OT: "Science" on the other side of the pond

wer?

heaper than wind power.

purpose - somewhat out of date.

"Projected"? Also known as imaginary.

sed cost.

o it matter, and parading out of date numbers isn't a way gaining credibili ty.

not telling a story that sounds plausible to the krw's and the dca's of th is world.

See

t Live will get the reference.

I did watch show, early on - but it was a long time ago, and - as wikipedia points out - the Mr.Bill character became a fixture after the show had bee n running for several years. By then it had become rather more predictable, a lot less funny and had shed the more discriminating elements of its audi ence, which you clearly weren't.

You snipped the graph that shows the huge, nearly linear decline in CO2 over the past 20 million years or so.

Plants

Billions of people are suffering, now. They don't have clean water, or water pumps and fertilizer for their crops, or transportation, or electricity. There are places where an empty bleach bottle is precious, because it can be used to carry water. They die of lung cancer because they burn dung indoors for cooking and heat. They need affordable fuel and electricity and petrochemical derivatives. To kill them in the dubious, imaginary attempt to "save the Earth" is another, bigger Holocaust.

ule.

Humans use cultural adaption to survive and thrive in new environments with out having to waste time on using mutations to generate lots of variations that might work and selection to get rid of the ones that don't.

Thinking about what you need to do to survive is what makes some humans suc cessful. You don't seem to be one of them.

You, on the other hand, have failed to understand that we - and our plants

- have adapted to the falling CO2 levels over the 20 million year period, a nd neither we nor the plants are going to do well when we rapidly undo the

the > >Holocaust.

Business as usual isn't killing them. It isn't offering them a good life ei ther, but going for renewable energy is a better route for both the third w orld and the first world.

There's nothing "idealistic" about deciding that the only way the third wor ld can get to our life-style is by digging up even more fossil carbon and b urning it as fuel.

For one thing, we've already dug up all the easily accessible fossil carbon , and the harder to get stuff is more expensive than it was for our ancesto rs, and dear enough that wind power is now already a cheaper power source t han burning fossil carbon.

By the time that the third world is anywhere near in a position to burn as much fossil carbon as we are, solar cells will also be a cheaper source of power.

Even if burning all that fossil carbon wasn't going to produce an inconveni ent amount of anthropogenic global warming, condemning the third world to g etting it's energy that way would be sticking them with an expensive power source when a cheaper one is becoming available.

Your proposition is insane, and reflects the fact that you haven't thought about what's going on in anything like enough detail.

thout having to waste time on using mutations to generate lots of variation s that might work and selection to get rid of the ones that don't.

uccessful. You don't seem to be one of them.

John Larkin seems to be much better at surviving and prospering than you. He manages to run a business.

enient amount of anthropogenic global warming, condemning the third >world to getting it's energy that way would be sticking them with an expensive >p ower source when a cheaper one is becoming available.

The third world countries need cheap energy now. Somewhere in the future i s not much help.

Dan

The business part is a nuisance; I let other people do that. The best part is designing electronics. Sloman doesn't do that; he'd be happier and more civil if he did.

I gave a lecture yesterday, "oscillators." It was great fun. It was supposed to be a half hour, and I couldn't leave until 6:30.

Let's feed them, educate them, help them get their lives and countries in order, if we can, while oil and gas are cheap. We have a couple of hundred years to develop new energy sources.

Maybe but, it would put a smile on many faces here.

Jamie

OOH! Cheeky!

Why do you value 'business' so much? His 'business' is successful, but so is subsistence farming a successful business. The difference, is that his use of fuel can change the climate and clobber the one-and-only staple crop of a subsistence farmer (remember the Irish potato famine?).

So, his business depends on global trade, transport and available electricity, and he wants the subsistence farmer to similarly value global transport and electricity (but that won't happen). He also wants to dismiss as inessential the reliability of a local crop (which that other business, the African subsistence farmer, would disagree strongly about). Subsistence farming doesn't rely on or particularly value global money-based trade. Nor does it rely on electrical power. Alas, there's no subsistence-farmer input on usenet...

And that really IS a problem, because subsistence-farmer wisdom might be the salvation of our progeny, when fossil fuels are gone.

My company designed the gear to do hundreds of utility end-use load studies, to understand domestic and business energy flows. We are suppling gear to develop the GTF high-efficiency jet engines. We participated in a (doomed) cogeneration project. We supplied a lot of key gear to NIF, which has a slim chance of leading to fusion power. And a few other minor things.

I'd estimate we've already saved thousands of times more energy than we've consumed. Ten thousands, more likely.

I doubt that my use of fuel will change the planetary temperature one microdegree, or increase atmospheric CO2 concentration by 1 PPB.

Subsistance farming is fragile and uses a lot more land and resources than modern farming. It's OK some years, and deadly some years. And not fun for people or their kids. Don't romanticize barely surviving.

How about you? Do you own a fossil-fueled car? What heats and cools your house? Ever fly on jet planes? Do you grow your own food?

As well as greatly increasing Bill's credibility. There's a word for people who preach reform to others while not reforming themselves, and it isn't a pretty one.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

And, you are one person in 7 billion. If you apply your estimated 1 PPB out over the total population, which is implied in sharing out the US type of lifestyle, do you blame people for finding the prospect scary?

An upper limit of 7 atmospheres CO2 buildup in one human lifetime!

But your electronic products business is equally or more fragile, unless you think it can persist for centuries (millennia, in some parts of China, with terraced farming). The threats are different, as are the opportunities. I'm not seeing the relevance here...

Short-term, local, one-person or one-business entities, aren't the right focus for tackling such a global problem as greenhouse gasses and climate change.

ns successful. You don't seem to be one of them.

u.

John Larkin as not having the skills to be successful. So you have someon e has been unemployed for some years and not able to create a business, sa ying that John Larkin does not have the skills to be successful. Does tha t not strike you as odd?

Dan

I doubt that electronics, as we know it now, will exist centuries from now. My company certainly won't.

I'd like to leave the world a little better off for my having been here; That's probably so. I probably net reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere more than my share... not that it matters. We need more CO2.

What we all do is the sume of what each of us does. Simple arithmetic.

What do you drive?

Slogan has some bizarre obsession with me. Creepy.

He claims I'm a bad engineer, apparently because some people buy my stuff. That makes him a good engineer, because....

without having to waste time on using mutations to generate lots of variati ons that might work and selection to get rid of the ones that don't.

successful. You don't seem to be one of them.

That's his thing. I've got my name or more patents, and one of my peer-revi ewed publications has got 19 citations (only two of them by me). That's a d ifferent kind of success. I'm probably not as prosperous as he is, but equa lly, not as vulnerable to changes in fashion - if I actually wanted to driv e around in an Audi I could do it.

nvenient amount of anthropogenic global warming, condemning the third >worl d to getting it's energy that way would be sticking them with an expensive

is not much help.

Sure. But the energy you can offer them isn't going to be delivered now - b uilding up any kind of infra-structure on a country-wide scale takes time ( which they've got) and capital investment, which takes as least as long to organise as the construction.

It makes more sense for them to go for something which is going to be cheap er in the near future, rather than buying into the exploitation of a dimini shing and progressively more expensive resource.

without having to waste time on using mutations to generate lots of variat ions that might work and selection to get rid of the ones that don't.

s successful. You don't seem to be one of them.

I do do some design - and I've been doing some at the moment. It's all conf ined to LTSpice, and I'd certainly be happier and more civil if I could wor k out a situation where I could build stuff as well. The owner of the next door flat - which we are currently renting - is procrastinating about selli ng it to us, and we are holding fire on exploiting the extra space until he makes up his mind.

I don't share it with John Larkin - he wouldn't be interested.

Who formed the audience?

onvenient amount of anthropogenic global warming, condemning the third >wor ld to getting it's energy that way would be sticking them with an expensive >power source when a cheaper one is becoming available.

e is not much help.

We've already done it. Wind is now as cheap a source of energy as burning f ossil carbon, and solar cells are getting there quickly.

Oil and gas aren't cheap - by historical standards - and the price has nowh ere to go but up, as we have to dig deeper and exploit more expensive extra ction technology (like fracking) to get our fossil carbon from harder-to-ex ploit deposits. The "bankrupt Iran by shipping more Saudi crude" drop in oi l price is a blip on the rising curve, not any sign of a permanent change i n reality.

And the claim that we can get away with a couple of hundred more years of b urning fossil carbon as if there was no anthropogenic global warming is bei ng made by the kind of sucker who believes the stuff he reads in the Murdoc h press.

ts without having to waste time on using mutations to generate lots of vari ations that might work and selection to get rid of the ones that don't.

ans successful. You don't seem to be one of them.

ou.

nfined to LTSpice, and I'd certainly be happier and more civil if I could w ork out a situation where I could build stuff as well. The owner of the nex t door flat - which we are currently renting - is procrastinating about sel ling it to us, and we are holding fire on exploiting the extra space until he makes up his mind.

so you sit around moaning all day because you can't find half a meter of de sk space?

-Lasse

umans successful. You don't seem to be one of them.

you.

of John Larkin as not having the skills to be successful.

I wasn't suggesting that he wasn't successful now, but that his gullibility and his enthusiasm for persisting in an approach to third world developmen t that is now becoming sub-optimal weren't exactly the kind of approach tha t enabled human being to adapt rapidly to a changing environment, and chang e their behaviour to survive and thrive in unfamiliar environments.

John Larkin posts more nonsense than most people who post here. When I last looked he was the most prolific poster. He may not post as high a proporti on of fatuous nonsense as Jamie or krw but since he posts more than anybody else, and quite a bit of it is nonsense, I do frquently find myself giving him a hard time

create a business, saying that John Larkin does not have the skills to be successful. Does that not strike you as odd?

It would have been if that had been what I said. I was in fact criticising his inability to accommodate his world view to new information. In business he has found a model that works for him at the moment. One wonders how wel l he'd adapt to a different environment - granting that his immediate react ion to change would be to deny that it was happening.

Typical Larkin rhetoric. I don't claim that he's a bad engineer, merely tha t he sits closer to the tinkerer end of the spectrum than most of the peopl e who post here. Churning out a new product on a two week development cycle clearly works, but it's incremental development in remarkably small increm ents.

Taking bigger steps makes failures more likely. I have had my successes - t he millidegree temperature controller was in many respects very different f rom what I saw as it's predecessors - but I've not been in a position to cr eate a business that did that kind of development.

ents without having to waste time on using mutations to generate lots of va riations that might work and selection to get rid of the ones that don't.

umans successful. You don't seem to be one of them.

you.

confined to LTSpice, and I'd certainly be happier and more civil if I could work out a situation where I could build stuff as well. The owner of the n ext door flat - which we are currently renting - is procrastinating about s elling it to us, and we are holding fire on exploiting the extra space unti l he makes up his mind.

desk

kbenchB.jpg

The die-cast box that I bought to accommodate the assembled low distortion oscillator is almost as big as that box. The box that holds most of my loos e components - not the various reels of enameled wire - is about twice that size.

I'd don't think that I've ever been able to cope with less than 2 metres of bench space.

I don't sit around moaning because I haven't got it. I'd be happier if I ha d it, but if I am depressed it isn't making me moan or sob.

Making Jamie happier would be a Christian thing to do, but Jamie needs to be made smarter, rather than happier, and that would seem to need a brain transplant.

Only amongst people who believe in futile quixotic gestures.

Perhaps, but I'm not preaching reform, but rather revolution.

Our society - as a whole - has to move from getting it's energy from burning fossil carbon and progress to getting it's energy from renewable sources. There's no point in trying do it piece-meal - the hold-outs would burn enough fossil carbon to screw up the planet for the rest of us.

In practice we will have to do it on a nation-by-nation basis, but with a lot of arm-twisting to get the slower nations to get their acts together.