Uh. There NEVER was any intel that iraq had WMDs in 2002/2003. That they didn't have them wasn't "new evidence that came to light years later". It was simply knowledge that was confirmed after it was too fuckin' late to not go to war and destroy the country.
I have to disagree.. with the part that states "It was simply knowledge that was confirmed after it was too fuckin' late to not go to war". There was NO necessity at the time to go to war. The presence of the U.S. military on its border ready to go to war was enough to finally convince Saddam Hussein (interested above all in self-preservation) to drop all the coy games he had been playing and offer accurate disclosures AND allow in the UN inspectors who had so successfully uncovered and dismantled his nuclear program in the early 1990s. The inspectors went in 18 November 2002 and reported good progress on 7 March 2003 and made it clear that given the great scope of the investigation, more time was required.
The Bush Administration simply refused to take "Yes" for answer and let the UN complete its verification Iraq tens of thousands of pages of disclosures, and thousands of facilities upon which the US was casting suspicion. Bush could have saved thousands of US lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and a trillion dollars by letting the threat of U.S. military force do the talking. It was foreordained that Bush/Cheney would reject any cooperation by Iraq, or disproof of their fanciful accusations, as being sufficient. They never cared what the truth was, they just wanted an excuse.
Forests in the US have been increasing for almost the past 60 years. More wood is grown than harvested by a ratio of 3:1, and significant acreage has been returned to forests, in part because more responsible timber farms have been created over the decades. We may have at one time reached peak wood, but usage and growth patterns changed, and that is no longer the case.
Other nations may have problems with their forests, but the US is not one that does.
A better researched and written article would have made the parallel between peak wood and peak oil more explicit and exact. Peak wood hit all of the industrializing nations of the West during the 18th or 19th century due to its consumption for fuel. The areas close to the iron works and major cities in France and Britain were stripped bare of trees by 1750 or so. Coal, and then oil, replaced wood because energy demand could not be satisfied by wood. This is not only still true today, it is far more true now than ever. Tree harvesting today is not for fuel except in poor countries which cannot afford oil-based fuels and are now experiencing the same deforestation-for-fuel calamity. Bio-energy to replace oil cannot be based on burning trees (for the most part) because their energy productivity per acre is too low.
In the 19th century the more densely settled East of the United States lost half of its forests from this cause. Fortunately the U.S. retained vast forests in the West where it was much less densely settled. http://forestry.about.com/library/bl_us_forest_acre_trend.htm.
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond (who also wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel") covers several historical cases of societies that collapsed. Deforestation is the main trigger that comes up in most of the stories. He also makes parallels to our current relationship with oil.
Comparing the content of the article with Diamond's account reveals the weakness of the article. None of his striking examples of actual societal collapses triggered by deforestation are even mentioned in the article, which goes for a soft "literary" approach to the issue.
And a more cogent treatment would show how closely earlier periods of industrially driven deforestation truly parallel "peak oil" and how it forced the move to coal in the 18th century in Britain and France. Both nations had essentially converted all their forests into charcoal to make steel and drive steam engines, which had the same utilization curve collapse now appearing for oil.
I understand that the term was originally used as an end run around a supreme court decision, as you say. However, it has taken on its own meaning since, a term for a notion that has existed for thousands of years quite separately from creationism. Claiming that it is still only a drop-in replacement for creationism is as silly as claiming that Volkswagen still exists to serve as the common man's car for fascist regimes. Though it was created for that purpose originally, it has since served different purposes.
Nice try.
A problem for your thesis (Now ID is really, really unrelated to promoting creationism! Honest!) is that many of the leading proponents of the ID program have in the past self-identified as being creationists and asserted that the ID program is based on the Christian religion, and the leading organization pushing it (the Center for Science and Culture) was founded in 1995 explicitly as a Christian-doctrine based organization.
The voluntary self-identification of ID with Fundamentalist Christian theology was filed off when it became clear that this was a serious handicap in getting it inserted into secular schooling.
When the very same people and organizations that not so long ago were out openly promoting this as a Christian-doctrine based program are still its leading lights, claiming it's all ancient history and that there has been a complete transformation of the movement just doesn't cut it.
I could recast your spurious "Nazi car" analogy to illustrate the true situation (i.e. what if the regime and principals were still in charge) , but this is treading a bit close to Godwin's Law to my taste.
I don't really think anyone seriously believes in Intelligent Design.
Then you don't really understand people very well. From the Center for Science and Culture (a pro-ID organization) here
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
Right. Every statement from an advocacy group's website is an honest statement belief, and not disingenuous in the slightest.
Are you acquainted with the evidence that was introduced in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District?
It was discovered that the ID text that Dover sought to introduce was originally written as an advocacy tract for creationism, which called it by that very name. Then, to try to do an end-run around a Supreme Court prohibition on teaching creationism in public schools, they simply did a mechanical search-and-replace to change "creationism" into "intelligent design", and "creationist" with "intelligent design proponent".
"Intelligent Design" is a transparent construct invented in the 1980s by people who self-identify as "creationists".
How much does one unit cost, and is this actually scalable and affordable for nations where there are landmines?...
It is pretty clear that this device is intended to support ground attack by a first world army against an adversary like Iraq (or some other country beginning with "I"?).
Think about its specs - it is a robotic device deploying an explosive system for instantly clearing a lane through a mine field. You need an instant lane if you launching a time-critical operation (i.e. an attack), and a robot to deploy it if you expect to get shot at - i.e. you are in combat.
A minefield clearing system for a third world country would probably be an armored flail system that can beat the earth of an entire field by methodically "mowing" it. This system would minimize collateral damage, be thorough, and inexpensive to operate (though the capital cost would be substantial).
It's unknown if large geological events like this occur according to any central tendency. It may be that the mean time between large earthquakes is not related to the mean. Ultimately we have no idea, the data is not good enough to say...
This is an absurd contention. Paleoseismic research provides precisely this information, and is a very well developed field. Further, we actually understand the basic mechanism that creates very large earthquakes and thus have a normative theory that explains and reinforces a purely statistical approach. Large earthquakes follow the same frequency law (the Guttenburg-Richter Law) as small and moderate earthquakes.
It strikes me as sad (but I guess not surprising given the anti-scientific political culture on the right) to find this same contra-factual "we don't really know anything" claim for earthquake geology that is currently pushed by those hostile to climate research.
For a useful backgrounder on earthquake statistics loook at: www.earthquake.ethz.ch/education/NDK/NDK
... It's not that I think the stories are incorrect so much as they serve no purpose other than to feed the human hunger for new and overwhelming things to fear.
I've lived in Los Angeles since I left Vancouver and been faced with the same cycle of destruction predictions and they serve no useful purpose. They are not instructive. They just terrify people to no real end. How are people supposed to respond to a supposedly impending natural disaster that spells utter destruction?...
How are people supposed to respond? Allow me to explain.
"Fear mongering" can create public pressure, and political support, for introducing strong building codes and enforcement, and effective disaster planning that can drastically reduce death and injury.
Alerting people to the danger, and giving them good information about danger zones (e.g. tsunamai strike zones, soil liquifaction zones, etc.) allows them to avoid placing themselves at avoidable risk.
Are you truly unaware of how you can reduce your own exposure to risk? If so, you have only your own ignorance to blame. (Hint: staying out of old masonry buildings helps. I sure do. Also, did you strap your water heater? How about that masonry chimney?)
Even the largest earthquake ever recorded did not create "utter destruction", even though it was vast; the vast majority of people still survived and most who died could have been saved with appropriate planning.
On the other hand, throwing up your hands and saying "nothing can be done" assures that the maximum number of people are killed and maimed.
This information is great and all, but now what?... Sure, some preparedness will result in minor differences in life loss, etc. but in the grand scheme of things the same net effect will occur: total destruction.
How thoroughly untrue. I gather you have never paid much attention to (sounds much nicer than "are ignorant about...") what happens in deadly earthquakes. The vast majority of loss of life in most great 'quakes is due to collapsing structures falling on people. Strong building codes, based on the best and latest engineering insights into the problem, and rigidly enforced can drastically reduce the death toll.
Identifying tsunami zones, and developing suitable marked evacuation paths and alarm/direction systems for rapid evacuation can eliminate most of the death toll from this source.
The Great Cascadia Quake may happen tomorrow, but is much more likely to be 50+ years out. This is plenty of time to transform the safety of buildings and overpasses and tsunami zones throughout the Pacific Northwest.
It's great that you'd like to tinker around and play with stuff at home. You may learn some things, and it will definitely present with some interesting engineering problems. But true scientific R&D, where you discover something new, forget about it for the most part.
...
I can offer a few examples of real cutting edge science from the last 25-30 years that were/are accessible with a garage laboratory: work on chaotic/self-critical/self-organizing systems (work is still being published using simple mechanical experiments), the discovery of fullerenes, and the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Now, fullerenes were NOT discovered with simple garage-type equipment, but they could have been (high school students make fullerenes with home-built equipment these days). The last two of these discoveries/inventions even won Nobel prizes.
And bearing in mind these examples, one wonders what other major discoveries accessible to the garage lab are still out there. Sorry, can't give a roadmap for a real breakthrough. But I would judge that genomic exploration of the environment still has potential for real amateur discoveries. There is so much in the natural living world that has not been discovered, but can fall to new technologies percolating down to the amateur scientist.
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
This sounds about right. Remember - if you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (us tech types can only dream of such a light schedule...) you are working 2000 hours a year, i.e. "thousands of man hours".
They way I figure, they hired one guy (probably a contractor) as an "innovator", and ended up wasting his time for a year before they let him go.
Most remarkably he calculates that 99% of the Earth's ACTUAL liquid water contains life!!
This 12% business is the volume of the Earth where liquid water can physically exist due to its pressure-temperature phase diagram - whether or not there is actually much (or any water) there.
There are yet more limitations on this claim: it is based on the presumption that there is no life below 5 km in the Earth's crust. This is a region very slightly explored, so it can hardly be said that this claim is based on extensive direct observation. The assumption is really that the temperatures below this depth are too high life to exist (the assumed limit is 150 C). But organisms known to survive this temperature dormantly (tardigrades) are actually complex organisms (not simple extremophiles), and it was only recently that organisms were discovered that actually thrive above 121 C (the temperature of an autoclave), so the assumption that this is really the upper limit seems weak.
And the claims get even weaker. Why have we only recently discovered thermophiles above 121 C? Because there are very few accessible locations where liquid water can exist above this temp in which to observe it! Concentrated salts can raise boiling points only so far, beyond which only considerable pressure will keep it liquid. Probably the only environments we can access currently to investigate the >150 C regime are the black smoker vents on the sea floor, where emerging water hits 400 C (before rapidly cooling due to mixing).
And by this same token, the high pressure high temperature liquid water regime will be impossible for astronomers to directly observe anyway (its buried under kilometers of rock, or deep, dense atmospheres, don't ya know).
So if it is an environment where we can actually hope to OBSERVE liquid water (rather than simply postulate its existence) then yes indeed, it is almost certain to be one where life-as-we-know-it can exist.
It isn't as bad as the Ixtoc I spill that went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf. That was 30,000 barrels per day for 9 months.
Maybe you aren't keeping up with the news - current estimates based on actual observations of the oil flowing out of the hole is 50,000 barrels a day, making it worse than Ixtoc 1's peak flow rate (the number you gave). But Ixtoc 1 "only" released a total of 3 million barrels over those 9 months, an average flow rate more like 10,000 barrels a day.
Deep Horizon looks like it will only take 60 days to break the world record for an accidental oil spill, and we are now in day 30, with no estimate of when it is likely to be shut down (though that relief well, touted to be the real fix will take at least 3 months).
That would put it on par with Ixtoc I, which went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf.
That would put it well ahead of Ixtoc 1, which at its worst had only half the current best estimate of 50,000 barrels a day for Deep Horizon. Ixtoc 1 in the end released 3 million barrels over 9 months, the largest accidental oil spill in history. Deep Horizon should only take 60 days to break that record, and we are now on day 30.
It should be remembered that Ixtoc 1 was just off the southern Gulf coast of Mexico, hundreds of miles from U.S. waters. Before dismissing the effect of Ixtoc 1, examining studies of what happened in Mexican (not Texan) waters would be in order.
... Without that juicy legislation by Congress, they would have been damn sure their stuff was safe, because they would be on the hook for the entire damages otherwise...
Right. BP's corporate misfeasance is Congresses fault, because we know corporation always act in an optimal way to preserve their long-term self-interest and would never cut corners otherwise to risk horribly expensive disasters.
Let's look at something that BP was responsible for less than four years ago: the Alaska oil pipeline shutdown (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14219844/).
Set aside the environmental aspects of the spill entirely and just focus on how BP managed that pipeline which delivered 8% of U.S. oil consumption and $30 million of revenue a day. Obviously in possession of such a cash cow, BP's enlightened self-interest ensured that they would keep that pipeline in good condition so that that billion-dollar-a-month gusher would never dry up. But did they? Nooo... they cut corners on maintenance and suffered an entirely avoidable shutdown.
The Libertarian notion, taken up by many non-Libertarian right wingers also -- that regulation is unnecessary since the discipline of the marketplace guarantees good corporate behavior and citizenship (And maximizes economic performance in the short and long terms! Really, no downside at all it seems!) -- is a quaint bit of Nineteenth Century economic utopianism.
Although pointing in a different direction, this "perfect free market" notion is strikingly similar to the character of Marxist thought - another bit of economic fantasy literature harkening back to the 1800s. Both are elegant theoretical structures, so pleasing to its adherents, that the naked evidence of its disastrous failures (and thus the falsity of their premises) in the real world go entirely unacknowledged.
The article says 10,000+ sq miles surface area slick. Assuming this is 1 molecule thick and assume that each molecule is touching each other and atom size of 1 angstrom and average atomic weight of 9 au, we get total volume of 12 million Ga. Again the article claims this is about 20% of total, so we get total of 60 million Ga. this is about 25 times that of the estimate based on 5000 barrels a day.
This thread discussing whether an analog computation by a physical device is really a computation (it is, a world of non-digital computers once existed) provokes another question in my mind. What haven't we seen electronic analog technologies developed to implement neural network computation, which is intrinsically analog in the first place? Why must the combining of inputs in a neural device be simulated numerically?
This bears somewhat on the prospects of quantum computing. It seems to me that electrical processes in standard materials that precisely mimic biological neural processes should be relatively easy to develop (compared to quantum computing), and that they would be far faster than numerical simulation. Yet special neural devices (in the same sense that a transistor is a device) and circuits do not seem to be prominent in neural computing. If this relatively accessible technology space has not been turned into commercial hardware, it suggests the immense difficulty that quantum computing will have.
All this assumes that without the government, none of these things would exist, or they would be poorer. Ever consider that all the above would exist, and more, at a lower cost?
No. The responding poster was refuting (quite easily) the claim that the government cannot accomplish anything - an ideological claim made with no evidence whatsoever. It is not necessary to show that any of these could only be accomplished by the government to disprove the OP.
Now YOU are making an ideological claim - with no evidence whatsoever.
Please. Demonstrate for us that, indeed, all of these things (FCC regulation?) would exist with no government, be better, and be cheaper. Citations of Ayn Rand or selected works of Robert Heinlein do not constitute evidence.
We get a small percentage of our electrical power from oil so why is everyone comparing wind to oil production?
Because one of the most viable means to reduce the use of oil (nearly all for transportation) is to replace gasoline and diesel powered vehicles with electrical ones.
I'd say, first of all this is pitch by the natural gas industry to build many more gas-fired power plants. And this is not an accusation, or an inference, or a suspicion, if you read the TFA this is exactly what the report is and claims to be.
That being the case, their methods of analysis could use some critical outside examination.
Second, the daily power load already has a 30% day night variation that is largely handled by coal plant throttling already, and coal plants spend about 6% of their time in unplanned outages (planned outages are extra). Wind power won't contribute any additional significant variation over a grid that already has to adapt to fluctuating supply and demand until it exceeds the 10% level. Since this already routine, and independent of wind power, I suspect that this coal throttling issue is already well understood and likely to minimized with further plant improvements
Third, the gas industries suggestion is actually a good one. Bringing more gas peaking plants online would be a good way of improving grid load handling, if they displace coal (it also somewhat less carbon intensive).
Fourth, this is actually an example of a repsonsible criticism to wind power, even if the claim is exaggerated or wrong. It points out a potential problem, and proposes a viable solution. This is how potential problems are dealt with - you identify them and you plan to address them.
And fifth - all of FUD I seen thrown at wind power (and most of what I see thrown at solar, or electric cars) is based on the absurd proposition that their will be no other changes -- to the distribution grid, to power balancing, etc. - to accommodate the introduction of wind. This is basically taking the first half of point four, and pretending nothing can be done to fix it. It is certain that there will be many changes in the national power system going on in the years ahead.
The resulting fusion reaction will release many times more energy than the laser energy required to initiate the reaction.
Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology.
The goal of this kind of experience is geared toward energy production. Granted, this is not a prototype power plant, but one could consider the lasers used there as a prototype for elements of a power plant."
To sharpen this point a bit, the NIF is a physics experiment to study the behavior of a particular class of inertial confinement fusion targets - indirect drive pellet explosions. There are other approaches (direct drive fast ignition) that may be more promising.
The lasers used for the NIF are entirely useless as a model for future power production. It is a technological dead end similar to using rubber band sling shots to study flight.Your sling shot can launch a glider allowing you to realistically study airfoil behavior and stability (subject to appropriate scaling laws), but there is no way a super-duper high tech sling shot is giving you useful air transportation. The most promising driver technology - heavy ion particle beams - is not being actively pursued in the U.S.
An interesting aspect of the particular target technology being studied at LLNL is that it is very closely related to thermonuclear weapon designs, so closely in fact that until 1997 almost every aspect of this research required nuclear weapons clearances to study in the U.S. The code used to model ICF implosions at NIF is a classified code (very unusual for basic science) derived from nuclear weapons design codes. And the NIF is scheduled to do classified experiments of an unspecified kind, along with its basic science.
By the way. LLNL is not only a national lab, it is a nuclear weapons lab. Might the relative lack of interest in aspects of the ICF problem that are essential for commercialization, and the emphasis on technical approaches that are most closely allied to nuclear weapons technology, suggest that LLNL is more interest in studying tiny model swords, instead of plowshares?
Apples and oranges. Scheduled downtime is just that - scheduled. You can plan around it, sometimes months or years in advance. Windpower's downtime isn't scheduled or predictable.
Nor do entire plants shut down for accidents with any great regularity.
So yes, it is more expensive and more complicated to provide backup power - as you cannot predict the frequency, duration, or level of backup required.
Apples and oranges, and then there are peaches.
Coal power plants undergo unplanned shutdowns about 6% of the time (nuclear plants are more reliable), in addition to the 6.5% of the time in planned outages. Day-night power demand variation is around 30%, and daily peak power demand can vary unpredictably (in the exact same sense that the wind is unpredictable) by 10% due to extreme hot or cold weather.
Wind power doesn't add any new level of grid instability until its use level exceeds 10% (i.e is at least half the size of the nuclear power contribution, and at even at much higher levels production variation can be handled the same way we handle most of the normal 30% day-night variation: throttling coal plants. We don't get into regimes where exotic or unusual backup power solutions are called for until wind grows to more than 20% of the grid (thus exceeding nuclear power's contribution today).
Really, you are greatly underestimating the amount of power balancing already required, and overestimating the severity of the wind production fluctuation problem.
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Before we invaded Iraq, the only person who knew whether Iraq had any WMDs left was Saddam, and he wouldn't let UN inspectors do their jobs.
Hans Blix, head on UNMOVIC reported differently on 7 March 2003, saying that it would simply take more time to complete the very large job. See http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/07/sprj.irq.un.transcript.blix/.
The Bush Administration ordered the inspectors out just days later so the invasion could begin.
Bush did not want to take "yes" for an answer.
Even anti-war folk thought the probability of WMDs in Iraq was moderate to high.
Wow! So not true! On the Pinocchio Meter this hits "Redwood"!
...
Uh. There NEVER was any intel that iraq had WMDs in 2002/2003. That they didn't have them wasn't "new evidence that came to light years later". It was simply knowledge that was confirmed after it was too fuckin' late to not go to war and destroy the country.
I have to disagree.. with the part that states "It was simply knowledge that was confirmed after it was too fuckin' late to not go to war". There was NO necessity at the time to go to war. The presence of the U.S. military on its border ready to go to war was enough to finally convince Saddam Hussein (interested above all in self-preservation) to drop all the coy games he had been playing and offer accurate disclosures AND allow in the UN inspectors who had so successfully uncovered and dismantled his nuclear program in the early 1990s. The inspectors went in 18 November 2002 and reported good progress on 7 March 2003 and made it clear that given the great scope of the investigation, more time was required.
The Bush Administration simply refused to take "Yes" for answer and let the UN complete its verification Iraq tens of thousands of pages of disclosures, and thousands of facilities upon which the US was casting suspicion. Bush could have saved thousands of US lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and a trillion dollars by letting the threat of U.S. military force do the talking. It was foreordained that Bush/Cheney would reject any cooperation by Iraq, or disproof of their fanciful accusations, as being sufficient. They never cared what the truth was, they just wanted an excuse.
Forests in the US have been increasing for almost the past 60 years. More wood is grown than harvested by a ratio of 3:1, and significant acreage has been returned to forests, in part because more responsible timber farms have been created over the decades. We may have at one time reached peak wood, but usage and growth patterns changed, and that is no longer the case.
Other nations may have problems with their forests, but the US is not one that does.
A better researched and written article would have made the parallel between peak wood and peak oil more explicit and exact. Peak wood hit all of the industrializing nations of the West during the 18th or 19th century due to its consumption for fuel. The areas close to the iron works and major cities in France and Britain were stripped bare of trees by 1750 or so. Coal, and then oil, replaced wood because energy demand could not be satisfied by wood. This is not only still true today, it is far more true now than ever. Tree harvesting today is not for fuel except in poor countries which cannot afford oil-based fuels and are now experiencing the same deforestation-for-fuel calamity. Bio-energy to replace oil cannot be based on burning trees (for the most part) because their energy productivity per acre is too low.
In the 19th century the more densely settled East of the United States lost half of its forests from this cause. Fortunately the U.S. retained vast forests in the West where it was much less densely settled. http://forestry.about.com/library/bl_us_forest_acre_trend.htm .
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond (who also wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel") covers several historical cases of societies that collapsed. Deforestation is the main trigger that comes up in most of the stories. He also makes parallels to our current relationship with oil.
Comparing the content of the article with Diamond's account reveals the weakness of the article. None of his striking examples of actual societal collapses triggered by deforestation are even mentioned in the article, which goes for a soft "literary" approach to the issue.
And a more cogent treatment would show how closely earlier periods of industrially driven deforestation truly parallel "peak oil" and how it forced the move to coal in the 18th century in Britain and France. Both nations had essentially converted all their forests into charcoal to make steel and drive steam engines, which had the same utilization curve collapse now appearing for oil.
I understand that the term was originally used as an end run around a supreme court decision, as you say. However, it has taken on its own meaning since, a term for a notion that has existed for thousands of years quite separately from creationism. Claiming that it is still only a drop-in replacement for creationism is as silly as claiming that Volkswagen still exists to serve as the common man's car for fascist regimes. Though it was created for that purpose originally, it has since served different purposes.
Nice try.
A problem for your thesis (Now ID is really, really unrelated to promoting creationism! Honest!) is that many of the leading proponents of the ID program have in the past self-identified as being creationists and asserted that the ID program is based on the Christian religion, and the leading organization pushing it (the Center for Science and Culture) was founded in 1995 explicitly as a Christian-doctrine based organization.
The voluntary self-identification of ID with Fundamentalist Christian theology was filed off when it became clear that this was a serious handicap in getting it inserted into secular schooling.
When the very same people and organizations that not so long ago were out openly promoting this as a Christian-doctrine based program are still its leading lights, claiming it's all ancient history and that there has been a complete transformation of the movement just doesn't cut it.
I could recast your spurious "Nazi car" analogy to illustrate the true situation (i.e. what if the regime and principals were still in charge) , but this is treading a bit close to Godwin's Law to my taste.
I don't really think anyone seriously believes in Intelligent Design.
Then you don't really understand people very well. From the Center for Science and Culture (a pro-ID organization) here
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
Right. Every statement from an advocacy group's website is an honest statement belief, and not disingenuous in the slightest.
Are you acquainted with the evidence that was introduced in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District?
It was discovered that the ID text that Dover sought to introduce was originally written as an advocacy tract for creationism, which called it by that very name. Then, to try to do an end-run around a Supreme Court prohibition on teaching creationism in public schools, they simply did a mechanical search-and-replace to change "creationism" into "intelligent design", and "creationist" with "intelligent design proponent".
"Intelligent Design" is a transparent construct invented in the 1980s by people who self-identify as "creationists".
How much does one unit cost, and is this actually scalable and affordable for nations where there are landmines? ...
It is pretty clear that this device is intended to support ground attack by a first world army against an adversary like Iraq (or some other country beginning with "I"?).
Think about its specs - it is a robotic device deploying an explosive system for instantly clearing a lane through a mine field. You need an instant lane if you launching a time-critical operation (i.e. an attack), and a robot to deploy it if you expect to get shot at - i.e. you are in combat.
A minefield clearing system for a third world country would probably be an armored flail system that can beat the earth of an entire field by methodically "mowing" it. This system would minimize collateral damage, be thorough, and inexpensive to operate (though the capital cost would be substantial).
It's unknown if large geological events like this occur according to any central tendency. It may be that the mean time between large earthquakes is not related to the mean. Ultimately we have no idea, the data is not good enough to say...
This is an absurd contention. Paleoseismic research provides precisely this information, and is a very well developed field. Further, we actually understand the basic mechanism that creates very large earthquakes and thus have a normative theory that explains and reinforces a purely statistical approach. Large earthquakes follow the same frequency law (the Guttenburg-Richter Law) as small and moderate earthquakes.
It strikes me as sad (but I guess not surprising given the anti-scientific political culture on the right) to find this same contra-factual "we don't really know anything" claim for earthquake geology that is currently pushed by those hostile to climate research.
For a useful backgrounder on earthquake statistics loook at: www.earthquake.ethz.ch/education/NDK/NDK
... It's not that I think the stories are incorrect so much as they serve no purpose other than to feed the human hunger for new and overwhelming things to fear.
I've lived in Los Angeles since I left Vancouver and been faced with the same cycle of destruction predictions and they serve no useful purpose. They are not instructive. They just terrify people to no real end. How are people supposed to respond to a supposedly impending natural disaster that spells utter destruction?...
How are people supposed to respond? Allow me to explain.
"Fear mongering" can create public pressure, and political support, for introducing strong building codes and enforcement, and effective disaster planning that can drastically reduce death and injury.
Alerting people to the danger, and giving them good information about danger zones (e.g. tsunamai strike zones, soil liquifaction zones, etc.) allows them to avoid placing themselves at avoidable risk.
Are you truly unaware of how you can reduce your own exposure to risk? If so, you have only your own ignorance to blame. (Hint: staying out of old masonry buildings helps. I sure do. Also, did you strap your water heater? How about that masonry chimney?)
Even the largest earthquake ever recorded did not create "utter destruction", even though it was vast; the vast majority of people still survived and most who died could have been saved with appropriate planning.
On the other hand, throwing up your hands and saying "nothing can be done" assures that the maximum number of people are killed and maimed.
This information is great and all, but now what? ... Sure, some preparedness will result in minor differences in life loss, etc. but in the grand scheme of things the same net effect will occur: total destruction.
How thoroughly untrue. I gather you have never paid much attention to (sounds much nicer than "are ignorant about...") what happens in deadly earthquakes. The vast majority of loss of life in most great 'quakes is due to collapsing structures falling on people. Strong building codes, based on the best and latest engineering insights into the problem, and rigidly enforced can drastically reduce the death toll.
Identifying tsunami zones, and developing suitable marked evacuation paths and alarm/direction systems for rapid evacuation can eliminate most of the death toll from this source.
The Great Cascadia Quake may happen tomorrow, but is much more likely to be 50+ years out. This is plenty of time to transform the safety of buildings and overpasses and tsunami zones throughout the Pacific Northwest.
It's great that you'd like to tinker around and play with stuff at home. You may learn some things, and it will definitely present with some interesting engineering problems. But true scientific R&D, where you discover something new, forget about it for the most part.
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I can offer a few examples of real cutting edge science from the last 25-30 years that were/are accessible with a garage laboratory: work on chaotic/self-critical/self-organizing systems (work is still being published using simple mechanical experiments), the discovery of fullerenes, and the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Now, fullerenes were NOT discovered with simple garage-type equipment, but they could have been (high school students make fullerenes with home-built equipment these days). The last two of these discoveries/inventions even won Nobel prizes.
And bearing in mind these examples, one wonders what other major discoveries accessible to the garage lab are still out there. Sorry, can't give a roadmap for a real breakthrough. But I would judge that genomic exploration of the environment still has potential for real amateur discoveries. There is so much in the natural living world that has not been discovered, but can fall to new technologies percolating down to the amateur scientist.
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
This sounds about right. Remember - if you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (us tech types can only dream of such a light schedule...) you are working 2000 hours a year, i.e. "thousands of man hours".
They way I figure, they hired one guy (probably a contractor) as an "innovator", and ended up wasting his time for a year before they let him go.
Mod parent up!
Looking up some of the author's actual publications on this issue shows some very interesting details that greatly modify this picture. See: http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/Jones&LineweaverProceedingsv7color.pdf.
Most remarkably he calculates that 99% of the Earth's ACTUAL liquid water contains life!!
This 12% business is the volume of the Earth where liquid water can physically exist due to its pressure-temperature phase diagram - whether or not there is actually much (or any water) there.
There are yet more limitations on this claim: it is based on the presumption that there is no life below 5 km in the Earth's crust. This is a region very slightly explored, so it can hardly be said that this claim is based on extensive direct observation. The assumption is really that the temperatures below this depth are too high life to exist (the assumed limit is 150 C). But organisms known to survive this temperature dormantly (tardigrades) are actually complex organisms (not simple extremophiles), and it was only recently that organisms were discovered that actually thrive above 121 C (the temperature of an autoclave), so the assumption that this is really the upper limit seems weak.
And the claims get even weaker. Why have we only recently discovered thermophiles above 121 C? Because there are very few accessible locations where liquid water can exist above this temp in which to observe it! Concentrated salts can raise boiling points only so far, beyond which only considerable pressure will keep it liquid. Probably the only environments we can access currently to investigate the >150 C regime are the black smoker vents on the sea floor, where emerging water hits 400 C (before rapidly cooling due to mixing).
And by this same token, the high pressure high temperature liquid water regime will be impossible for astronomers to directly observe anyway (its buried under kilometers of rock, or deep, dense atmospheres, don't ya know).
So if it is an environment where we can actually hope to OBSERVE liquid water (rather than simply postulate its existence) then yes indeed, it is almost certain to be one where life-as-we-know-it can exist.
It isn't as bad as the Ixtoc I spill that went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf. That was 30,000 barrels per day for 9 months.
Maybe you aren't keeping up with the news - current estimates based on actual observations of the oil flowing out of the hole is 50,000 barrels a day, making it worse than Ixtoc 1's peak flow rate (the number you gave). But Ixtoc 1 "only" released a total of 3 million barrels over those 9 months, an average flow rate more like 10,000 barrels a day.
Deep Horizon looks like it will only take 60 days to break the world record for an accidental oil spill, and we are now in day 30, with no estimate of when it is likely to be shut down (though that relief well, touted to be the real fix will take at least 3 months).
That would put it on par with Ixtoc I, which went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf.
That would put it well ahead of Ixtoc 1, which at its worst had only half the current best estimate of 50,000 barrels a day for Deep Horizon. Ixtoc 1 in the end released 3 million barrels over 9 months, the largest accidental oil spill in history. Deep Horizon should only take 60 days to break that record, and we are now on day 30.
It should be remembered that Ixtoc 1 was just off the southern Gulf coast of Mexico, hundreds of miles from U.S. waters. Before dismissing the effect of Ixtoc 1, examining studies of what happened in Mexican (not Texan) waters would be in order.
... Without that juicy legislation by Congress, they would have been damn sure their stuff was safe, because they would be on the hook for the entire damages otherwise...
Right. BP's corporate misfeasance is Congresses fault, because we know corporation always act in an optimal way to preserve their long-term self-interest and would never cut corners otherwise to risk horribly expensive disasters.
Let's look at something that BP was responsible for less than four years ago: the Alaska oil pipeline shutdown (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14219844/).
Set aside the environmental aspects of the spill entirely and just focus on how BP managed that pipeline which delivered 8% of U.S. oil consumption and $30 million of revenue a day. Obviously in possession of such a cash cow, BP's enlightened self-interest ensured that they would keep that pipeline in good condition so that that billion-dollar-a-month gusher would never dry up. But did they? Nooo... they cut corners on maintenance and suffered an entirely avoidable shutdown.
The Libertarian notion, taken up by many non-Libertarian right wingers also -- that regulation is unnecessary since the discipline of the marketplace guarantees good corporate behavior and citizenship (And maximizes economic performance in the short and long terms! Really, no downside at all it seems!) -- is a quaint bit of Nineteenth Century economic utopianism.
Although pointing in a different direction, this "perfect free market" notion is strikingly similar to the character of Marxist thought - another bit of economic fantasy literature harkening back to the 1800s. Both are elegant theoretical structures, so pleasing to its adherents, that the naked evidence of its disastrous failures (and thus the falsity of their premises) in the real world go entirely unacknowledged.
The article says 10,000+ sq miles surface area slick. Assuming this is 1 molecule thick and assume that each molecule is touching each other and atom size of 1 angstrom and average atomic weight of 9 au, we get total volume of 12 million Ga. Again the article claims this is about 20% of total, so we get total of 60 million Ga. this is about 25 times that of the estimate based on 5000 barrels a day.
Hmmm. Check my math:
(5000 bbl/day)(159 l/bbl)(0.001 m^3/l)(23 day) = 18285 m^3
(10,000 mi^2)(2.59 km^2/mi^2)(1,000,000 m^2/km^2) = 25,900,000,000 m^2
(18285 m^3)/(25,900,000,000 m^2) = a layer of oil 7*10^-7 m (0.7 microns) thick.
Reduce by a factor of 5 (since only 20% is in the slick) then we get 0.14 microns, or 1400 angstroms thick.
The layer is ~1000 atoms thick on average if the original cited parameters are correct.
This thread discussing whether an analog computation by a physical device is really a computation (it is, a world of non-digital computers once existed) provokes another question in my mind. What haven't we seen electronic analog technologies developed to implement neural network computation, which is intrinsically analog in the first place? Why must the combining of inputs in a neural device be simulated numerically?
This bears somewhat on the prospects of quantum computing. It seems to me that electrical processes in standard materials that precisely mimic biological neural processes should be relatively easy to develop (compared to quantum computing), and that they would be far faster than numerical simulation. Yet special neural devices (in the same sense that a transistor is a device) and circuits do not seem to be prominent in neural computing. If this relatively accessible technology space has not been turned into commercial hardware, it suggests the immense difficulty that quantum computing will have.
All this assumes that without the government, none of these things would exist, or they would be poorer. Ever consider that all the above would exist, and more, at a lower cost?
No. The responding poster was refuting (quite easily) the claim that the government cannot accomplish anything - an ideological claim made with no evidence whatsoever. It is not necessary to show that any of these could only be accomplished by the government to disprove the OP.
Now YOU are making an ideological claim - with no evidence whatsoever.
Please. Demonstrate for us that, indeed, all of these things (FCC regulation?) would exist with no government, be better, and be cheaper. Citations of Ayn Rand or selected works of Robert Heinlein do not constitute evidence.
So we are going to attach large windmills to the tops of cars?
Absolutely. Just like we have oil derricks and refineries under the hood of gasoline automobiles.
We get a small percentage of our electrical power from oil so why is everyone comparing wind to oil production?
Because one of the most viable means to reduce the use of oil (nearly all for transportation) is to replace gasoline and diesel powered vehicles with electrical ones.
I'd say, first of all this is pitch by the natural gas industry to build many more gas-fired power plants. And this is not an accusation, or an inference, or a suspicion, if you read the TFA this is exactly what the report is and claims to be.
That being the case, their methods of analysis could use some critical outside examination.
Second, the daily power load already has a 30% day night variation that is largely handled by coal plant throttling already, and coal plants spend about 6% of their time in unplanned outages (planned outages are extra). Wind power won't contribute any additional significant variation over a grid that already has to adapt to fluctuating supply and demand until it exceeds the 10% level. Since this already routine, and independent of wind power, I suspect that this coal throttling issue is already well understood and likely to minimized with further plant improvements
Third, the gas industries suggestion is actually a good one. Bringing more gas peaking plants online would be a good way of improving grid load handling, if they displace coal (it also somewhat less carbon intensive).
Fourth, this is actually an example of a repsonsible criticism to wind power, even if the claim is exaggerated or wrong. It points out a potential problem, and proposes a viable solution. This is how potential problems are dealt with - you identify them and you plan to address them.
And fifth - all of FUD I seen thrown at wind power (and most of what I see thrown at solar, or electric cars) is based on the absurd proposition that their will be no other changes -- to the distribution grid, to power balancing, etc. - to accommodate the introduction of wind. This is basically taking the first half of point four, and pretending nothing can be done to fix it. It is certain that there will be many changes in the national power system going on in the years ahead.
From https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/
The resulting fusion reaction will release many times more energy than the laser energy required to initiate the reaction. Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology.
The goal of this kind of experience is geared toward energy production. Granted, this is not a prototype power plant, but one could consider the lasers used there as a prototype for elements of a power plant."
To sharpen this point a bit, the NIF is a physics experiment to study the behavior of a particular class of inertial confinement fusion targets - indirect drive pellet explosions. There are other approaches (direct drive fast ignition) that may be more promising.
The lasers used for the NIF are entirely useless as a model for future power production. It is a technological dead end similar to using rubber band sling shots to study flight.Your sling shot can launch a glider allowing you to realistically study airfoil behavior and stability (subject to appropriate scaling laws), but there is no way a super-duper high tech sling shot is giving you useful air transportation. The most promising driver technology - heavy ion particle beams - is not being actively pursued in the U.S.
An interesting aspect of the particular target technology being studied at LLNL is that it is very closely related to thermonuclear weapon designs, so closely in fact that until 1997 almost every aspect of this research required nuclear weapons clearances to study in the U.S. The code used to model ICF implosions at NIF is a classified code (very unusual for basic science) derived from nuclear weapons design codes. And the NIF is scheduled to do classified experiments of an unspecified kind, along with its basic science.
By the way. LLNL is not only a national lab, it is a nuclear weapons lab. Might the relative lack of interest in aspects of the ICF problem that are essential for commercialization, and the emphasis on technical approaches that are most closely allied to nuclear weapons technology, suggest that LLNL is more interest in studying tiny model swords, instead of plowshares?
Apples and oranges. Scheduled downtime is just that - scheduled. You can plan around it, sometimes months or years in advance. Windpower's downtime isn't scheduled or predictable. Nor do entire plants shut down for accidents with any great regularity. So yes, it is more expensive and more complicated to provide backup power - as you cannot predict the frequency, duration, or level of backup required.
Apples and oranges, and then there are peaches.
Coal power plants undergo unplanned shutdowns about 6% of the time (nuclear plants are more reliable), in addition to the 6.5% of the time in planned outages. Day-night power demand variation is around 30%, and daily peak power demand can vary unpredictably (in the exact same sense that the wind is unpredictable) by 10% due to extreme hot or cold weather.
Wind power doesn't add any new level of grid instability until its use level exceeds 10% (i.e is at least half the size of the nuclear power contribution, and at even at much higher levels production variation can be handled the same way we handle most of the normal 30% day-night variation: throttling coal plants. We don't get into regimes where exotic or unusual backup power solutions are called for until wind grows to more than 20% of the grid (thus exceeding nuclear power's contribution today).
Really, you are greatly underestimating the amount of power balancing already required, and overestimating the severity of the wind production fluctuation problem.