I'm not usually one to defend Disney's practices, but I doubt that the reasoning you described applied. According to this site, The Adventures of Pinocchio was never under copyright in the US:
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_P ublic_Domain.htm
because it was published before the US honored foreign copyrights in 1909. Ironically, the US did not even allow non-US citizens to copyright things in the US until 1891. Even if it had been eliglible, it's not quite as bad as you say. The Disney film was made in 1940. At the time the US copyright expired 28 or 56 years after publication, depending on if it was renewed. The adventures of Pinocchio was published in 1883, which is 57 years.
As for showing the movie in Europe, they could have delayed it until it was out of copyright, but this wouldn't have applied in the US strictly.
It seems to me that lots of people confuse the trade deficit with the national debt.
The trade deficit doesn't have anything to do with the government other than that the government can prevent it by imposing tariffs and restrictions. It simply means that more goods come in than go out. This is a concern to economicists because it means that other countries are getting richer at the indicated country's expense. This is offset somewhat by the fact that the US dollar is hoarded by many people outside the US as a "reserve currency," but if others decide they have enough dollars or the dollar falls out of favor then this compounds the issue.
The national debt is simply treasury bonds and the like. They don't give their bearer any direct power over the government in question. You can't collect them early or put pressure on the government that issues them other than by declaring that you will be refusing to buy them. Government bonds are always paid becsaue the govenment prints the money. This does influence inflation, of course, and has a host of other consequences, but they aren't the same ones as when an individual consistently engages in deficit spending.
So I gather you're either trying to spark people into doing a bit of research by posting trollish comments or you're trying to get someone to argue so you can offer a clever rebuttal. Offering tidbits of history that aren't popularly accepted may get people to bite on your hook for an arguement, but it isn't actually that useful if you're trying to educate people.
I'm doing exactly what I've said I am. I'm trying to push Americans to do a little reading outside of their safe, government approved, sources. Everything I mentioned is quite accepted everywhere except the US.
Pft. While the primary and secondary education I received in California (where the curriculum was chosen more or less by the California Teacher's Association, a non-government body) was doubtlessly slanted, I'm fairly well read. The independent things I've read since then have only backed that information up. You're reading conspiracy into something you have no first-hand experience with. I'm obviously not going to convince you otherwise, because conspiracy theorists never want to give up their favorite conspiracy.
The Revolution? I have to assume you're talking about the Loyalists that helped the British and eventually fled to Canada.
Yes, "The Revolution". Contrary to what you where taught, the first American civil war had nothing to do with ideology (neither did the second, but that's another story). Democratic reforms where progressing naturally throughout the Western world with the idea of responsible government. Representation in government had been allocated for quite some time to what were considered the important parts of society: the nobles, the clergy, and the commoners. Post war America did not look significantly different from this, in many states only landowners could vote well into the 19th century.
You know? Using non-standard terminology may make you feel warm and fuzzy ideologically, but there's a reason we have standards: to aid communication. I'm also curious as to how you know what I was taught, because you've obviously never been to the US.
So the fact that the British suspended colonial legislatures had nothing to do with it or suspended other rights that colonials enjoyed? The colonial point of view was that their rights as Englishmen were being taken away and they had no recourse because none of their peers could stand for Parliament. It's true that their grandchildren probably would have received representation in Parliament like the Irish did (eventually), but even in hindsight, who would have wanted to put up with what the Irish had to before they were granted emancipation (note that this is the British legal term for giving Catholics full citizenship rights)? Also it certainly wouldn't have helped those people. It's true that in most states only land-owners could vote, but that was true everywhere. On the other hand, the US was the first country to allow women to vote.
This first American civil war was a financial dispute between rich colonists and the British nobility. Nothing more.
It's true that Washington, Jefferson, and the like were rich, but the colonial army was made up of the poor colonists by and large. I think if you did some actual research I think you'll find that the majority of Loyalists were rich folk who wanted the protection of the British Army more than representation. You're also overstating the land-owning requirements because almost everyone who wasn't a slave owned land due to homesteading laws. This means that everyone had an interest in taxation and the like. The reason it's not a civil war is because the colonists won and the "country" split, duh. If the colonists had lost it might have been able to be called a civil war by some stretch, but I doubt anyone would have. There's also this common practice in the English language of calling certain types of civil wars revolutions (i.e. the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and even the non-violent Glor
Americans have taken up arms against each other twice in their short history on a large scale, and many more times on smaller scales. Americans enslaved, in some cases, the majority of their population and extracted forced labour. Americans have waged wars of conquest against Mexico and Cuba, and attempted to do so against Canada. Americans have been at war, in some form or another, for most of their history. Americans even declare war on abstract concepts, like drugs, poverty, or terrorism. So I gather you're either trying to spark people into doing a bit of research by posting trollish comments or you're trying to get someone to argue so you can offer a clever rebuttal. Offering tidbits of history that aren't popularly accepted may get people to bite on your hook for an arguement, but it isn't actually that useful if you're trying to educate people.
But I'm curious, so I'll bite although I don't expect to actually learn anything useful. So what was the US's other civil war? The Revolution? I have to assume you're talking about the Loyalists that helped the British and eventually fled to Canada. The only other thing I can think of that you could possibly mean are what used to be called the Indian Wars which were a sporadic series of battles covering about a hundred years with different parties on the one side, which I have to point out wasn't considered a civil war by either side.
And there was no war of conquest against Canada. I doubt that you could even convince very many Canadians that there was. Again I have to assume that you mean the War of 1812, which was provoked by the British Navy kidnapping US sailors and enslaving them. Annexing Canada was talked about at the time and York (now Toronto, more or less) was burned, but that was the extent of it. Talking about annexing the land of an actively beligerent power in not a war of conquest.
Sure, "buying" a third of Mexico (most of which was unsettled by Mexicans, by the way) at gunpoint was not very neighborly, but if it were Britain or France, the US would have installed a thinly disguised puppet government (something France tried to do, incidently; the French puppet's defeat in Mexico is celebrated every year in May) or taken over the whole place outright.
And Cuba? There were people in the US and its government who wanted to keep Cuba, but the US honored its promise to the Cuban people of independence. If you wanted to complain about that incident, the least you could have done is taken the part of the people with the real grievance against the US: the Filipinos who switched from fighting the Spanish to fighting the Americans. The whole episode of the Spanish-American War being fought to sell newspapers is distasteful, but any European power (even freaking Belgium in the Congo) would have behaved much poorer by modern standards in that circumstance based on what happened in Africa and Asia around that time.
Yes, the US had about a hundred years of overt imperialism and some claim that the economic imperialism practiced since then is just as bad. Bad, in some cases; as bad, not even close. France held onto its imperialism until the 60s, quitting only because it didn't have the strength to go on. The US has let go of its imperialism much more gracefully, deciding to let the Phillipines go before World War II (although implimentation happened after).
I won't dispute that there are defects in the US national character and its present government, but harping about the choice of metaphor in a PR campaign?
And more on topic France outlawing "hate speach" (which is a stupid class of laws whose end game is shown in Farenheit 451--any non-thought crime connected to them is already on the books) while they have government oppression of regional languages and minorities (most of the rest of the EU has stopped that particular kind of shenanigans) is hypocritical.
The parent is garbage. The fact that it condemns trans fats, which _are_ bad for you, appears to be lucky.
Oils are partially hydrogenated to make them an easily spreadable or easily meltable solid. It doesn't matter if it's corn, soy, canola, peanut, olive, or whatever oil. To get a butter or lard substitute, we've been doing it this way for the last 50-something years. The problem is that industrial processes use methods that don't discriminate between the cis and trans isomers and produce roughly equal amounts of them. The body doesn't know how to deal with the non-naturally occuring trans isomer and so it accumulates. That's why it's bad. (Beware of products containing partially hydrogenated oils that advertize "0 g Trans fats" because that just means they have a small serving size.)
Incidently, (fully) hydrogenated oils aren't chemically different than naturally saturated fats. It's the _partially_ hydrogenated oils you really have to watch out for.
Different oils have different health values depending on the amount of saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated oils they contain as well as minor fat-soluable ingredients. However, canola oil (as well as olive) is supposed to be one of the better ones (less saturated fat than some of the tropical oils). Regardless, your chemical explanation was completely bogus. It has nothing to do with preservation and everything to do with making a spread and little to do with what is available in the US. If olive oil were cheaper here, they would do the exact same thing and it would be just as bad.
(Fully) Hydrogenated oil means that all the double bonds are "filled in" with hydrogen. Hydrogenated oil is not any different chemically than other saturated fat. It's generally considered more of a heart risk, but isn't bad in small quantaties.
Partially hydrogenated oils means that only some of the double bonds are "filled in." The way this is done industrially creates roughly equal amounts of cis and trans (isomers in chemistry speak) configurations in the remaining double bonds. Only the cis configuration occurs in nature, so human bodies aren't equiped to utilize the trans configuration because the appropriate enzymes can't wrap around them. Because of this they tend to accumulate in the body which is bad. Current advertising rules in the US allows companies to advertize "No trans fat" if there is less than 0.5 g or 0.1 g per serving (I don't know which it is). This is particularly misleading for things like margarine that have a small "serving size" but are often used in higher amounts for cooking. If you see partially hydrogenated oils in the ingredients list, there are trans fats no matter what the advertizing blurb on the package says.
The reason that food companies hydrogenate oils is to get the consistency of the oil correct. Unsturated oils have a lower melting point than saturated oils of the same molecular weight. This makes it easy to extract and separate liquid oils and then partially hydrogenate them to get a solid fat that melts easily and is spreadable.
In general fat-like substances accumulate in your body because the body's active transport systems all revolve around water. Fat is transported passively. This is why you can kill yourself by overdosing on fat-soluble vitamins, but not water-soluble ones. (Vitamin C is water-soluble so it's pushed as a "cure-all" rather harmlessly) Any fat-like substance that your body can't use is a big no-no health wise for this reason. That's why you need to stay away from trans fats and why I'm suspicious of fat subtitutes (although I don't have any specific information on Oleo or the like).
Disclaimer: I've taken University classes in organic chemistry and biochemistry and have an advanced degree in Chemical Engineering, so I could be considered part of the "establishment."
Quincy is relatively close to both Grand Coulee Dam and I-90. Another good choice would have been Moses Lake, but Microsoft et al. probably got better tax breaks from Quincy because it's smaller and more desparate.
Grand Coulee is the biggest of the dams on the Columbia and so it generates the most power. There isn't much of the Columbia that isn't dammed, but most of those are small dams that don't have deep resevoirs and therefore can't generate as much electricity as Grand Coulee. I think most of the small dams serve primarily agricultural purposes.
I lived in Quincy for about half a year in the early 90s and they had signs on the exits to the town that read "Quincy Opportunities Unlimited." I guess someone finally took them up on it.
Liquid and solid phases are the condensed phases. Just as you can vaporize something straight from a solid, you can also condense something straight to a solid skipping the liquid phase.
"Vernacular" means common, everyday usage. It's fairly common for words to have a slightly different technical meanings than they do in the vernacular. What you were doing was interpretting a technical usage as a vernacular usage. The fact that the guy has a doctorate should have tipped you off that he wasn't using the vernacular and that there was a technical usage you weren't familiar with.
An extreme case of this is the word "berry" where the vernacular and botanical usages don't match up at all.
Being a democracy does not preclude a country from tyrannous behavior. This was well known by the founders of the United States which is why the US constitution includes so many checks and balances. They haven't always worked here (and we have some pretty large black stains in our history that were popular at the time), but we're better off than if we didn't have them despite the inefficiencies that they cause. It makes me wonder whether "emerging democracies" such as Turkey and India have sufficient checks and balances in place or whether they are just sufferring "growing pains."
And incidentally, being the "World's Largest Democracy" means you have extra challenges because democracy works best in small, homogeneous communities (and India is much less homogenous than the US). To make it work in large countries requires extra effort. It's still better than the alternatives, but the risks for tyranny are high.
A few nitpicks. They don't substantially alter your main point, but hey a day in which you learn something is a day that's not wasted.
> Our military adventures, be they respectable or not, are not attempts to feed our maw with loot. Our last act of militarized looting was > Mexico, and that was over a century ago -- well before we gained the capability of conquering any country we choose.
All of Spain's remaining non-African colonies in 1898 (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Phillipines, and Guam). We let Cuba go only because Teddy Rosevelt put his foot down about honoring promises. Hawaii was annexed that same year I believe at the behest of pineapple plantation owners like Dole. Still over a hundred years since the last territorial grab, but some would argue (more or less correctly) that we've installed plenty of puppet governments since then or propped up oppressive dictators who suited our intrests.
> IMHO, our great cultural advantage is that our dominant religion is liberal. Protestantism has always defended the freedom to choose other > religions, and therefore the core freedom of thought.
Your reasoning on the other hand is patently false. It's true that Protestantism has been this way recently, but certainly not always and it's certainly not an inherent characteristic of Protestantism. Looking at the histories of Germany and England in the 17th century should give you a clue about this. Lutherans in nothern Germany in the 1600s didn't give Catholics or even Calvinists freedom of religion. It's even still illegal in the UK for a non-Anglican to inherit the throne. In what would become the US, Rhode Island was founded because the Puritans in Massachusetts wouldn't allow freedom of religion. In the 1800s you have the Extermination Order in Missouri and the lynching of Joseph Smith.
Ever soaked for too long and your fingers have gotten pruney? Now imagine that happening to all your cells. If your blood gets too high a concentration of water the extra gets drawn into your cells. Your brain does not like to swell. This is a concentration effect so your body can handle it pretty easily if it's spread out over time, especially if you're eating stuff as well or drinking things that are more than just pure water.
Actually, Standard American is the proper name. The Imperial gallon is different than the US gallon (as well as the other liquid measures). Also, the English used the long ton and we used the short ton in the US.
Imperial and English are synonyms as adjectives as far as units of measurement go.
The math is trivial and integer based. When you realize that it's all computerized, one more multiplication doesn't do much. It's more likely that the heads of NASA are physicists or retired military (the US military uses metric, I believe) which are more comfortable with metric. While the new launch vehicles are shuttle-based, they are new and it's probably seen as a chance to move to something the top-dogs prefer. The engineers actually designing the modules probably would rather keep the old system just because they have a better frame of reference for it, although like I said, the math is trivial.
In the US, engineers use mainly Standard American units which are slightly different than Imperial units in some measurements (liquid volume are the main ones that are different, I think). US scientists use one of the metric systems almost exclusively. University classes in engineering hammer checking units pretty strenuously, something scientists don't get because they use metric. Checking units is pretty useful because of dimensional analysis and it's pretty simple compared to most of the other math engineers do, so most engineers just don't care enough to make an issue out of it. It's also a matter of scale: replacing a beaker is trivial compared to the expense of replacing a large reactor.
There are two main metric systems used in science: SI (International System in French)/mks (meters-kilograms-seconds) and cgs (centimeters-grams-seconds) plus a handful of other non-SI metric units that are in wide use. In the US, SI is mainly taught in University science classes, although sometimes the other units are also mentioned or used. Converting between cgs and SI usually isn't hard, but it isn't consistent (and so may be hard to remember). For instance:
1 newton is 100,000 dyne (units of force).
1 weber is 100,000,000 maxwell (units of magnetic flux).
1 tesla is 10,000 gauss (units of magnetic flux density).
I think the SI system is more common nowadays, although the cgs system is older and in many cases more convenient. Some fields still use cgs and if you're going to read old papers you need to be familiar with it.
Then you have other odd-ball units that are often used because they are more convenient than the standard SI unit:
1 bar is 100,000 pascals (units of pressure--used because 1 bar is very close to 1 atmosphere).
The torr (milimeter mercury) is another metric units of pressure. The atmosphere is also arguably metric (1 atmosphere = 760 torr = 101,325 pascal).
273.15 kelvin is 0 degrees Celsius (units of temperature--they share the same interval).
The angstrom is 0.1 nanometers (units of length--used because atoms are on the angstrom scale).
The calorie (food calories are 1000 normal calories) is 4.184 joules (depending on the basis for the calorie) (units of energy). The calorie is the amount of energy required to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius where the joule is 1 newton*meter. The cgs unit is the erg (10,000,000 joules) and is 1 dyne*centimeter.
The calorie and the torr are the only really weird metric units. Calories are deprecated (because there are several different versions depending on the temperature of the water it's based on and it doesn't convert nicely), but lots of chemists still use them. Torr (often called milometers mercury) are probably not too common, but you do run across them (it was easy to measure before digital barometers became ubiquitous).
One of my personal frustrations is a chemistry program I use at work where you input an energy in kiojoules/mole and the output is in calories/mole. This makes it nontrivial to do iterations (i.e., you need a calculator or something similar).
So you see, metric isn't as simple as you may think when you get to non-everday situations.
The hydrogen economy has absolutely *NONE* of those problems. The only problem it has is efficiency. We have to first charge the battery (separate H2 from H2O). Fortunately, there is a virtually unlimited supply of both H2O (the ocean!) and energy (the sun, wind, waves, etc). We can tap both the fuel supply (water) and generate hydrogen from it, even at extreme inefficiencies, without *ANY DRAWBACKS WHATSOEVER*, once the initial investment is paid for.
The "hydrogen economy" has all of these problems (plus one more) because the the second half of the second sentance above is false--or rather at this point in time we can't tap those renewable sources well enough to matter. In order for the hydrogen economy to be clean we would have to go nuclear and that doesn't seem to be politically feasible, at least in the US. Sure you can get the energy from burning coal, but coal is generally even more dirty than oil and coal gasification or liquification is more feasible than electrolysis to produce hydrogen and would reuse a lot of existing infrastructure once we run out of oil.
The second problem is that it is currently impossible to store hydrogen the molecule (H2) long term. It leaks from any container we try to store it in. This isn't anything that's going to be easily solved. The current solution is to make hydrogen as you need it from steam reformation of hydrocarbons (from oil or coal) or a similar process. This doesn't solve our dependence on fossil fuels. It may increase the efficiency over burning the hydrocarbon in an engine, but not by much.
The third problem is that hydrogen has lousy energy density because it's a low density gas. You either have to store it at high pressure (which exacerbates the leak problem and is too dangerous for consumer applications) or really low pressure to make it a liquid (-423 F = -253 C = 20 K--which is way too costly energy-wise and too dangerous for consumer applications). Liquid hydrogen will NEVER work on Earth (maybe it would work in space if solid/liquid hydrogen is mined from comets or other bodies). High pressure gas may work for large scale applications where you can afford to have a think-walled tank, but compressed gas is really dangerous and I'm doubtful it would be approved for automobiles.
The only real way to solve the energy density problem is to adsorb (look up the difference between adsorb and absorb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsorption) the hydrogen onto a high surface area pourous solid, but we don't know how to make this work with current technology. Some challenges off the top of my head: desorption of the hydrogen to free it (if its adsorbed too loosely you have a leak problem--too tighly and you can't use it); keeping the adsorbent material clean (it is often poisoned by things such as carbon monoxide, sulfur, etc.; reactivation of the aged adsorbent material; controlling the temperature of the adsorbent material tank; gas flow through the packed bed of adsorbent material; crushing of the material resulting in less surface area (and therefore less storage) as time goes on; it's possible that you just won't get enough energy density to make this more attractive than alternatives; weight of the adsorbent material. It's possible that all that can be worked through given enough time and ingenuity or there is some other adsorption scheme that is more feasible, but I bet we can come up with a better battery that is more feasible than a fuel cell before we come up with a feasible method for transporting and storing hydrogen.
By the way, fuel cells are batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell). The difference between fuel cells and conventional cell batteries is that you can have a steady state replacement of the anode and cathode materials quite easily because they are gasses. Other conveniences of fuel cells are: no byproduct to remove on the anode side, you get the cathode material (oxygen) for "free" from the air, and the only byproduct on the cathode side is the ubiquitous water. It's a great concept battery that has real world problems.
You realize that if electricity were cheap enough it would be feasible to replace oil-powered motors and heaters with electrical versions, not just oil-powered electrical plants, right? This would reduce the need for oil to just providing feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries. I think the DOE has thought this through a little more thoroguhly than you.
Your point on deserts not being empty is very valid. However the solar panels I have seen in the desert (to power call boxes and flashing warning lights) are all angled steeply in order to give them the best collection angle. If they go for something like this then there would be lots of open space because you wouldn't want one to block another.
If you didn't spread them out you would also have problems with the ground cover disappearing giving rise to frequent dust storms (which would be bad for solar power). Spreading them out also makes access for repairs and modularity for failsafes and replacement much easier.
The rationale for putting them in the desert is because deserts have quite a bit more cloud-free days and you'll get more power out of Phoenix than you will from Seattle.
> People who want hydrogen for various industries tend to steam reform it from hydrocarbons instead of using this oil > infrastructure you think can transport hydrogen.
This statement just doesn't make sense. Oil (petroleum) is a mixture "naturally occurring" liquid hydrocabons. If you specifically meant methane, well the natural gas structure is there too.
In fact it seems to me that the natural gas infrastructure would be better because it doesn't rely on tankers.
All this doesn't change the fact that this isn't the solution. Hydrogen is desirable as a storage medium becasue we can make it fairly easily and it has only water as a byproduct. It is however a beast to store and transport. If we're going to transport it as methane or oil byproducts then that sort of defeats the purpose of using hydrogen since we can't manufacture them "from scratch" economically and you get the same byproducts that normal oil use gives you instead of water only. It's probably true that fuel cells are more efficient than internal combustion engines and that there are applications for fuel cells that you wouldn't use diesel, gas, or methane for now, this isn't the magical solution that the hydrogen economy is supposed to be.
I work for the company that makes the Space Shuttle's solid booster rockets (in a different area of the same plant). Shortly after I was hired I attended a demonstration where they lit some AP. It just fizzled and barely burned. Then they brought out an old boot that they had soaked in AP and lit it. The boot exploded. AP by itself usually doesn't do much. AP contaminating flammable material like sawdust, wood, paper, clothing can be really nasty. AP will also detonate if contained or prepared a certain way. It's also true that some material burns very nicely, but will detonate when exposed to static or impact.
If you think that AP is harmless, you should check out this Wikipedia article:
Nitpick: The US military contribution to World War I wasn't that large.
Since sometime in the Hundred Years War (which ended in 1453), Paris has fallen 3 times: Napoleonic War, Franco-Prussian War, and World War II. Probably the only European capital to fair better during that time was London only because of Britian's huge geographic advantages. If it weren't on an island, England would have fallen to the French, Spanish, and Germans on numerous occasions.
France's problem is that it went from having the premier army of Europe to the second best somewhere in the late 1800s. Americans' love to see the top dog knocked down and second place is little better than worst (better to be middle of the pack). Post World War II saw globalization and the end of conventional warfare which further limited French power, but I imagine they still have one of the better European armies.
While the French were grossly incompetent in World War I because of lack of adjustment in methodologies due to changes in technology and some atrocious leadership theories, they still managed to keep the Germans out of Paris.
Quantum does not mean "a small amount" it means "amount" as in a discrete amount rather than a continuous change.
Quantum is used in quantum mechanics because classical chemistry said that electron energies (for example) scale continuously, but experimental work shows that there are discrete energy jumps, i.e. there are fractional energy levels that are not phycically possible for a given system. The language itself doesn't care that this happens on the Angstrom level or the kilometer level. A "quantum leap" does not mean a "giant leap" or a "small leap," it means a "discernable, measurable leap."
Spanish speakers (similar words exist for other Romance languages) will if they think about recognize that the word "cuanto" is descended from the Latin "quantum." "Cuanto" is usually translated into English as "how much" or "amount of."
The whole double letter/digraph thing only really affects dictionaries and the like. I admit that it might make things difficult if you're used to looking for something in a phonebook in a different order. I expect the change was made to bring Spanish in line with other languages. Spanish is the only European language that used the Latin alphabet that had official digraphs.
Actually, the whole 'x' to 'j' conversion makes a lot of sense. Compare to Portuguese which didn't make the adjustment. X can have 3 different sounds there. You may wish that they had kept the Greek chi and converted the Latin 'x' to 'cs,' but one way or the other was desirable.
I believe that 'ç' was merged into 'z' because they had the same sound and to get rid of an unnecessary letter. I also belive that the 'f' to 'h' conversion happened before the 'h' went silent.
In the Spanish of Spain they spell Mexico with a 'j.' The 'x' keeps its old sound only in place names and only in Latin America. The Acadamía Real doesn't recognize that spelling.
In current Spanish you have the y/ll overlap which I understand doesn't exist in parts of Spain where they still say it like the 'lli' in English 'million' or the Portuguese 'lh' and Italian 'gli.' The second overlap is the s/c/z which only exists in Latin America and Andalucia. In most of Spain the s is different from the c/z (which don't overlap because it's 'c' before 'i' and 'e,' but 'z' otherwise). The third overlap is b/v. The fourth 'overlap' is the silent 'h.' I'm not sure why they keep the last two other than that they might be a lot more recent or that they help keep meanings separate in written language.
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I'm not usually one to defend Disney's practices, but I doubt that the reasoning you described applied. According to this site, The Adventures of Pinocchio was never under copyright in the US: http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_P ublic_Domain.htm
because it was published before the US honored foreign copyrights in 1909. Ironically, the US did not even allow non-US citizens to copyright things in the US until 1891. Even if it had been eliglible, it's not quite as bad as you say. The Disney film was made in 1940. At the time the US copyright expired 28 or 56 years after publication, depending on if it was renewed. The adventures of Pinocchio was published in 1883, which is 57 years.
As for showing the movie in Europe, they could have delayed it until it was out of copyright, but this wouldn't have applied in the US strictly.
It seems to me that lots of people confuse the trade deficit with the national debt.
The trade deficit doesn't have anything to do with the government other than that the government can prevent it by imposing tariffs and restrictions. It simply means that more goods come in than go out. This is a concern to economicists because it means that other countries are getting richer at the indicated country's expense. This is offset somewhat by the fact that the US dollar is hoarded by many people outside the US as a "reserve currency," but if others decide they have enough dollars or the dollar falls out of favor then this compounds the issue.
The national debt is simply treasury bonds and the like. They don't give their bearer any direct power over the government in question. You can't collect them early or put pressure on the government that issues them other than by declaring that you will be refusing to buy them. Government bonds are always paid becsaue the govenment prints the money. This does influence inflation, of course, and has a host of other consequences, but they aren't the same ones as when an individual consistently engages in deficit spending.
So I gather you're either trying to spark people into doing a bit of research by posting trollish comments or you're trying to get someone to argue so you can offer a clever rebuttal. Offering tidbits of history that aren't popularly accepted may get people to bite on your hook for an arguement, but it isn't actually that useful if you're trying to educate people.
I'm doing exactly what I've said I am. I'm trying to push Americans to do a little reading outside of their safe, government approved, sources. Everything I mentioned is quite accepted everywhere except the US.
Pft. While the primary and secondary education I received in California (where the curriculum was chosen more or less by the California Teacher's Association, a non-government body) was doubtlessly slanted, I'm fairly well read. The independent things I've read since then have only backed that information up. You're reading conspiracy into something you have no first-hand experience with. I'm obviously not going to convince you otherwise, because conspiracy theorists never want to give up their favorite conspiracy.
The Revolution? I have to assume you're talking about the Loyalists that helped the British and eventually fled to Canada.
Yes, "The Revolution". Contrary to what you where taught, the first American civil war had nothing to do with ideology (neither did the second, but that's another story). Democratic reforms where progressing naturally throughout the Western world with the idea of responsible government. Representation in government had been allocated for quite some time to what were considered the important parts of society: the nobles, the clergy, and the commoners. Post war America did not look significantly different from this, in many states only landowners could vote well into the 19th century.
You know? Using non-standard terminology may make you feel warm and fuzzy ideologically, but there's a reason we have standards: to aid communication. I'm also curious as to how you know what I was taught, because you've obviously never been to the US.
So the fact that the British suspended colonial legislatures had nothing to do with it or suspended other rights that colonials enjoyed? The colonial point of view was that their rights as Englishmen were being taken away and they had no recourse because none of their peers could stand for Parliament. It's true that their grandchildren probably would have received representation in Parliament like the Irish did (eventually), but even in hindsight, who would have wanted to put up with what the Irish had to before they were granted emancipation (note that this is the British legal term for giving Catholics full citizenship rights)? Also it certainly wouldn't have helped those people. It's true that in most states only land-owners could vote, but that was true everywhere. On the other hand, the US was the first country to allow women to vote.
This first American civil war was a financial dispute between rich colonists and the British nobility. Nothing more.
It's true that Washington, Jefferson, and the like were rich, but the colonial army was made up of the poor colonists by and large. I think if you did some actual research I think you'll find that the majority of Loyalists were rich folk who wanted the protection of the British Army more than representation. You're also overstating the land-owning requirements because almost everyone who wasn't a slave owned land due to homesteading laws. This means that everyone had an interest in taxation and the like. The reason it's not a civil war is because the colonists won and the "country" split, duh. If the colonists had lost it might have been able to be called a civil war by some stretch, but I doubt anyone would have. There's also this common practice in the English language of calling certain types of civil wars revolutions (i.e. the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and even the non-violent Glor
Hate speach was the justification for banning all books in Ray Bradbury's classic.
But I'm curious, so I'll bite although I don't expect to actually learn anything useful. So what was the US's other civil war? The Revolution? I have to assume you're talking about the Loyalists that helped the British and eventually fled to Canada. The only other thing I can think of that you could possibly mean are what used to be called the Indian Wars which were a sporadic series of battles covering about a hundred years with different parties on the one side, which I have to point out wasn't considered a civil war by either side.
And there was no war of conquest against Canada. I doubt that you could even convince very many Canadians that there was. Again I have to assume that you mean the War of 1812, which was provoked by the British Navy kidnapping US sailors and enslaving them. Annexing Canada was talked about at the time and York (now Toronto, more or less) was burned, but that was the extent of it. Talking about annexing the land of an actively beligerent power in not a war of conquest.
Sure, "buying" a third of Mexico (most of which was unsettled by Mexicans, by the way) at gunpoint was not very neighborly, but if it were Britain or France, the US would have installed a thinly disguised puppet government (something France tried to do, incidently; the French puppet's defeat in Mexico is celebrated every year in May) or taken over the whole place outright.
And Cuba? There were people in the US and its government who wanted to keep Cuba, but the US honored its promise to the Cuban people of independence. If you wanted to complain about that incident, the least you could have done is taken the part of the people with the real grievance against the US: the Filipinos who switched from fighting the Spanish to fighting the Americans. The whole episode of the Spanish-American War being fought to sell newspapers is distasteful, but any European power (even freaking Belgium in the Congo) would have behaved much poorer by modern standards in that circumstance based on what happened in Africa and Asia around that time.
Yes, the US had about a hundred years of overt imperialism and some claim that the economic imperialism practiced since then is just as bad. Bad, in some cases; as bad, not even close. France held onto its imperialism until the 60s, quitting only because it didn't have the strength to go on. The US has let go of its imperialism much more gracefully, deciding to let the Phillipines go before World War II (although implimentation happened after).
I won't dispute that there are defects in the US national character and its present government, but harping about the choice of metaphor in a PR campaign?
And more on topic France outlawing "hate speach" (which is a stupid class of laws whose end game is shown in Farenheit 451--any non-thought crime connected to them is already on the books) while they have government oppression of regional languages and minorities (most of the rest of the EU has stopped that particular kind of shenanigans) is hypocritical.
The parent is garbage. The fact that it condemns trans fats, which _are_ bad for you, appears to be lucky.
Oils are partially hydrogenated to make them an easily spreadable or easily meltable solid. It doesn't matter if it's corn, soy, canola, peanut, olive, or whatever oil. To get a butter or lard substitute, we've been doing it this way for the last 50-something years. The problem is that industrial processes use methods that don't discriminate between the cis and trans isomers and produce roughly equal amounts of them. The body doesn't know how to deal with the non-naturally occuring trans isomer and so it accumulates. That's why it's bad. (Beware of products containing partially hydrogenated oils that advertize "0 g Trans fats" because that just means they have a small serving size.)
Incidently, (fully) hydrogenated oils aren't chemically different than naturally saturated fats. It's the _partially_ hydrogenated oils you really have to watch out for.
Different oils have different health values depending on the amount of saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated oils they contain as well as minor fat-soluable ingredients. However, canola oil (as well as olive) is supposed to be one of the better ones (less saturated fat than some of the tropical oils). Regardless, your chemical explanation was completely bogus. It has nothing to do with preservation and everything to do with making a spread and little to do with what is available in the US. If olive oil were cheaper here, they would do the exact same thing and it would be just as bad.
(Fully) Hydrogenated oil means that all the double bonds are "filled in" with hydrogen. Hydrogenated oil is not any different chemically than other saturated fat. It's generally considered more of a heart risk, but isn't bad in small quantaties.
Partially hydrogenated oils means that only some of the double bonds are "filled in." The way this is done industrially creates roughly equal amounts of cis and trans (isomers in chemistry speak) configurations in the remaining double bonds. Only the cis configuration occurs in nature, so human bodies aren't equiped to utilize the trans configuration because the appropriate enzymes can't wrap around them. Because of this they tend to accumulate in the body which is bad. Current advertising rules in the US allows companies to advertize "No trans fat" if there is less than 0.5 g or 0.1 g per serving (I don't know which it is). This is particularly misleading for things like margarine that have a small "serving size" but are often used in higher amounts for cooking. If you see partially hydrogenated oils in the ingredients list, there are trans fats no matter what the advertizing blurb on the package says.
The reason that food companies hydrogenate oils is to get the consistency of the oil correct. Unsturated oils have a lower melting point than saturated oils of the same molecular weight. This makes it easy to extract and separate liquid oils and then partially hydrogenate them to get a solid fat that melts easily and is spreadable.
In general fat-like substances accumulate in your body because the body's active transport systems all revolve around water. Fat is transported passively. This is why you can kill yourself by overdosing on fat-soluble vitamins, but not water-soluble ones. (Vitamin C is water-soluble so it's pushed as a "cure-all" rather harmlessly) Any fat-like substance that your body can't use is a big no-no health wise for this reason. That's why you need to stay away from trans fats and why I'm suspicious of fat subtitutes (although I don't have any specific information on Oleo or the like).
Disclaimer: I've taken University classes in organic chemistry and biochemistry and have an advanced degree in Chemical Engineering, so I could be considered part of the "establishment."
Quincy is relatively close to both Grand Coulee Dam and I-90. Another good choice would have been Moses Lake, but Microsoft et al. probably got better tax breaks from Quincy because it's smaller and more desparate.
Grand Coulee is the biggest of the dams on the Columbia and so it generates the most power. There isn't much of the Columbia that isn't dammed, but most of those are small dams that don't have deep resevoirs and therefore can't generate as much electricity as Grand Coulee. I think most of the small dams serve primarily agricultural purposes.
I lived in Quincy for about half a year in the early 90s and they had signs on the exits to the town that read "Quincy Opportunities Unlimited." I guess someone finally took them up on it.
Liquid and solid phases are the condensed phases. Just as you can vaporize something straight from a solid, you can also condense something straight to a solid skipping the liquid phase.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensed_phase
"Vernacular" means common, everyday usage. It's fairly common for words to have a slightly different technical meanings than they do in the vernacular. What you were doing was interpretting a technical usage as a vernacular usage. The fact that the guy has a doctorate should have tipped you off that he wasn't using the vernacular and that there was a technical usage you weren't familiar with.
An extreme case of this is the word "berry" where the vernacular and botanical usages don't match up at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry
Being a democracy does not preclude a country from tyrannous behavior. This was well known by the founders of the United States which is why the US constitution includes so many checks and balances. They haven't always worked here (and we have some pretty large black stains in our history that were popular at the time), but we're better off than if we didn't have them despite the inefficiencies that they cause. It makes me wonder whether "emerging democracies" such as Turkey and India have sufficient checks and balances in place or whether they are just sufferring "growing pains."
And incidentally, being the "World's Largest Democracy" means you have extra challenges because democracy works best in small, homogeneous communities (and India is much less homogenous than the US). To make it work in large countries requires extra effort. It's still better than the alternatives, but the risks for tyranny are high.
A few nitpicks. They don't substantially alter your main point, but hey a day in which you learn something is a day that's not wasted.
> Our military adventures, be they respectable or not, are not attempts to feed our maw with loot. Our last act of militarized looting was
> Mexico, and that was over a century ago -- well before we gained the capability of conquering any country we choose.
All of Spain's remaining non-African colonies in 1898 (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Phillipines, and Guam). We let Cuba go only because Teddy Rosevelt put his foot down about honoring promises. Hawaii was annexed that same year I believe at the behest of pineapple plantation owners like Dole. Still over a hundred years since the last territorial grab, but some would argue (more or less correctly) that we've installed plenty of puppet governments since then or propped up oppressive dictators who suited our intrests.
> IMHO, our great cultural advantage is that our dominant religion is liberal. Protestantism has always defended the freedom to choose other
> religions, and therefore the core freedom of thought.
Your reasoning on the other hand is patently false. It's true that Protestantism has been this way recently, but certainly not always and it's certainly not an inherent characteristic of Protestantism. Looking at the histories of Germany and England in the 17th century should give you a clue about this. Lutherans in nothern Germany in the 1600s didn't give Catholics or even Calvinists freedom of religion. It's even still illegal in the UK for a non-Anglican to inherit the throne. In what would become the US, Rhode Island was founded because the Puritans in Massachusetts wouldn't allow freedom of religion. In the 1800s you have the Extermination Order in Missouri and the lynching of Joseph Smith.
Ever soaked for too long and your fingers have gotten pruney? Now imagine that happening to all your cells. If your blood gets too high a concentration of water the extra gets drawn into your cells. Your brain does not like to swell. This is a concentration effect so your body can handle it pretty easily if it's spread out over time, especially if you're eating stuff as well or drinking things that are more than just pure water.
Actually, Standard American is the proper name. The Imperial gallon is different than the US gallon (as well as the other liquid measures). Also, the English used the long ton and we used the short ton in the US. Imperial and English are synonyms as adjectives as far as units of measurement go.
The math is trivial and integer based. When you realize that it's all computerized, one more multiplication doesn't do much. It's more likely that the heads of NASA are physicists or retired military (the US military uses metric, I believe) which are more comfortable with metric. While the new launch vehicles are shuttle-based, they are new and it's probably seen as a chance to move to something the top-dogs prefer. The engineers actually designing the modules probably would rather keep the old system just because they have a better frame of reference for it, although like I said, the math is trivial.
There are two main metric systems used in science: SI (International System in French)/mks (meters-kilograms-seconds) and cgs (centimeters-grams-seconds) plus a handful of other non-SI metric units that are in wide use. In the US, SI is mainly taught in University science classes, although sometimes the other units are also mentioned or used. Converting between cgs and SI usually isn't hard, but it isn't consistent (and so may be hard to remember). For instance:
1 newton is 100,000 dyne (units of force).
1 weber is 100,000,000 maxwell (units of magnetic flux).
1 tesla is 10,000 gauss (units of magnetic flux density).
I think the SI system is more common nowadays, although the cgs system is older and in many cases more convenient. Some fields still use cgs and if you're going to read old papers you need to be familiar with it.
Then you have other odd-ball units that are often used because they are more convenient than the standard SI unit:
1 bar is 100,000 pascals (units of pressure--used because 1 bar is very close to 1 atmosphere).
The torr (milimeter mercury) is another metric units of pressure. The atmosphere is also arguably metric (1 atmosphere = 760 torr = 101,325 pascal).
273.15 kelvin is 0 degrees Celsius (units of temperature--they share the same interval).
The angstrom is 0.1 nanometers (units of length--used because atoms are on the angstrom scale).
The calorie (food calories are 1000 normal calories) is 4.184 joules (depending on the basis for the calorie) (units of energy). The calorie is the amount of energy required to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius where the joule is 1 newton*meter. The cgs unit is the erg (10,000,000 joules) and is 1 dyne*centimeter.
The calorie and the torr are the only really weird metric units. Calories are deprecated (because there are several different versions depending on the temperature of the water it's based on and it doesn't convert nicely), but lots of chemists still use them. Torr (often called milometers mercury) are probably not too common, but you do run across them (it was easy to measure before digital barometers became ubiquitous).
One of my personal frustrations is a chemistry program I use at work where you input an energy in kiojoules/mole and the output is in calories/mole. This makes it nontrivial to do iterations (i.e., you need a calculator or something similar).
So you see, metric isn't as simple as you may think when you get to non-everday situations.
The "hydrogen economy" has all of these problems (plus one more) because the the second half of the second sentance above is false--or rather at this point in time we can't tap those renewable sources well enough to matter. In order for the hydrogen economy to be clean we would have to go nuclear and that doesn't seem to be politically feasible, at least in the US. Sure you can get the energy from burning coal, but coal is generally even more dirty than oil and coal gasification or liquification is more feasible than electrolysis to produce hydrogen and would reuse a lot of existing infrastructure once we run out of oil.
The second problem is that it is currently impossible to store hydrogen the molecule (H2) long term. It leaks from any container we try to store it in. This isn't anything that's going to be easily solved. The current solution is to make hydrogen as you need it from steam reformation of hydrocarbons (from oil or coal) or a similar process. This doesn't solve our dependence on fossil fuels. It may increase the efficiency over burning the hydrocarbon in an engine, but not by much.
The third problem is that hydrogen has lousy energy density because it's a low density gas. You either have to store it at high pressure (which exacerbates the leak problem and is too dangerous for consumer applications) or really low pressure to make it a liquid (-423 F = -253 C = 20 K--which is way too costly energy-wise and too dangerous for consumer applications). Liquid hydrogen will NEVER work on Earth (maybe it would work in space if solid/liquid hydrogen is mined from comets or other bodies). High pressure gas may work for large scale applications where you can afford to have a think-walled tank, but compressed gas is really dangerous and I'm doubtful it would be approved for automobiles.
The only real way to solve the energy density problem is to adsorb (look up the difference between adsorb and absorb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsorption) the hydrogen onto a high surface area pourous solid, but we don't know how to make this work with current technology. Some challenges off the top of my head: desorption of the hydrogen to free it (if its adsorbed too loosely you have a leak problem--too tighly and you can't use it); keeping the adsorbent material clean (it is often poisoned by things such as carbon monoxide, sulfur, etc.; reactivation of the aged adsorbent material; controlling the temperature of the adsorbent material tank; gas flow through the packed bed of adsorbent material; crushing of the material resulting in less surface area (and therefore less storage) as time goes on; it's possible that you just won't get enough energy density to make this more attractive than alternatives; weight of the adsorbent material. It's possible that all that can be worked through given enough time and ingenuity or there is some other adsorption scheme that is more feasible, but I bet we can come up with a better battery that is more feasible than a fuel cell before we come up with a feasible method for transporting and storing hydrogen.
By the way, fuel cells are batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell). The difference between fuel cells and conventional cell batteries is that you can have a steady state replacement of the anode and cathode materials quite easily because they are gasses. Other conveniences of fuel cells are: no byproduct to remove on the anode side, you get the cathode material (oxygen) for "free" from the air, and the only byproduct on the cathode side is the ubiquitous water. It's a great concept battery that has real world problems.
You realize that if electricity were cheap enough it would be feasible to replace oil-powered motors and heaters with electrical versions, not just oil-powered electrical plants, right? This would reduce the need for oil to just providing feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries. I think the DOE has thought this through a little more thoroguhly than you.
Your point on deserts not being empty is very valid. However the solar panels I have seen in the desert (to power call boxes and flashing warning lights) are all angled steeply in order to give them the best collection angle. If they go for something like this then there would be lots of open space because you wouldn't want one to block another. If you didn't spread them out you would also have problems with the ground cover disappearing giving rise to frequent dust storms (which would be bad for solar power). Spreading them out also makes access for repairs and modularity for failsafes and replacement much easier. The rationale for putting them in the desert is because deserts have quite a bit more cloud-free days and you'll get more power out of Phoenix than you will from Seattle.
> People who want hydrogen for various industries tend to steam reform it from hydrocarbons instead of using this oil
> infrastructure you think can transport hydrogen.
This statement just doesn't make sense. Oil (petroleum) is a mixture "naturally occurring" liquid hydrocabons. If you specifically meant methane, well the natural gas structure is there too.
In fact it seems to me that the natural gas infrastructure would be better because it doesn't rely on tankers.
All this doesn't change the fact that this isn't the solution. Hydrogen is desirable as a storage medium becasue we can make it fairly easily and it has only water as a byproduct. It is however a beast to store and transport. If we're going to transport it as methane or oil byproducts then that sort of defeats the purpose of using hydrogen since we can't manufacture them "from scratch" economically and you get the same byproducts that normal oil use gives you instead of water only. It's probably true that fuel cells are more efficient than internal combustion engines and that there are applications for fuel cells that you wouldn't use diesel, gas, or methane for now, this isn't the magical solution that the hydrogen economy is supposed to be.
I work for the company that makes the Space Shuttle's solid booster rockets (in a different area of the same plant). Shortly after I was hired I attended a demonstration where they lit some AP. It just fizzled and barely burned. Then they brought out an old boot that they had soaked in AP and lit it. The boot exploded. AP by itself usually doesn't do much. AP contaminating flammable material like sawdust, wood, paper, clothing can be really nasty. AP will also detonate if contained or prepared a certain way. It's also true that some material burns very nicely, but will detonate when exposed to static or impact.
If you think that AP is harmless, you should check out this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster
AP is easy to disrespect because there's a lot of evidense that it doesn't do much, but a stupid mistake with it can be deadly.
Nitpick: The US military contribution to World War I wasn't that large.
Since sometime in the Hundred Years War (which ended in 1453), Paris has fallen 3 times: Napoleonic War, Franco-Prussian War, and World War II. Probably the only European capital to fair better during that time was London only because of Britian's huge geographic advantages. If it weren't on an island, England would have fallen to the French, Spanish, and Germans on numerous occasions.
France's problem is that it went from having the premier army of Europe to the second best somewhere in the late 1800s. Americans' love to see the top dog knocked down and second place is little better than worst (better to be middle of the pack). Post World War II saw globalization and the end of conventional warfare which further limited French power, but I imagine they still have one of the better European armies.
While the French were grossly incompetent in World War I because of lack of adjustment in methodologies due to changes in technology and some atrocious leadership theories, they still managed to keep the Germans out of Paris.
Quantum is used in quantum mechanics because classical chemistry said that electron energies (for example) scale continuously, but experimental work shows that there are discrete energy jumps, i.e. there are fractional energy levels that are not phycically possible for a given system. The language itself doesn't care that this happens on the Angstrom level or the kilometer level. A "quantum leap" does not mean a "giant leap" or a "small leap," it means a "discernable, measurable leap."
Spanish speakers (similar words exist for other Romance languages) will if they think about recognize that the word "cuanto" is descended from the Latin "quantum." "Cuanto" is usually translated into English as "how much" or "amount of."
It will next occur in the following millenium.
Penultimate means next to last rather than last. Unless there's some last resort beyond Cheyene Mountain, the word you want is ultimate.
Trivia: Antepenultimate is second to last.
Actually, the whole 'x' to 'j' conversion makes a lot of sense. Compare to Portuguese which didn't make the adjustment. X can have 3 different sounds there. You may wish that they had kept the Greek chi and converted the Latin 'x' to 'cs,' but one way or the other was desirable.
I believe that 'ç' was merged into 'z' because they had the same sound and to get rid of an unnecessary letter. I also belive that the 'f' to 'h' conversion happened before the 'h' went silent.
In the Spanish of Spain they spell Mexico with a 'j.' The 'x' keeps its old sound only in place names and only in Latin America. The Acadamía Real doesn't recognize that spelling.
In current Spanish you have the y/ll overlap which I understand doesn't exist in parts of Spain where they still say it like the 'lli' in English 'million' or the Portuguese 'lh' and Italian 'gli.' The second overlap is the s/c/z which only exists in Latin America and Andalucia. In most of Spain the s is different from the c/z (which don't overlap because it's 'c' before 'i' and 'e,' but 'z' otherwise). The third overlap is b/v. The fourth 'overlap' is the silent 'h.' I'm not sure why they keep the last two other than that they might be a lot more recent or that they help keep meanings separate in written language.