npts2020

ParanoiA; I agree that the dollar is probably in at least as much trouble as any automaker but the pain will be felt by far more than those in the auto industry. The question is what do you do with all of those people currently employed by that industry? If left to the "market", you are likely to be dooming many places to a generation or more of high unemployment and related problems. Who do you suppose will end up with that bill? It seems like everyone in the world except Americans think that nationalizing the big three is the most sensible thing to do. If there isn't a plan to weasel the money out of the TARP program by inauguration, I would bet the ranch the issue will be revisited by the end of January.

If I am not mistaken they said the whole pig, even the meat would glow. What cooking would do to its glowing I wouldn't speculate and tasting it to see if it is the same or safe I will leave for others.

I'm a little slow and had to put this in a form I could understand but it seems pretty much true to me.

I would tend to agree with that Dutch writer that nothing new is being produced by the auto industry and that its weight in the economy is far disproportionate to its value. A large portion (if not most) of what the big 3 owes in liabilities is to their worker pension and health care funds and it could easily be hundreds of billions of dollars that they owe. This debt is why investors are not lining up to buy auto manufacturers stock and lend them money. IMO Ford is the healthiest (probably more due to luck than anything) and is unlikely to undergo a lot of change. Chrysler is probably the worst off and is likely to either merge with one of the other auto companies or go belly up outright (less likely). GM is so big that it is unlikely to fail outright but that also makes it harder for them to do anything about their condition, we may live to see them become a financial institution instead of car manufacturer. *I wish I had a better source but a mid-level exec from one of the big 3 was on a NPR radio talk show yesterday saying that labor was only 10% of their cost of making a car.

Scientific American had an article about this a couple of months ago. If I remember rightly, the researchers inserted jellyfish genes into a pig embryo. I think the green glowing was under UV light, but still a pretty impressive accomplishment.

This is probably one of the best cabinet selections in many years and certainly one of the best Energy Secretary appointments ever. Now if only they actually listen to him.......

Isn't that still photons or matter?

The public forum is the reason he is in office. IMO how he manages it now that he is there will have more to do with his effectiveness than congressional action or inaction. With the proper use he may well be able to effectively change congress in 2 years if they are reluctant to support him.

When I lived right outside Washington D.C., there was a metrobus stop right in front of my house and metrorail was about a two minute bicycle ride away. During those 15 years I didn't own a car but rarely used public transportation becase most places it went, that I wanted to go, were as fast for me to ride to on my bicycle. Transfers from one train to another or train to bus is the main reason for this as it is relatively rare to use the system and not have to make at least one transfer. If there was an automated system with car sized vehicles no transfers would be necessary and you wouldn't have unoccupied vehicles going any further than needed for refueling/recharging. Rails can be efficient but they are very expensive to build and require heavy use to be worthwhile. Finally, it would probably be easier for Detroit to retool for automated vehicles than to build railcars.

Well I can conceive it. I can also conceive a great number of other not-so-well-defined things that may or may not exist in reality, branes, ghosts, and god come immediately to mind.

Well, IMO exploration and scientific advancement are inseparable. Science without exploration is simply philosophy. I guess it comes down to the motivations for doing the exploratory part. If you are doing it just to compile a cool list, it might be said to not be science but if you have a particular goal, like the notion that knowing how the human genome is sequenced might somehow be useful for many branches of science, I don't see how you can't call it science.

Another thing that doesn't get mentioned enough is the pace the warming is happening, unprecedented for as far back as measurements can be extrapolated or at least several hundred thousand years.

drdanger; It's a great idea. You don't want them looking too much like the stuff evangalists hand out or a lot of people will throw them away without even looking. You aren't related to Thomas Paine ("Common Sense") are you? (He was a famous pamphleteer in Revolutionary times for those that need to ask.)

If this is too tame for you, I highly recommend building your own model rockets (ala Estes) for initial experiments. These rockets will not reach orbit but they will give you some ideas about how to move toward that and are not very expensive to try out.

Is there any other kind of existence?

Spectrum lines are a measure of photon absorption of a substance. Hydrogen effects more than one energy level of photons and thereby has more than one absoption line in the spectrogram.

I for one am glad of the length of this thread, it is a very good and fairly intelligent discussion. Personally I would be much more sympathetic if the big 3 were the ONLY auto manufacturers but they are not. Some other automakers are not asking to be bailed out, those are the ones that should be entrusted to keep building cars. The current situation brings to my mind a college student who sends in for every credit card offer he recieves, maxes all of them out, then goes back to his parents for a bailout because he can't afford the loans. Why is it that ALL of the finance options for Detroit have been shut off if giving them money was such a good idea? Apparently investing in automakers is even less attractive than sub-prime mortgages and other "liar's loans".

I would think that all such things are included in what we call science. Discovering a new species or planet automatically inspires questioning in a scientific mind about how it fits into the greater scheme of things. SETI, WMAP, and the LHC are doing basically what you describe and I defy you to explain to me how any of those are not science.

If a guitar string exceeded the speed of sound, wouldn't it make a sound like a whip rather than a musical note (at least till is slowed below the speed of sound).

Why aren't the financial institutions who have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal government "to keep liquidity in the credit market" not loaning them the money?

Where's King Yertle when you need him?

I can assure you as well that zinc will rust in seawater even at near freezing temps. The only thing that changes with the temperature is the rate of oxidation, faster at higher temp.

Well, they did scale back the "requisition request" from stupidly ridiculous ($34B) to just ridiculous ($15B). Notes to MrSkeptic, CaptainPanic, and others. 1) When mass transit becomes similar to personal transit in convenience and cost, people will switch to mass transit but seems to me unlikely to ever happen (especially in the US) with todays modes. The way around this is to make mass transit more like personal transit i.e. automating the system. A minimal system would only require a master controller, guidance devices imbedded in the road, and vehicle control. This does not address the problem of locomotion, however, which needs a better source like electricity generated from renewable sources. 2) Much of the current infrastructure could be used with little modification other than repairing wear and tear. The problem with this is that the new system would be much the same as the old system, only automated (brings to my mind Steve Martin in "The Jerk" buying his family a new house). In addition, there is a substantial percentage of Americas highways that now need major repair or replacement, so why not to begin to put into place something that would actually be better i.e. enclosed to be faster, incorporating a new power grid, powered by solar and wind, prefab roadway sections for faster building and repairs etc. This should be competitive with rail systems for cost and would be a much more flexible system. 3)AFAIK no system like an automated personal transit system has ever been built. There are rail (Morgantown W. Va.) and guideway systems (Heathrow Airport) but nobody has yet built a system with a central control system that tells all of the vehicles what to do. I believe this control scheme to be best suited for a large scale system with millions of vehicles (someone please disabuse me of this notion if there is a better way) on a flexible (not all vehicles going the same speed in a single lane of traffic) road system. 4) All of the technology required is available and proven.

Yep.

Here is a site that posts information on various ongoing green energy projects and other related issues on nearly a daily basis. http://peakenergy.blogspot.com