TheVat

Count me among the dubious. What happens if a jet accidentally flies through the beam? (Murphy's law cannot be violated) Why wouldn't ground solar arrays with battery or gravity storage (to even out the supply) be orders of magnitude cheaper? A kilo to geostationary orbit is estimated around $7000(US). And they're talking an array that's a km each side, plus all the maintenance, robots, stabilizing jets, flare shielding, etc. In any case, with research progress on ambient temp superconductors, I would think there's a brighter future for grid distribution on the planets surface.

This thread has massaged loose a recollection of enjoying Sam Kean's book, Caesar's Last Breath, which touches on many aspects of gas diffusion, entropy, and atmospheric chemistry... as the title whimsically suggests. I thank Studiot, Ken, Seth, and Exchem for illuminating some of the tricky aspects of concentration gradients and a possible fresh excuse for avoiding retrievals of boxes stored in the attic (not well ventilated, and a perilous trip via ladder is required). I hope I am correct in understanding that the troposphere tends towards homogeneity, where longterm gases are concerned, while the stratosphere is a bit different with a higher ozone concentration.

Not sure what that means. Sorry - a minor language confusion. In death cults, people believe they will die and are okay with it because they are rewarded in heaven or their souls are harvested by benevolent extraterrestrials or whatever.

I think a lot depends on how Ukrainians hold up in the winter. If infrastructure is destroyed to where many are freezing to death and Western aid can't get through, he may feel there is no moral choice other than negotiating.

Doubt it's anything but a cult overfed on propaganda. They might be Millennarians who believe it's inevitable. Somewhat akin to that doomsday cult Mike Pompeo and Pence are members of. https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/mike-pence-mike-pompeo-belong-doomsday-cult-may-trying-bring-apocalypse/?mc_cid=d1d2f0da07&mc_eid=7bd263b041#.XD4aPp1NIMQ.reddit

I would hazard a guess that many people in the central Front Range area of Colorado are getting tired of mealy-mouthed politician responses to mass shootings. Littleton, Aurora, Boulder, now CO Springs - I haven't broken it down statistically, but that seems like a high concentration there. And the latest shooting, at the gay nightclub in CS, it seems the shooter evaded the Red Flag law that should have taken his weapons from him a couple years ago. I hope this tragedy will prompt some modifications in enforcement of such laws. In any case, heroic job done by the fellow who went all Liam Neeson on the guy - probably stopped the body count from going into double digits.

Fasting for a week, it's not uncommon for fasters to drink lemon water with a tiny pinch of salt. Metabolically, it doesn't have enough to activate calorie absorption (or stop ketosis), and it helps keep electrolytes up.

Lake Nyos disaster is worth googling, on the dangers of CO2 accumulation on a large scale when there's a sudden belch of a lake. The cloud hugged the ground and moved down valleys, killing 1700+ people.

I'm sure others have addressed some of the long established science on CO2 and radiative forcing. I'm just here to point out that you forgot that water vapor amplifies the GH effect of CO2 and throws off your calculations. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere amplifies the warming caused by other greenhouse gases. It works like this: As greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane increase, Earth's temperature rises in response. This increases evaporation from both water and land area. Climatologists have made more predictive models by accounting for this increase in water vapor as a positive feedback mechanism in global warming. As absorbed energy radiates up from the Earth's surface, water vapor is very good at absorbing and holding that heat in the lower atmosphere. And the atmosphere can hold a lot of water vapor - it's a very long way to saturation.

But they don't. The travelers in the Triplet scenario exist in two inertial reference frames, while the earth observer exists only in one. The only reference frame an observer "uses" is her own. The point of the fly-by scenario is to remove deceleration from the picture and get to the core of the paradox and resolve it with the multiple IRFs flashing digital readouts to each other. As long as we're in effectively flat Mink spacetime, with no large masses around, that's all that's needed. Maybe I'm not really understanding your problem with that, but you seem to think Don hasn't really explained it. If I skimmed past something my apologies - I was probably too near c.

Teaspoon of grounds in mug, pour boiling water in, let sit a minute. Grounds will settle, you can drink off most of it without fuss. Kaliningrad is Russia's only ice free seaport on the Baltic. And without Crimea it might be their only ice free seaport except for Vladivostok. I'm all for containment, but that could verge on strangulation.

Durbin is right on with his urging Congress to pass a code of ethics for SCOTUS. Sorely needed. Leaks, failures to recuse themselves (this means you, Amy and Clarence), spousal influence and conflicts of interest... it's a cesspool atm.

The madman is probably Aleksandr Dugin, whose book Foundations of Geopolitics had a powerful influence on Putin and Russian leadership generally. If you read a summary, it makes clear that US/NATO ceding any sovereign territory to Putin is a bad path to get on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics The book expresses an ideology called Neo-Eurasianism. The ideology of the Eurasianism was partially incorporated into a new Neo-Eurasianism movement after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. It considers Russia to be culturally closer to Asia than to Western Europe. This ideology was influenced by political theorist Aleksandr Dugin to publish in 1997 a magnum opus by the name of Foundations of Geopolitics. He later founded the Eurasia Party on the Russian political scene.[12] Political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov defines Dugin's version of Neo-Eurasianism as "a form of a fascist ideology centred on the idea of revolutionising the Russian society and building a totalitarian, Russia-dominated Eurasian Empire that would challenge and eventually defeat its eternal adversary represented by the United States and its Atlanticist allies, thus bringing about a new ‘golden age’ of global political and cultural illiberalism". In a sense. Though maybe sleepy indifference would be a better term than appeasement. I think maybe US and NATO lulled themselves into believing that giving Russia a seaport would pacify it and, hey, the Crimea peninsula was mostly ethnic Russians anyway so why fuss. Not sure if there was much awareness that Crimea was a domino falling.

Longterm prevention, if you're getting the corrosion on the negative terminal, is to run the engine at idle without accessories running for a couple minutes each day. This can prevent undercharge, which is the root cause of the buildup. If corrosion is on positive terminal then it's overcharging. IIRC that's less common. Either way, a failing alternator can cause incorrect charging and so corrosion to increase. Vented sulfuric acid vapor is reacting with the copper terminal and forming copper sulfate. So, as others note, petrolatum is a good way to seal off the copper.

China buying fossil fuel from Russia at a record-setting pace - there is the mother of all blunters.

Just as with other climate changes where there are feedback effects, we need to watch closely and determine what all the effects might be. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/17/microbes-melting-glaciers-bacteria-ecosystems Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria are being released by melting glaciers, a study has shown. The microbes being washed downstream could fertilise ecosystems, the researchers said, but needed to be much better studied to identify any potential pathogens. The scientists said the rapid melting of the ice by the climate crisis meant the glaciers and the unique microbial ecosystems they harboured were “dying before our eyes”, leaving researchers racing to understand them before they disappeared. Some of the microbes may also be a future source of useful biological molecules, such as new antibiotics. The scientists collected surface meltwaters from eight glaciers across Europe and North America and from two sites on the Greenland ice cap. They found tens of thousands of microbes in each millilitre of water....

Thanks, Pete. The National Geographic primer is pretty helpful. It is somewhat reassuring that the turbines turn slowly enough that most fish can get by without being turned to sushi. I will read further.

America, being a fairly stable continental land mass, I imagine that the trend in plate tectonics will keep America as a portion of the Earth's crust for several hundred million years. The duration of democracy, however, a recent experiment in government after millennia of fiefdoms, monarchies, totalitarian dictatorships, and misc. authoritarian political structures, is difficult to predict. Iceland, Isle of Man, and The Six Nations of the Iroquois all managed to keep some sort of democracy going for many centuries verging on a millennium, but those societies differed distinctly from a large modern industrialized nation and had somewhat more homogeneity and zero would-be oligarchs trying to shoulder in. So, tough to say.

As the OP title suggests, just asking if the Grinding Nemo group has a legitimate objection or do engineers have reasonable confidence that the marine life can be kept away from the screws. It looks like the mobile platform approach will be better than the stationary installations, but I just wondered if anyone had more insight on this.

My talent for misremembering Latin phrases is the ne plus ultra. Hobbes has a famous quote regarding mankind, if left in a state of nature... Hobbes wrote some stupid things, too, like a faulty proof of squaring the circle. As fans of the American comic strip know, he inspired the name of Hobbes the stuffed tiger in "Calvin and Hobbes."

Losing to Hobbs, I assume her life will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For her party as a whole, it will be Hobbes' bellum omnia contra omnes.

ABOARD THE PLAT-I 6.40 GENERATING PLATFORM, Nova Scotia — The Bay of Fundy, off the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, has long tantalized and frustrated engineers hoping to harness its record-setting 50-foot high tide to generate electricity. After more than a century of attempts, there has only been one small power-generating station, since closed, and countless broken dreams, abandoned plans and bankruptcies. Even so, a new coalition of entrepreneurs and scientists in Nova Scotia are trying again. One participant, a company called Sustainable Marine, has devised a new technology and successfully operated it for more than seven months, longer than any other similar system, producing enough electricity for about 250 homes. Sustainable Marine’s innovation is that rather than placing stationary turbines onto the seabed as has been tried in the past, it floats movable ones on the surface, lifting them when a dangerous object approaches and for maintenance. If the platform continues to prove reliable, is economically viable and doesn’t harm marine life, it will have harnessed not just a new source of renewable energy, but also one of the most reliable ones in the world. Because unlike wind or sunshine, tides are unceasing and completely predictable. (...) Scientists collaborating with a government-financed research center are studying the impact of the technologies on marine life. A fishing group unsuccessfully went to court six years ago to block the deployment of a turbine at the center’s test site, and ran billboards with the catchphrase “Grinding Nemo.” Regulators have required Sustainable Marine to outfit its platform with a variety of underwater sensors and cameras to track sea life and to automatically lift the turbines when whales or other large creatures approach. If Sustainable Marine’s underwater sensors and cameras confirm assertions by the tidal power generation industry that fish, whales and other sea creatures will safely swim around their turbine blades and the prototype proves reliable, it may become part of a large-scale development. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/tidal-power-clean-energy-bay-fundy.html

Bringing in an extraneous theory doesn't help. Is there any evidence of Kardashev scale 2 civilizations that are bioengineering humans? Huh? The 21 cm and 18 cm wavelengths are obvious choices due to the prevalence of hydrogen and hydroxyl radicals in space absorbing radio noise on those bands and making quiet channels for communication. Has nothing to do with any special neurological attribute of human brains. The "watering hole" (a clever science wordplay in English, since hydrogen plus hydroxyl equals water) is universal, with nothing specific to humans.

Someday I will get a perfect slice of toast, thanks to the LHC. Duh. BTW, y'all....what is a philosophic chat about value doing in quantum theory forum? Anyway, my serious response is: the value of pure research is that it's fun for curious apes like us to find things out. Curious seven year olds take apart old clocks, curious twenty-plus year olds with doctorates take apart hadrons.