Coastal electricity

Here's a technique that can generate electricity by swapping salty and fresh water. Essentially you charge a battery in fresh water, replace the fresh water with salty water, and discharge the battery. The swap generates more electricity than originally went into the battery for a net gain in power. This would be another way to harness the solar power put into the Earth's system by the rain cycle.

Radiation Levels Visualized Side-By-Side (INTERACTIVE)

A little walk through what various radiation doses actually mean.

Understanding Campbell's Law

Campbell's Law says that incentives corrupt. The more punishments and rewards that are attached to any measurement or test, the more people will game that measurement, either by focusing on it to the detriment of other useful activities or by outright cheating.

Update: I've actually seen this in play at my company's headquarters. When there was a policy that allocated landlord costs according to the square footage occupied by various departments, the managers reduced their budget by squeezing their staff into smaller and smaller offices. Eventually they ended up with everyone sufficiently crammed into one end of the building that they were able to rent out a portion of it to another company. Productivity and morale fell because people felt so overcrowded so eventually the policy was changed.

Renewable petroleum

The real answer to foreign oil imports is a technology that artificially creates long-chain hydrocarbons economically. Not only that, it reverses greenhouse gas creation by consuming CO2. Bacteria and sunlight can give us truly renewable petroleum.

Physics Of Sailing

Yes, you can sail faster than the wind. Remember F=ma? If you apply a constant force to a movable object it will accelerate continuously. When you sail 90 degrees to the wind, the boat experiences a constant force and will go faster and faster until it reaches the maximum speed attainable. The limit of the speed is dictated by the shape and length of the hull, not the wind.

States broke?

McClatchy news points out that states are broke because they cut taxes too much. When taxes are cut, rich people win and poor people lose.

Artificial leaf

This is a new direction for solar energy generation.

About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in a bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day, Nocera said. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen.
The hydrogen and oxygen gases would be stored in a fuel cell, which uses those two materials to produce electricity, located either on top of the house or beside it.

Battery charging

The technology for electrical transport makes another advance. This brings it closer to being able to recharge a battery as fast as one can fill a fuel tank.

Charting historical tax burdens

Once again here's another chart showing that a major contributor to the deficit problem is historically low taxes.

deficit hawks often sidestep a no-less important trend: In recent decades, tax rates--especially for the rich--have been on the decline by historical standards. Everyone likes getting a tax cut, but it's worth remembering that the shrinking of tax revenue has contributed to the deficit problem, just as spending has.

If we are going to our budget by giving grace to the wealthy there had better be a public benefit. If not, we are just being stupid or duped.

Chemical-free pest management

Methods of chemical-free pest management show great promise for reducing the waste of rice. This is good news for the billions who depend on rice for food.

New process for tar sands

A new process using Ionic liquids separates oil from tar sands at room temperature. The need for large amounts of water is eliminated because the fluid can be processed and reused. The process would also be able to completely clean oil from beach sand.

Cheap Talk

The cheapest talk is a Republican pledge. When they wanted to defund NPR, the 72-hour pledge of transparency didn't mean a thing. Republicans are as reliable as drug addicts. They will say anything but you can't believe any of it.

We All Could Be Texas

By their fruits..... Texas has been run by Republicans for so long that it should be a shining example of the value of Republican governance. It's an example, but it ain't very shiny. Financial planning 101: Any family that goes through hard times by only cutting expenses eventually must starve or sell their children. At some point you have to find a way to increase revenue.

Skipping the Disinfectants

This study shows that elbow grease is a better cleaner than disinfectant.

Expect Global Warming

If nuclear power declines after Fukushima, we must resolve ourselves to living in a warmer world and make the necessary adjustments. We might want to learn from past experience what to expect in a warming world. It's time to build those dikes around Manhattan and Hong Kong.

Klippert Touts his bills

• House Bill 1150 – Would allow a business seven days, instead of two, to continue their misbehavior before they can be issued a fine or penalty.
• House Bill 1151 – Would require that agencies be granted specific statutory authority before they can regulate the way they were established to regulate.
• House Bill 1156 – Claims that jobs would be created by putting a freeze on new rules or regulations by state agencies until 2014, or when the economy recovers. If the public needs protection by a regulation, forget it.
• House Bill 1388 – Would prohibit implementation of new energy building codes until April 1, 2012, giving the big campaign contributors in the construction industry a chance to make more money building substandard buildings for a while.
• House Joint Resolution 4213 – Would make it nearly impossible to balance the state's budget without loss of vital services by making permanent the two-thirds vote requirement to raise taxes by passing a constitutional amendment.

Failure of Imagination

The containment vessels on the reactor cores have basically done their jobs but sadly, the biggest threat to pubic safety from the Fukushima reactors has been the loss of external power. While design energy has gone into protecting the public from the hazard of an overheated core, it looks like engineers have been short-sighted in considering the hazard of power loss to the spent fuel cooling pools.

That being said, the largest public safety risk appears to be simply being too close to a coast line. As bad as things are at Fukushima Daiichi, thousands probably lost their lives in an instant from the tsunami. And that loss of life has nothing to do with nuclear energy.

Fukushima 'stable'

Danger abates for the Fukushima reactor. Despite the hysteria in the media, this may go down as a textbook case in how to handle a major nuclear disaster. Since it was slated for decommissioning in the near future, the decision was made to flood it with boron-doped seawater. It's decommissioning just came a little earlier than planned.

Downside of No-Choice Laws

An unusual case, yes. But that's why hard-and-fast abortion laws are tragedies-in-the-making. The only way for real compassion to operate is when there is choice rather than prohibition.

Dumbing Deficits Down

It's past time for the left to muster some courage for their convictions.

Health care is only one of the large and difficult problems America needs to deal with, ranging from infrastructure to climate change, all of which demand that we engage in a lot of hard thinking. Yet what we have instead is a political culture in which one side sneers at knowledge and exalts ignorance, while the other side hunkers down and pretends to halfway agree.