Rev Blair

Ah, so this already exists. Which makes me wonder why we don't have it already. Canada is way bigger than any of the routes described in the links. Hell, the relatively short trip I was thinking about is longer...and quite possibly duller...than those in the articles. It would seem to me that this would be a natural here.

I do drive the truck. So do thousands of others. We haven't got a lot of choice. I'm looking for a lower emissions option. That's one of the things I'm wondering about. If it costs more than driving, it won't work. People won't use it. If it costs about the same though, I think a lot of people would. There's already plenty of rail traffic, so it could started by adding cars to trains. I think that you could realistically get 10 to 15 vehicles on a rail car, depending on the size of the vehicle, if you went with a two level design. Ah, see I wasn't aware of the metal dust thing. That's the kind of thing I need to know.

I'm trying to flesh out this idea a bit. The situation: I often have to travel back to my home province. Usually this entails taking two dogs, a wife, and a bunch of carpentry tools, so I need to take the truck. I also need transport when I get there, since most of my relatives live in rural areas and there is no public transit available. I know a lot of people who make this kind of trip, either for family or business. My idea: My idea is for a rail ferry. You drive to the rail station in Winnipeg, put the truck on a rail car and sit either in the truck or in a passenger lounge until the train gets to Regina. You can take all your stuff with you, and you have a way of getting around when you get there. You could do this all across Canada and likely the US too. A lot of the infrastructure is already in place...the rail lines are there and the trains move already. We'd need facilities for loading cars and trucks onto trains and we'd need to build or modify rail cars for the purpose. The rationale: The rail companies already do this with semi-trailers and cargo containers to some extent, but this would be for people and personal vehicles. We use an incredible amount of fuel and emit a lot of GHGs to travel in personal automobiles. Getting most of the salesmen, technicians, tradespeople, and vacationers off the highways would save a lot. It deals with a lot of the objections, real and imagined, to using public transit. So how hard would this be to do? You'd need some way off locking the vehicles down, I think. The cars would have to be enclosed so people wouldn't fall off. The price would have to comparable to the cost of driving for people to use the service. You'd need regular service, but there's no reason I can see why a car or two couldn't be hooked on to existing trains. Obviously I've missed a lot of things. I'm not sure about the engineering that would be necessary and have no idea how to calculate savings in emissions, for example. The logistics of loading and unloading vehicles belonging to people who can't parallel park most days could be a problem. Then there's dealing with the rail companies. CN has been a nightmare of brutal ignorance ever since those guys in Chicago bought it. CP is no better...some would say that it's worse. I think these things can be dealt with though. What have I missed?

In Canada it's 330 feet (110 yards). Also, our balls are bigger.

Not too far from where we were in the 19th century, when feeding a team of horses so they could work was often in competition with feeding your family. One of my friends used to have a Chesapeake retriever that was pretty bright, considering the breed. If you put a bowl of food in front of the dog though, it would eat so fast and get so excited that it would actually snort food into its sinuses. The human race reminds me a lot of that dog.

The other day I expressed something by saying, "That's a lot of hay," in a conversation about something having nothing to do with hay (we were actually talking about the price of lithium power tools). The guy I was talking to, who knows nothing about agriculture, insisted that I express it by how many pick-up trucks it would take to haul the hay. "Blue trucks or green trucks?" I asked (not such a bizarre question, since I own a green 3/4 ton and a blue 1/2 ton), then wondered, "And what kind of bales?" (also not bizarre if you know about bales) He didn't get my point...that I could say anything and it would be more or less meaningless to him...and actually got a little upset at me. This is a relatively bright guy, but he's been so conditioned by meaningless "measurements" that he expected me to have one ready. So I sent him an e-mail a little later, "Assuming large round bales made on a John Deere hay brake in a filed of prime alfalfa, it's about the same as 50 dozen Two Rivers beer." His reply was, and I'm assuming he'd regained his sense of humour by this time, "Do you mean volume or weight?"

It's a lot more complicated than that...I actually spent about three hours sitting in a bar with political/money guy today talking about this, and it was so involved that I didn't even get to take advantage of the fact that he was buying. That is a big part of the problem though and the only way it can really be addressed is by government regulation, as near as I can tell. The problem is this...cellulosic processes are great because they use agricultural waste (straw, corn stalks etc.). Both cellulosic crops and some bio-diesel crops are also great because they can be grown on marginal lands and the crops tend to sequester carbon rather efficiently (BTW, don't write off the pot people when they start talking about hemp...they have a point, although they tend to exaggerrate it). Once you create the market for those crops though, you run into a whole other reality. Crops that grow well on marginal land will grow even better in good rich soil. If they are worth more per acre, farmers will grow them instead of food. These crops tend to have relatively low input costs...you plant them once, and harvesting is basically like haying. They require very little fertilizer or insecticide. They are likely to draw subsidies as well, making them even cheaper to produce. That leaves them being worth more per acre than most food crops. So the price of food will rise even more. So who is going to tell the farmers that they can't plant these crops to get the best return on their investment? Not me...I've been called a commie enough for one lifetime.

It's on the Canadian History Channel. I'm not sure whether it's a Canadian show or something they bought from the US though.

I've heard of it and it works. There are a variety of processes that break down the cellulose to make it suitable for conversion into ethanol. Most are quite energy intensive in themselves, at least so far, but a couple technologies stand out. The best is a bacteria (I think) that's been developed to break down cellulose rapidly. It requires very little energy and can process wood waste, straw, and cornstalks.

No, a lawn isn't enough to support yourself. I didn't mean to imply that it was. It is part of a solution, though...one piece of the puzzle. I doubt there is any single solution and no partial solution is one-size fits all. There are other forms of urban agriculture as well...growing food crops in common green spaces, and even raising livestock by allowing grazing in suitable areas. There are rooftop gardens. There are different agricultural practices we can follow. There is land reclamation. Not one of them will solve the problem on its own though. There are no silver bullets.

I think the best solution to a lot of that is to practice urban agriculture, agentchange. All that grass we mow every weekend could be growing food for us instead. If you look at the Cuban model, it becomes apparent that we actually have a lot more land accessible than we use. You have to wonder why we have people going hungry, yet we pay somebody 18 bucks an hour to drive around on a lawn tractor cutting grass. Couldn't we pay that guy 18 bucks an hour to grow food instead? It seems like an obvious solution, at least to me, but it doesn't fit into our economic and political models at present. Try suggesting that we pay public employees to produce food for the disadvantaged, or to turn public greenspace over to community groups to produce their own food, and men in suits start calling you a commie pretty damned quick. Okay, I hit the post button before I meant to. I also see hydrogen as a better solution than bio-fuels, agentchange. Looking at the situation in my own province, we have huge hydroelectric resources. There is no reason why we can't use at least some of those resources to produce hydrogen. I do see bio-fuels (produced from agricultural waste etc.) as a likely niche fuel for things like running small engines and powering equipment for some applications though. I think part of the problem with bio-fuels, and hydrogen for that matter, is that we're looking for a magic bullet to replace fossil fuels. I don't think there is a single solution, but a lot of small solutions.

Smash Lab does have better science, I think. I've noticed a few other things that seem to have come from the Mythbusters thing too. There's the Reinventors...they take old patents and try to make them work. Sometimes there's good science and sometimes it's kind of goofy, but it's always entertaining. For pure science in the popular media, I think Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio still pretty much sets the standard. It's just interviews with working scientists for the most part, but they actually talk about science in an accessible manner. The Jay Ingram show on Discovery Canada used to be good too...he came from Quirks and Quarks and that seemed to be the model for the original...but it's become a showcase for gadgetry instead of a science show.

Cool. I had this impression that mammals were pretty much snack food back then.

You could try using some technological explanation to preserve, or somewhat preserve conditions where they wouldn't otherwise exist...some alien experiment left on its own. Technology we don't understand looks a lot like magic, after all. It also occurs to me that you might want to have a look at some of the scenarios in Larry Niven's "Ringworld". Not exactly the same scenario you are talking about, but it might give you some ideas, Splamo. As for strange ecological places, here in Manitoba we have the Carberry desert. It has moving sand dunes and some species peculiar to it. Right next to it is a geographical feature called The Devil's Punchbowl, which is basically a small, abrupt valley in the middle of the prairie. You might want to do some research into places like that, since they are so different from the surrounding area.

The surplus stores have been shrinking for the last several years and are now at their lowest levels since the Great Depression. That has pushed the price up. There is also much less fallow land than at anytime in the past. Where leaving land fallow used to be a recommended part of crop rotation, modern farming practices call for low or zero tillage and constant cropping. If food is too expensive for people to afford, then there is a shortage of food. We've only seen food riots in the developing world so far, although the Tortilla Riots in Mexico a little while were a little closer to home. Look around your own city though, and you'll see that there are people who unable to afford food. There are people with full time jobs that use food banks. We aren't seeing rioting in the streets yet, but that is an indication of a shortage.

Being more or less self-educated in evolution, sometimes (maybe more than that) I find myself getting a little confused on some things sometimes. I'm hoping some of you don't mind helping me become less befuddled. Presently I'm confused about the whole mammal-like reptile thing. My current understanding is this: They were the dominant species, then what's now part of Russia blew up, there was runaway global warming and a mass extinction. Over several million years the mammal-like reptiles became proto-mammals hiding in the bush and dinosaurs became the dominant species. Is this more or less accurate? Does it match the current thinking, or am I half-remembering something from grade four science that's changed in the 30+ years since?

Why should this happen? Evolution is not some directed thing where every species can be expected to go through some hierarchy of development until they become us. Instead, it is more or less random...some trait is favourable under some conditions so individuals with that trait breed more. That's a gross oversimplification on my part, I know, but no other species is going to evolve into humans. Maybe they'll develop bigger brains or become bipedal. Maybe not. Whether they do or not though, they are in no way on a path to evolving into humans.

I think the argument that acting will force us into a global depression is misguided at best. Such action is a really a shift in technology and there has never been a shift that didn't create wealth and leave us better off in the long run. Those who say the costs are too high are very much like the Luddites who fought tooth and nail to maintain the old technologies instead of embracing the new.

I'd say that most of the present food shortage is a function of too many people and too little arable land. Bio-fuels, in their present incarnation, will make that situation worse. That's especially true given the twisted way that subsidy regimes are applied, especially in the US and Europe.

Hello. I'm Reverend Blair...an internet-ordained atheist reverend, just so I don't confuse anybody. I'm not a scientist, but have an interest in science, especially as it pertains, or should pertain, to politics and public policy. Anyway, I do try to understand science and recognize my lack of education, so don't feel bad about correcting me if I'm wrong about some theory or something. I am a writer by trade, a freelancer who cobbles words together in exchange for cheques. It's a dicey way to make a living, but I've discovered that writing how-to books and articles with other people's names on them keeps me in beer and cigarettes and anything I sell with my own name on it is gravy. Anyway, somebody from the Dawkins site mentioned this place, and it sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a shot.