Climate Change
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Two things worth reading
- A DIY guide to building your own CNC machine (for about $600)
- Interesting thoughts on Global Warming
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Monday link roundup
- Popular Science has a predictions market
- Global Warming makes you fat! Really! Or so say the environmentalists. For some reason we treat a virgin birth as a matter of faith, but the weather in thirty years is a scientific fact.
- Safari is now available on Windows, I’m not sure why.
- An-arrgh-chy – The economics of Pirates. HT: ZenPundit
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Local cooling
I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it’s 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.
I wonder if there’s a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project…
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Tuesday Rapid Fire
- Networks, in Forbes
- Tin Can Stirling Engine – really cool, this would go nicely with the passive solar heating system that I blogged about last week.
- Global warming awareness reaches diminishing marginal returns, aptly explained by Instapundit. I’m still waiting for the Shotgun News green issue.
- Gauss vs Pareto, if you understand bell curves, you should read this.
- Robots, Robots, Robots, in Iraq and elsewhere
- An insightful article on internal migrations in the US. By Michael Barone
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Interesting developments on carbon emissions
It would seem that there has been some progress in developing an actually useful way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Essentially it’s a giant vacuum that sucks the CO2 out of the air. It gets around several problems, most notably geography (the devices can be anywhere). While there is energy expended in the proccess, the main guy has the interesting observation
The real issue, says Lackner, is not the energy consumed but the CO2 emitted. He estimates that for every ton of CO2 he captures, he’ll generate another 0.4 ton. But because this process will take place at a plant, where emissions are concentrated relative to air, it will be easily captured.
Pair it up with nuclear power and you’ve got an even bigger net decrease.
One item not mentioned in the article is that it is possible to start this on a small scale without any public/government consensus on the topic. Any meaningful consensus, particularly an international one would most likely be ineffective, slow, corrupt in implementation and captured by special interests from the start.
The above remedy is able to be done by quite a few people with little public input and delay. The Sierra Club, Richard Branson, Wal-Mart, whoever, could just set them up as much as they wanted. It doesn’t get around the free-rider problem, but it does allow private virtue to be accomplished.
For the record, I’m still a skeptic on global warming, but the technology is fascinating.
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Best headline of the year so far
From the Grand Rapids Press: Snow won’t dampen global-warming rallies
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Random assortment of links
- Frank Miller is going to be on G4 on Sunday.
- A 96 year old mobster has his day in court. His mob name is “The Old Man” which is rather unimaginative. His record goes back to 1932.
- Stand-in mistress sought to take wife’s abuse
- Your tax dollars at work, in hovering cloud of smoke form.
- Underground coal fires.
- A horrible abuse of language from the junior senator from Massachusetts. “
Might I ask you what your opinion is with respect to the state of American politics as regards the politics of personal destruction?
He has the perfectly descriptive term, slander, to use and yet he came up with that. He makes Bush seem downright articulate sometimes.
- A lot of interesting talk on Gore, and specifically his carbon offsetting program from Marginal Revolution and The Economist. FYI – he seems to be a part owner of the offsetting company.
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The current cold spell
The recent proclamation from on high proclaiming Global Warming is real, because it just is, seems to have brought on a nationwide Gore Effect.
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Global warming is….
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Midweek rapid fire
- Real life Pac Man – hysterical
- One must not question the existence of Global Warming – This is in line with a trend I’ve been noticing in the media and it’s associated hacks, which is the annoying “No serious [insert either scientist, economist, expert, industry insider, analyst] disputes the existence of [insert theory that one is pushing]” mantra.
- Proportionate responses – one of the more daft comments on the Israel -Hezbollah conflict was that Israel’s response was disproportionate. Intentionally proportionate responses went out with the Greeks, and it’s only by accident now when the response is proportionate. The whole notion of strategy is matching strength to weakness. That is most of Sun Tsu’s Art of war.
- AcousticFriends.com – MySpace for the bluegrass/acoustic crowd. I’m listed on there as “Pale Rider”.
- Townes van Zandt Lyrics – and some tab
- A guide to black and white photography