Sounds like a bungled job. It's apparent that it wasn't supposed to look like a hit. The victim wasn't going to glow in the dark and measuring alpha particles in a corpse isn't supposed to be part of an autopsy. It seems the last big flap was the umbrella injector of ricin - that was discovered by the puncture wound.
since the perp was leaving a trail, it's probably because the sucker spilled it on himself by accident. Alpha won't penetrate anything.
Besides, 007 woulda just shot him with his ppk or tossed him out the window.
To understand some of what the prize approach can do, one should read Dava Sobel's book, Longitude, which makes a fascinating and instructive look on the effort to achieve a prize of major value.
One thing a prize does is provide an open invite to the nonestablished 'inventors' to participate. While it might bring out some kooks, it also can bring out some who are 'thinking out of the box'. The predisposition of the greatest minds of the time in the longitude prize case was to solve the problem by astronomical means. This included Newton, one of the greatest minds ever. The prize (or some special dispensation associated with it) went to Harrison, a tinkerer and clock builder - and an extraordinary mind in mechanical engineering.
Please note that a research grant given to the Newton Research Lab would not have resulted in a practical solution for use during the common shipboard problems of stormy or cloudy weather.
As for exploitive, it could be if all the work product of the nonwinners were kept by the contest operators and denied use by the contestants. That is seldom the case and the rules of the contest are usually posted for all entrants to read. It is then up to the entrants to decide if the contest is worth their time and investment or not. If it's up to the contestant and there is full disclosure of the contest rules - it cannot be exploitive as it is the decision of the contestant whether to participate.
Please note that applying for grant money is the same thing but with far more exclusivity as one competes in a 'contest' to obtain grant money. Here, who one is or where they work oftimes counts for as much as what one proposes to do. I could just imagine a Harrison type character, maybe call him Farnsworth, living in Nowhere Idaho or some other podunk location tries to compete with some engineer from RCA or GE's Menlow Park facility for a grant to invent a remote transmission movie device or a new and improved hi-fi music type of radio. I doubt Farnsworth would have made it past the first cut for grant money.
There would never be enough money to provide significant grants to every contestant for a prize like the longitude prize. Besides, who would consider providing grant money to the guy that suggested anchoring strings of ships within signalling range across the oceans or some with even whackier nutjob ideas. Once one starts the exclusions, who's to say wether that tinkerer Harrison's audacious idea of an accurate clock mechanism that works in different temperatures and locations with a required unparalleled accuracy never before achieved by all the professionals in the industry could possibly sound more reasonable than setting up strings of ships across the oceans.
The idle rich? Except for those in DC pretending to represent the poor, there are very very few around. Most of the rich who aren't working a job are concerned with preservation of capital and minimizing risk. Investing big bucks in speculative enterprises is often not associated with either of those efforts. I guess Paul Allen? was the idle rich guy that put up a bunch of money for the x-prize winning team. I wouldn't be surprised that if you worked as hard as he did or does, that you might make it into your 'idle rich' category too, but I doubt you've ever come close to working that hard.
From what I've seen, it's the much less rich gamblers who take the big chances and do things like fund wildcat drilling where an investment in multiples of $10,000 can either bring a whole lot of money in or totally dissappear like the chips on a roullette table. Then again, that's a lot like being a farmer - where 10s of thousands of dollars may be spent on crop seed and fertilizer as a bet that it's going to rain so much over the next few months and not rain any after that for a month.
Finally, there is the potential benefits of winning the prize and the benefit of achieving something even without winning. That something may be a product or it may be the knowledge and experience that ha
Well, it probably will take a miracle to overcome some of the problems the ceo was queried about but didn't answer. Nothing works for efficiency like leaking out $5 worth of electricy over night.
Having seen the advances made in batteries over the last 2 decades, it does look like this stuff might hold some fantastic opportunities. The sheer forces being held inside those batteries due to separation of charges though have got to be incredible - assuming that there is significant amounts of charge rather than energy tied up in chemical changes. It takes lots of energy to move objects from one place to another and whenever that energy cuts loose over a very short time, it goes into tearing up and radically heating up stuff around it. To equate gasoline energy with explosive energy - it seems like its either 5 or 25 sticks of dynamite per gallon which weighs just a few pounds. Mileage depends substantially on the weight of the vehicle and passengers/cargo and if that's a given, the mileage for various types of cars (gas,diesel,electric) are going to be fairly similar as well because the efficiencies tend to be fairly close (order of magnitude close - not necessarily 2-5% close). That means to have any decent distance between recharges, there is going to be a serious amount of explosive energy stored in the battery - even if it takes some outside conditions to help. Anyone here ever see the big table top capacitor with the 1/4" nichrome wire short experiment in elementary school??? Suffice to say it's about like a fire cracker going off - and that is nothing compared to the energy in this battery.
As for the 10 minute quick charge, that's probably only for the corner fuel stop. A 15kwh battery set - which I thought was the power mentioned for 100 pounds of weight - would need about 400 amps at 220 volts to fill it up (assuming perfect efficiency). At home, the need for a 10 minute charge is far less than being somewhere else and needing to refill. There, a 60 minute recharge would be acceptable to most people most of the time. That requires about 66 amps - which can be handled by most modern electric breaker boxes which can usually handle 200 amp service to homes. For those that don't have that capacity, 4 hour charging would permit usage in the realm of electric stoves and electric clothes dryers.
The big question is where is all this excess electric power generation going to come from if such vehicles suddenly gain mass popularity. Hmm - maybe it'll come from some big old ugly surplus generators sitting behind Friendly Fred's service station - the ones with no pollution controls which haven't been maintained since 1965. OOPs!
If it was a conspiracy, it's by a democrat since bush junior is pushing hydrogen fuel cells, not electric/battery technology. THis doesnt support his position, it implies his position is wrong and that other things are on the verge of sucess without the need for billions of gov. boondoggle dollars.
Texas is and has been a hotbed for technology, usually on more practical real world applications than one sees on the two coasts so having a high tech battery company here in texas is nothing unusual.
That battery company CEO is out to push his company as much as possible. If he chose the night of the state of the union to do so intentionally - it's because he hoped to get more publicity for himself and his company by doing so.
CEO of a big company requires people skills and doesn't really require technical skills. It is the top of line management. CIO is a highly technical position that is a staff position requiring relatively little people skills. Going from CIO to CEO is about as traumatic a change in job requirements as the opposite - going from CEO to CFO. Can you imagine the disasters waiting to happen for the typical CEO to switch over and become CIO?????
This is not to say that someone cannot have all skills and be sufficiently talented to do well in both - just rather unlikely and uncommon. How many professional grade baseball players are also professional grade football AND basket ball players???
A CEO has to be able to sell - products and ideas - to employees, customers. He has to be able to decide based on imperfect information where the direction of the company needs to be and has to rely on virtually everything being done by others.
While that's probably a given, judging by the way the rest of winders works, these failures at validation might just be more winders bugs. It's really hard to figure out if mickiesoft is actually getting screwed that bad or if there's just a substantial failure rate in validation attempts due to their crappy products.
Considering that so many of the computers sold come from relatively few very large companies, it's hard to believe that even 25% of the market is a bunch of small shop made clones done by people that only use illegal copies of winders. That would mean that one or more of the majors would be involved in the fraud - which would be worth mickiesofts efforts to go after them - which they haven't.
That leads me to believe that it's a matter of poor, improperly function products which require multiple tries to get it right. Years of frustration and personal experience with mickiesoft tends to add support this assumption.
All things have their potential disasters - tis only a matter of degree or size of the thing that determines the degree or size of the potential disaster.
It's nice that the MIT researcher wasted lots of research money to determine that viable commercial applications of geothermal power are in fact viable.
As for the ultimate potential disaster of dependence on geothermal for massive amounts of energy in the future is that it could bring on the onset of the core solidifying and destroying the earth's magnetic field - which could result in the loss of most of its atmosphere - so much for global warming continuing to be a problem. I sorta doubt that at current energy usage, the world depending totally on geothermal for a few centuries would amount to any serious detriments at current usage rates but more will be needed in the future. Then again, smaller disasters tend to outnumber larger ones.
Also, all this attention on co2 production might lead to a shortage of it ith massive plant die-offs and subsequent catastrophes.
Maybe, it's time to invest more in headache remedy companies.
"The "peak oil" claim is not that we are about to have no oil. It is that the world's production rate of oil is about to peak and decline (just as the USA's production peaked in 1971 and declined, and any individual oilfield of significance you care to name). What this means is that prices will be much higher and more volatile, and the key to managing energy costs is cutting demand"
Drilling restrictions severely affect where we can drill. Prospecting for oil also tends to be limited by just how much estimated reserves are around as well. Spending money on something not needed for 50 years is not very popular among competent corporate executives and less so among incompetent ones. The availability of cheap oil is now extremely limited due to the volitile political situations where it is located. There will be no cutting of demand world wide - no one controls china outside of china and their demand can outstrip the rest of the world.
Methane is a far more serious ghg than co2 by a factor of at least 20 times.
As for the melting permafrost in siberia - seems like that is in the northern hemisphere - where the earth will be closer to the sun during the summer months due to the earths precession - which would facilitate the melting of permafrost and ice with an expected equivalent relative cooling in the southern hemisphere.
The current manmade global warming stuff is also a media driven thing - this time with some 'scientists' jumping on board the gravy train. Also, the political hacks are on board - gov. restrictions is something they understand and love to do. If we'd listened to that butterfly collector back in the early 70s, we'd have put lamp black across the north and exacerbated whatever situation we seem to now be finding ourselves. It's still the same alarmist industry with the same suspects - just a different message, one totally contradictory to their first one.
"If you want to get technical, O2 is the real culprit." I'm not sure if it was you or me that left out the 'H' but that should be h2o which, as I recall, causes 96% of green house gas effects. Maybe you could save the planet from global warming by cutting down all the rain forests.
Considering that it has been warmer and colder in the very recent past (geologically speaking) and apparently the co2 concentrations tend to follow (lag) temperature changes, it would seem that we cannot be sitting on the verge of an unstable equilibrium point never before reached or exceeded.
As for axes, beavers don't need them to dam rivers and turn them into meadows. Forest fires work much faster than chain saws for that matter and the occaisional comet/asteroid impact is virtually instantaneous. Besides, you are talking of impacting very small areas compared to global. Even a dead fire ant creates a footprint of destructive pollution where it dies.
Not all political scum are merely in it to get rich. Some are true believers and believe they know more about how to run people's lives than anyone else. Usually, those true believer types know very little about anything, much less than the average dolt on the street knows about many things. Also, not every outfit greasing the skids and lining the pockets in gov. is out to destroy the world - usually they're out to make a buck and sometimes are there merely to keep from losing lots more bucks than being there is costing them. There's even a few who are quite concerned over things.
I don't think I mentioned electricity but I was actually thinking of coal - as in coal mines. But then, that's mostly the actual oil companies and not the oil industry which is a myriad of various types of companies, many of which are totally dependent on the oil industry and have severe ups and downs as the oil companies themselves change activities and locations. Relative to this whole industry, the major oil companies themselves are quite small.
The reason bush is pushing the h2 industry is that the infrastructure exists substantially and that the hydrogen from fo
you might have a million detectors - but that can be represented (addressed)by 20 bits of data. Then again, you've got no more than about a 90% chance at best of the photon regisering 1 electron in the sensor - assuming that it is not blocked by a floating piece of dust.
The whole experiment was an optical fifo- and a fifo by nature must retrieve without failure.
However, good luck finding a 30m photon and good luck detecting it. It's going to be far below the thermal noise and interference.
When dealing with such low energy small things as photons, it's probably going to take a bunch of them for error free results, definitely in the approach described.
It looks like the article was written emphasizing an erroneous concept rather than the real benefit of the experiment. The article should probably be about the ultra slow velocity of light in the medium. The information is assuredly coded statistically by many photons in order to be decoded. Firing a photon into a young's double slit experiment is very much like this experiment. The interference fringes will be created even with one photon in the system at one time - the same as if it's illuminated by a bright light with visible results. However, a single photon only occurs at one spot on the target and the final fringe pattern only shows up after many many photons have gone through the system.
While one can say the whole thing is 'encoded' in each photon because changing the layout (say from UR to BYOB) will result in a different pattern, these patterns will only become apparent (or be decoded) after numerous photons have painted it.
It was vaguely reminiscient of a holographic setup but didn't seem like it really was though.
If the information provided the reporter was about storage, it sure didn't seem like that was the topic of the presentation. Besides, I wasn't particulary impressed by the delay time amount (equivalent to light traveling through 30 meters worth of free space). Granted it's a very high index of refraction or a serious reduction in the velocity of light in that medium but I thought there were higher ones than that being done fairly recently. There wasn't even a mention of just how fast the light was traveling through the medium (or at least not one that made it to my short term memory).
No, I'm sure the whole story had to be about how much information was supposedly being encoded on a single photon and I have trouble believing that the reporter would have done it on his own - implying the one being interviewed was the source for the bent of the story. This implies the interviewee believed it. Either that or the reporter was a scientific reporter and was a major screwup.
'Variations in cloud cover due to solar variations still do not compete with anthropogenic CO2 as far as climate is concerned.'
Actually the danes determined it was the cosmic ray flux that affected the cloud formation rather than variances in solar intensity. Clouds are far more important that co2 in temp. effects. Other than minor observations from this area, I don't know what the true variations in cloud cover are due to solar variations - other than that here over a couple of years (along with possible other factors) appeared to produce substantial differences and temp. effects short term are heavily associated with cloud cover here.
I'm well aware of the weather girls reference to decertification. It's the same thing - shutting up people who don't subscribe to your doctrines.
As for food sources which produce less methane - well - from what I understand of vegetarians - they simply replace cows in producing it.
Cow's do produce a nice fertilizer although it is an excellent source of methane - capable of being used effectively to provide methane for cooking in some primative 3rd world areas. It's nothing new - except for the popular media who recently announced that bovines were responsible for more gcg effects than mankind's entire transportation system. While ghgs come out of both ends of all creatures, I've never tried to analyze which end produces the most.
Global warming is far superior to an iceage. What's more - it's more amenable to vegetation being a sink for co2 as well as providing more food. It looks like we are at the trailing end of an unusual warming trend which has lasted far longer than average. While it's been warmer before - when man wasn't a factor, it seems that warm periods are the rarity in more recent geological times.
I don't plan on getting involved in any climatic research as it interests me relatively little so I don't expect to discover any fudged data until the scandal makes the news media.
Despite living in the southern most united states where it seldom freezes, I don't plan on investing in water skis nor in getting rid of my heavy winter coat.
h2o vapor is the predominate ghg. Clouds are very serious in their immediate effects on temperatures and hence on energy absorption available to heat sinks. Cloud formation is where the solar sunspot cycle tends to have its most serious impact. The presence or lack of cloud cover makes tremendous differences. It's far more important than the minor radiation variances which occur in the cycle. While the sun is variable over all time frames it is invariably heating up in the long term and will ultimately broil everything in this region of the solar system. Whether we'll be around for that is quite debatable as there are many transient factors which may get involved to eliminate life on earth prior to this.
The religious global warming crowd I referred to would have stopped those danish scientists from publishing were they to have had the power and the whole point of the thread is that weather girl's public pronouncements to punish people for doing such research.
I find it impossible to believe your statement on measuring other factors and acccounting for them very well. It's been only a few months that bovine flatulence made the news. Granted that there is a great deal of difference between algore, the weather girl and the popular press and people who actually do climate studies but there seems to be a number of the latter who belong in the category of the former who are fueling the hysteria of the former. Also, while the sources I mentioned are known, there is the possibility of sources not known and hence unaccounted for which by definition cannot be discussed in any specifics.
Co2 is only a moderate ghg of a very small fraction of the whole. It's far less effective than methane as I recall. That's why the bovines are so effective. While these might be manmade or caused by man, these are not due to man's technology which is the main excuse for man not being a part of nature. Considering there are thousands of pounds of insects and termites per person and that they, being extremely small, have a much higher metobolic rate than man and hence create far more methane and co2 per pound means that there has to be a great deal of technological pollution created per person in order to have enough for similar effects. The average amount of technological activity per person is far less than that of the US or western europe and is more towards burning a few lumps of coal or tree limbs for the technological pollution contributions of most of the human populace.
Of course, fossil fuels contain carbon that was once part of the atmosphere in the form of co2 so even burning oil and coal is merely returning to the atmosphere that which was already present at one time.
As for the data I mentioned, our direct observations are limited to long ago when the wife was doing mainframe statistical package applications at a major university. She was forever getting pestered by grad students from the social science area trying to get the statistics to back the conclusions desired by their advisors. The statistics could not be manipulated in any legitimate fashion to provide the desired conclusions (in fact they refuted them). Ultimately, they simply ceased trying to have the data processed, choosing instead to fudge the data and results themselves and taking the risk of ultimate discovery rather than the certainty of failing to please their advisor and having to drop out of graduate school. The same socialist ideology was pushing them as is pushing the mancaused global warming. It's an ideology that believes the end justifies the means and the truth is whatever promotes the socialist agenda. Such a philosophy makes it fairly easy to try to fudge the data.
While I'm neither a climatologist nor a planetary scientist, I find some of the stuff fairly interesting as it fits a bit more into some of my actual interests. And, I tend to be sketical about many things thought to be concluded (as well as most of the alternatives). After all, the flat earth and earth centered universe were both ideas that were firmly held for centuries and believed by some of the most brilliant of all time. What can I say other than - they were wrong.
This 1 pixel camera is one of the most stupid ideas I've ever encountered and shows a total lack of comprehension on the topic.
First off, all those mirrors are mechanical things which require control circuitry and mechanisms and complex mechanical design - at least compared to the a piece of flat silicon with something etched in it. And, to some extent it seems like someone looked at a complex cmos area sensor and shouted "eureka I done found it - we could invent a simpler gizmo - like maybe take a sheet of paper and curl it up on a cylinder, spin it and run a light and photocell along the top and scan that sheet of paper and send the scan over the telephone line".
What's worse is that light consists of photons, each with around 1-2 eV of energy so they are quite discrete at visible wavelengths. That means at a given light intensity level that to actually get a photo image, it takes a sensor of a certain size so much time to aqcuire enough photons to register its relative intensity. That must be done for each pixel of the final image. If the time required is 1 millisecond per pixel - then for an 8 megapixel image, it's only gonna take 2 hours to capture the data - in which nothing better change. I'm sure the kids will be happy to sit still and hold their breaths that long.
In computer terms, this is the equivalent of looking at a future Cray parallel processing supercomputer, shouting eureka i found it, and then proceeding to (re)invent the turing machine.
The use of mechanical systems to achieve image capture (or use to achieve higher resolution images) has been around for decades. The original tv camera used a series of holes in a rotating disk to achieve a serial stream of video data. When ccd arrays were small, expensive and with lots of defects, linear ccds were used with rotating mirrors to achieve higher resolution.
In fact, with modern processing, adding in random vibrations (directional variations) into a camera mount can be used to achieve higher resolution images from a video stream than the pixel count of the sensor.
The notion of digressing to what looks like a much more expensive technology to achieve vastly limited and inferior results to existing technology makes me wonder why these guys have yet to be awarded the darwin award of the century. Maybe that's because they didn't know to plug in the lamp when they were sticking their tongues in the empty lamp socket.
If the amount of terrorism is a measure of how our foreign relations are, then they have become much better in the last 6 years. 9/11 was the culmination of a decade of increasing terrorist attacks on the US. Terrorists may or may not be state sponsored - and foreign relations are relations with states.
As for being less of a dick - well - probably a better word might be duck - as in dead duck. Or perhaps, ostrich might be a more suitable bird for your prescription.
It's a changing world out there. Back in the cold war era, our enemies only wanted to rape, pillage and enslave us after taking all we had. That was the good old days. Note that there are plenty of nostalgia types out there trying to bring it about again - that is the rape pillage and enslave part not the cold war which was the resistance to that happening. Note too that this was the wet dreams of a small handful of rulers and not the desires of the populace already under their boot heels. Our current enemies aren't so nice and are not the same. They'd rather see us dead than alive and this is a bottom up mentality shared by all involved with radical islam. In fact, many of these radical islam types are eager to die just for the priveledge of killing you and your family. In this case, the leadership has harnessed and perverted a religion (a religion easily perverted) to achieve this goal (heck - who wants to go die for brezhnev and the polit bureau).
Until terrorists are dealt with more brutally than terrorists themselves act, they're going to be around. Then there's the private sector - criminals who might also be enticed into the act.
It's an unfortunate waste of resources to deal with terrorism and it can easily lead to serious losses of freedom. The big gov. type
Skepticism in science is what generates progress in science. It's good. The fact is that this weather girl has shown us she has a religious faith and that blasphemy against it must be stamped out. That isn't science, it's religion and politics which tends to expose more light on just what the manmade global warming cabal is all about.
As for northern europe - enjoy the warmth while you got it. The earth precessing every 23000 yrs or so seems to be in the cycle part where the northern hemisphere gets summer time while the orbital distance is closest. Hence, it's getting warmer up here and colder down there. It'll be around for quite a while of course but then, it's gonna get really cold.
As for these nonscientists pushing their religion. Just imagine what would have happened if they'd succeeded in invoking this total censorship back in the 1970s when these same clowns were predicting the next iceage was going to be happening (at present time). No one would have been able to say wait, stop, it's getting warmer - and if politicians had gotten involved, we'd be in the midst now of wasting scarce economic resources trying to melt down glaciers to save us from the iceage.
Everyone condemns the catholic church for making a sun centered universe a heresy back a few hundred years ago. Actually, that wasn't as bad as this since the first proponents of it were actually a heresey - a sun worshipping cult. Unfortunately for the church, the reality of cosmology was on the side of the cult and the previous evidence - like parallax of stars - was simply too small to measure back when this rather ancient alternative was first presented - hence the incorrect model won out for centuries since is appeared to produce better results and the more correct model was falsified due to the parallax detection failure.
So much for science being infallible absolute fact that should never be questioned - especially by a thinly guised religion and political agenda trying to pass as science. Perhaps the weather girl is afraid that some of the fraudulent 'research' supposedly done to prove her pet theory might get discovered to be false before these stalinists can establish full control over the situation.
BTW, I live in southern Texas where it seems that the climate does cycle some with the 11 year sunspot cycle. We're at the absolute minimum now - and it's all rainy and cloudy. We seem to have droughts during virtually every sunspot maxima, except for the periodic arrival of hurricanes and some wet cold fronts which sweep moisture in. At present, we've been drenched for the last week by el nino generated clouds. This is certainly better than 2 yrs ago when we had 60 weeks with no rain and virtually no clouds.
There was an interesting tv show presentation by some Danish scientists who discovered the link between sunspot cycles and cloud formation (cosmic ray flux) and their attempts to get the information out past the global warming religious crowd - like that weather girl- although she would have probably tried to get these guys fired from the university). They had the cameras running on some of this cocktail party scientific crowd and their responses. Those pictures were worth more than a thousand words in exposing some of those people for the fools there are.
I suspect man's contributions to global warming might forestall the coming ice age - by only a few days rather than by a few years. That is assuming that co2 actually does have a measureable effect and that its increase is in fact due to man rather than to more important factors - things like insects, plant dormancy, termites, bacteria, plankton activity, volcanic activity, forest fires and possibly other factors. Each of those individually can exceed man's technilogical contributions. Heck, we just learned cows have a greater effect producing methane than man's transportation system. OOPs!
This controversy isn't the first time that some have fudged data when it couldn't be made to agree with their conclusions, not that
Sounds like we need more plankton. Note that we are not on the verge of running out of oil. I doubt we are on any verge of the ability of the earth to absorb co2 either. Whats more, all that fossil fuel carbon came out of the atmosphere to begin with anyway. Burning it just returns it back to the atmosphere to be absorbed again by life for the cycle.
If you want to get technical, O2 is the real culprit. While it's down 50% from several million years ago, it can still be a problem for some life forms. Of course this reducing atmosphere is a second generation one - our original was substantially methane.
As for man and his technology - we're a tertiary effect at best - outdone by more prevelent life forms with much higher metobolic rates along with factors yet to be discovered along with factors whose effects and interactions are not fully known. If it suited the alarmist industry, we'd be back to expecting the next ice age and probably trying to put lamp black on the glaciers to melt them - like they wanted to do back in the 1970s. However, the political scum wants control and restrictions so they switched to warming.
The earth will do whatever it's going to do and man's influence is going to affect only the timing and probably more in a measure of days rather than years when it comes to delaying or shortening the time frame. And, like the alarmist's whinings of the 70s, the actions they want to take could well exacerbate the situation rather than help it - even if only by a miniscule amount.
As for the oil companies - they're energy companies. Also, there is an entire industry there with myriads of companies of all sizes. Note that haliburton is a very large engineering/construction company with substantial activities outside of the oil industry - like nuclear plant construction, but they are not an oil company and if somewhere in their bowls, they buy and sell oil - which I seriously doubt, it's too small a fraction of their operation to be of any consequence. The power of propaganda has been astounding in the last several years.
The real oil industry companies are relatively young, innovative and used to handling major challenges - quite different from gov. and other more bureaucratic established companies. They will deliver what the customers want at a rather good price compared to what is actually possible.
As I said earlier, i don't care that much about the problem other than to note that there are a number of technologies available and the free market will select the best one - given the chance. To assume that the hydrogen fuel bs push by the gov. is any different than anything else gov. ever does about virtually anything is to miss understanding its nature. By it's very nature, it is a monopoly that controls by restrictions and rules by force. It can easily be an obstacle to advancement but it is never the solution to the problem.
The oil companies are energy companies. They don't care what they provide and in fact, do care about any prospects of running out and so spend lots of money to find new sources of energy - sometimes years in advance. Part of the reason we've only got so many years of energy left is that it becomes prohibitive to look for more that won't be needed. Major investments like refineries don't pay for themselves in just a few years so there is much longer term planning than the usual 5 year scenario of many businesses. As for the urban myths about 200 mpg carborators suppressed by the oil companies, it's just another perpetual motion machine promoted by shysters because there isn't enough energy in the fuel to handle it - at least for a full sized (and weight) vehicle.
Because of the 'investment' in researching the epicycle model, it was significantly superior to the sun centered model early on. Having a big gun or two behind it did not hurt either and the apparent falsification of the concept of parallax virtually doomed the actual description of reality to obscurity until much later.
Applying science though is really engineering which is not concerned with the nature of nature but only the consequences as they are known. Elves, smoke and mirrors can and do substitute for the knowledge of nature and that can work well for engineering. The antikythera clock mechanism seems to exhibit a rather good accuracy and correct gear ratios for the motions it does as well as being a great example of technologies lost for many centuries.
The acceptance of using turn the crank wierdness whose only claim is a certain usefulness and accuracy in making predictions of nature currently passes for science now and so far defies conceptual interpretation of the underlying nature. In other words, quantum mechanics appears to almost always give right answers but it might as well be by elves smoke and mirrors. And, there's no telling just where or when it's going to blow a gasket and totally fail to render correct predictions about nature. It's undoubtedly the epicycle theory of modern science, but at present, there doesn't seem to be anything in the way of a seriously competitive theory which might be far closer to reality.
As an example of this absurdum is what happens with a photon traveling from a distant galaxy to our eye through a telescope some evening. When a photon is emitted, according to quantum, it sends out an instantaneous pilot wave in all directions and receies the information back as to deciding which way to go. Of course a distant one would have to have that pilot wave travel into the future (as well as into the distance) because the earth might not yet have formed - much less man existing and creating telescopes and of course the solar system isn't even in the same part of space yet. Then, the pilot wave must return back to its point of origin and instruct the photo to head out in that direction. I'm afraid I really don't buy into that - even though I cannot explain young's double slit experiments using single photons without such malarky.
Actually, I get it rather well, enough not to waste much time analyzing it, much less investing in designs or proposals for designs. I'm not really any sort of advocate for developing it or so far as gov. is concerned For them to develop anything in this area, there is almost a certain probability that the results would be to distort the market and cause the selection of an inferior approach - maybe like hydrogen fuel cells - and crowd out or delay develoopment of the superior answer -- perhaps for a long time.
You missed my point on the 'cracking' though. There are some efforts to make portable small cracking units - which could potentially eliminate the need for high pressure tanks scenario - keeping the fuel in its hydrocarbon liquid state - like in the form of gasoline - until usage needs dictate it should be converted for immediate use. It still doesn't preclude the need for way too much support equipment though.
H is a very tiny atom and h2 a very small molecule. That means the stuff tends to get through as leaks even when the leak is so tiny that larger molecules cannot escape. Also, if I recall properly, h2 has the tendency to cause materials to become weak and brittle.
However, when going to intermediate storage systems, there are always significant losses so the need for storage must have serious justifications - like photovoltaics, and anything that can be described as a heat engine is theoretically going to be less than 50% at best too. H2 might offer a good storage and transport (via pipeline) means for the output of energy from distance reactors or solar arrays - aside from the previously mentioned problems associated with it.
Some of my point in the previous post was an offer at an explaination of why h2 is being pushed - ie - association of the approach with existing hydrocarbons companies and an existing infrastructure reduce the amount of distribution infrastructure creation. This existing distribution infrastructure and the need for infrastructure that can handle future fuels is probably the most critical aspect of change to new fuels. Also, since it will likely be an evolutionary process, whatever works that is sustainable and can meet reasonable pollution standards will likely be where the evolution stops - possibly for a long time. Synthetic gasoline will most likely be this point - whether is is some form of gasohol or a more pure form of 'regular'. Note that the gasohol which has had decades of gov. involvement is probably more of a boondoggle and a boon for archer daniels midland company than a good solution. On the other hand, willie the pothead nelson and his BioWillie organic diesel fuel which is being sold (at a premium price) could be the start a serious trend - perhaps with little assitance from the gov.
Note that during this last fuel price crunch, the cost of diesel went from less than the cost of regular to the same or more than the cost of premium (relatively speaking). While there can be variations due to diverting production over to winter heating oil for a time, the costs for diesel did not go down with the rest of the gasoline. Also, most of the diesel gets used for the transporation of food and products (making it rather non elastic in economic terms) which increase the costs of all goods. Evidently, during the crunch - the gov. slipped in the requirements for lower sulpher content - driving up the cost of production and hence a permanent higher price for diesel. That was very nice of them - and they didn't even consider dropping the exhorbitant taxes on every gallon of fuel - which amounts to several times the profit margin.
What happens when the wrong model provides more accurate observable results than the 'right' or more correct model?
Sorry, but it's happened before. Back a few thousand years, there were two competing cosmologies, earth centered and sun centered. Note that the absence of parallax of the 'fixed' stars virtually falsified the sun centered model. Added research efforts of the new preferred theory permitted it to gain and provide improvements in the theoretical calculations over it's failed competitor - and this lasted for centuries.
Finally, the sun centered model won out, partly due to a buncha pseudo scientific sun worshipper types (which is why the catholic church actually got involved - on the wrong side). Of course, things have progressed since then and we know about galaxies and think we know about the big bang and now think we can learn more about what didn't exist in our imaginations not too long ago.
Personally, I suspect something got seriously fouled up in the last 100 yrs or so and it is currently part of the unassailable foundation which seems to be leading to kookier and more insane results as we progress down the merry path.
It also seems to me that there are too many out there desiring fame/fortune or whatever who will posit wild new theories to explain discrepancies which can be explained by far more mundane things. A possible instance is dark matter being exotic never before seen or observed - versus condensed nonluminous objects or other similar sorts of things. It's sort of like having a steady diet of alien abduction and crop circle shows on the discovery science channel.
Europe has let in enough muslims now to be returned to the 11th century. Along with their socialist ideology which pushes them towards the 17th century. If I could believe that capitalists could think and act on the 30+year time frame, I'd join the conspiracy theorists in believing that socialism and communism were devices created by capitalism to sabotage potential foreign competition. Central and south america is well on its way to the deep freeze of total stagnation.
The US is dire straights because we are universally hated for our success. We are also vulnerable to the massive influx of whomever, which includes revolutionaries as well as gangs and terrorists. We are vulnerable to the politicians who think we should be merged with other countries - so we can all become equally poor - giving more meaning to being a rich politico and saving the planet by reduced consumption and perhaps reduced population.
MIT and CalTech are perhaps the best overall in the world and perhaps have the most top flight people there. However, when one goes for a phd, it's a specialization rather than a generalization so for their education, all that really matters is the specific subtopic in their discipline, not what someone is doing there in other fields. As such, one would not gain anything to study astrophysics at MIT by the departments that do dna medicine or oceanography.
Top notch people in particular areas are spread around quite a bit, not just at first or second tier establishments. To study room temperature superconductivity, one might find that the university of houston (alias cougar high) has the foremost reasearch effort in the world. (Or at least did at one time).
The advent of the internet has probably done even more to reduce concentrations of brain power and spread them out across the plains. One can have collaborative meetings with A/V across the world now. The notion of a class room as a single physical place is mostly just a holdover from the pre-net era, held on to by the higher education establishment. The ability of researchers to collaborate across the world is unprecedented.
And, amusing enough as it is, academia cannot control their costs and are continuing to pass it along to their customers. Bureaucracy has made advancements in bloat that are truly incredible - although it should not be considered an advancement.
Actually, the problem is that the USAF should have treated all commercial imaging satellites as potential enemy intellegence assets and taken them out or to have reached an agreement with the companies to keep them out of the theatre of operations.
Historically speaking, someone who went around town taking photos of defense contractor buildings and subsequently mailing the images to the enemy would most likely have been executed within a few months of being caught. This wasn't so much for taking pictures as for sending sensitive information to the enemy - which is part of the definition of treason - giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
With the advent of media sat many years ago (the first private 1m resolution eye in the sky) there were new concerns and problems to be dealt with in the intellegence community. Reporting on what could be observed goes both to a public for their amusement and to the enemy for their planning and usually translates into allied lives lost and failed missions. It's sort of like the notion of some reporter calling up bin laden 2 hours before a raid to capture/kill him and asking him to comment on the upcoming raid - and apparently assuming that his tip-off of the raid would have no effect on the outcome - otherwise that would be a treasonous act.
The reason why it would be google rather than the satellite owner or for that matter, the satellite manufacturer is simply that google is the one who sent the information to the enemy. That's why in world war II, it wasn't the camera maker or kodak, the film maker who was prosecuted for treason, it was the one(s) that took the photos and sent them to the enemy.
On the gov. intellegence side, there has been a failing to realize that just because one obtained sensitive information without violating the law, doesn't mean it cannot be classified as secret nor should it be possible to disseminate it without legal consequence.
Another example of this type of thinking was back when newt gingrich and friends were recorded in a cellphone discussion of medicare and such by democrat operatives who subsequently gave it over to democrat politicians who release it to the media. The applicable law, which was never applied dated back to the 1930s telecommunications act which made it a felony to release any private information gleaned from listening to radio transmissions. Instead of enforcing a workable law, the response to ignore the existing law and prosecution of those who violated it and to push for trying to prevent new radios from being able to receive it and to get new technologies that made it 'impossible' to capture future private conversations. Subesquent problems have surfaced with overpriced radio communications equipment for police and fire and city services along with a serious interoperability problems that rears its ugly head in any serious emergency.
I was musing on whether the younger generation will put libs and probably the rest us older generation on the menu if the libs were to screw up food production in the US. Note that the 'if' concerns the possibility of the libs actually gaining power and not to the certainty of screwing up the food supply were they to gain total power.
Note too that the term canabalism isn't strictly related to the eating of others of the same species. It actually means dismantling something and using the parts for unrelated purposes. That means it is a correct use of the word to say that someone canabalized their TV set and created a color organ. It also means that harvesting stem cells by aborting babies qualifies as well. I suppose though that soylent green probably doesn't qualify as canabalism since the people are being fed to a fungus first.
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Sounds like a bungled job. It's apparent that it wasn't supposed to look like a hit. The victim wasn't going to glow in the dark and measuring alpha particles in a corpse isn't supposed to be part of an autopsy. It seems the last big flap was the umbrella injector of ricin - that was discovered by the puncture wound.
since the perp was leaving a trail, it's probably because the sucker spilled it on himself by accident. Alpha won't penetrate anything.
Besides, 007 woulda just shot him with his ppk or tossed him out the window.
To understand some of what the prize approach can do, one should read Dava Sobel's book, Longitude, which makes a fascinating and instructive look on the effort to achieve a prize of major value.
One thing a prize does is provide an open invite to the nonestablished 'inventors' to participate. While it might bring out some kooks, it also can bring out some who are 'thinking out of the box'. The predisposition of the greatest minds of the time in the longitude prize case was to solve the problem by astronomical means. This included Newton, one of the greatest minds ever. The prize (or some special dispensation associated with it) went to Harrison, a tinkerer and clock builder - and an extraordinary mind in mechanical engineering.
Please note that a research grant given to the Newton Research Lab would not have resulted in a practical solution for use during the common shipboard problems of stormy or cloudy weather.
As for exploitive, it could be if all the work product of the nonwinners were kept by the contest operators and denied use by the contestants. That is seldom the case and the rules of the contest are usually posted for all entrants to read. It is then up to the entrants to decide if the contest is worth their time and investment or not. If it's up to the contestant and there is full disclosure of the contest rules - it cannot be exploitive as it is the decision of the contestant whether to participate.
Please note that applying for grant money is the same thing but with far more exclusivity as one competes in a 'contest' to obtain grant money. Here, who one is or where they work oftimes counts for as much as what one proposes to do. I could just imagine a Harrison type character, maybe call him Farnsworth, living in Nowhere Idaho or some other podunk location tries to compete with some engineer from RCA or GE's Menlow Park facility for a grant to invent a remote transmission movie device or a new and improved hi-fi music type of radio. I doubt Farnsworth would have made it past the first cut for grant money.
There would never be enough money to provide significant grants to every contestant for a prize like the longitude prize. Besides, who would consider providing grant money to the guy that suggested anchoring strings of ships within signalling range across the oceans or some with even whackier nutjob ideas. Once one starts the exclusions, who's to say wether that tinkerer Harrison's audacious idea of an accurate clock mechanism that works in different temperatures and locations with a required unparalleled accuracy never before achieved by all the professionals in the industry could possibly sound more reasonable than setting up strings of ships across the oceans.
The idle rich? Except for those in DC pretending to represent the poor, there are very very few around. Most of the rich who aren't working a job are concerned with preservation of capital and minimizing risk. Investing big bucks in speculative enterprises is often not associated with either of those efforts. I guess Paul Allen? was the idle rich guy that put up a bunch of money for the x-prize winning team. I wouldn't be surprised that if you worked as hard as he did or does, that you might make it into your 'idle rich' category too, but I doubt you've ever come close to working that hard.
From what I've seen, it's the much less rich gamblers who take the big chances and do things like fund wildcat drilling where an investment in multiples of $10,000 can either bring a whole lot of money in or totally dissappear like the chips on a roullette table. Then again, that's a lot like being a farmer - where 10s of thousands of dollars may be spent on crop seed and fertilizer as a bet that it's going to rain so much over the next few months and not rain any after that for a month.
Finally, there is the potential benefits of winning the prize and the benefit of achieving something even without winning. That something may be a product or it may be the knowledge and experience that ha
Well, it probably will take a miracle to overcome some of the problems the ceo was queried about but didn't answer. Nothing works for efficiency like leaking out $5 worth of electricy over night.
Having seen the advances made in batteries over the last 2 decades, it does look like this stuff might hold some fantastic opportunities. The sheer forces being held inside those batteries due to separation of charges though have got to be incredible - assuming that there is significant amounts of charge rather than energy tied up in chemical changes. It takes lots of energy to move objects from one place to another and whenever that energy cuts loose over a very short time, it goes into tearing up and radically heating up stuff around it. To equate gasoline energy with explosive energy - it seems like its either 5 or 25 sticks of dynamite per gallon which weighs just a few pounds. Mileage depends substantially on the weight of the vehicle and passengers/cargo and if that's a given, the mileage for various types of cars (gas,diesel,electric) are going to be fairly similar as well because the efficiencies tend to be fairly close (order of magnitude close - not necessarily 2-5% close). That means to have any decent distance between recharges, there is going to be a serious amount of explosive energy stored in the battery - even if it takes some outside conditions to help. Anyone here ever see the big table top capacitor with the 1/4" nichrome wire short experiment in elementary school??? Suffice to say it's about like a fire cracker going off - and that is nothing compared to the energy in this battery.
As for the 10 minute quick charge, that's probably only for the corner fuel stop. A 15kwh battery set - which I thought was the power mentioned for 100 pounds of weight - would need about 400 amps at 220 volts to fill it up (assuming perfect efficiency). At home, the need for a 10 minute charge is far less than being somewhere else and needing to refill. There, a 60 minute recharge would be acceptable to most people most of the time. That requires about 66 amps - which can be handled by most modern electric breaker boxes which can usually handle 200 amp service to homes. For those that don't have that capacity, 4 hour charging would permit usage in the realm of electric stoves and electric
clothes dryers.
The big question is where is all this excess electric power generation going to come from if such vehicles suddenly gain mass popularity. Hmm - maybe it'll come from some big old ugly surplus generators sitting behind Friendly Fred's service station - the ones with no pollution controls which haven't been maintained since 1965. OOPs!
If it was a conspiracy, it's by a democrat since bush junior is pushing hydrogen fuel cells, not electric/battery technology. THis doesnt support his position, it implies his position is wrong and that other things are on the verge of sucess without the need for billions of gov. boondoggle dollars.
Texas is and has been a hotbed for technology, usually on more practical real world applications than one sees on the two coasts so having a high tech battery company here in texas is nothing unusual.
That battery company CEO is out to push his company as much as possible. If he chose the night of the state of the union to do so intentionally - it's because he hoped to get more publicity for himself and his company by doing so.
CEO of a big company requires people skills and doesn't really require technical skills. It is the top of line management. CIO is a highly technical position that is a staff position requiring relatively little people skills. Going from CIO to CEO is about as traumatic a change in job requirements as the opposite - going from CEO to CFO. Can you imagine the disasters waiting to happen for the typical CEO to switch over and become CIO?????
This is not to say that someone cannot have all skills and be sufficiently talented to do well in both - just rather unlikely and uncommon. How many professional grade baseball players are also professional grade football AND basket ball players???
A CEO has to be able to sell - products and ideas - to employees, customers. He has to be able to decide based on imperfect information where the direction of the company needs to be and has to rely on virtually everything being done by others.
While that's probably a given, judging by the way the rest of winders works, these failures at validation might just be more winders bugs. It's really hard to figure out if mickiesoft is actually getting screwed that bad or if there's just a substantial failure rate in validation attempts due to their crappy products.
Considering that so many of the computers sold come from relatively few very large companies, it's hard to believe that even 25% of the market is a bunch of small shop made clones done by people that only use illegal copies of winders. That would mean that one or more of the majors would be involved in the fraud - which would be worth mickiesofts efforts to go after them - which they haven't.
That leads me to believe that it's a matter of poor, improperly function products which require multiple tries to get it right. Years of frustration and personal experience with mickiesoft tends to add support this assumption.
All things have their potential disasters - tis only a matter of degree or size of the thing that determines the degree or size of the potential disaster.
It's nice that the MIT researcher wasted lots of research money to determine that viable commercial applications of geothermal power are in fact viable.
As for the ultimate potential disaster of dependence on geothermal for massive amounts of energy in the future is that it could bring on the onset of the core solidifying and destroying the earth's magnetic field - which could result in the loss of most of its atmosphere - so much for global warming continuing to be a problem. I sorta doubt that at current energy usage, the world depending totally on geothermal for a few centuries would amount to any serious detriments at current usage rates but more will be needed in the future. Then again, smaller disasters tend to outnumber larger ones.
Also, all this attention on co2 production might lead to a shortage of it ith massive plant die-offs and subsequent catastrophes.
Maybe, it's time to invest more in headache remedy companies.
"The "peak oil" claim is not that we are about to have no oil. It is that the world's production rate of oil is about to peak and decline (just as the USA's production peaked in 1971 and declined, and any individual oilfield of significance you care to name). What this means is that prices will be much higher and more volatile, and the key to managing energy costs is cutting demand"
Drilling restrictions severely affect where we can drill. Prospecting for oil also tends to be limited by just how much estimated reserves are around as well. Spending money on something not needed for 50 years is not very popular among competent corporate executives and less so among incompetent ones. The availability of cheap oil is now extremely limited due to the volitile political situations where it is located. There will be no cutting of demand world wide - no one controls china outside of china and their demand can outstrip the rest of the world.
Methane is a far more serious ghg than co2 by a factor of at least 20 times.
As for the melting permafrost in siberia - seems like that is in the northern hemisphere - where the earth will be closer to the sun during the summer months due to the earths precession - which would facilitate the melting of permafrost and ice with an expected equivalent relative cooling in the southern hemisphere.
The current manmade global warming stuff is also a media driven thing - this time with some 'scientists' jumping on board the gravy train. Also, the political hacks are on board - gov. restrictions is something they understand and love to do. If we'd listened to that butterfly collector back in the early 70s, we'd have put lamp black across the north and exacerbated whatever situation we seem to now be finding ourselves. It's still the same alarmist industry with the same suspects - just a different message, one totally contradictory to their first one.
"If you want to get technical, O2 is the real culprit." I'm not sure if it was you or me that left out the 'H' but that should be h2o which, as I recall, causes 96% of green house gas effects. Maybe you could save the planet from global warming by cutting down all the rain forests.
Considering that it has been warmer and colder in the very recent past (geologically speaking) and apparently the co2 concentrations tend to follow (lag) temperature changes, it would seem that we cannot be sitting on the verge of an unstable equilibrium point never before reached or exceeded.
As for axes, beavers don't need them to dam rivers and turn them into meadows. Forest fires work much faster than chain saws for that matter and the occaisional comet/asteroid impact is virtually instantaneous. Besides, you are talking of impacting very small areas compared to global. Even a dead fire ant creates a footprint of destructive pollution where it dies.
Not all political scum are merely in it to get rich. Some are true believers and believe they know more about how to run people's lives than anyone else. Usually, those true believer types know very little about anything, much less than the average dolt on the street knows about many things. Also, not every outfit greasing the skids and lining the pockets in gov. is out to destroy the world - usually they're out to make a buck and sometimes are there merely to keep from losing lots more bucks than being there is costing them. There's even a few who are quite concerned over things.
I don't think I mentioned electricity but I was actually thinking of coal - as in coal mines. But then, that's mostly the actual oil companies and not the oil industry which is a myriad of various types of companies, many of which are totally dependent on the oil industry and have severe ups and downs as the oil companies themselves change activities and locations. Relative to this whole industry, the major oil companies themselves are quite small.
The reason bush is pushing the h2 industry is that the infrastructure exists substantially and that the hydrogen from fo
not hardly!
you might have a million detectors - but that can be represented (addressed)by 20 bits of data. Then again, you've got no more than about a 90% chance at best of the photon regisering 1 electron in the sensor - assuming that it is not blocked by a floating piece of dust.
The whole experiment was an optical fifo- and a fifo by nature must retrieve without failure.
However, good luck finding a 30m photon and good luck detecting it. It's going to be far below the thermal noise and interference.
When dealing with such low energy small things as photons, it's probably going to take a bunch of them for error free results, definitely in the approach described.
It looks like the article was written emphasizing an erroneous concept rather than the real benefit of the experiment. The article should probably be about the ultra slow velocity of light in the medium. The information is assuredly coded statistically by many photons in order to be decoded. Firing a photon into a young's double slit experiment is very much like this experiment. The interference fringes will be created even with one photon in the system at one time - the same as if it's illuminated by a bright light with visible results. However, a single photon only occurs at one spot on the target and the final fringe pattern only shows up after many many photons have gone through the system.
While one can say the whole thing is 'encoded' in each photon because changing the layout (say from UR to BYOB) will result in a different pattern, these patterns will only become apparent (or be decoded) after numerous photons have painted it.
It was vaguely reminiscient of a holographic setup but didn't seem like it really was though.
If the information provided the reporter was about storage, it sure didn't seem like that was the topic of the presentation. Besides, I wasn't particulary impressed by the delay time amount (equivalent to light traveling through 30 meters worth of free space). Granted it's a very high index of refraction or a serious reduction in the velocity of light in that medium but I thought there were higher ones than that being done fairly recently. There wasn't even a mention of just how fast the light was traveling through the medium (or at least not one that made it to my short term memory).
No, I'm sure the whole story had to be about how much information was supposedly being encoded on a single photon and I have trouble believing that the reporter would have done it on his own - implying the one being interviewed was the source for the bent of the story. This implies the interviewee believed it. Either that or the reporter was a scientific reporter and was a major screwup.
'Variations in cloud cover due to solar variations still do not compete with anthropogenic CO2 as far as climate is concerned.'
Actually the danes determined it was the cosmic ray flux that affected the cloud formation rather than variances in solar intensity. Clouds are far more important that co2 in temp. effects. Other than minor observations from this area, I don't know what the true variations in cloud cover are due to solar variations - other than that here over a couple of years (along with possible other factors) appeared to produce substantial differences and temp. effects short term are heavily associated with cloud cover here.
I'm well aware of the weather girls reference to decertification. It's the same thing - shutting up people who don't subscribe to your doctrines.
As for food sources which produce less methane - well - from what I understand of vegetarians - they simply replace cows in producing it.
Cow's do produce a nice fertilizer although it is an excellent source of methane - capable of being used effectively to provide methane for cooking in some primative 3rd world areas. It's nothing new - except for the popular media who recently announced that bovines were responsible for more gcg effects than mankind's entire transportation system. While ghgs come out of both ends of all creatures, I've never tried to analyze which end produces the most.
Global warming is far superior to an iceage. What's more - it's more amenable to vegetation being a sink for co2 as well as providing more food. It looks like we are at the trailing end of an unusual warming trend which has lasted far longer than average. While it's been warmer before - when man wasn't a factor, it seems that warm periods are the rarity in more recent geological times.
I don't plan on getting involved in any climatic research as it interests me relatively little so I don't expect to discover any fudged data until the scandal makes the news media.
Despite living in the southern most united states where it seldom freezes, I don't plan on investing in water skis nor in getting rid of my heavy winter coat.
h2o vapor is the predominate ghg. Clouds are very serious in their immediate effects on temperatures and hence on energy absorption available to heat sinks. Cloud formation is where the solar sunspot cycle tends to have its most serious impact. The presence or lack of cloud cover makes tremendous differences. It's far more important than the minor radiation variances which occur in the cycle. While the sun is variable over all time frames it is invariably heating up in the long term and will ultimately broil everything in this region of the solar system. Whether we'll be around for that is quite debatable as there are many transient factors which may get involved to eliminate life on earth prior to this.
The religious global warming crowd I referred to would have stopped those danish scientists from publishing were they to have had the power and the whole point of the thread is that weather girl's public pronouncements to punish people for doing such research.
I find it impossible to believe your statement on measuring other factors and acccounting for them very well. It's been only a few months that bovine flatulence made the news. Granted that there is a great deal of difference between algore, the weather girl and the popular press and people who actually do climate studies but there seems to be a number of the latter who belong in the category of the former who are fueling the hysteria of the former. Also, while the sources I mentioned are known, there is the possibility of sources not known and hence unaccounted for which by definition cannot be discussed in any specifics.
Co2 is only a moderate ghg of a very small fraction of the whole. It's far less effective than methane as I recall. That's why the bovines are so effective. While these might be manmade or caused by man, these are not due to man's technology which is the main excuse for man not being a part of nature. Considering there are thousands of pounds of insects and termites per person and that they, being extremely small, have a much higher metobolic rate than man and hence create far more methane and co2 per pound means that there has to be a great deal of technological pollution created per person in order to have enough for similar effects. The average amount of technological activity per person is far less than that of the US or western europe and is more towards burning a few lumps of coal or tree limbs for the technological pollution contributions of most of the human populace.
Of course, fossil fuels contain carbon that was once part of the atmosphere in the form of co2 so even burning oil and coal is merely returning to the atmosphere that which was already present at one time.
As for the data I mentioned, our direct observations are limited to long ago when the wife was doing mainframe statistical package applications at a major university. She was forever getting pestered by grad students from the social science area trying to get the statistics to back the conclusions desired by their advisors. The statistics could not be manipulated in any legitimate fashion to provide the desired conclusions (in fact they refuted them). Ultimately, they simply ceased trying to have the data processed, choosing instead to fudge the data and results themselves and taking the risk of ultimate discovery rather than the certainty of failing to please their advisor and having to drop out of graduate school. The same socialist ideology was pushing them as is pushing the mancaused global warming. It's an ideology that believes the end justifies the means and the truth is whatever promotes the socialist agenda. Such a philosophy makes it fairly easy to try to fudge the data.
While I'm neither a climatologist nor a planetary scientist, I find some of the stuff fairly interesting as it fits a bit more into some of my actual interests. And, I tend to be sketical about many things thought to be concluded (as well as most of the alternatives). After all, the flat earth and earth centered universe were both ideas that were firmly held for centuries and believed by some of the most brilliant of all time. What can I say other than - they were wrong.
This 1 pixel camera is one of the most stupid ideas I've ever encountered and shows a total lack of comprehension on the topic.
First off, all those mirrors are mechanical things which require control circuitry and mechanisms and complex mechanical design - at least compared to the a piece of flat silicon with something etched in it. And, to some extent it seems like someone looked at a complex cmos area sensor and shouted "eureka I done found it - we could invent a simpler gizmo - like maybe take a sheet of paper and curl it up on a cylinder, spin it and run a light and photocell along the top and scan that sheet of paper and send the scan over the telephone line".
What's worse is that light consists of photons, each with around 1-2 eV of energy so they are quite discrete at visible wavelengths. That means at a given light intensity level that to actually get a photo image, it takes a sensor of a certain size so much time to aqcuire enough photons to register its relative intensity. That must be done for each pixel of the final image. If the time required is 1 millisecond per pixel - then for an 8 megapixel image, it's only gonna take 2 hours to capture the data - in which nothing better change. I'm sure the kids will be happy to sit still and hold their breaths that long.
In computer terms, this is the equivalent of looking at a future Cray parallel processing supercomputer, shouting eureka i found it, and then proceeding to (re)invent the turing machine.
The use of mechanical systems to achieve image capture (or use to achieve higher resolution images) has been around for decades. The original tv camera used a series of holes in a rotating disk to achieve a serial stream of video data. When ccd arrays were small, expensive and with lots of defects, linear ccds were used with rotating mirrors to achieve higher resolution.
In fact, with modern processing, adding in random vibrations (directional variations) into a camera mount can be used to achieve higher resolution images from a video stream than the pixel count of the sensor.
The notion of digressing to what looks like a much more expensive technology to achieve vastly limited and inferior results to existing technology makes me wonder why these guys have yet to be awarded the darwin award of the century. Maybe that's because they didn't know to plug in the lamp when they were sticking their tongues in the empty lamp socket.
If the amount of terrorism is a measure of how our foreign relations are, then they have become much better in the last 6 years. 9/11 was the culmination of a decade of increasing terrorist attacks on the US. Terrorists may or may not be state sponsored - and foreign relations are relations with states.
As for being less of a dick - well - probably a better word might be duck - as in dead duck. Or perhaps, ostrich might be a more suitable bird for your prescription.
It's a changing world out there. Back in the cold war era, our enemies only wanted to rape, pillage and enslave us after taking all we had. That was the good old days. Note that there are plenty of nostalgia types out there trying to bring it about again - that is the rape pillage and enslave part not the cold war which was the resistance to that happening. Note too that this was the wet dreams of a small handful of rulers and not the desires of the populace already under their boot heels. Our current enemies aren't so nice and are not the same. They'd rather see us dead than alive and this is a bottom up mentality shared by all involved with radical islam. In fact, many of these radical islam types are eager to die just for the priveledge of killing you and your family. In this case, the leadership has harnessed and perverted a religion (a religion easily perverted) to achieve this goal (heck - who wants to go die for brezhnev and the polit bureau).
Until terrorists are dealt with more brutally than terrorists themselves act, they're going to be around. Then there's the private sector - criminals who might also be enticed into the act.
It's an unfortunate waste of resources to deal with terrorism and it can easily lead to serious losses of freedom. The big gov. type
Skepticism in science is what generates progress in science. It's good. The fact is that this weather girl has shown us she has a religious faith and that blasphemy against it must be stamped out. That isn't science, it's religion and politics which tends to expose more light on just what the manmade global warming cabal is all about.
As for northern europe - enjoy the warmth while you got it. The earth precessing every 23000 yrs or so seems to be in the cycle part where the northern hemisphere gets summer time while the orbital distance is closest. Hence, it's getting warmer up here and colder down there. It'll be around for quite a while of course but then, it's gonna get really cold.
As for these nonscientists pushing their religion. Just imagine what would have happened if they'd succeeded in invoking this total censorship back in the 1970s when these same clowns were predicting the next iceage was going to be happening (at present time). No one would have been able to say wait, stop, it's getting warmer - and if politicians had gotten involved, we'd be in the midst now of wasting scarce economic resources trying to melt down glaciers to save us from the iceage.
Everyone condemns the catholic church for making a sun centered universe a heresy back a few hundred years ago. Actually, that wasn't as bad as this since the first proponents of it were actually a heresey - a sun worshipping cult. Unfortunately for the church, the reality of cosmology was on the side of the cult and the previous evidence - like parallax of stars - was simply too small to measure back when this rather ancient alternative was first presented - hence the incorrect model won out for centuries since is appeared to produce better results and the more correct model was falsified due to the parallax detection failure.
So much for science being infallible absolute fact that should never be questioned - especially by a thinly guised religion and political agenda trying to pass as science. Perhaps the weather girl is afraid that some of the fraudulent 'research' supposedly done to prove her pet theory might get discovered to be false before these stalinists can establish full control over the situation.
BTW, I live in southern Texas where it seems that the climate does cycle some with the 11 year sunspot cycle. We're at the absolute minimum now - and it's all rainy and cloudy. We seem to have droughts during virtually every sunspot maxima, except for the periodic arrival of hurricanes and some wet cold fronts which sweep moisture in. At present, we've been drenched for the last week by el nino generated clouds. This is certainly better than 2 yrs ago when we had 60 weeks with no rain and virtually no clouds.
There was an interesting tv show presentation by some Danish scientists who discovered the link between sunspot cycles and cloud formation (cosmic ray flux) and their attempts to get the information out past the global warming religious crowd - like that weather girl- although she would have probably tried to get these guys fired from the university). They had the cameras running on some of this cocktail party scientific crowd and their responses. Those pictures were worth more than a thousand words in exposing some of those people for the fools there are.
I suspect man's contributions to global warming might forestall the coming ice age - by only a few days rather than by a few years. That is assuming that co2 actually does have a measureable effect and that its increase is in fact due to man rather than to more important factors - things like insects, plant dormancy, termites, bacteria, plankton activity, volcanic activity, forest fires and possibly other factors. Each of those individually can exceed man's technilogical contributions. Heck, we just learned cows have a greater effect producing methane than man's transportation system. OOPs!
This controversy isn't the first time that some have fudged data when it couldn't be made to agree with their conclusions, not that
Sounds like we need more plankton. Note that we are not on the verge of running out of oil. I doubt we are on any verge of the ability of the earth to absorb co2 either. Whats more, all that fossil fuel carbon came out of the atmosphere to begin with anyway. Burning it just returns it back to the atmosphere to be absorbed again by life for the cycle.
If you want to get technical, O2 is the real culprit. While it's down 50% from several million years ago, it can still be a problem for some life forms. Of course this reducing atmosphere is a second generation one - our original was substantially methane.
As for man and his technology - we're a tertiary effect at best - outdone by more prevelent life forms with much higher metobolic rates along with factors yet to be discovered along with factors whose effects and interactions are not fully known. If it suited the alarmist industry, we'd be back to expecting the next ice age and probably trying to put lamp black on the glaciers to melt them - like they wanted to do back in the 1970s. However, the political scum wants control and restrictions so they switched to warming.
The earth will do whatever it's going to do and man's influence is going to affect only the timing and probably more in a measure of days rather than years when it comes to delaying or shortening the time frame. And, like the alarmist's whinings of the 70s, the actions they want to take could well exacerbate the situation rather than help it - even if only by a miniscule amount.
As for the oil companies - they're energy companies. Also, there is an entire industry there with myriads of companies of all sizes. Note that haliburton is a very large engineering/construction company with substantial activities outside of the oil industry - like nuclear plant construction, but they are not an oil company and if somewhere in their bowls, they buy and sell oil - which I seriously doubt, it's too small a fraction of their operation to be of any consequence. The power of propaganda has been astounding in the last several years.
The real oil industry companies are relatively young, innovative and used to handling major challenges - quite different from gov. and other more bureaucratic established companies. They will deliver what the customers want at a rather good price compared to what is actually possible.
As I said earlier, i don't care that much about the problem other than to note that there are a number of technologies available and the free market will select the best one - given the chance. To assume that the hydrogen fuel bs push by the gov. is any different than anything else gov. ever does about virtually anything is to miss understanding its nature. By it's very nature, it is a monopoly that controls by restrictions and rules by force. It can easily be an obstacle to advancement but it is never the solution to the problem.
The oil companies are energy companies. They don't care what they provide and in fact, do care about any prospects of running out and so spend lots of money to find new sources of energy - sometimes years in advance. Part of the reason we've only got so many years of energy left is that it becomes prohibitive to look for more that won't be needed. Major investments like refineries don't pay for themselves in just a few years so there is much longer term planning than the usual 5 year scenario of many businesses. As for the urban myths about 200 mpg carborators suppressed by the oil companies, it's just another perpetual motion machine promoted by shysters because there isn't enough energy in the fuel to handle it - at least for a full sized (and weight) vehicle.
Because of the 'investment' in researching the epicycle model, it was significantly superior to the sun centered model early on. Having a big gun or two behind it did not hurt either and the apparent falsification of the concept of parallax virtually doomed the actual description of reality to obscurity until much later.
Applying science though is really engineering which is not concerned with the nature of nature but only the consequences as they are known. Elves, smoke and mirrors can and do substitute for the knowledge of nature and that can work well for engineering. The antikythera clock mechanism seems to exhibit a rather good accuracy and correct gear ratios for the motions it does as well as being a great example of technologies lost for many centuries.
The acceptance of using turn the crank wierdness whose only claim is a certain usefulness and accuracy in making predictions of nature currently passes for science now and so far defies conceptual interpretation of the underlying nature. In other words, quantum mechanics appears to almost always give right answers but it might as well be by elves smoke and mirrors. And, there's no telling just where or when it's going to blow a gasket and totally fail to render correct predictions about nature. It's undoubtedly the epicycle theory of modern science, but at present, there doesn't seem to be anything in the way of a seriously competitive theory which might be far closer to reality.
As an example of this absurdum is what happens with a photon traveling from a distant galaxy to our eye through a telescope some evening. When a photon is emitted, according to quantum, it sends out an instantaneous pilot wave in all directions and receies the information back as to deciding which way to go. Of course a distant one would have to have that pilot wave travel into the future (as well as into the distance) because the earth might not yet have formed - much less man existing and creating telescopes and of course the solar system isn't even in the same part of space yet. Then, the pilot wave must return back to its point of origin and instruct the photo to head out in that direction. I'm afraid I really don't buy into that - even though I cannot explain young's double slit experiments using single photons without such malarky.
Actually, I get it rather well, enough not to waste much time analyzing it, much less investing in designs or proposals for designs. I'm not really any sort of advocate for developing it or so far as gov. is concerned For them to develop anything in this area, there is almost a certain probability that the results would be to distort the market and cause the selection of an inferior approach - maybe like hydrogen fuel cells - and crowd out or delay develoopment of the superior answer -- perhaps for a long time.
You missed my point on the 'cracking' though. There are some efforts to make portable small cracking units - which could potentially eliminate the need for high pressure tanks scenario - keeping the fuel in its hydrocarbon liquid state - like in the form of gasoline - until usage needs dictate it should be converted for immediate use. It still doesn't preclude the need for way too much support equipment though.
H is a very tiny atom and h2 a very small molecule. That means the stuff tends to get through as leaks even when the leak is so tiny that larger molecules cannot escape. Also, if I recall properly, h2 has the tendency to cause materials to become weak and brittle.
However, when going to intermediate storage systems, there are always significant losses so the need for storage must have serious justifications - like photovoltaics, and anything that can be described as a heat engine is theoretically going to be less than 50% at best too. H2 might offer a good storage and transport (via pipeline) means for the output of energy from distance reactors or solar arrays - aside from the previously mentioned problems associated with it.
Some of my point in the previous post was an offer at an explaination of why h2 is being pushed - ie - association of the approach with existing hydrocarbons companies and an existing infrastructure reduce the amount of distribution infrastructure creation. This existing distribution infrastructure and the need for infrastructure that can handle future fuels is probably the most critical aspect of change to new fuels. Also, since it will likely be an evolutionary process, whatever works that is sustainable and can meet reasonable pollution standards will likely be where the evolution stops - possibly for a long time. Synthetic gasoline will most likely be this point - whether is is some form of gasohol or a more pure form of 'regular'. Note that the gasohol which has had decades of gov. involvement is probably more of a boondoggle and a boon for archer daniels midland company than a good solution. On the other hand, willie the pothead nelson and his BioWillie organic diesel fuel which is being sold (at a premium price) could be the start a serious trend - perhaps with little assitance from the gov.
Note that during this last fuel price crunch, the cost of diesel went from less than the cost of regular to the same or more than the cost of premium (relatively speaking). While there can be variations due to diverting production over to winter heating oil for a time, the costs for diesel did not go down with the rest of the gasoline. Also, most of the diesel gets used for the transporation of food and products (making it rather non elastic in economic terms) which increase the costs of all goods. Evidently, during the crunch - the gov. slipped in the requirements for lower sulpher content - driving up the cost of production and hence a permanent higher price for diesel. That was very nice of them - and they didn't even consider dropping the exhorbitant taxes on every gallon of fuel - which amounts to several times the profit margin.
What happens when the wrong model provides more accurate observable results than the 'right' or more correct model?
Sorry, but it's happened before. Back a few thousand years, there were two competing cosmologies, earth centered and sun centered. Note that the absence of parallax of the 'fixed' stars virtually falsified the sun centered model. Added research efforts of the new preferred theory permitted it to gain and provide improvements in the theoretical calculations over it's failed competitor - and this lasted for centuries.
Finally, the sun centered model won out, partly due to a buncha pseudo scientific sun worshipper types (which is why the catholic church actually got involved - on the wrong side). Of course, things have progressed since then and we know about galaxies and think we know about the big bang and now think we can learn more about what didn't exist in our imaginations not too long ago.
Personally, I suspect something got seriously fouled up in the last 100 yrs or so and it is currently part of the unassailable foundation which seems to be leading to kookier and more insane results as we progress down the merry path.
It also seems to me that there are too many out there desiring fame/fortune or whatever who will posit wild new theories to explain discrepancies which can be explained by far more mundane things. A possible instance is dark matter being exotic never before seen or observed - versus condensed nonluminous objects or other similar sorts of things. It's sort of like having a steady diet of alien abduction and crop circle shows on the discovery science channel.
Europe has let in enough muslims now to be returned to the 11th century. Along with their socialist ideology which pushes them towards the 17th century. If I could believe that capitalists could think and act on the 30+year time frame, I'd join the conspiracy theorists in believing that socialism and communism were devices created by capitalism to sabotage potential foreign competition. Central and south america is well on its way to the deep freeze of total stagnation.
The US is dire straights because we are universally hated for our success. We are also vulnerable to the massive influx of whomever, which includes revolutionaries as well as gangs and terrorists. We are vulnerable to the politicians who think we should be merged with other countries - so we can all become equally poor - giving more meaning to being a rich politico and saving the planet by reduced consumption and perhaps reduced population.
MIT and CalTech are perhaps the best overall in the world and perhaps have the most top flight people there. However, when one goes for a phd, it's a specialization rather than a generalization so for their education, all that really matters is the specific subtopic in their discipline, not what someone is doing there in other fields. As such, one would not gain anything to study astrophysics at MIT by the departments that do dna medicine or oceanography.
Top notch people in particular areas are spread around quite a bit, not just at first or second tier establishments. To study room temperature superconductivity, one might find that the university of houston (alias cougar high) has the foremost reasearch effort in the world. (Or at least did at one time).
The advent of the internet has probably done even more to reduce concentrations of brain power and spread them out across the plains. One can have collaborative meetings with A/V across the world now. The notion of a class room as a single physical place is mostly just a holdover from the pre-net era, held on to by the higher education establishment. The ability of researchers to collaborate across the world is unprecedented.
And, amusing enough as it is, academia cannot control their costs and are continuing to pass it along to their customers. Bureaucracy has made advancements in bloat that are truly incredible - although it should not be considered an advancement.
Actually, the problem is that the USAF should have treated all commercial imaging satellites as potential enemy intellegence assets and taken them out or to have reached an agreement with the companies to keep them out of the theatre of operations.
Historically speaking, someone who went around town taking photos of defense contractor buildings and subsequently mailing the images to the enemy would most likely have been executed within a few months of being caught. This wasn't so much for taking pictures as for sending sensitive information to the enemy - which is part of the definition of treason - giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
With the advent of media sat many years ago (the first private 1m resolution eye in the sky) there were new concerns and problems to be dealt with in the intellegence community. Reporting on what could be observed goes both to a public for their amusement and to the enemy for their planning and usually translates into allied lives lost and failed missions. It's sort of like the notion of some reporter calling up bin laden 2 hours before a raid to capture/kill him and asking him to comment on the upcoming raid - and apparently assuming that his tip-off of the raid would have no effect on the outcome - otherwise that would be a treasonous act.
The reason why it would be google rather than the satellite owner or for that matter, the satellite manufacturer is simply that google is the one who sent the information to the enemy. That's why in world war II, it wasn't the camera maker or kodak, the film maker who was prosecuted for treason, it was the one(s) that took the photos and sent them to the enemy.
On the gov. intellegence side, there has been a failing to realize that just because one obtained sensitive information without violating the law, doesn't mean it cannot be classified as secret nor should it be possible to disseminate it without legal consequence.
Another example of this type of thinking was back when newt gingrich and friends were recorded in a cellphone discussion of medicare and such by democrat operatives who subsequently gave it over to democrat politicians who release it to the media. The applicable law, which was never applied dated back to the 1930s telecommunications act which made it a felony to release any private information gleaned from listening to radio transmissions. Instead of enforcing a workable law, the response to ignore the existing law and prosecution of those who violated it and to push for trying to prevent new radios from being able to receive it and to get new technologies that made it 'impossible' to capture future private conversations. Subesquent problems have surfaced with overpriced radio communications equipment for police and fire and city services along with a serious interoperability problems that rears its ugly head in any serious emergency.
I'm not even a pooka. As for your other questions - they are already answered in the previous post.
So far as eating rabbits, giant or otherwise, I prefer chicken.
I'm not saying anyone should eat anyone else.
I was musing on whether the younger generation will put libs and probably the rest us older generation on the menu if the libs were to screw up food production in the US. Note that the 'if' concerns the possibility of the libs actually gaining power and not to the certainty of screwing up the food supply were they to gain total power.
Note too that the term canabalism isn't strictly related to the eating of others of the same species. It actually means dismantling something and using the parts for unrelated purposes. That means it is a correct use of the word to say that someone canabalized their TV set and created a color organ. It also means that harvesting stem cells by aborting babies qualifies as well. I suppose though that soylent green probably doesn't qualify as canabalism since the people are being fed to a fungus first.