Free Republic

The saying goes that the mother of the last B52 pilot hasn’t been born yet...

If Mitt wants a stadium named after him, he should lobby the Rocherster, NY soccer team.

http://www.rhinossoccer.com/

I thought the commercial was good satire up until the checkpoint.

How about this for an alternate ending? Rather than have the check-point weenies fawn over and approve of the car, have them act upset that they know the car can’t be stopped for any of their violations. A Newman-like (Seinfeld) guard whines a "he’s fine – we HAVE to let him go" and a rebel yell by the driver as he zooms away (with a final snarl by Newman) would have more effectively played the point that the car is environmentally friendly but a rocket o’ fun and immune to the greenie crap.

I wonder what went through his mind as the environmentally friendly avalanche was smothering this idiot?

rocks

I’m guessing there won’t be a 4th break-in in four days...

hmmm...

good analogy:

apply enough pressure and heat and the coal will become transparent

A nice presetation in a book by Bill Bryson [Made in America]

excerpt:
“It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers,a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter­—occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.’ Their military com­mander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as “Captain Shrimpe”- hardly a figure to inspire awe in the sav­age natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of hus­bandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possi­ble way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England,* just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.’

At this remove, it is difficult to imagine just how alone this small, hap­less band of adventurers was. Their nearest kindred neighbors-at Jamestown in Virginia and at a small and now all but forgotten colony at Cupers (now Cupids) Cove in Newfoundland*-were five hundred miles off in opposite directions. At their back stood a hostile ocean, and before them lay an inconceivably vast and unknown continent of “wild and savage hue,” in William Bradford’s uneasy words. They were about as far from the comforts of civilization as anyone had ever been (certainly as far as anyone had ever been without a fishing line).

For two months they tried to make contact with the natives, but ev­ery time they spotted any, the Indians ran off. Then one day in February a young brave of friendly mien approached a party of Pilgrims on a beach. His name was Samoset and he was a stranger in the region him­self. But he had a friend named Tisquantum from the local Wampanoag tribe, to whom he introduced them. Samoset and Tisquantum became the Pilgrims’ fast friends. They showed them how to plant corn and catch wildfowl and helped them to establish friendly relations with the local sachem, or chief. Before long, as every schoolchild knows, the Pil­grims were thriving, and Indians and settlers were sitting down to a cor­dial Thanksgiving feast. Life was grand.

A question that naturally arises is how they managed this. Algonquian, the language of the eastern tribes, is an extraordinarily complex and ag­glomerative tongue (or more accurately family of tongues), full of for­midable consonant clusters that are all but unpronounceable by the untutored, as we can see from the first primer of Algonquian speech prepared some twenty years later by Roger Williams in Connecticut (a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame, incidentally). Try saying the following and you may get some idea of the challenge:

Nquitpausuckowashawmen-There are a hundred of us.

Chenock wonck cuppee-yeaumen?-When will you return?

Tashuckqunne cummauchenafimisz?-How long have you been sick?

Ntanneteimmin-I will be going.’

Clearly this was not a language you could pick up in a weekend, and the Pilgrims were hardly gifted linguists. They weren’t even comfortable with Tisquantum’s name; they called him Squanto. The answer, surpris­ingly glossed over by most history books, is that the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English-Samoset only a little, but Squanto with to­tal assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).

That a straggly band of English settlers could in 1620 cross a vast ocean and find a pair of Indians able to welcome them in their own tongue seems little short of miraculous. It was certainly lucky-the Pil­grims would very probably have perished or been slaughtered without them-but not as wildly improbable as it at first seems. The fact is that by 1620 the New World wasn’t really so new at all.”

One of these things is not like the others
One of these things just doesn’t belong...

“did you hear something hit the sonar buoy?”

hmmmm... so that’s how sonar works.

“We didn’t ask for the challenges that we face.”
uhh - yes you did, moron. When you chose to run for office.

Yes, very good book. My son took AP US History and used Schweikert’s book for ‘balance’. In fact, he was so impressed with it that he is considering Dayton (History) for college...

hmmmm.... this fits in nicely with the helicopter “wolf cull”

excellent picture -
the goofy t-shirt, skirt, running shoes, pleading expression

juxtaposed with
working people heading home who can't be bothered with her

tells an apt story...

Barney Fife: Now Andy, if you let them take thirty, they’ll take thirty-five. If you let them take thirty-five, they’ll take forty. If you let them take forty, they’ll take forty-five. If you...
Andy Taylor: Uh, Barn.

There are two issues here related to the article.

First is the high efficiency. Yes, this is higher than previously reported, but only marginally so, as compared to a similar structure by Spectrolab (40.7% I recall) a few months ago. It's like a 0.5 in improvement in the pole vault record. A new record, yes, but no earth-shattering breakthrough. Nonetheless, it is a good result.

The second issue is one of concentration. Think magnifying glasses and ants on a sidewalk. The accompanying article alludes to this. Typically, one places a cheap plastic Fresnel lens over the cell (ok, it's marginally more complicated than that) and focuses the sunlight onto a small area. The “one-sun’ efficiencies for these cells are typically in the 30+% range but the structure is, in fact, optimized for concentration. Concentrating the sunlight onto a small cell is - overall - much better than using more solar cell material to get similar power out under ‘one-sun conditions.

And these cells are more expensive than their silicon counterparts so high efficiency under concentration (more or less replace more expensive solar cell material with a cheap plastic lens) makes them more economically viable. Earlier generations of this type of cell are indeed used in most satellites, not because of the concentration (sunlight is not that much greater in space) but becuase of the higher efficiencies at low weight. One still needs large areas, etc, however, to produce decent power...

I remembered this book as well as the on-line lecture by Lomborg. I started to write my response and went to the site to watch his ~17 min lecture again. By the time I finished and sent the message, several replies had come through - yours included... ah well...

Not that this study is w/o its faults, but the issue that GW would not necessarily be bad is not new... A few years ago, Bjorn Lomborg spoke about the relative merits of spending resources on GW vs other problems in the world. His comments are supported by a key thrust of the study - that GW actually has some positive components and spending money on it will be worse than spending money on other things.

His point was that IF we took the huge cost associated with 'fixing' GW to spend on some other 'problems' in the world, what would be the most effective way to spend it? Dealing with GW came out a very low priority.

Link is at www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/62

A Soviet gulag, Pol Pot’s killing fields, etc come to mind as much more appropriate pictures for one to imagine there is no religion

for what it’s worth - the headline was not the only thing misleading / wrong.

hematite is iron oxide (Fe2O3). Rust is primarily hydrated hematite (Fe2O3 with some water molecules attached)

It would have been more accurate to say that the titania (TiO2) and rust were combined...

Iron is a metallic conductor; carbon as diamond is indeed a wide bandgap semiconductor (or insulator), although graphite is a conductor. There are differences between a low bandgap semiconductor and a metal in terms of the electrical properties as a function of temperature, etc.

Interesting work, actually - too bad the writer of the article mucked it up...

"because oil and gas are running out much faster than thought."

but in the GW propaganda, thought is almost completely absent... when there is less oil and gas than this amount of thought, we are indeed in for some changes...