At temperatures up to 70 C beneath the greenhouse, nothing is going to grow there and soil moisture will be lost rapidly. It may be possible to use this land to extract salts for industrial use, but given the rather low height of the tower any water evaporated is not going to re-condense before being exhausted and thus contribute nothing to the power output. From this I gather that, as a first approximation, energy expended to evaporate water will be lost (water vapor is lighter than air and will contribute slightly to buoyancy as a second-order effect).
I doubt that a large expanse of even more highly salinated land is going to contribute much to the local environment.
Leon O. Billig, in a fact article in _Analog_ titled "Defeating the son of Andrew" (11 years ago this month), proposed convection towers on the order of ten times as tall. I recommend this article to everyone as a mind-stretching exercise.
You could cut back on the fuel consumption of new vehicles in 2 years, but that's not going to affect the thirst of the fleet produced up to that point.
One of the biggest crimes of the "mega-SUV" deduction is that it locks us in to heavy petroleum dependence for a significant part of the fleet for at least a decade. Raise CAFE standards all you want; unless you send those vehicles to the crusher or raise fuel prices enough to make people drive them less, you will change their consumption little if at all.
...there appears to be little support for plug-in hybrids which could "refuel" on non-petroleum energy almost anywhere for little additional trouble or expense.
Well, yeah. If you're running low on 'juice', you have to find someplace to plug in your car and then wait, oh, about twelve hours.
It's a hybrid; when the battery runs low it switches to burning fuel, anywhere, anytime. Or did you forget that part?
Besides, you're wrong about the charging time. A plug-in hybrid using 300 WH/mile and going 20 miles on electricity would need 6 KWH, which you could get from an ordinary 110 volt wall outlet in about 4 hours. Drive to work, plug in, recharged by lunchtime.
Also, the energy comes from fossil fuels anyway, at least in most parts of the U.S. Until we start building more nuclear plants electric vehicles are not exactly a fossil fuel-free solution.
It eliminates oil (a politically troublesome fuel) immediately. And as you almost noted, the plug-in hybrid has a unique property: it can change the source of its motive energy years after it was built. Rather than locking yourself in to oil dependence for the life of the vehicle, you could offset the vehicle's fossil-fuel consumption by adding any combination of nuclear, solar, wind, hydropower or biomass. I haven't done the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the replacement of gasoline burned in a car engine at 17% efficiency by coal burned in a conventional powerplant at 33% is a pure win already.
As it is, hybrids barely beat out economy cars. Add 300 pounds more batteries, and they will actually get worse gas mileage, once those batteries run down.
If not wrong, at least debatable on all points.
Hybids can do considerably better; for instance, the Accord hybrid is tuned for performance while still delivering fairly good economy (design tradeoff).
At least one Future Truck hybrid managed to add all the hybrid features to an Explorer while subtracting weight from the smaller engine and superfluous drivetrain components. According to this CSM article:
With engineering students at the University of California at Davis, Professor Frank has spent more than a decade turning production vehicles into plug-in hybrids using off-the-shelf parts. "We just built a high-performance plug-in hybrid Ford Explorer," he says. "It's 325 horsepower - 200 of that horsepower is electric and 125 is gasoline. This car goes like a rocket, but still gets double the fuel economy of a regular hybrid. And for the first 50 miles it is all electric - zero emissions."
...
Built on a stock Explorer platform, the hybrid retains all its original interior space. There is also more space in the engine compartment because the vehicle lacks moving parts like a fan belt, generator, water pump, and even a transmission. Because it has fewer than one-fifth the number of moving parts of a conventional SUV, the hybrid's weight, even with a heavier battery, stays the same.
Even worse, unless you size up the gas engine and generator to handle the extra battery weight, it would be easy to run an electrical deficit which could leave you stranded with a puny 1 liter engine to haul your extra heavy hybrid up a hill.
You made three errors in that statement:
Maximum power requirements are typically in acceleration, not hill-climbing.
Running out of battery isn't "stranding", it's just going slower. Like, you know, having to downshift when climbing a mountain with a load?
These folks appear to be using engines in the ~2 liter department, but they're getting better-than-V8 performance out of the system. Better performance appears to be one of the common elements of hybrids, though the extent to which it is stressed vs. economy is a design tradeoff.
Unfortunately, nobody's trying to hatch it. The "egg", of course, is the electrical grid, and despite the previous programs to promote electric vehicles there appears to be little support for plug-in hybrids which could "refuel" on non-petroleum energy almost anywhere for little additional trouble or expense.
(two points if you can identify the reference in the subject)
Firstly, thanks for actually putting something with thought behind it down, rather than just being a grammar nazi.
I can't be a grammar not-see. All that stuff just leaps out at me.
What frustrates me is when someone says my arguement is invalid because I missed an apostrophe.
I'm sure you do, especially when they're right.;-) (Seriously, if a missing apostrophe changes the meaning enough to be confusing, there is some merit to the accusation. Written communications are difficult enough when people pay proper attention to clarity; when they let it slip, they can become downright opaque.)
I do hold myself to a set of standards, far more strict than most of the parents of my students.
Maybe you should hold them to a tough standard, whether they care or not. They, or someone, will thank you later.
Example: some time ago I was working on a project involving truck clutches, picking up some work which had been done by others. I had no access to the original workers, and I was confused by repeated references to the "warn condition". Some time later I realized that they meant the "worn" condition, but only after a lot of frustration. I got a lot of grief because a bunch of teachers decided to let someone's grammar errors slide.
This is compounded in a world of electronic knowledge bases. An automated search for "worn clutch" is unlikely to find "warn clutch", because they are so semantically different. Writing with such errors becomes useless because it cannot be indexed correctly.
The sad truth is that all aspiring teachers in this country have to pass an exam PPST, which is very easy. With that said, I watched many of my peers struggle on the test, and even have to retake it.
There's an easy way to solve that. Give them once chance to pass the test before entering ed school, and if they fail they spend a term in remedial classes before they can take it again. (If someone's skills are so weak that they can fail it because they had a bad day, they probably need remediation anyway.)
Firstly, depending on what part of the world you are from, there are different standards. Secondly, this is a place to rapidly exchange ideas and opinions, not a term paper. And yes, even your post has flaws in it depending on who reads it.
Are you labouring under the misconception that regional differences deserve no respect? Sod off, you bugger!;-)
To me, term-paper rigor means having one's argument airtight, research complete and references done properly. Spelling and grammar require no work beyond getting things right as they come off the fingers; they are basic, not frills, and shouldn't be shorted.
I could point out that you didn't use proper citation on my quotes (I didn't either), and that capitalizing "ALWAYS" is gramatically incorrect.
The citation is implicit in the structure of the forum, and ALL CAPS for emphasis is valid usage according to my in-house style guide.;-)
Also you only have 1 space between sentences, where most english guides say 2 is the requirement.
Here is a sentence with one space between words.
Here is a sentence with two spaces between words.
Here is a sentence using non-breaking spaces ( ) to add extra space between words.
They all look the same, because Slashdot edits out the formatting (they did this sometime in the last two years, it used to work decently). I put in the codes to space properly if they'll ever go back to letting people show what they want.
Basically it all comes down to being frustrated with the crowd of arogant idiots that slashdot attracts.
Hammer 'em on their errors (with copious use of hyperlinks to references) and you'll be surprised how often they fold up and disappear. You often get modded up, too.
There are times to worry about spelling and grammar, and there are times to worry about content.
It's ALWAYS time to worry about logical fallacies, like the false dichotomy you just used. Spelling and grammar are there to make certain that the content is accessible, rather than being confused or obscured by errors and ambiguities.
I am able to teach people where to find the information they seek.
If you can't spell a word, you're not going to be able to look it up.
Oar should eye say, if ewe cant spell a word, ewer knot going two bee able too look it up.
Teachers are no different than anyone else, so isn't it a bit unfair to expect more from them than from ourselves? Kids mirror their peers and family and teachers, yet teachers are required to know everything about everything.
Spelling, grammar and punctuation are basic. You may not hold yourself to the standards you expect of a teacher, but I do. I wouldn't expect an elementary school teacher to know the math and science I do, but if they are teaching spelling and grammar they should be able to do it the right way every time, in class and out. I expect everyone, even the gym teacher, to get things right on report cards and such. Call it a religious duty, the right writing rite.
... every time I come to slashdot for a reasonably intelligent conversation, it lands up being about grammar.
I found your sub-thread when it popped up in metamod and I went to look.
If you don't want things to devolve to discussions about spelling and grammar, hold yourself to a high enough standard that nobody raises the issue with you. And stop making excuses for sloppiness among people who ought to be setting the standards!
Shell and Exxon will not only survive, they will lead the changes once they pour all of their R&D into these new hydrogen producing technologies.
You make several assumptions:
They will be able to catch up, after others have established market positions and have patent portfolios.
That they will have the money for R&D once the oil business starts fading.
That hydrogen is the key; maybe it's electricity, in which case the utility companies will eat the oil companies' lunches.
There are just too many ways for big, slow companies to be outmaneuvered when the technologies underlying markets are superceded. There are many ways for their managements to miss important trends even when they are paying attention (Microsoft and the Internet is one example). You're making a poor case.
Their shareholders will demand it once the wells start running dry and before it reaches $80 a berrel.
Their shareholders will be selling, and if the oil giants have neither the revenue to support R&D nor the stock price to borrow against, they'll shrink as the market for their product shrinks.
After all, who would invest in a starup company with no previous history?
If you're charging a plug-in hybrid car and want to be zero-emission about it, are you going to buy an old Arco solar panel because it came from an oil company and they know (knew) cars, or are you going to get the latest production from Kyocera? Are you not going to buy wind power because Jacobs and Bergey never dealt with the automobile market?
The point I'm making is that energy in any given form (e.g. electricity) is fungible. Even somewhat different forms (biodiesel vs. petroleum diesel) are close enough to be nearly interchangeable. As long as your output meets specs, it's a commodity on the market. If you've got a more efficient system, your startup can put the established guy out of business.
At least the oil companies and all the gas stations can convert to E85 fuel and/or hydrogen.
Plug-in hybrids can replace 80% or more of all motor fuel with electricity, using the wasted off-peak capacity of the network at night. You have to convert... nothing but the vehicles. The electric utilities are in position to eat the oil companies' lunch, if they'd only get their act together with Detroit.
Actually, they dated the shroud, called it a fake, called the Church frauds and patted themselves on the back.
Oh, bull. Why would they call the Church frauds, when the Church hadn't been able to perform conclusive tests before either? (Never mind that the first documented appearance of the Shroud is in the 14th century; what was it doing for 1300 years, and how the hell did it get to Italy?)
In a later, unrelated case they had multiple artifacts from a site that dated differently when the scientists felt it wasn't possible. Hence they further analysed their results and samples and discovered the bioplastic.
Some time after that, someone when back and realized that the sample from the shroud had enough of this bioplastic to put the age back into the range suggested by the Church's records.
Two problems with that scenario:
The half-life of C14 is about 5730 years; for a 2000-year interval, the decay can be considered roughly linear. To cut a radiocarbon date to 1/3 of its true age, you'd have to add roughly 2x the mass of the original. There is no way that this "bioplastic" coating, if it exists, could have been so heavy as to have changed the apparent age that far.
(The "bioplastic" hypothesis is bogus on other grounds, too. Any organisms consuming the material of the Shroud would acquire its radiocarbon date, and the whole "bioplastic" issue seems to have originated with the dating of an artifact made of jade, which contains no carbon itself, by radiocarbon dating of materials added after carving.)
The first documented appearance of the Shroud is in 1357. There is no 2000 year old paper trail of its provenance. (You lied.)
Well, they might not want to let scientist cut the thing to shreds
And they haven't had to, for some time. Years ago the only way to radiocarbon-date something was to burn it to CO2, put the CO2 in a tank in a heavily shielded container and use a scintillation counter to measure the radioactivity from the remaining C-14. Because the C-14 measurement was from decays, this took a large mass of material to give a useful signal. Today the measurement is direct counting of C-12 vs. C-14 atoms, and milligram quantities are sufficient.
They already have enough smug folks (like you might see here) pointing to finding that have be found invalid already and they trust their paper trail.
You keep hyping this non-existent paper trail; the 12 radiocarbon dates are consistent with the first record of the Shroud's existence... in 1357.
Isn't it easier just to believe that the claims of authenticity are false, and that people are clinging to it because of what they want to be true?
If that's what you want to believe, sure. You don't need scientists for that.
But if you believe the radiocarbon dates of 12 samples, none of which are older than 800 years, you're just being cynical? Excuse me if I imagine you putting your fingers in your ears and shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" (Incidentally, the historian.net piece has many suspect statements; how would the Shroud get a coating of calcium carbonate when it is composed of cellulose? All of the hedging appears to be excuses for the Shroud not appearing to be as old as the Christians who believe it to be Christ's burial cloth want it to be. Oh, let us not forget: excuses for the Shroud's keepers to keep bringing in pilgrims and their contributions. I'm sure that the Shroud is a very lucrative relic and its value would be destroyed by an admission that it isn't so important.)
I think they worked from a single sample where they normally would
Industrial giants have gone bust before. US Steel? A shadow of its former self. HP? Once a powerhouse, it spun off its instrument division (its former heart and soul) in order to become a shrinking maker of computers. Railroads used to be hugely popular (and profitable) for moving both passengers and freight; now look at them. Changes in technology and teh resulting competition did them in.
Shell and Exxon-Mobil are probably too big to survive the coming changes. If we get something like the artificial-photosynthesis systems which produce hydrogen straight from sunlight and water, changes could come very fast. A company which has bonds outstanding and suddenly has falling income from its major operations plus devaluation of its major assets (petroleum reserves) could be forced to liquidate. A quick look at Exxon-Mobil's balance sheet doesn't show a lot of debt that could precipitate such a crisis, but in the runup to a collapse that would be likely to change.
The fact is, nothing yield more energy per unit like hydrocarbons.
There, I'll agree with you. However, alcohols are well within a factor of 2, and we don't necessarily have to get either of them from fossil sources. If we get artificial photosynthesis, you'll be able to turn any old stream of CO2 into methanol; just add hydrogen.
How about some links to the data which shows that the previous radiocarbon dates were from samples drawn from patches, which shows that the coloration on the cloth is not from pigments, and so forth? Either you have that or you're blowing smoke.
Proof that the vanillin test is more trustworthy than radiocarbon would be good too.
What parts of it have been superceded? What are the inaccuracies? Note that radiocarbon dating is immune to chemical changes (e.g. racemization) which can be affected by storage conditions.
Rogers' vanillin analysis, even if accurate, could have been confounded by such factors and may be useless. I don't see you claiming that Rogers is sloppy, so I will bet that you are a True Believer and will not accept any evidence which does not confirm your desire for authenticity. Or you're a troll.
the british museum's dating was patheticly incompetent
Scientifically or religiously?
failing to account for the role of accumulating bioplastic coating on the fibers
Which makes the Shroud unique among all ancient textiles? (If you can't properly date the Shroud, how could you date anything else? Do you think that scientists don't test their methods for reliability before using them for any work of importance?)
the preservation of the shroud in oil during the late renaissance
Are you saying that cellulose cannot be purified from the material? If you cannot obtain guaranteed-original material for radiocarbon dating, you can't get it for any other analysis either. That includes the vanillin that Rogers is using for his claims... claims which are highly suspect because they make assumptions about rates of chemical reactions under the uncontrolled storage conditions.
and now, as has been demonstrated by use of other dating methods, the selection of repair materials for the dating.
You're not making sense here. Are you telling me that
The very people who maintain the Shroud as a holy artifact
Who by definition believe in its authenticity
Who have every reason to want it to be proven authentic
Who control access to it, and
Who only permitted research on it after a long and difficult negotiation with the scientists involved,
didn't allow anyone to have the proper things to test?
Isn't it easier just to believe that the claims of authenticity are false, and that people are clinging to it because of what they want to be true?
Rogers looks like someone who will believe regardless of the evidence, and is thus someone whose "scientific" results are not trustworthy. The McPaper article quotes Rogers saying " the blood spots on it are real blood", when the actual material of the "blood stains" has been proven to be red ochre. Am I also being asked to believe that Jesus bled red ochre?
given that it is the only proposed physical artifact of a pivotal event in human history, with profound import, compentent pursuit of an accurate and factual account of its characteristics is a very worthwhile endeavour, and entirely undeserving of the deceitful mockery of the poster.
Refusing to accept the reality that the "artifact" is a 14th-century creation says nothing about the dating process, and everything about your prejudices. It's not what its keepers think it is. Get over it.
Warming the troposphere raises the tropopause, which means that the stratosphere (the zone which is not mixed by convection, and can thus support ozone) gets thinner and colder. This gives less room for ozone and more clouds etc. to catalyze its destruction.
If you really wanted to be funny, you'd suggest fighting warming and ozone depletion with sulfur emissions (which make reflective clouds) and NOx and HC emissions (to replace stratospheric ozone with ground-level ozone, aka smog).
... take your engineering skills and apply them in the oil industry allow this industry to be more clean an efficient.
This leaves the following issues hanging:
Emissions from the users of the petroleum products.
Emissions from the producers of the crude oil (e.g. leaking natural gas)
Political/terrorist problems caused by the religious/philosophical tendencies of the suppliers of the crude oil
You can get rid of all of those at once by engineering things so that they no longer need oil, or need a much smaller amount. No amount of re-engineering a refinery is going to cut the emissions from the H2 Hummer it feeds, but you could slash both refinery and vehicular emissions (and OPEC volume) by going to plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Putting up political roadblocks is only going to piss people off and get your agenda nowhere fast.
Yeah, like putting up roadblocks to DDT and phosphate detergents pissed people off by saving the American Bald Eagle and dozens of lakes from turning into disgusting masses of overgrown, stinking rotting algae. We still kill bugs and get our stuff clean, so where's the roadblock?
Ozone depletion depends not only on the concentration of chlorine and such, but also on the weather. The weather determines how cold the polar stratosphere will get, how many clouds will form and consequently how many catalytic ice-crystal surfaces will be available to decompose ozone (catalysis in free air is very slow).
One of the problems is that the stratosphere is warmed by the absorption of UV light by ozone; depleting the ozone reduces the warming and lengthens the period when conditions cause further depletion.
The fundamental goal they are striving for, however, is the for muslim states of the middle east to become Islamic states.
You'd be wrong about that; the goal is not limited to the Middle East, and all democracies are enemies to be attacked. Al-Zarqawi released an audiotape on January 23, and he speaks for the movement when he expresses these sentiments:
"The speaker said democracy was based on un-Islamic beliefs and behaviors such as freedom of religion, rule of the people, freedom of expression, separation of religion and state, forming political parties and majority rule.
He said that freedom of expression is allowed "even cursing God. This means that there is nothing sacred in democracy." He said Islam requires the rule of God and not the rule of "the majority or the people."
Democratic government and freedom of speech, religion and conscience are all on their list. If we left the Middle East and let them turn it to their brand of Islamism, we'd have to go right back to clean out the weapons labs and terrorist camps. We're still dealing with the mess after our neglect of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal we engineered, we cannot make the same mistake again.
I am not questioning intent, I am questioning capability.
You appear to be arguing that these groups can be ignored until we know they have such capability. If we wait that long, we'll be doomed.
Aum Shinrikyo was a japanese cult...
... which had to operate within the hostile Japanese culture it was trying to attack. It was not at all like Al Qaeda, which had close ties to the ISI state security forces in Pakistan which also produced (not coincidentally) Abdul Qadeer Kahn and his nuclear proliferation network. If Iran produced a nuclear bomb (and it looks like they'll be able to do it very soon if not stopped), do you think the mad mullahs wouldn't try to slip it into the US to destroy one of our cities? Especially if it looked like they might lose power without an external threat to use as an excuse to eliminate their opposition?
A.Q. Kahn is considered the person responsible for the end of mutual assured destruction as a geopolitical doctrine. In this era of asymmetrical warfare and jetliners changing skylines in hours, do you really think that this is something we can afford to let go?
In theory the US has a vast and powerful foreign intelligence agency (NSA) that is supposed to be good at tracing and shutting down money flowing into terrorist causes.... All the rest - the tromping around of military, the random security measures applied piecemeal to random points of infrastructure in the US, the arrests of terrorist cells (usually innocent) - that's all for show.
The NSA is involved mostly in SIGINT. The NSA isn't very useful in this regime; how do you trace the finances of an organization which has learned (through our news media) that its safest way of moving money is to carry cash, gold and even drugs around rather than wire transfers or even hawala agents?
I'm afraid that the military stuff is not an option, it is essential. While religious zealots may be able to mobilize people to support would-be mass-murderers, it's going to be more difficult to obtain support if it means the likelihood of tanks rolling through your streets and Marines grabbing the conspirators in house-to-house raids. There's no reason to let a terrorist conspiracy fester and build itself up when we'd send hundreds of agents and a SWAT team to take down a criminal conspiracy with a small fraction of the potential for harm. I pay my taxes so that the government will do its best to stop the people who want to harm or kill me, and living in a foreign country and having murder as one of your sacraments doesn't give you a free pass.
You seem to suggest, incorrectly, that most plants that might benefit from increased CO2 fertilization can't because they are currently nurtient limited. How can you know this? I don't think it's true.
It doesn't take "most". Further, your definition of "benefit" is too loose to be useful. Sure, the growth of most plants will increase to some degree if the concentration of CO2 is increased by 100 ppm. However, CO2 concentration does not change in a vacuum, and the overall effect of all the changes may be to reduce total growth.
The only purpose in your comment seems to be to diminish to nothing the value of CO2 fertilization.
Hardly. It's very useful in greenhouses. The problem is that the influence on the flora (both cultivated and wild) depends on all inputs, including the atmospheric contributions of CO2, water and temperature. A warmer environment can be more productive, unless it is drier; an environment with more CO2 can be more productive, unless it is darker.
You seem to have missed the concept of "balance".
I don't think so, but you've missed the concepts of "mixed blessing" and "too much of a good thing". If we have to orbit huge areas of dichroic mirrors to reflect some of the sun's infrared radiation and thereby cool the earth without cutting the productivity of our biosphere, it'll be an enormously difficult and expensive undertaking. Far better to just find a way to get the energy we want without pumping CO2 into the atmosphere; that way, we could add or subtract warming potential to suit our desires for the climate rather than to suit the current electric demand or the fad for driving trucks to get a gallon of milk.
You seem to have missed the concept of "limiting nutrients". If the plant runs out of phosphorus or nitrogen or potash or light (think "global dimming"), there is not much it can do with a smaller energy burden to grab CO2.
A higher concentration of CO2 means that the plant doesn't need to keep its stomata open as far or as long, which limits its water losses. But if evaporation increases due to higher temperatures, it would not be difficult to consume all the water savings and then some. Less available water means less growth.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that a large expanse of even more highly salinated land is going to contribute much to the local environment.
Leon O. Billig, in a fact article in _Analog_ titled "Defeating the son of Andrew" (11 years ago this month), proposed convection towers on the order of ten times as tall. I recommend this article to everyone as a mind-stretching exercise.
The manufacturers seem to like to hold warranty info close to the vest, but the numbers I've been seeing lately are 25 years.
One of the biggest crimes of the "mega-SUV" deduction is that it locks us in to heavy petroleum dependence for a significant part of the fleet for at least a decade. Raise CAFE standards all you want; unless you send those vehicles to the crusher or raise fuel prices enough to make people drive them less, you will change their consumption little if at all.
Besides, you're wrong about the charging time. A plug-in hybrid using 300 WH/mile and going 20 miles on electricity would need 6 KWH, which you could get from an ordinary 110 volt wall outlet in about 4 hours. Drive to work, plug in, recharged by lunchtime.
It eliminates oil (a politically troublesome fuel) immediately. And as you almost noted, the plug-in hybrid has a unique property: it can change the source of its motive energy years after it was built. Rather than locking yourself in to oil dependence for the life of the vehicle, you could offset the vehicle's fossil-fuel consumption by adding any combination of nuclear, solar, wind, hydropower or biomass. I haven't done the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the replacement of gasoline burned in a car engine at 17% efficiency by coal burned in a conventional powerplant at 33% is a pure win already.- Hybids can do considerably better; for instance, the Accord hybrid is tuned for performance while still delivering fairly good economy (design tradeoff).
- At least one Future Truck hybrid managed to add all the hybrid features to an Explorer while subtracting weight from the smaller engine and superfluous drivetrain components. According to this CSM article:
If that isn't enough for you... read one of their technical reports (not sure if that's the same vehicle or not). You made three errors in that statement:- Maximum power requirements are typically in acceleration, not hill-climbing.
- Running out of battery isn't "stranding", it's just going slower. Like, you know, having to downshift when climbing a mountain with a load?
- These folks appear to be using engines in the ~2 liter department, but they're getting better-than-V8 performance out of the system. Better performance appears to be one of the common elements of hybrids, though the extent to which it is stressed vs. economy is a design tradeoff.
If you don't know what I mean by now...Unfortunately, nobody's trying to hatch it. The "egg", of course, is the electrical grid, and despite the previous programs to promote electric vehicles there appears to be little support for plug-in hybrids which could "refuel" on non-petroleum energy almost anywhere for little additional trouble or expense.
Example: some time ago I was working on a project involving truck clutches, picking up some work which had been done by others. I had no access to the original workers, and I was confused by repeated references to the "warn condition". Some time later I realized that they meant the "worn" condition, but only after a lot of frustration. I got a lot of grief because a bunch of teachers decided to let someone's grammar errors slide.
This is compounded in a world of electronic knowledge bases. An automated search for "worn clutch" is unlikely to find "warn clutch", because they are so semantically different. Writing with such errors becomes useless because it cannot be indexed correctly.
There's an easy way to solve that. Give them once chance to pass the test before entering ed school, and if they fail they spend a term in remedial classes before they can take it again. (If someone's skills are so weak that they can fail it because they had a bad day, they probably need remediation anyway.) Are you labouring under the misconception that regional differences deserve no respect? Sod off, you bugger!To me, term-paper rigor means having one's argument airtight, research complete and references done properly. Spelling and grammar require no work beyond getting things right as they come off the fingers; they are basic, not frills, and shouldn't be shorted.
The citation is implicit in the structure of the forum, and ALL CAPS for emphasis is valid usage according to my in-house style guide.Here is a sentence with two spaces between words.
Here is a sentence using non-breaking spaces ( ) to add extra space between words.
They all look the same, because Slashdot edits out the formatting (they did this sometime in the last two years, it used to work decently). I put in the codes to space properly if they'll ever go back to letting people show what they want.
Hammer 'em on their errors (with copious use of hyperlinks to references) and you'll be surprised how often they fold up and disappear. You often get modded up, too.Oar should eye say, if ewe cant spell a word, ewer knot going two bee able too look it up.
Spelling, grammar and punctuation are basic. You may not hold yourself to the standards you expect of a teacher, but I do. I wouldn't expect an elementary school teacher to know the math and science I do, but if they are teaching spelling and grammar they should be able to do it the right way every time, in class and out. I expect everyone, even the gym teacher, to get things right on report cards and such. Call it a religious duty, the right writing rite. I found your sub-thread when it popped up in metamod and I went to look.If you don't want things to devolve to discussions about spelling and grammar, hold yourself to a high enough standard that nobody raises the issue with you. And stop making excuses for sloppiness among people who ought to be setting the standards!
If the kids don't see anyone who writes with proper spelling and grammar, how are they going to learn it?
There are just too many ways for big, slow companies to be outmaneuvered when the technologies underlying markets are superceded. There are many ways for their managements to miss important trends even when they are paying attention (Microsoft and the Internet is one example). You're making a poor case.
Their shareholders will be selling, and if the oil giants have neither the revenue to support R&D nor the stock price to borrow against, they'll shrink as the market for their product shrinks. If you're charging a plug-in hybrid car and want to be zero-emission about it, are you going to buy an old Arco solar panel because it came from an oil company and they know (knew) cars, or are you going to get the latest production from Kyocera? Are you not going to buy wind power because Jacobs and Bergey never dealt with the automobile market?The point I'm making is that energy in any given form (e.g. electricity) is fungible. Even somewhat different forms (biodiesel vs. petroleum diesel) are close enough to be nearly interchangeable. As long as your output meets specs, it's a commodity on the market. If you've got a more efficient system, your startup can put the established guy out of business.
Plug-in hybrids can replace 80% or more of all motor fuel with electricity, using the wasted off-peak capacity of the network at night. You have to convert... nothing but the vehicles. The electric utilities are in position to eat the oil companies' lunch, if they'd only get their act together with Detroit.Oh, bull. Why would they call the Church frauds, when the Church hadn't been able to perform conclusive tests before either? (Never mind that the first documented appearance of the Shroud is in the 14th century; what was it doing for 1300 years, and how the hell did it get to Italy?)
Two problems with that scenario:
(The "bioplastic" hypothesis is bogus on other grounds, too. Any organisms consuming the material of the Shroud would acquire its radiocarbon date, and the whole "bioplastic" issue seems to have originated with the dating of an artifact made of jade, which contains no carbon itself, by radiocarbon dating of materials added after carving.)
And they haven't had to, for some time. Years ago the only way to radiocarbon-date something was to burn it to CO2, put the CO2 in a tank in a heavily shielded container and use a scintillation counter to measure the radioactivity from the remaining C-14. Because the C-14 measurement was from decays, this took a large mass of material to give a useful signal. Today the measurement is direct counting of C-12 vs. C-14 atoms, and milligram quantities are sufficient.
You keep hyping this non-existent paper trail; the 12 radiocarbon dates are consistent with the first record of the Shroud's existence... in 1357.
But if you believe the radiocarbon dates of 12 samples, none of which are older than 800 years, you're just being cynical? Excuse me if I imagine you putting your fingers in your ears and shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" (Incidentally, the historian.net piece has many suspect statements; how would the Shroud get a coating of calcium carbonate when it is composed of cellulose? All of the hedging appears to be excuses for the Shroud not appearing to be as old as the Christians who believe it to be Christ's burial cloth want it to be. Oh, let us not forget: excuses for the Shroud's keepers to keep bringing in pilgrims and their contributions. I'm sure that the Shroud is a very lucrative relic and its value would be destroyed by an admission that it isn't so important.)
Shell and Exxon-Mobil are probably too big to survive the coming changes. If we get something like the artificial-photosynthesis systems which produce hydrogen straight from sunlight and water, changes could come very fast. A company which has bonds outstanding and suddenly has falling income from its major operations plus devaluation of its major assets (petroleum reserves) could be forced to liquidate. A quick look at Exxon-Mobil's balance sheet doesn't show a lot of debt that could precipitate such a crisis, but in the runup to a collapse that would be likely to change.
There, I'll agree with you. However, alcohols are well within a factor of 2, and we don't necessarily have to get either of them from fossil sources. If we get artificial photosynthesis, you'll be able to turn any old stream of CO2 into methanol; just add hydrogen.Proof that the vanillin test is more trustworthy than radiocarbon would be good too.
Rogers' vanillin analysis, even if accurate, could have been confounded by such factors and may be useless. I don't see you claiming that Rogers is sloppy, so I will bet that you are a True Believer and will not accept any evidence which does not confirm your desire for authenticity. Or you're a troll.
- The very people who maintain the Shroud as a holy artifact
- Who by definition believe in its authenticity
- Who have every reason to want it to be proven authentic
- Who control access to it, and
- Who only permitted research on it after a long and difficult negotiation with the scientists involved,
didn't allow anyone to have the proper things to test?Isn't it easier just to believe that the claims of authenticity are false, and that people are clinging to it because of what they want to be true?
Rogers looks like someone who will believe regardless of the evidence, and is thus someone whose "scientific" results are not trustworthy. The McPaper article quotes Rogers saying " the blood spots on it are real blood", when the actual material of the "blood stains" has been proven to be red ochre. Am I also being asked to believe that Jesus bled red ochre?
Refusing to accept the reality that the "artifact" is a 14th-century creation says nothing about the dating process, and everything about your prejudices. It's not what its keepers think it is. Get over it.Other people have already taken care of that for you, some of them centuries ago.
You can always make more polar bears. Just take Cartesian bears and put them through a coördinate transform.
If you really wanted to be funny, you'd suggest fighting warming and ozone depletion with sulfur emissions (which make reflective clouds) and NOx and HC emissions (to replace stratospheric ozone with ground-level ozone, aka smog).
You can get rid of all of those at once by engineering things so that they no longer need oil, or need a much smaller amount. No amount of re-engineering a refinery is going to cut the emissions from the H2 Hummer it feeds, but you could slash both refinery and vehicular emissions (and OPEC volume) by going to plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Yeah, like putting up roadblocks to DDT and phosphate detergents pissed people off by saving the American Bald Eagle and dozens of lakes from turning into disgusting masses of overgrown, stinking rotting algae. We still kill bugs and get our stuff clean, so where's the roadblock?One of the problems is that the stratosphere is warmed by the absorption of UV light by ozone; depleting the ozone reduces the warming and lengthens the period when conditions cause further depletion.
A.Q. Kahn is considered the person responsible for the end of mutual assured destruction as a geopolitical doctrine. In this era of asymmetrical warfare and jetliners changing skylines in hours, do you really think that this is something we can afford to let go?
The NSA is involved mostly in SIGINT. The NSA isn't very useful in this regime; how do you trace the finances of an organization which has learned (through our news media) that its safest way of moving money is to carry cash, gold and even drugs around rather than wire transfers or even hawala agents?I'm afraid that the military stuff is not an option, it is essential. While religious zealots may be able to mobilize people to support would-be mass-murderers, it's going to be more difficult to obtain support if it means the likelihood of tanks rolling through your streets and Marines grabbing the conspirators in house-to-house raids. There's no reason to let a terrorist conspiracy fester and build itself up when we'd send hundreds of agents and a SWAT team to take down a criminal conspiracy with a small fraction of the potential for harm. I pay my taxes so that the government will do its best to stop the people who want to harm or kill me, and living in a foreign country and having murder as one of your sacraments doesn't give you a free pass.
A higher concentration of CO2 means that the plant doesn't need to keep its stomata open as far or as long, which limits its water losses. But if evaporation increases due to higher temperatures, it would not be difficult to consume all the water savings and then some. Less available water means less growth.