It's not all that distant of a relative of chickens, actually - it's in the same family (but a different subfamily). It's kind of wierd that one family (Phasianidae) has almost all of the commonly consumed poultry - chicken, turkey, grouse, quail, pheasant, peafowl, guineafowl, etc. Go up to the order level and you find more (mostly regionally popular) game fowl, like ptarmigan. And once you hit the superorder level, you get the water fowl like ducks, geese, and swans. I can't even think of any other poultry species. There's lots of Aves clades, subclasses, and infraclasses, but apparently the species that people find make good eating are rather clustered together.

Yes, and the three countries in the worst shape (as it relates to the spread of Ebola) all have a miserable record of taking lots of external support that could be educating their people, bolstering their healthcare systems, and generally improving the lives of everyone in those countries. But because of cultural inertia and rampant corruption (you know, the people who feel entitled to skim the support cash/material personally and not do things like march out into the rougher parts of their own country to explain to the rural population that they're killing themselves with primitive rituals), those are places that can't shake off the problem.

Do you want to know who is a smug western douche? You are. "Africa" isn't a place you can talk about in sweeping terms like you just have. Your dim, uninformed vision of it as a single, monocultural place with a common level of education and sophistication is absurd (and incredibly condescending, Mr. Holier Than Thou). "The entire continent" isn't the same. Countries like Nigeria have seen cases in this outbreak, but have headed it off at the pass because the population, culture, and approach to things like this are very different there than they are in, say, Liberia.

I have no trouble telling ANY group of superstitious people that what they think is ridiculous. Especially when they do things insist a capricious god is going to cure their kid's cancer, or kiss the bodies of Ebola victims, and then wander back to their own homes and, a couple of weeks later, wonder why their whole family is dying - despite a helpful aid worker risking her life to explain to them the basic facts of life and death. It's the 21st century. Billions and billions of dollars in aid flows into the countries most vulnerable to issues like this, and it gets squandered, diverted, or mis-applied because of toxic levels of corruption by comparatively educated people. They want to have a piece of that foreign aid action while also having the lazy inertia of backwards cultures that can't cope with this much human density. That sense of entitlement to both a primitive past and a piece of the largess of other countries that have moved on - it's unmistakable.

No, the entitled assholes are the ones who feel no reason to stop doing the very things that are spreading the disease. You're the one with the skin color obsession, everyone else is talking about what people actually do. Like laying hands on the corpse of someone who's just died of Ebola, while simultaneously asking the rest of the world to risk their lives and spend their money and time to come help ... even as they refuse to stop their idiotic, suicidal customs. That is a sense of entitlement, and a ridiculous part of a culture that simply has to stop if they want to quit spreading that disease around.

Ah, a change of topic. I was restricting myself to the electric grid, as I specified. As for the rest of it, I don't know what you think you're arguing with me about seeing as how I agree with it.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Right now you can get a 250W panel for around $200. You should be able to generate around 438kWh from it a year(20% capacity factor). Or around $4.38 worth of electricity, which is a 46 year straight payoff(not worth it). If you pay 20 cents like some people, it's only a 23 year payoff(worth it).

A 22% increase in efficiency makes that 250W panel into a 305W one. 534kWh/year, $5.34 - 37 year payoff, which is barely not worth it, but you're looking at not needing to be paying on the highest end of the scale anymore for it to be worth it.

I can remember one wise lecturer in my computer science course gave a challenge to come up with a system to solve a customer's problem. Being CS students we designed everything requiring the use of a computer. At the end he asked us if we had considered whether a non-computer based system would have actually have done a better job. While in the particular case the answer was no, it did show us that sometimes we use technology for technology's sake and not to solve the problem in the best possible way. Voting machines should be approached in the same way and the opti-scan mention by another poster certainly seems to strike the right balance between solving the problem and not throwing the wrong technology into the mix.

A lot of companies are involved in a lot of renewables tech research. That doesn't mean that any particular one is going to be profitable. The vast majority are going to be big failures.

Wave power's track record so far has been subpar to say the least. And looking at their diagrams, I can't imagine that they're not headed straight for the same fate. Even if we assume that their numbers aren't overly optimistic, their design looks like it would involve several times more steel per nameplate capacity than a wind turbine tower. And they're operating in a much harsher environment. No rotors, but they're dealing with major hydraulic pumping instead. It just doesn't look like a winner to me.

If it was my job to have a go at wave power, I can't imagine going for anything involving large amounts of structural steel or hydraulic pumping; I'd keep it simple and just go for a grid of cables (potentially a high tensile strength UV-resistant plastic), anchored at the edges to keep tension up across the whole grid, with the only slack available involving the grid pulling on regularly spaced springloaded reels (the rotation thereof generating electricity), with any combination of floats, drag chutes and weighs/anchors to cause the needed tug from the movement of water. No pumps, no hydraulic fluid, no large compressive-loaded structures, just a tensile structure that would be (proportionally) lightweight and easy to deploy.

But hey, it's not my industry ;)

I'd say the guy performing the cost estimate, because efficiency at extraction is a key indicator to how much space you'll need to produce your target amount of power(or how much power your limited space can produce), which determines how much equipment you need to do it, which drives cost. That's without considering that if you need to purchase/lease/rent land or area rights there can be a cost there as well.

But as an executive deciding between different options, you're right.

Electricity is fungible - IE most people don't care where it comes from, so any one kWh is equivalent to any other.

Consider if Biodiesel is $3.50 and fossil diesel is $3. You're going to sell vastly more diesel than biodiesel. Make Biodiesel 22% cheaper and it's now $2.73. The situation will reverse practically overnight. More realistically what will happen is that investments in BD would languish until diesel hit $3.50, then plants would be built right and left, pushing down the price of both, but as process improvements decrease the cost of BD and capacity is increased even as fossil oil becomes harder to extract, that more and more BD would be sold even as FD sales decrease. Eventually FD would occupy more or less the same position as BD now.

To put it another way - alternative energy is very cliff-like - you don't notice much change until you actually fall of the cliff, then change happens very quickly. We're relatively close to the cliff right now. Hawaii is holding onto the old production model by it's fingernails. It's possible that very soon daytime electricity will be cheaper there than nighttime.

To avoid the chads problem I think we should stick with the 'fill in the bubble' or 'finish this line' type optical scanning ballots. Easier to write what counts and what doesn't, as well as easy for verification/counting by hand if necessary.

It's less about absolute accuracy than it is about being auditable.

Seriously, the rush to electronic voting after the 2000 Presidential election was just a bad idea all the way around -- and, frankly, most IT people with any experience were saying so. It is vastly, vastly harder to change physical media than to change electronics.

Why not? Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about shutting down every single fossil fuel power plant, though some would be converted to biomatter plants. That's a massive game changer right there.

The idea is that at 20% solar covers the daytime increase in power usage. It should be installed such that, normally speaking, it only covers 50% of daytime usage. 20% wind is within reach without massive grid modification. My peaking/windless generators are the hydro and biomass plants. I would encourage the use of thermal storage systems though - bigger water heaters that operate only when electricity is at it's cheapest(most plentiful).

As for transmitting electricity for thousands of miles, at least in the USA you wouldn't have to. You would just 'trade off' production towards the area having a shortfall.

Well, yes, I keep forgetting to put 'for the USA' into my statement. It also averages out to the world. Specific countries have different ideal setups. Brazil and Canada can keep using it's hydro and neglect solar in favor of wind. Hawaii and other equatorial islands can go nearly all solar. Alaska would probably end up being more nuclear(as I understand it our hydro prospects aren't that great).

Finally, I'll say there's a reason I said 'roughly'.

There's a lot more wrong with hydro than just 'takes too much land'. There's lots of ecological issues, which is why the USA is considered pretty much maxed out on hydro. It' also not zero CO2, it's really low, but making all that concrete does produce it. Plus you eventually have to dredge the lake to get rid of sediment build up.

For some reason this irks me. It's the same chemical as the majority of natural gas, IE CH4. NG tends to be a bit dirtier depending on how well they've filtered/cleaned it.

Southern half of the USA for that matter.

I think you're glossing over a number of issues. There are real-world concerns with the growth, harvest, processing(moisture removal), and delivery of biomass to the plants. There are also serious pollution concerns when you do a lot of it. Mostly fine particulates and NOx compounds. You have a very interesting outlook if you think that 'high costs' = 'high profits'. You get the highest net profits from high-gross profits combined with low costs - IE cheap to produced, sold high. Electricity is normally a standard in fungible goods - if you can produce it a cheaper way, that's the way to make a profit.

Huh, that made total sense when I wrote the post. What's captured? Costs. 'externalities' are costs that are not directly paid for by the company. Pollution is normally an externality because while it causes harm(which is a cost), it's imposed on others. Such as the population as a whole for air pollution, those downstream for water pollution, etc...

There's not a lot of external costs with nuclear power - the waste isn't going up the smokestack.

What about the human effort required to make the machine? Or perhaps I'm expanding the scope of the machine you're looking at - beyond the storage system to also encompass the generation systems, because if you make the storage systems more efficient you need less generation, and on average that will indeed save you human effort if the extra efficiency isn't too expensive(in human labor and such).