So on the one hand, what you describe is phenomenally dumb, but on the other hand, are you sure it's really blind, and are you sure they're really not looking, and that they're really riding straight across? It's possible they're doing the R-U-R (stands for Right-U-Right, also Rossum's Universal Robots) stunt for getting across an intersection. Enter with a right turn, and as soon as you are IN the intersection and can see what's going on, do a (flattened) U followed by a right turn. This works even better if the first "R" happens to be uphill.
I assume it has to be something like this, because if they were really blasting straight across without looking, there would be bad crashes. What you see, if it's done right, is a lot of "lucky" cyclists who look like they're blasting straight across, and then a number who seem to turn right for a bit, possibly noodle around, and then go.
You can get this back to robot cars in two different ways. Near Boston, one of the issues with the commuter rail is that some of the outlying towns are access-to-station limited -- not dense enough for many people to walk, yet parking-and-traffic constrained if people drive. And anyone near the station hates the traffic anyway. This in turn eats into the viability of the commuter rail, which cuts service, which makes it less attractive -- a money-sucking downward spiral.
People could bike (and they are actually experimenting with additional racks, some covered) but the roads tend to suck ass on account of all the traffic to the station. If either (1) robot cars were substantially safer/friendlier to bikes or (2) robot cars could do drop-off-near and then return to home or park themselves further away, then more people could get to the train. Or, given robot cars, and some amount of search and social networking, maybe casual carpooling would get much more convenient and efficient. Each robo-car could function as a sort of mini-jitney.
Careful - in some places (Idaho) it is legal for a bike to treat a stop sign as a yield, and a red light as a stop sign. Filtering though traffic is legal in most places (not all).
The problem with ranting at cyclists about traffic laws is that the law is kinda stupid for cyclists.
First, consider outcomes: If bicycles were piloted perfectly, 1 pedestrian death each year would be avoided. If cars were piloted 1% better, 31 pedestrian deaths each year would be avoided. (I use pedestrian deaths because it avoids blame assignment for car/bike crashes.) It would be interesting to see if a robot car could be as safe as a bicycle for pedestrians.
Second, consider existing behavior: Drivers "fudge" all sorts of safety-related laws, everything from stopping at stop lines, to actually stopping at stop signs and for right-on-red, and definitely speeding. Everyone speeds, and in residential and urban areas, the difference between 20mph and 24mph is (conservative estimate) a doubled risk of pedestrian fatality in a crash (risk rises from 5% to 45% between 20 and 30mph, exponential fit gives 1.55x risk for +2mph). Robot cars would be a huge improvement here.
Third, consider ability to see/hear/avoid: Most car drivers are cut off from the surrounding by a wall of glass, which may be dirty or foggy, and their hearing is impaired by that wall of glass, their stereo, and the noise of their own engine and any fans for climate control. A car is 6 or more feet wide, where a bicycle is about 2 feet wide. Turning radius on a bicycle is well within a single lane on the road, and a bike can hop curbs and fit between small spaces by the side of a road where a car cannot. A stopped bicycle can hop sideways, unlike a car.
Fourth, the nanny state argument turns out different than might you think: One reason to complain about cyclists breaking traffic laws is that it might not be good for them, in the same way that driving a car without seatbelts is not good for the driver. Unfortunately, this logic only works if you believe that people only die in crashes. If you consider death in general from all causes, you discover that not getting enough exercise is fantastically dangerous. Studies from Denmark find a correlation of 28% lower mortality rate with bicycle commuting, and 2-5 years of additional expected lifespan (this is after adjusting for other risk factors). (By-the-way, regarding nanny state-ism -- drivers and passengers in cars should *definitely* wear helmets. Car crashes are the cause of about half of all serious head injuries, and you don't have the sweaty-head excuse that cyclists do.)
You may not agree with this reasoning, but this is why lots of people on bikes don't have much respect for traffic laws, even when they obey them. And the cyclists I know, don't wonder why some drivers are hostile -- we're pretty sure that it's irrational tribal nonsense. Try to come up with a reason, and then think hard to see if you're not just bullshitting yourself. It's sure not safety.
I think it's a datapoint, and somewhat reassuring. It-would-be-very-nice to get historical records on arctic and not-arctic methane levels, to see if these leaks are a long-standing and non-acclerating phenomenon (as the paper you cite proposes) or if there is something else going on besides what was studied in that paper. We know that agriculture has boosted levels world-wide, and if the arctic has always leaked methane, it would make sense for levels to be higher yet there -- but has the extra methane increased or not in the last century? We ought to be able to get that information (but I'm not seeing definitive numbers at Wikipedia).
I thought that the gamma emitters had a half life that was very annoying for proliferation purposes, but really pretty tractable for storage -- yeah, U232, 70 years. Putting them in a lead cask is one thing; fashioning them into a bomb is something else entirely.
I think grandparent is wrong on some details, but from what I've read, Thorium is still a better choice for the fuel. The principal reasons appear to be that (1) there's a whole lot of it; (2) the byproducts are harder to weaponize (contains U-233, but also contains nasty gamma emitter U-232 -- less of a weight difference than 235-238, and the gamma rays are bad news for everything nearby); (3) fast reactors are apparently hard to design (control/safety issues). Seems like the gamma rays would interfere with home use:-).
On the other hand, the Wikipedia page for LFTR seems to ONLY compare to with light-water reactors.
The chart you reference doesn't seem to tell the whole story, since it doesn't discuss the half lives of any of those products, or their biological risk, or the easy of extracting/confining the longer-lived ones. Tc-99 is apparently a problem, and Thorium (U-233) scores somewhat better there.
The chemical issues involved with LFTR appear amusing. Beryllium, fluorine, and isotopically pure lithium. Yum!
I guess I have a different attitude than the police. The driver's offense was stopping well forward of the stop line (and obstructing the crosswalk -- two offenses, actually). It's a relatively common offense here near Boston. The pedestrian was mostly at fault, but without the driver's contribution it would not have happened -- she, like me, would have been able to see the jaywalking ped.
I ride a bicycle a lot (I also drive). We hear lots about how important it is to Obey The Law, and what Bad People we are for running stop lights and stop signs (because always, judge the group by the actions of a few). If you don't ticket offenses when the bad outcome actually occurs, what's the point?
I don't think that the reduction in pedestrian deaths is necessarily caused by better car design (as of 2007, deployed in some EU cars and some concept cars). There haven't been that many changes in this country, and at the SUV/minivan level, none that I can perceive at all. On the other hand, we have tightened up licensing restrictions for new drivers (in some states), we've had years of MADD-inspired ratcheting down of tolerance for drunk driving, and we're also in a recession (which cuts driving by a bit). It is apparently the case (at least in some studies in NYC) that adding bicycle lanes in urban areas tends to increase pedestrian safety (and driver safety), and we've been doing a fair amount of that in recent years. It appears to be a matter of reduced speeding (i.e., "traffic calming").
I was low-balling the numbers because I did not care to endure complaints about using numbers that are too large. I know that they're down. The number that I actually recall is 3100. Perfect safety is probably unattainable, but I'm pretty sure we can do better. I've seen a pedestrian run into, in one of those team-effort sort of collisions, where the driver did in fact break a law (stopped well past stop line, made it difficult to see jaywalking pedestrian approaching), but was not cited it for it. WTF?
If I were king of automated traffic enforcement, I would direct it at violations that were actually correlated with harm. That is, however, assuming something that is not true, so things might not turn out that way.
There is another approach to reducing harm from driving, given that we both agree that perfect safety is unattainable, and that is simple to avoid unnecessary driving. We drive a lot in this country; it's not all necessary.
Law enforcement should have to put forth a reasonable effort in their enforcement activities
Why? And why shouldn't drivers walk on eggshells if they're breaking traffic laws? Or rather, how hard is it to obey the stupid law? Just this afternoon/evening, I've seen drivers roll right through stop signs (in a residential neighborhood), fail to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk, and (of course) speed in a residential area. Speeding in a residential area is really bad news -- the pedestrian death rate in 20mph crashes is far lower than the rate from 30mph crashes.
3000 pedestrian deaths per year is a big deal, never mind car-to-car crashes. Given all the crazy, pointless laws that we enforce (and trample all over the constitution in the process), why shouldn't we merely make it easy to enforce traffic laws? I'd trade that for warrantless wiretaps, home-invasion-style drug busts, and federal fondling at the airport.
I think I'd rather be rear-ended than T-boned -- note that I used a dead-body statistic, not a bent-metal statistic.
Are you sure, if all the yellow lights aren't lengthened, that people wouldn't just fudge the yellow that much longer? Or are we relying on a statistical effect, that if half the drivers are vigilant in stopping for yellows, that eventually the way is blocked.
I suspect, however, that if we were to deploy automatic enforcement with an eye towards reducing deaths, it would be different from red-light cameras.
People grumble about automated traffic law enforcement, but poorly-driven cars do manage to kill a steady 30,000 people per year in crashes (3000 of those, pedestrians). A war on terrible driving would save far more lives than all this other nonsense.
I don't know how long this will list. Middle child heads straight off to the Khan Academy when he wants a second opinion on one subject or another. Oldest child was so pissed at his thermo textbook, that he spent a summer trying to write his own. Textbooks for older kids are just documents, they don't need some fancy app.
Immunity wears off in general; consider shingles, after chickenpox. In the case of tetanus (as I read recently) you are also not immunized with the toxin itself, but a modified version of it -- the toxin is so deadly that the amount necessary to induce immunity directly would kill you many times over, first. Consider also the smallpox vaccine; back when I was younger, people who traveled to areas where smallpox was still present would get a second vaccination, and it would leave a second scar. Since a smallpox vaccination is actual infection with a different live virus, if live-virus-immunity were foolproof and life-long against that very virus, there would not have been a second scar. The reason to prefer vaccination to getting the disease itself is that the cost of revaccination is low compared to the cost of getting the disease.
So in the particular case of your garden, you are some combination of (1) lucky (2) coasting on residual immunity from repeated tetanus shots over the years and (perhaps) (3) re-exposing yourself and acquiring immunity that way. But (3) is unlikely, otherwise everyone who ever dug much in the dirt back in the days before tetanus shots would have died horribly.
Note that the shot is against the toxin, not the shot, so I think there is also some chance of your having once contracted a tetanus-producing infection while you were well-protected from the toxin by recent immunization, and your immune system may have at that time gone ape-shit on the toxin as it was produced and acquired a life-long grudge in the process. But -- I don't know that my little theory holds water, and it cannot be that likely, else tetanus would have been an extremely common cause of death among gardeners, pre-immunization.
You're deriving a principle from an analogy, and I don't think that works, partly because the analogy is imperfect.
With bacteria, (1) we coexist with a bunch that have the possibility of going-rogue, but usually don't (staph on our skin and in our nose, for example), (2) we dose them with antibiotics when we already have a large population run amuck (thus giving random variation more traction), (3) and there's a much higher opportunity to swap genes (our guts are filled with mostly-good-guys, all the time).
With viruses, we don't coexist with a huge bunch, and the vaccine provides immunity against the small handfuls of virus that might constitute an initial infection, not against the billions that might exist in an established infection or the 100 Trillion (10^14) good-ish guys residing in our gut who might later swap genes with a bad guy. Viruses can swap genes, but it requires simultaneous co-infection, for example in a pig, tended by humans, exposed to birds. So there is an analogy, but there are many orders of magnitude difference between the two cases.
It is true that vaccination would exert pressure to favor faster mutation, but it would need to be much, much faster -- what gates us the time to ramp up the doses, not the change in a given epidemic.
In addition, vaccination of our "best spreaders" (children, teachers, medical personnel) and good sanitary practices (hand washing, covered coughs and sneezes) also exerts selection pressure on the virus; by making spread less likely, it favors those strains that leave people feeling good enough to be out and around and not being as careful as they should (like the common cold). One theory for why the 1918 virus was so bad was that it was very easy to spread in WW1 conditions, and thus its ability to make people very ill (which normally prevents spread, if people don't even get out of bed) was not a handicap.
But you get more bang for the buck if you can avoid rewarding "reductions" that would have happened anyway, and use the money instead to cause reductions that would not have happened on their own. I agree that the spin -- "oh, teh incompetent government and international global warming conspiracy" -- is wrong, but it would actually be better if we could audit these a little more stringently.
You seem to ignore the role of demand and scarcity; if the price of oil rises to $200/barrel, there are extraction methods that would be profitable, that are not profitable now. The technology does not "cause" the price, that is true, but in this case it only lowers the price from a very high level to one that is somewhat more tolerable -- the energy return on energy invested is not nearly as good. I assume, unless we get some really nasty climate-related bite in the ass, that we will eventually get all the oil that can be gotten, but not necessarily at anything we would call a "low" price.
And if that price exceeds the cost of alternatives for obtaining transportation (non-oil electricity + batteries; bicycles for short trips; robot-assisted taxi/carpooling), then we might leave it in the ground after all.
Debate's easy -- "did you consider X, and Y, and Z?" The 2007 (?) IPCC report included an explicit disclaimer that they were not modeling potential feedback effects from melting ice caps and glacier (less white snow/ice = more light converted to heat, in a naive, not rigorous analysis, so this is something to worry about). You can have field day with that, especially given that arctic melting has run well ahead of their predictions.
It's a misleading hack piece. First, 600 acre-feet of water per year to run a 1000-MW plant is diddly-shit. For comparison, a unit-home consumes about 1kw (averaged over a month, give or take a factor of two) and one acre-foot/year of water. So a plant supplying enough power for a million homes, which themselves consume a million acre-feet/year of water, will add 600 acre-feet/yr of water to their consumption. Whoopie-shit.
Notice how no numbers were given for the geothermal plants and their consumption. The Geysers were initially run from in-place groundwater, which they did consume (there was no condensation, no recharge). Now they are being recharged, NOT with groundwater, but with treated sewage water. So the article was misleading there, too, since groundwater is no longer the limiting factor.
She gives numbers for windpower resource consumption, but is again misleading. A "4-foot-wide, 7630 mile sidewalk". How do you suppose that compares to a single lane of interstate highway (12 feet wide) capable of carrying truck traffic? 636 miles of 4-lane interstate, NOT accounting for the increased road thickness. She repeats the "rare earth metals are rare" canard.
Neodymium: "Although neodymium is classed as a "rare earth", it is no rarer than cobalt, nickel, and copper ore, and is widely distributed in the Earth's crust". She may be right about Dysprosium, at least with current magnet technology. It's not clear if it's necessary, or merely nice at current prices. Note that the current main consumption appears to be hybrid automobiles, not wind turbines. (Hybrid autos, not a good idea at present size.)
Her treatment of hydropower is similarly deceptive -- first dismiss newer technologies as "experimental", then hammer on the problems of (some) hydropower installations. Wave power looks interesting. There's not too much that can go wrong with a buoy anchored to the bottom; we've got ample experience with them in their non-power-producing form.
All of the article lacks a good "compared to what" -- how much water and concrete are consumed by existing energy production? What resources do they consume?
The members of Mensa are not necessarily representative of people who qualify for membership -- speaking as someone who does, and is not a member, and did once attend a meeting when I was in high school. I assume you just forgot the citation for your claim, of course.
I'd be a little wary of the prescriptions of any one economist; it seems that you can find an economist to fit any political tilt.
Not that. Hurricanes are somewhat self-limiting over time, because they both depend on warm surface water, and stir the water up to bring less-warm water to the surface. Other things I've read suggest that there will be a general increase in wind shear, which works against hurricanes.
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So on the one hand, what you describe is phenomenally dumb, but on the other hand, are you sure it's really blind, and are you sure they're really not looking, and that they're really riding straight across? It's possible they're doing the R-U-R (stands for Right-U-Right, also Rossum's Universal Robots) stunt for getting across an intersection. Enter with a right turn, and as soon as you are IN the intersection and can see what's going on, do a (flattened) U followed by a right turn. This works even better if the first "R" happens to be uphill.
I assume it has to be something like this, because if they were really blasting straight across without looking, there would be bad crashes. What you see, if it's done right, is a lot of "lucky" cyclists who look like they're blasting straight across, and then a number who seem to turn right for a bit, possibly noodle around, and then go.
You can get this back to robot cars in two different ways. Near Boston, one of the issues with the commuter rail is that some of the outlying towns are access-to-station limited -- not dense enough for many people to walk, yet parking-and-traffic constrained if people drive. And anyone near the station hates the traffic anyway. This in turn eats into the viability of the commuter rail, which cuts service, which makes it less attractive -- a money-sucking downward spiral.
People could bike (and they are actually experimenting with additional racks, some covered) but the roads tend to suck ass on account of all the traffic to the station. If either (1) robot cars were substantially safer/friendlier to bikes or (2) robot cars could do drop-off-near and then return to home or park themselves further away, then more people could get to the train. Or, given robot cars, and some amount of search and social networking, maybe casual carpooling would get much more convenient and efficient. Each robo-car could function as a sort of mini-jitney.
Careful - in some places (Idaho) it is legal for a bike to treat a stop sign as a yield, and a red light as a stop sign. Filtering though traffic is legal in most places (not all).
The problem with ranting at cyclists about traffic laws is that the law is kinda stupid for cyclists.
First, consider outcomes:
If bicycles were piloted perfectly, 1 pedestrian death each year would be avoided. If cars were piloted 1% better, 31 pedestrian deaths each year would be avoided. (I use pedestrian deaths because it avoids blame assignment for car/bike crashes.) It would be interesting to see if a robot car could be as safe as a bicycle for pedestrians.
Second, consider existing behavior:
Drivers "fudge" all sorts of safety-related laws, everything from stopping at stop lines, to actually stopping at stop signs and for right-on-red, and definitely speeding. Everyone speeds, and in residential and urban areas, the difference between 20mph and 24mph is (conservative estimate) a doubled risk of pedestrian fatality in a crash (risk rises from 5% to 45% between 20 and 30mph, exponential fit gives 1.55x risk for +2mph). Robot cars would be a huge improvement here.
Third, consider ability to see/hear/avoid:
Most car drivers are cut off from the surrounding by a wall of glass, which may be dirty or foggy, and their hearing is impaired by that wall of glass, their stereo, and the noise of their own engine and any fans for climate control. A car is 6 or more feet wide, where a bicycle is about 2 feet wide. Turning radius on a bicycle is well within a single lane on the road, and a bike can hop curbs and fit between small spaces by the side of a road where a car cannot. A stopped bicycle can hop sideways, unlike a car.
Fourth, the nanny state argument turns out different than might you think:
One reason to complain about cyclists breaking traffic laws is that it might not be good for them, in the same way that driving a car without seatbelts is not good for the driver. Unfortunately, this logic only works if you believe that people only die in crashes. If you consider death in general from all causes, you discover that not getting enough exercise is fantastically dangerous. Studies from Denmark find a correlation of 28% lower mortality rate with bicycle commuting, and 2-5 years of additional expected lifespan (this is after adjusting for other risk factors). (By-the-way, regarding nanny state-ism -- drivers and passengers in cars should *definitely* wear helmets. Car crashes are the cause of about half of all serious head injuries, and you don't have the sweaty-head excuse that cyclists do.)
You may not agree with this reasoning, but this is why lots of people on bikes don't have much respect for traffic laws, even when they obey them. And the cyclists I know, don't wonder why some drivers are hostile -- we're pretty sure that it's irrational tribal nonsense. Try to come up with a reason, and then think hard to see if you're not just bullshitting yourself. It's sure not safety.
I think it's a datapoint, and somewhat reassuring. It-would-be-very-nice to get historical records on arctic and not-arctic methane levels, to see if these leaks are a long-standing and non-acclerating phenomenon (as the paper you cite proposes) or if there is something else going on besides what was studied in that paper. We know that agriculture has boosted levels world-wide, and if the arctic has always leaked methane, it would make sense for levels to be higher yet there -- but has the extra methane increased or not in the last century? We ought to be able to get that information (but I'm not seeing definitive numbers at Wikipedia).
I thought that the gamma emitters had a half life that was very annoying for proliferation purposes, but really pretty tractable for storage -- yeah, U232, 70 years. Putting them in a lead cask is one thing; fashioning them into a bomb is something else entirely.
I think grandparent is wrong on some details, but from what I've read, Thorium is still a better choice for the fuel. The principal reasons appear to be that (1) there's a whole lot of it; (2) the byproducts are harder to weaponize (contains U-233, but also contains nasty gamma emitter U-232 -- less of a weight difference than 235-238, and the gamma rays are bad news for everything nearby); (3) fast reactors are apparently hard to design (control/safety issues). Seems like the gamma rays would interfere with home use :-).
On the other hand, the Wikipedia page for LFTR seems to ONLY compare to with light-water reactors.
The chart you reference doesn't seem to tell the whole story, since it doesn't discuss the half lives of any of those products, or their biological risk, or the easy of extracting/confining the longer-lived ones. Tc-99 is apparently a problem, and Thorium (U-233) scores somewhat better there.
The chemical issues involved with LFTR appear amusing. Beryllium, fluorine, and isotopically pure lithium. Yum!
I guess I have a different attitude than the police. The driver's offense was stopping well forward of the stop line (and obstructing the crosswalk -- two offenses, actually). It's a relatively common offense here near Boston. The pedestrian was mostly at fault, but without the driver's contribution it would not have happened -- she, like me, would have been able to see the jaywalking ped.
I ride a bicycle a lot (I also drive). We hear lots about how important it is to Obey The Law, and what Bad People we are for running stop lights and stop signs (because always, judge the group by the actions of a few). If you don't ticket offenses when the bad outcome actually occurs, what's the point?
I don't think that the reduction in pedestrian deaths is necessarily caused by better car design (as of 2007, deployed in some EU cars and some concept cars). There haven't been that many changes in this country, and at the SUV/minivan level, none that I can perceive at all. On the other hand, we have tightened up licensing restrictions for new drivers (in some states), we've had years of MADD-inspired ratcheting down of tolerance for drunk driving, and we're also in a recession (which cuts driving by a bit). It is apparently the case (at least in some studies in NYC) that adding bicycle lanes in urban areas tends to increase pedestrian safety (and driver safety), and we've been doing a fair amount of that in recent years. It appears to be a matter of reduced speeding (i.e., "traffic calming").
I was low-balling the numbers because I did not care to endure complaints about using numbers that are too large. I know that they're down. The number that I actually recall is 3100. Perfect safety is probably unattainable, but I'm pretty sure we can do better. I've seen a pedestrian run into, in one of those team-effort sort of collisions, where the driver did in fact break a law (stopped well past stop line, made it difficult to see jaywalking pedestrian approaching), but was not cited it for it. WTF?
If I were king of automated traffic enforcement, I would direct it at violations that were actually correlated with harm. That is, however, assuming something that is not true, so things might not turn out that way.
There is another approach to reducing harm from driving, given that we both agree that perfect safety is unattainable, and that is simple to avoid unnecessary driving. We drive a lot in this country; it's not all necessary.
Law enforcement should have to put forth a reasonable effort in their enforcement activities
Why? And why shouldn't drivers walk on eggshells if they're breaking traffic laws? Or rather, how hard is it to obey the stupid law? Just this afternoon/evening, I've seen drivers roll right through stop signs (in a residential neighborhood), fail to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk, and (of course) speed in a residential area. Speeding in a residential area is really bad news -- the pedestrian death rate in 20mph crashes is far lower than the rate from 30mph crashes.
3000 pedestrian deaths per year is a big deal, never mind car-to-car crashes. Given all the crazy, pointless laws that we enforce (and trample all over the constitution in the process), why shouldn't we merely make it easy to enforce traffic laws? I'd trade that for warrantless wiretaps, home-invasion-style drug busts, and federal fondling at the airport.
I think I'd rather be rear-ended than T-boned -- note that I used a dead-body statistic, not a bent-metal statistic.
Are you sure, if all the yellow lights aren't lengthened, that people wouldn't just fudge the yellow that much longer?
Or are we relying on a statistical effect, that if half the drivers are vigilant in stopping for yellows, that eventually the way is blocked.
I suspect, however, that if we were to deploy automatic enforcement with an eye towards reducing deaths, it would be different from red-light cameras.
People grumble about automated traffic law enforcement, but poorly-driven cars do manage to kill a steady 30,000 people per year in crashes (3000 of those, pedestrians). A war on terrible driving would save far more lives than all this other nonsense.
Don't forget "resisting arrest". Till this video surfaced, this was "resisting arrest": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUkiyBVytRQ
I don't know how long this will list. Middle child heads straight off to the Khan Academy when he wants a second opinion on one subject or another. Oldest child was so pissed at his thermo textbook, that he spent a summer trying to write his own. Textbooks for older kids are just documents, they don't need some fancy app.
That was my impression too. In particular, a love fest for iPhome, the padded-foamy-holder.
Immunity wears off in general; consider shingles, after chickenpox. In the case of tetanus (as I read recently) you are also not immunized with the toxin itself, but a modified version of it -- the toxin is so deadly that the amount necessary to induce immunity directly would kill you many times over, first. Consider also the smallpox vaccine; back when I was younger, people who traveled to areas where smallpox was still present would get a second vaccination, and it would leave a second scar. Since a smallpox vaccination is actual infection with a different live virus, if live-virus-immunity were foolproof and life-long against that very virus, there would not have been a second scar. The reason to prefer vaccination to getting the disease itself is that the cost of revaccination is low compared to the cost of getting the disease.
So in the particular case of your garden, you are some combination of (1) lucky (2) coasting on residual immunity from repeated tetanus shots over the years and (perhaps) (3) re-exposing yourself and acquiring immunity that way. But (3) is unlikely, otherwise everyone who ever dug much in the dirt back in the days before tetanus shots would have died horribly.
Note that the shot is against the toxin, not the shot, so I think there is also some chance of your having once contracted a tetanus-producing infection while you were well-protected from the toxin by recent immunization, and your immune system may have at that time gone ape-shit on the toxin as it was produced and acquired a life-long grudge in the process. But -- I don't know that my little theory holds water, and it cannot be that likely, else tetanus would have been an extremely common cause of death among gardeners, pre-immunization.
You're deriving a principle from an analogy, and I don't think that works, partly because the analogy is imperfect.
With bacteria, (1) we coexist with a bunch that have the possibility of going-rogue, but usually don't (staph on our skin and in our nose, for example), (2) we dose them with antibiotics when we already have a large population run amuck (thus giving random variation more traction), (3) and there's a much higher opportunity to swap genes (our guts are filled with mostly-good-guys, all the time).
With viruses, we don't coexist with a huge bunch, and the vaccine provides immunity against the small handfuls of virus that might constitute an initial infection, not against the billions that might exist in an established infection or the 100 Trillion (10^14) good-ish guys residing in our gut who might later swap genes with a bad guy. Viruses can swap genes, but it requires simultaneous co-infection, for example in a pig, tended by humans, exposed to birds. So there is an analogy, but there are many orders of magnitude difference between the two cases.
It is true that vaccination would exert pressure to favor faster mutation, but it would need to be much, much faster -- what gates us the time to ramp up the doses, not the change in a given epidemic.
In addition, vaccination of our "best spreaders" (children, teachers, medical personnel) and good sanitary practices (hand washing, covered coughs and sneezes) also exerts selection pressure on the virus; by making spread less likely, it favors those strains that leave people feeling good enough to be out and around and not being as careful as they should (like the common cold). One theory for why the 1918 virus was so bad was that it was very easy to spread in WW1 conditions, and thus its ability to make people very ill (which normally prevents spread, if people don't even get out of bed) was not a handicap.
informative, perhaps
But you get more bang for the buck if you can avoid rewarding "reductions" that would have happened anyway, and use the money instead to cause reductions that would not have happened on their own. I agree that the spin -- "oh, teh incompetent government and international global warming conspiracy" -- is wrong, but it would actually be better if we could audit these a little more stringently.
You seem to ignore the role of demand and scarcity; if the price of oil rises to $200/barrel, there are extraction methods that would be profitable, that are not profitable now. The technology does not "cause" the price, that is true, but in this case it only lowers the price from a very high level to one that is somewhat more tolerable -- the energy return on energy invested is not nearly as good. I assume, unless we get some really nasty climate-related bite in the ass, that we will eventually get all the oil that can be gotten, but not necessarily at anything we would call a "low" price.
And if that price exceeds the cost of alternatives for obtaining transportation (non-oil electricity + batteries; bicycles for short trips; robot-assisted taxi/carpooling), then we might leave it in the ground after all.
Debate's easy -- "did you consider X, and Y, and Z?" The 2007 (?) IPCC report included an explicit disclaimer that they were not modeling potential feedback effects from melting ice caps and glacier (less white snow/ice = more light converted to heat, in a naive, not rigorous analysis, so this is something to worry about). You can have field day with that, especially given that arctic melting has run well ahead of their predictions.
It's a misleading hack piece. First, 600 acre-feet of water per year to run a 1000-MW plant is diddly-shit. For comparison, a unit-home consumes about 1kw (averaged over a month, give or take a factor of two) and one acre-foot/year of water. So a plant supplying enough power for a million homes, which themselves consume a million acre-feet/year of water, will add 600 acre-feet/yr of water to their consumption. Whoopie-shit.
Notice how no numbers were given for the geothermal plants and their consumption. The Geysers were initially run from in-place groundwater, which they did consume (there was no condensation, no recharge). Now they are being recharged, NOT with groundwater, but with treated sewage water. So the article was misleading there, too, since groundwater is no longer the limiting factor.
She gives numbers for windpower resource consumption, but is again misleading. A "4-foot-wide, 7630 mile sidewalk". How do you suppose that compares to a single lane of interstate highway (12 feet wide) capable of carrying truck traffic? 636 miles of 4-lane interstate, NOT accounting for the increased road thickness. She repeats the "rare earth metals are rare" canard.
Neodymium: "Although neodymium is classed as a "rare earth", it is no rarer than cobalt, nickel, and copper ore, and is widely distributed in the Earth's crust". She may be right about Dysprosium, at least with current magnet technology. It's not clear if it's necessary, or merely nice at current prices. Note that the current main consumption appears to be hybrid automobiles, not wind turbines. (Hybrid autos, not a good idea at present size.)
Her treatment of hydropower is similarly deceptive -- first dismiss newer technologies as "experimental", then hammer on the problems of (some) hydropower installations. Wave power looks interesting. There's not too much that can go wrong with a buoy anchored to the bottom; we've got ample experience with them in their non-power-producing form.
All of the article lacks a good "compared to what" -- how much water and concrete are consumed by existing energy production? What resources do they consume?
So, NOT an excellent article.
"More gaming -> ... -> more gaming" works out okay for the gaming companies, doesn't it?
Maybe the parents support the lame law? Makes their life easier, doesn't it?
The members of Mensa are not necessarily representative of people who qualify for membership -- speaking as someone who does, and is not a member, and did once attend a meeting when I was in high school. I assume you just forgot the citation for your claim, of course.
I'd be a little wary of the prescriptions of any one economist; it seems that you can find an economist to fit any political tilt.
Not that. Hurricanes are somewhat self-limiting over time, because they both depend on warm surface water, and stir the water up to bring less-warm water to the surface. Other things I've read suggest that there will be a general increase in wind shear, which works against hurricanes.