For all his fault's Blair deserves credit for spotlighting the problem to people who didn't want to know. It's indeed a pity the cupboard is bare.
I had the good fourtune to spend 5 weeks driving around the UK staying at B&B's. I don't know if you have driven down the west coast of Scotland but the sceanery is breathtaking, same with the Yorkshire dales (eg: Fountains Abbey), the orkneys, parts of Ireland. Being an Aussie I was amazed at the extent of wide open spaces and postcard views. You need to keep as much of that as is practicable, even if it means moving a couple of miles away and losing a few efficiency points.
I don't think it's a binary choice, helio's are good for tacking on to buildings, especially where there isn't enough sun (eg: shady side of a building in an otherwise sunny clime). Large windmills work well in the North Sea and would probably hold up to hurricane strength winds as well as your average oil rig. The drawback is that they need to be built in shallow water, so floating helios may have a place in the deep sea. There is also a lot of research going into floating WM's, ironically most of these projects are consulting the oil industry for their rig building expertise.
Smart oil and coal companies have been looking at themselves as "energy companies" for a few years now but there are still plenty of ludites.
Yes, to get close to Germany the US needs five million homes / 25 gigawatts = 5kwh / home.
I live alone in a 3 bedroom home in Australia and use ~1.2Kwh (yes I have a dishwasher, dryer, ect. gas heating, cooking, hot water. )
Germany is more energy efficient than Oz (who are up near the top of the least efficient list along with the US), so say each 5kwh mansion has 5 people = 100% for 25 million people.
That's just under 1/3 of their population getting 100% of their residential power from wind alone.
I don't know how many buildings are powered by solar in Germany but I do know they were pumping almost a gigawatt of excess solar back on to the grid last summer.
"The other big part is logical and critical thinking, and I don't think American children are getting it"
Same is true here in Australia. Scientific skepticisim is an easy skill to learn, the only difficulty (post-pubecent) people have is learning to question their own ideas. IMHO scientific skepticisim and it's place in the philosophy of science should be taught alongside reading and writing as "basic education". I taught it to my (now adult) kids, ( I learnt it from a book by James Randi in my early twenties ). One of the problems is the kids have to learn diplomacy when dealing with adults and there are many adults who are more concerned with losing face than finding facts.
Don't hide psudeo-skeptical propoganda, teach kids how pull it to bits by themselves.
I read a survey the other day that said 50% of respondents think "science will cure cancer in the next 30yrs", only 3% of the same respondents thought "science had a major impact on their lives". I'm not saying that is reliable evidence, just that I'm not surprised by the numbers.
"at what point does a stone that happens to have been eroded/chipped naturally into the rough shape of an axe-head become a stone that has been intentionally crafted by (pre)human hands."
That question seriously underestimates the abilities of both those who made stone tools and those who found them.
"Uh, wait, you're calling Italy enlightened, even in sarcasm? The country with a government so far-right nationalistic that it's flirting with a return to fascism?".
Italy has averaged one government per year since WW2. They flirt with everyone, they're kinda famous for it.
I think you have it upside down, resouces are the PRIME reason regardless of any percieved 'need'. When you talk about enforcing "ideology" you are talking about political/religious control of a particular territory and consequently all the resouces within it.
Wars are never just between the two sides in the headlines, there are all sorts of factions at all sorts of levels. The underlying motivation for war comes from our shared territorial instincts. I'm sure priests, politicians and crusaders would disagree but IMHO religion and politics is just the sales pitch.
"Contrary to populer beleif, Einstein did not replace Newtons work with his spacetime/relativity work. Rather, he enhanced it."
Contrary to your belief that's not what the GP said, you just enhanced it.
The Universe acts as a computer, even though I can't predict what will happen in the next ten seconds I believe my (zero dimentional?) "soul" is a particular instance of a calculation within the Universal calculator.
The word "simulation" implies the calculator and it's calculations have a "higher" purpose, ie: an external intelligence pre-programmed it and/or is still pushing the buttons. Note that by definition the Universe has no "outside".
We will never know if there is a button pushing God, there is simply no way for a temporary calculation to decide what is going on "outside" of the calculator.
I invented the "Dodo meat industry" to illustrate a point. The point being that while in the long run technology can shift any limit to growth further into the future until that technology is invented (or simply used in the case of AGW), we are still limited. A more realistic example would be the fisheries of the northern hempisphere that collapsed like dominos in the 80'-90's. Cod were just too tasty and fishing has now been seriously curtailed in an effort to try and get the population back up. The "market" cannot sustain ever increasing prices on ever diminishing stocks when that stock is wild, for the targeted species there is no quicker way to ensure their rapid extinction.
We are currently ramming into the limit of a multitude of various types of human shit that the planet can absorb the most critical of these on a planetary scale is what comes out of burning coal. The two most obvious are sulphates (smog, acid rain, global cooling, ocean acidification) and CO2 ( global warming, ocean acidification ).
BTW: If every city was 9' deep in horse shit it would be a GoodThing(TM), with todays technology we could move it pretty quickly and we could re-habilitate a lot of land with that much fertilizer.
Well yes you could go for things of dubious, possibly negative value or you could use technology to stop burning coal. We all seem to agree a technological fix is the best option but where does this idea we have to hang on to the current way of generating energy come from?
ASS-U-ME, I didn't realise it meant two pens - although I'm having are hard time figuring why you would want it on anything smaller than a table top?
Not sure how the hardware would have coped back then but PenPoint was OO from the ground up and made use of threads, two pens would have required nothing more than a new screen driver. It was "before it's time" so it ran like cold molases just loading a decent sized app into memory.
Slashdot Mirror
For all his fault's Blair deserves credit for spotlighting the problem to people who didn't want to know. It's indeed a pity the cupboard is bare.
I had the good fourtune to spend 5 weeks driving around the UK staying at B&B's. I don't know if you have driven down the west coast of Scotland but the sceanery is breathtaking, same with the Yorkshire dales (eg: Fountains Abbey), the orkneys, parts of Ireland. Being an Aussie I was amazed at the extent of wide open spaces and postcard views. You need to keep as much of that as is practicable, even if it means moving a couple of miles away and losing a few efficiency points.
I don't think it's a binary choice, helio's are good for tacking on to buildings, especially where there isn't enough sun (eg: shady side of a building in an otherwise sunny clime). Large windmills work well in the North Sea and would probably hold up to hurricane strength winds as well as your average oil rig. The drawback is that they need to be built in shallow water, so floating helios may have a place in the deep sea. There is also a lot of research going into floating WM's, ironically most of these projects are consulting the oil industry for their rig building expertise.
Smart oil and coal companies have been looking at themselves as "energy companies" for a few years now but there are still plenty of ludites.
Yes, to get close to Germany the US needs five million homes / 25 gigawatts = 5kwh / home.
I live alone in a 3 bedroom home in Australia and use ~1.2Kwh (yes I have a dishwasher, dryer, ect. gas heating, cooking, hot water. )
Germany is more energy efficient than Oz (who are up near the top of the least efficient list along with the US), so say each 5kwh mansion has 5 people = 100% for 25 million people.
That's just under 1/3 of their population getting 100% of their residential power from wind alone.
I don't know how many buildings are powered by solar in Germany but I do know they were pumping almost a gigawatt of excess solar back on to the grid last summer.
Sorry, my bad. I misunderstood your post (didn't parse the "not" properly).
Forgot the /jk tag.
Great article, great site, here's a favorite story of mine.
"The other big part is logical and critical thinking, and I don't think American children are getting it"
Same is true here in Australia. Scientific skepticisim is an easy skill to learn, the only difficulty (post-pubecent) people have is learning to question their own ideas. IMHO scientific skepticisim and it's place in the philosophy of science should be taught alongside reading and writing as "basic education". I taught it to my (now adult) kids, ( I learnt it from a book by James Randi in my early twenties ). One of the problems is the kids have to learn diplomacy when dealing with adults and there are many adults who are more concerned with losing face than finding facts.
Don't hide psudeo-skeptical propoganda, teach kids how pull it to bits by themselves.
I read a survey the other day that said 50% of respondents think "science will cure cancer in the next 30yrs", only 3% of the same respondents thought "science had a major impact on their lives". I'm not saying that is reliable evidence, just that I'm not surprised by the numbers.
I don't disagree with your argument but I think you shot yourself in the foot by equating AGW and religion.
Sorry Bill, it was joke. I'm not the one who marked it as insightfull. Please don't tell Balmer.
...almost. :(
oh, and frosty piss!!!
...to ask a drop out for advice to government on how to spend education dollars?
"at what point does a stone that happens to have been eroded/chipped naturally into the rough shape of an axe-head become a stone that has been intentionally crafted by (pre)human hands."
That question seriously underestimates the abilities of both those who made stone tools and those who found them.
"Uh, wait, you're calling Italy enlightened, even in sarcasm? The country with a government so far-right nationalistic that it's flirting with a return to fascism?".
Italy has averaged one government per year since WW2. They flirt with everyone, they're kinda famous for it.
"burning is probably how they reproduce"
So you're saying Titan porn is hot?
I think you have it upside down, resouces are the PRIME reason regardless of any percieved 'need'. When you talk about enforcing "ideology" you are talking about political/religious control of a particular territory and consequently all the resouces within it.
Wars are never just between the two sides in the headlines, there are all sorts of factions at all sorts of levels. The underlying motivation for war comes from our shared territorial instincts. I'm sure priests, politicians and crusaders would disagree but IMHO religion and politics is just the sales pitch.
"Contrary to populer beleif, Einstein did not replace Newtons work with his spacetime/relativity work. Rather, he enhanced it."
Contrary to your belief that's not what the GP said, you just enhanced it.
The Universe acts as a computer, even though I can't predict what will happen in the next ten seconds I believe my (zero dimentional?) "soul" is a particular instance of a calculation within the Universal calculator.
The word "simulation" implies the calculator and it's calculations have a "higher" purpose, ie: an external intelligence pre-programmed it and/or is still pushing the buttons. Note that by definition the Universe has no "outside".
We will never know if there is a button pushing God, there is simply no way for a temporary calculation to decide what is going on "outside" of the calculator.
"What kind of freakin' "bug" takes a bloody week to work on?"
One that refuses to happen while your watching.
"They're extinct because they weren't tasty."
Excellent point!
I invented the "Dodo meat industry" to illustrate a point. The point being that while in the long run technology can shift any limit to growth further into the future until that technology is invented (or simply used in the case of AGW), we are still limited. A more realistic example would be the fisheries of the northern hempisphere that collapsed like dominos in the 80'-90's. Cod were just too tasty and fishing has now been seriously curtailed in an effort to try and get the population back up. The "market" cannot sustain ever increasing prices on ever diminishing stocks when that stock is wild, for the targeted species there is no quicker way to ensure their rapid extinction.
We are currently ramming into the limit of a multitude of various types of human shit that the planet can absorb the most critical of these on a planetary scale is what comes out of burning coal. The two most obvious are sulphates (smog, acid rain, global cooling, ocean acidification) and CO2 ( global warming, ocean acidification ).
BTW: If every city was 9' deep in horse shit it would be a GoodThing(TM), with todays technology we could move it pretty quickly and we could re-habilitate a lot of land with that much fertilizer.
Ummm I meant a science link, you know one that has a pointer to a peer-reviewed paper. I'm not interested in political bile.
Ummm yeah, re-read my post and look for the word "temporary", then look at the other words on either side. ;)
Humanity produces but ~2% of it, the rest is produced naturally by volcanoes, forest fires and such.
Linky, linky or your "facts" are stinky.
Well yes you could go for things of dubious, possibly negative value or you could use technology to stop burning coal. We all seem to agree a technological fix is the best option but where does this idea we have to hang on to the current way of generating energy come from?
Yeah, yeah. Provide a link we can argue over or fuck off.
ASS-U-ME, I didn't realise it meant two pens - although I'm having are hard time figuring why you would want it on anything smaller than a table top?
Not sure how the hardware would have coped back then but PenPoint was OO from the ground up and made use of threads, two pens would have required nothing more than a new screen driver. It was "before it's time" so it ran like cold molases just loading a decent sized app into memory.