or any number of other more local instances where the police either opted out "until the dust settled" or were unable to prevent "bad things" from happening, you would know that you are still personally responsible for your own safety.
The Second Amendment is highly relevant in the modern world, in it's original wording, with it's original intent.
It is even compounded when we have activists courts attempting to legislate from the bench
Activist court? Ugh. You're one of those people.
You don't seem to be aware that invalidating laws that violate the constitution and/or lawful treaties is the responsibility of the judicial branch. Nullification is a critical check and balance that the courts have to offset the sometimes overreaching efforts of the legislature and executive. And that every time a court uses that power, it's necessarily saying that something passed by a majority vote is in fact, a really bad idea?
Go back to high school civics. You were apparently napping at a few critical moments.
String Theory is more correctly a descriptive language of physical theories. Within the mathematical framework of String Theory it is possible to describe just about any configuration of the universe. In that way, it's more similar to applied math than anything else.
What String Theorists have been doing is building descriptive models of actual theories. It's a valuable exercise, but they shouldn't feel that String Theory is going to provide anything other than another modeling and analysis tool. Specifically, because String Theory is so expressive, it is impossible to make a falsifiable assertion in pure String Theory. You always need an outside theory, and it's the outside theory that provides the falsifiable assertion.
String Theory can describe just about any system, so it's impossible to prove right, and more importantly for this discussion, impossible to prove wrong. Which means that it is not science. Knowledge of this reality is gradually percolating through the physics establishment. Give it time.
So yeah, they change together. Different from the normal relationship between language and subject, you've got plenty of math without a known application in the real world, but as long as you're using the same axioms, it all seems to eventually make sense...
My wife was a public elementary school teacher for three years and is now an Education Professor, so that list came from her experiences along with a number of discussions about what we're going to do with our kids when they get old enough.
I'm glad you appreciated the list. Trying to simplify a complex issue down to a few bullet points is fairly difficult.
OODBMS allows polymorphic types in a dataset, those types can themself be in a type inheritance tree. This structure is extreemly difficult to model in an RDBMS system, where trees are not a supported organisation.
Hm. I've never had that much trouble representing polymorphic class heirarchies in relational table structures.
Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture can provide some guidance the various means of doing that if you're not clear. Actually, you did describe two of the common ways of doing that, but you definitely overestimated the complexity of using those approaches.
If the additional effort of mapping the objects into tables causes you to value a simpler and more focused model... is that really a bad thing? In my experience, it's a very good thing.
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Actually, that's not true. In a reactor, we bring that diffuse fuel much more closely together and then we get criticality, which increases the burn rate dramatically.
Noncritical U235 has a half-life of 700 million years and is primarily an alpha-emitter, but in a reactor the rare neutron emissions become a cascade of decay events, and the "half-life" is only constrained by the reactor's fuel load and energy output. An exceptionally designed reactor may be able to burn 87% of it's primary fuel in 25 or 30 years (fuel half-life of 8-10 years). In the detonation of a nuclear bomb, the half life concept doesn't even make sense because the bomb is designed to get as close as possible to every U235 atom breaking down in the insignificant fraction of a second before the bomb flies apart.
Th232 is an even more likely long-term nuclear fuel. It's half life is about 10 billion years, but in reactors, the earth could burn up the supplies found in Norway and India in about 5000 years (assuming continuous exponential growth of energy demand).
As you noted, tofu and yuba are treated differently. I didn't put them on that list of safe soy foods because I wasn't exactly sure how much of the phytates and other stuff the salt-treatment eliminated. It's my understanding that tofu and yuba still have some of the defensive chemicals, just a lot less than when they started.
One thing I noted when I was in Japan and China is that soy foods are eaten much more sparingly than westerners assume.
Most of my information on the downsides of soy started from The Whole Soy Story. I have followed up with pubmed to critically verify the claims made about soy. Also, there have been a number of recently completed studies appearing in the news lately that corroborate the information in that book.
There's no flavor left when it's well done.
Meat should only be cooked enough to be safe to eat. Anything more than that is just burning the flavor and texture of the meat away.
For a steak from an FDA-approved source, that means red or possibly pink in the middle. For ground beef from an FDA-approved source, pink in the middle (because the grinding process mixes the outside surface into the middle of the beef, so it needs to be cooked more). If you personally trust the source of the meat (was the animal healthy) and the slaughterhouse to have kept the meat uncontaminated, there's no need to cook meat at all (steak tartar).
Meat does not require cooking to be 100% digestible by the human gut. Nor do fruiting plants where the fruit is a deliberate part of the seed-propagation strategy (most of what's called fruits and berries). Cooking may still be useful to minimize the risk of biological contamination. On the other hand, most starchy vegetables (tubers, grains, pulses) have more bioavailable calories after cooking. Like 100-1000% more calories.
Further, whenever you consume the actual seed of a plant (grains, pulses, nuts, etc.), you often also have to overcome the defensive toxins that the plant was using to prevent the loss of reproductive potential (they don't propagate if every animal can consume the whole ovary). Drying and cooking are the most effective way, by far, to eliminate and defuse the risks of those chemicals.
Sometimes, like with soy (phytates and phytoestrogens/isoflavones), cooking isn't good enough, and you need fermentation or another process to eliminate the toxins before they're safe to eat. Too bad most soy-food processing doesn't do that, so the defensive toxins end up in most of the processed crap made from soy protein and soy oil on the supermarket shelves. Soy sauce, miso, tempeh, and natto are safe. Most other soy-based foods are not.
A class III license is actually easy to get (as long as you don't live in the wrong state), and they have a one time cost of $200. Want to own a sawed-off shotgun? A GE minigun like Jesse Ventura carted around in Predator? A silencer for your subsonic rifle or handgun? A 40mm grenade launcher with a few grenades? No problem. Just go through the background check, submit your fingerprints, a fee of $200 per device (one per grenade, and another for the launcher), and viola! As for signing away rights to private or search and seizure, well, it does get complex.
The 1934 National Firearms Act was written to dissuade people from owning certain classes of weapons without prohibiting that ownership and running afoul of the 2nd Amendment. Licensing and documenting those owners who chose to follow the rules was an explicit and deliberate part of that. Also, in 1934, $200 was about half a year's salary. Finally, you have to lock the devices up unless you have them on your person. And you have to be able to demonstrate this security when properly challenged. Pretty impressive disincentives.
But you don't have any fewer rights than someone who didn't pay the fee or fill out the forms. If a cop takes your class III guns/silencers/etc., there's a process to recover your property from the police. And since you have a legally obtained federal license to own that gun/silencer/etc., you're a lot more likely to get it back than if you don't. Judges are impressed by people who go through the motions and who have the right paperwork.
About those inspections. You can require that the inspections happen by appointment. The BATF doesn't come around at 2:00am pounding on the door to see if your silencers are locked up properly. They've got a lot of things to do with their time, and you're pretty much not on their radar. I have no idea where BATF agents spend their time, but I know five people with class III licenses, and in the past twenty years, only one of them had to show any federal agents his properly locked up gun safe. Which he did, by appointment, at his place of work, first thing on a Monday morning.
So, yes, the NFA is an infringement on your privacy, because the government has a file on you and knows where some guns and gun parts are stored. So I'm against it and if someone wanted to run for Congress on a plarform of rolling that back, I'd think about voting for them. But in the here and now, it's just not that hard to own a machine gun or a sawed-off shotgun if I really wanted one. And it certainly seems like less trouble to get the right paperwork than to risk getting into very serious legal problems by owning one without the paperwork.
What you need is a thermal storage system and good insulation of your hot gear. Since they're talking about using molten salt as well as other substances like hard pitch (incredibly high boiling point) as thermal storage to allow solar power plants to produce power over 24 hours, I'd say the solution to the problem is at hand.
And you're 100% correct that you should keep the solar power in thermal form. Thermal solar is much lower cost and you don't have the transformation losses that you mentioned. All you need is glass with aluminum/glass coatings for the mirrors along with an efficient thermal transfer/storage system and you're off to the races.
This is false. Futures trading smooths out commodity pricing and reduces volatility. As long as investors are not creating stockpiles large enough to influence the market, futures trading can not cause increased volatility or sustain a non-market price deviation for very long (more than a few days).
I'm reminded of a parable about glass houses and stones... Hmm... It will come to me. :)
Oil prices are high primarily due to the devaluation of the dollar. The dollar has been under strong inflationary pressure because the US Government has been creating more of them lately. Specifically, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been funded entirely by deficit spending (creating new US Dollars in the form of Treasury Bills) and not by taking tax revenue away from existing programs.
These new Treasury Bills are fungible with USD notes in foreign reserve banks, and are the same as cash for those banks. So a few months ago (last time I knew the amount spent), there was at least $480 Billion in shiny new USD floating around, which devalues all of the other USD that you and I have. By extension, it dilutes the value of everything measured in USD, including the value of our bank accounts.
All commodities are increasing in price. Oil reacts the fastest because that market is the most international. Precious metals are the next fastest commodity to move because they're not consumable and there are processes that allow for easy transfer of ownership without possession (everyone expects the trade to happen very quickly and the actual gold to eventually follow). Consumables like food follow a little more slowly, but the futures markets make sure that they're not too far behind (except for onions, which has no futures market, so prices are all over the place).
It is Bush's fault, but it's much simpler than people think. There's no need to bring in grand conspiracies or nefarious neocon meddlers in back rooms. If you try to fund expensive projects by printing money, your money loses value. That's what we're doing, and that's what's happening.
Actually, there's no need to put it into a geosynchronous orbit. There are lots of circumsolar orbits that are more favorable (and safer) than a circumterran orbit.
Bringing large, potentially unstable masses close to the earth is a mistake. You wouldn't want the asteroid to fragment during a maneuver and accidentally impact something important. Like the Mediterranean Sea, for instance.
Do your mining out near the earth-sun L4 or L5 point and bring the packaged extraction products into earth orbit via solar sail. And the L4/L5 points aren't really necessary either. There are all sorts of AAA orbits that will give you regular, low-cost payload transfers from the asteroid to the earth-moon system. The L4/L5 points might be attractive because they would be convenient places for habitats or other space industries (and therefore be resource concentrations for solving problems, etc.)
Moving an asteroid from an earth impact orbit to a "close call" orbit is a major undertaking, but not impossible or even particularly complex. Having a space-based resource extraction industry in operation would make it a LOT easier to get done. You'd have engines, fuel, solar sails, large solar furnaces, equipment to stabilize a poorly cemented asteroid: all of the things needed to get the job done. And the space-based resource industry could also solve several other pressing needs: orbiting solar panels are not economical to launch (they never pay back the power required to launch them), but they are economical to build from material in space, advanced battery chemistries needed for mass adoption of electric vehicles are running into resource shortages in cobalt, nickel, tantalum, etc.
Interesting analysis of the drive for electronic voting. I label myself a moderate (I am a registered Republican). I wanted change after Florida. Change to a simpler paper ballot.
As a software developer, I was and remain strongly against electronic voting, unless the protections in place are equivalent or stronger than the state protections put on regulated slot machines.
When I look at where Sequoia and Diebold executives contributed their money, they mostly supported the campaigns of local Republican candidates who then advocated for and approved the purchase of their voting machines. There were a few Democrats bought off in the same way, but not nearly as many.
No need to blame the liberals, dude. Republicans have been more than self-serving enough to be corrupted in the pursuit of change.
I don't think this limitation exists.
I agree that the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed, but it's my belief that the rules will be changed such that the immortal oligarchy will acquire control over the monetary system (how we measure wealth) and then maintain control through various means (including force), with substantial barriers keeping the young separate from any ability to control the wealth they create.
You mention reactors and orbital solar power, my two favorite future energy sources. But who will be the owner of record of those devices? Who will have been the investor? Who will have controlled the permit board that approved the construction of the reactor or the launch of the equipment needed to build the solar array?
Anyone with wealth and immortality will first use their wealth to protect the future of both. The difficult balance will be how to keep the young from threatening the position of the wealthy without instigating a successful revolution.
Actually, I think we still have a long way to go on nutrition and lifestyle.
Low fat foods tend to trade carbs for fat, leading to all sorts of chronic dysfunction. People are gradually becoming aware that low-fat dietary advice is likely responsible for the obesity epidemic it correlates with, but it will probably take decades before the authorities finally get around to checking Ancel Keys's work and realizing that he fudged his results.
On lifestyle, we're playing the Red Queen's game and we're losing. Running faster and faster just to stay in place. In the US, we work longer hours than any other country for a lifestyle that's less satisfying than that found in most other developed countries (only partly because of the poor work/life balance). That stress has a cost on our bodies and only a few will be able to be above the churning competition if biological immortality really occurs.
IMHO, immortality will be disastrous for humanity. The arrival of immortality will signal the last generation with upward mobility as the wealthy will move quickly to secure themselves a future they can depend on. The only hope is a selfish one: already be one of the wealthy when the rules change.
I live in LA. I was a little suprised when I moved here five years ago to discover that the normals outnumber the wierdos by a dramatic margin.
Except for the huge variety of ethnic food of all varieties, the ridiculous amount of very high quality live theater going on every night, the excellent surfing and scuba diving, the easy access to mountains (15 minutes), ocean (10 minutes), and desert (90 minutes), I might think that I was just in any old town in the USA.
Then there is the true and enduring blight called Hollywood right up the road. *shudder* Thank goodness for me it's actually difficult to get to Hollywood from where I live (Santa Monica).
A few thoughts.
First, the US military is currently in the process of using it's "howitzers, mobile rocket launchers, and bomb-proof APC's" in Iraq. And we're not going to win that fight. In fact, the military is wearing out and destroying those fancy toys so quickly that current procurement rates aren't close to keeping up.
Second, the US culture would have to change pretty radically before the military would attack a populated area in the United States. Go after a person or a group in violation of Posse Comitatus? That's actually fairly likely if things continue. Go after a town? Part of a state? Call me skeptical. Not in the next ten years, anyway. Eighteen years if Obama is elected.
I think you'll find it very difficult to motivate the human beings in the military to actually carry out your mission. Under the scenarios where a substantial part of a region would take up arms against the government, I suspect, but do not know for sure, that the rebels would find a number of military personnel and their gear available to them.
And the guns that are in civilian hands right now? You clearly haven't understood the problems of Vietnam and Iraq wrt counterinsurgency. Semiautomatic rifles are more than enough to hold off the US Army long enough to secure a supply of Stingers and Javelins. At which point, the military would be well and truly fucked. In multiple post-battle accounts, armies with semi-automatic weapons were slightly more effective than armies with fully automatic weapons. The difference was entirely one of logistics (less ammo to resupply). The lower rate of fire is basically an even trade-off against better aimed shots. Most M16's only shoot three round bursts for exactly that reason. You think that an otherwise identical AR15 that only shoots one round per pull is really less effective as a weapon?
There's a lot more fear-mongering and radical changes to privacy, surveillance and gun control laws before the government would dare any direct attack against the civilian population of the United States. IMHO, that's a very good thing.
California requires registration of all handguns, and registration of all firearms transfers. If you were to buy a gun at a flea market in California, you are not permitted to have possession of the gun until after you have applied for and been cleared for the transfer by the California Department of Justice.
Historically, the hazard rate is higher (the cost of injuries was more severe), but once that's controlled for, the average lifespan of most indigenous populations on their own diet was longer than modern Americans and with better quality of life in later years.
In case you're curious, that not a fact at all.
Repeated mild sun exposure is associated with basal cell carcinoma. Uncommon, not aggressive, rarely metastasize, very rarely fatal.
Repeated severe sun exposure is associated with malignant melanoma. Rare, highly aggressive, commonly metastasize, accounts for most skin cancer mortalities.
And since getting out in the sun (without burning) helps to prevent and fight malignant melanoma? Yeah, regular mild sun exposure decreases your overall risk of dying from cancer. So put your man-pants on and get back in the sun.
Sunscreen blocks most the UVB needed by your body to endogenously synthesize vitamin D3. Also, repeated sun exposure without burning is not associated with malignant melanomas, only basal cell carcinomas.
Basal cell carcinomas: nearly harmless. Malignant melanomas: spectacularly dangerous.
Unless vitamin D is delivered in oil, it's pretty much not bioavailable. Very few multis, even the good ones, have a gelcap in the daily mix.
Vitamin D from food is an even bleaker picture. It's basically not found in unprocessed, whole foods and the amount found in supplemented food is still so small as to be worthless. This is the fault of the US RDA for Vitamin D, which appears to be too low by a factor of 5 or more.
If you want Vitamin D, take a gelcap or get outside for 15-20 minutes a day with lots of skin exposed. In the northern US, 15-20 minutes will not be sufficient.
Actually, there are two important forms of skin cancer: basal cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma. The differences between these two forms of cancer are so significant as to be "critical knowledge for humans", and yet they tend to be lumped together under "skin cancer".
Basal cell carcinomas are pretty low grade, tend to be very easy to treat, and are not associated with very many mortalities. They are unlikely to metastasize (spread) and don't grow very quickly. Basal cell carcinomas are associated with repeated mild sun exposure, so getting out in the sun and tanning increases your risk of basal cell carcinoma. This is also the most common form of skin cancer by a long stretch.
Malignant melanomas tend to be higher grade cancers, are much more likely to metastasize, and are responsible for most of the mortalities from skin cancer. Malignant melanomas are associated with extreme sun exposure, so staying out in the sun too long and getting a severe sunburn increases your risk of malignant melanoma.
So once you discriminate between kinds of skin cancer, there's a strong case to be made that tanning is a low risk activity, while burning is a high risk activity. Further, as this study showed, levels of vitamin D are inversely associated with malignant melanoma, and vitamin D is naturally produced through repeated mild sun exposure without sunscreen (sunscreen blocks the UVB needed to endogenously synthesize vitamin D3).
So, being in the sun without sunscreen long enough to get a tan but not to burn is not only low risk, but actually reduces your overall risk of dying from cancer.
There are other benefits to regular exposure to direct sunlight. It can help with mild depression, sleep disorders, eye problems, and a whole host of other benefits. Tough to get all of that in a one-a-day vitamin (joking, vitamin D that's not suspected in oil is only marginally bioavailable, so if you're not taking a vitamin tablet and you're not going outside, you're not actually getting any vitamin D).
Besides, is getting outside for 15-20 minutes a day really that tough? Go for a walk for chrissakes.
I have my own theory about that: the change in attitude you observe is due to a lack of perceived desperation.
Women intensely dislike any hint of desperation, and many women mislabel direct or frank interest as desperation.
When you act aloof, or at least more relaxed, you're not triggering her desperation detection circuit, and things have the possibility of heading down a very different path. I met my wife online after 13 horrible first dates, and I was basically completely checked out and ready to take a break from the dating scene. So I went to the date with nothing to lose and feeling very relaxed about getting a second date. The rest is history.
Do you have any idea how much easily accessible Thorium there is in India? There's enough black thorium sand on the beaches of Kerala to supply the earth's power needs for 500 years. Including other surface deposits, there's enough for 3000 years. Also, the waste products from the thorium reaction (which starts with) Th232 -> U233 have very short half lives. The bulk waste is less radioactive than coal ash within 50 years, and less radioactive than most dirt in 300 years.
There is one significant downside to the thorium reaction. It's a breeder reaction. Further, the Uranium that's produced in the "molten salt reactor" is easily accessible as nearly pure uranium hexafluoride gas (UFl6) just by bubbling fluorine gas through the core material. Luckily for those who don't want the Uranium used for bombs, the U233 that's produced is contaminated with U234 (a strong gamma emitter). The presence of the U234 wouldn't stop the production of a dirty bomb, but does make the uranium you get from the process unsuitable for a nuclear weapon. The U234 also makes the resulting Uranium especially visible to the detectors that are located at the US border and those operated by the Coast Guard.
The problem with tapping the earth's heat near volcanoes is putting a big enough heat exchanger in the right spot. Eventually we might be able to build some sort of core tap, putting a heat tap directly into the mantle, near a volcano so that the crust thickness was less of an issue. For now, though, the areas around active volcanoes are far too unstable to mess with.
Nuclear power is a highly viable means of getting us out of the current power jam. As for renewable power, mining asteroids for the materials to build orbiting solar panels is a viable long-term fix. Nuclear power could give us the time to develop the in-space industry needed to do that sort of construction. Another upside of building the space industry is that the asteroids closest to hitting the earth are the best targets for capture and extraction and the whole industry would provide the capability to intercept and divert any others that we determined to be risky.
As for "mentioning religion", I have no problem if an elected official is religious and uses that fact as a part of his/her campaign. But I do get very upset if I hear that elected official voting for laws that favor one set of beliefs over another, or using his personal religious justification to argue for a law (gay marriage, anyone?). If a law is really that good of an idea, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with an argument that doesn't rely on a religious dogma.No, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution does not protect the right to hunt. Never has, never will. The Second Amendment guarantees the individual right to be responsible for defense of community (and by extension, yourself).
As for "never meant for a modern world", that's also false. If you owned property in or near the LA riots of 1992, or in Southern Louisiana for about three months after Katrina, or were in one of the wrong classrooms at Virginia Tech, or any number of other more local instances where the police either opted out "until the dust settled" or were unable to prevent "bad things" from happening, you would know that you are still personally responsible for your own safety.
The Second Amendment is highly relevant in the modern world, in it's original wording, with it's original intent.Activist court? Ugh. You're one of those people.
You don't seem to be aware that invalidating laws that violate the constitution and/or lawful treaties is the responsibility of the judicial branch. Nullification is a critical check and balance that the courts have to offset the sometimes overreaching efforts of the legislature and executive. And that every time a court uses that power, it's necessarily saying that something passed by a majority vote is in fact, a really bad idea?
Go back to high school civics. You were apparently napping at a few critical moments.
String Theory is more correctly a descriptive language of physical theories. Within the mathematical framework of String Theory it is possible to describe just about any configuration of the universe. In that way, it's more similar to applied math than anything else.
What String Theorists have been doing is building descriptive models of actual theories. It's a valuable exercise, but they shouldn't feel that String Theory is going to provide anything other than another modeling and analysis tool. Specifically, because String Theory is so expressive, it is impossible to make a falsifiable assertion in pure String Theory. You always need an outside theory, and it's the outside theory that provides the falsifiable assertion.
String Theory can describe just about any system, so it's impossible to prove right, and more importantly for this discussion, impossible to prove wrong. Which means that it is not science. Knowledge of this reality is gradually percolating through the physics establishment. Give it time.
Math is the language.
Physics is the subject matter.
So yeah, they change together. Different from the normal relationship between language and subject, you've got plenty of math without a known application in the real world, but as long as you're using the same axioms, it all seems to eventually make sense...
My wife was a public elementary school teacher for three years and is now an Education Professor, so that list came from her experiences along with a number of discussions about what we're going to do with our kids when they get old enough.
I'm glad you appreciated the list. Trying to simplify a complex issue down to a few bullet points is fairly difficult.
Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture can provide some guidance the various means of doing that if you're not clear. Actually, you did describe two of the common ways of doing that, but you definitely overestimated the complexity of using those approaches.
If the additional effort of mapping the objects into tables causes you to value a simpler and more focused model... is that really a bad thing? In my experience, it's a very good thing.