OT: A Bunch of Hot Air

d use.

Atmosphere

Oh for goodness' sake! Obviously another bio-process.

Chemical plants have to purchase Sodium hydroxide, Magnesium sulfate, and Sulfuric acid to produce 3-hydroxypropionic acid. Could it be that purchasing hydrogen for the hydrogen/microorganism method is cheaper than the chemical method? I know we are not taking the same path here, so I'm going to bed. Mikek

...he said, with a steely grin...

--

Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is enough left over to pay them.

Sometimes Friday is just the fifth Monday of the week. :(

Please, go jump off a ferrous wheel.

Tim

It's probably the same % that accept evolution. Probably the same people.

Speaking of which, you how to make an Irishman burn his ear?

Phone him while he's doing the ironing.

(Yes, I know. Some of my best friends are Irish.)

They discovered photosynthesis?

:)

There is some truth in there.

Jon

I think the key word is "directly".

currently they make ethanol from carbohydrates.

this is just more microbes ... this can't be much better.

exactly my thought...

plant trees

they absorb large amounts of CO2 and provide nice shade

you know the CO2 levels actually DECREASE during summer in the northern hemi.

we need more trees

Mark

How does this differ from brewing moonshine?

That is a separate problem. Do you design a system all at once?

Try this... :^p

If it's supposed to produce "new ways to generate power" and "the creation of biofuels" and it seems to violate COE, I wouldn't design it at all.

But yes, I do design a system all at once. Then I might implement the pieces, if it seems to make sense.

Kind of like saying that you've got a switch that works and that now all you need is the FTL engine to go with it -- to be designed later.

It's not possible to be useful for the purposes expressed in the article lead, even conceptually. It's not a separable problem. There is no way to design that later.

It's theoretically excluded, like perpetual motion machines.

Jon

Who say's it's "supposed" to do anything? A reporter??? Do you put total faith in *reporters*? This wasn't a scientific paper you know. It's hard to believe you put so much stock in stuff like this.

Yeah, right. It just flashes in front of you all at once...

Really? If you were going to design a microbe that would use sunlight to convert CO2 into useful hydrocarbons you would just go ahead and do it without anything intermediate that might just not do the whole job? Really?

Even evolution works in tiny steps. Do you think the eye came about in one generation? A gene mutated and an organism had a complex eye?

First the scientist didn't write the article, some reporter did. Second why is anything excluded? What about this is like a perpetual motion machine?

BTW, there has *never* been a perpetual motion machine that was designed all at once without at least a few poor attempts along the way.

Are you saying that the reporter made that stuff up, and the scientist neither suggested any of those phrases, nor reviewed the article before it was published?

It's hard to believe you put so much stock in stuff like this.

Sometimes but not always. But we generally design top-down before we do the engineering of the subsystems. Why design parts of a system if it's provable that the system can't work?