Thomas Kirby

Cpl. Luke: Hemp produces a tremendous amount of biomass on an acre. It does not require nearly as much care to grow as corn does. You don't have to put nitrogen in the soil, for one thing. Even if hemp plants weren't larger than corn plants, and tremendously larger than soybean plants, producing fuel using hemp takes carbon out of the air instead of putting carbon into the air the way fossil fuels do. The problem with corn-derived fuel is that it takes a lot of processing to convert it into mash, ferment it, and distill it. With hemp all that needs to be done is to press the seeds. This can be done by hand. If it had to be, the press could be made completely of wood, but it can be built with a few parts from a hardware store. Legal hemp would give any backwoods engineer the ability to go into his back forty, gather a few sacks of seed, and press enough fuel to run his car for a week without using electricity, expensive technology, fermentation, or distillation. The same fuel could also produce all of his energy needs from a few acres, heating and electricity. I personally would recommend the use of an optimized steam engine. Get the most out of the fuel with the least pollution. Biodiesel Site These facts have been known for a very long time. Diesel engines were actually invented to run on vegetable oils and I think that petroleum is a poor substitute. Also, the stalks contain a huge amount of cellulose that can be processed into fuel. Cellulose is a polymer of starch that can be broken down and fermented to make alcohol, and there are other ways to make it into fuel. It's not just the solution to pollution. We need to have our independence, and what twist of the human mind made us even want to give it over to Arabian warlords anyway? Sure, they can participate in the 20th and 21st century as far as I am concerned, but one, actually be 21st century, and two, they don't get to mess with US. We make them filthy rich, so filthy rich that they can buy and sell billionaires, and they bomb Israel and knock over our skyscrapers. They also treat their people like dirt.

People aren't horribly turned on by technology that can easily kill your mechanic if he tries to repair it, or that you have to take to specialty shops to have repaired. 240 to 500 volts DC is no joke. I thought the guy got it right when he used a 24 volt system on a late 1970s Suburu pickup and got around 75 mpg. Even 48 volts is fairly safe unless you wear a pacemaker. People needed to take some cars that were basically sound, 500 dollar fixer-uppers, and be able to retrofit them for good hybrid systems. If vehicles got double the gas mileage, which is within the reach of 30 year old technology, we wouldn't have shortages and the high prices wouldn't hurt us so much, getting twice as far on a dollar. Building cars with less flexible, less adaptable technology prevents us from using innovative technology to improve gas mileage. People used to be able to convert aluminum block VW engines to steam engines, for goodness sake.

Flyboy, what makes it even more frustrating is that it can still be wonderful beyond belief.

And hemp can produce anywhere from 25 barrels of oil per acre on up. There is a lot of unused land, there is even a lot of unused hemp growing on that land. Some of it can be used to make ethanol, too. 1100 or so gallons of usable fuel from an acre of land each year is definitely a good thing. Takes carbon out of the atmosphere, creates a reservoir of carbon in usable fuel, may help with global warming, scrubs pollution from the air, and we can even eat a lot of the byproducts including the oil. I try to tell people. I try to tell people. I try to tell people. Half the time I can't figure out what goes on their heads. The other half I don't want to know. Just let me sit here and rant a while, because for crying out loud, we should have had colonies on the moon by now. Gasoline should be a dollar a gallon and diesel made from hemp should be even less. We should be recycling the plastics that pool in different places in the ocean. People should learn how to raise fish for food in tanks at home like my grandfather used to. Stupid people shouldn't breed. Also, I think that by now it probably costs less to make your own ethanol for fuel than it costs for gasoline, and cars should be getting 50 miles per gallon while SUVs do at least 40. The Carnot efficiency equation is wrong, too. The sun still works to generate hot water for bathing and central heating. I think we've given up. Grokking the fullness doesn't seem like a good idea so much anymore.

Now that is when it would be useful to have a chip that records exactly what you see and hear. Thank you very much for the story, Bender.

How they work, or how best to use them?

We used to talk about gas-saving vehicles. Some still do, that's why you can get a pretty good price for a Ford Escort that is about 20 years old. Do that, we can reduce the problem. Perfectly good fuel for diesel engines can be extracted from the seeds of the hemp plant, in huge quantities, growing hemp that isn't worth smoking. The crisis that we are in is largely because we are braindead.

Bad power supply. If the power supply is internal, it's probably not worth fixing. If it uses a wall transformer, you can replace it if you can find one with the correct voltage, polarity, and connector.

Transformers are very inefficient and do use power while plugged in. There is an issue of both safety and expense. In a wall-mounted transformer, it is physically difficult to arrange to cut off the AC power. No amount of quality control can prevent the odd bad part or bad hookup from slipping through the net, then someone's house catches fire. They also get beat up. Eliminate the switch, tie all the loose ends with wire nuts or other secure fasteners, you eliminate that safety issue. Switches that cut off the high side are only suitable for sturdy, highly fire resistant cases. They are not suitable for small plastic cases. Most, but unfortunately not all transformers that are used that way are completely enclosed in metal, making them "Class II." Some devices need a continuous trickle of power, like clocks and anything run by remote control. That's almost everything but the electric can opener. Each watt consumed by a transformer takes about a month and a half to run up a kilowatthour on the meter. It isn't worth the risk to try to save the energy by wiring a switch into a wall transformer. The best you can do is just unplug the device or attach it to a power strip that has a switch on it.

I don't know if at one time NASA studied the feasibility of growing plants in space for oxygen and food, and I don't know if this idea has been overlooked or not: It is much less feasible to use any kind of fluorescent or halogen lamps in space, because of weight, power requirements, fragility, poor lifespan, and bulk. LEDs are becoming just about as power efficient, and they generate little heat, are much less bulky for the light they produce, weigh a lot less, and are very much simpler to install. They can be handwired if they have leads, soldered to circuit board material in easy to build arrays, are extremely sturdy compared to light bulbs and fluorescent tubes, and last an extremely long time per unit. Any hobbyist can build an LED lighting unit for a very low cost that is very easy to attach to almost any power source. You don't need hardware like sockets. One thing occured to me while reading "Heart of the Comet" by Gregory Benford and David Brin. We seem very unlikely to need to use UV LEDs to combat growths of cometary life in ice tunnels, but if we, humanity, take on a project like that, we are likely to have short supplies of essentials like grow lights. One fact is worth thinking about. Literally a million LEDs, chip style, can be stowed in a cardboard box that one man can carry in Earth's gravity, and that's in carriers. If I'm wrong, I'm not far wrong. We might even be able to approach a million pre-mounted on panels in small arrays. Just one LED can light up a fair length of corridor enough to see where you're going. A few dozen to a few hundred can keep a few plants growing. Keeping this in mind, for anyone who works on space projects, no mission need ever be short on replacement lighting units. This could work out to the ability to easily carry a one hundred year supply. Something like this could even be made into kits for growing vegetables in any convenient place in a Lunar colony using Lunar soil. Containers of lightweight plastic like they use to make those Ziploc dishes, something to hold the lighting panels up, seeds, LED panels, and if we can figure out how to make them collapsible fit the whole thing into a large manila envelope.

Well, I haven't read the Smolin conjecture, but using vector analysis, the law of conservation of energy and matter proves that we can get something from nothing and that it can return to nothing.

Have you taken vector algebra, at least the basics? If so, do you believe that it applies to reality? The sum of the energy in some theoretical constructs of the universe is constant because the vector sum of all energies formed in the universe is zero. When you set one side of the equation to zero, you are being very literal. We have a situation in which matter and energy can be created and destroyed without violating either the first law or the laws of conservation of matter and energy.

Microsoft Visual Basic generates dlls, to get away from them you have to have a professional version. I think of dlls as giant pains in the ass, especially after several years of dll hell with half the software writers replacing standard dlls with their own versions and causing all sorts of problems with other software. 80 gig drives can be bought two for a week's paycheck, so why try to save drive space that way? These days any compiled language can create dlls. I just stay away from them when I can.

The key to this is going to lie in the fact that what we see as a vacuum is actually a space-time continuum with a certain degree of fourth-dimensional curvature. We know that where this curvature is increased, the speed of light is decreased. It follows that to increase the speed of light, we must decrease the curvature of space.

Circular reasoning always proves itself.

With all eyes on Katrina, it would be wise to pay attention to any tornadoes that might be spawned. Also, landfall is coming during what is usually the hottest part of the day. I think we're going to see the worst we can get for a hurricane. The heated land will add thermal energy.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert. The question that Semnae asked is if this ten percent rule means that different diets would give individual humans more or less usable energy. My answer would be that it does not because the percentage of sunlight that is converted to food calories in a trophic level is not related to the number of food calories that a given consumer will eat, or how well that individual will use those calories. Depending somewhat on the individual there is a difference between the diets, but the ten percent rule has nothing to do with that. It doesn't have anything to do with how much a person eats or how much good it does that person.

As I remember, the laws of thermodynamics were not handed down to us by God or anyone with a status even close to that of God. How do we know that even one statement of the laws of thermodynamics is true? These are unproven assertions. The person who says that they are unproven doesn't have to prove anything. The person who says that these laws are universal and absolute has a lot to prove.

Imagine looking for and reading some really professional studies on rape, ones in which they actually tried to find out what was going on instead of adhering to some doctrine or dogma. This alone is a good reason why older journal articles need to be available for a lot less than 6 US dollars or even 20 US dollars each.

They officially decided that the north pole had to be water ice a long time ago. Here is a good place to start: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/search/Scientist/MariaZuber.html More lengthy explanation The mechanisms for preserving water in craters are pretty clear. Just set a glass of water somewhere quiet and see how long it takes for that to dry out. Water at near the freezing point has a vapor pressure of about four millibars. Water in that glass has a vapor pressure of a hundred or so millibars. The water is also protected from evaporation in still air by a layer of humid air, and that's almost too basic to have to look up. Craters that we can see plainly in photographs have walls hundreds or even thousands of feet high, so any water vapor has hundreds or thousands of feet to climb to escape. Even though the atmosphere of Mars runs seven to ten millibars of pressure, 300 kph winds can pick up sand, let alone snow and chipped ice, and carry it great distances. It's not just the wind pressure, which per any speed runs about a 7th that of Earth (cube root of speed rule), it's the velocity that it drives smaller bits at. The wind will still accelerate light enough materials to its own velocity, and there is lower gravity to help make that happen. Water ice is just about the lightest material to be found and the most fragile. It's being carried to the equator, I'm quite certain.

Millions of cubic kilometers of ice at the poles, seasonal variations in the visible size of the icecaps that correspond with the seasons, winds that blow hard enough to drive sand and dust into the middle of the icecaps, and someone is surprised to see patches of ice in craters when the dark patches are plainly visible in many craters and they follow the contours of the land.

These campaigns help discredit classes of people. Not that I don't think that the Catholic Church needs a lot of that, but I really can't believe a lot that is said about Africans to make it look like they are a bunch of diseased jungle animals. With the Church it is a mere "purging of the ranks" and an excuse to ban homosexuals. With other groups it opens them up to attacks that destroy their reputations and their persons.

Shouldn't resident experts hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior? I don't think that was called for, Severian.