Can't we genetically engineer crop fields, to make the them white?
If the crops are reflecting all the light, what are they going to use to power photosynthesis?
Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
That, of course, assumes that economics deserves to be treated as science.
"If you want to breathe oxygen, you'll have to go up several hundred metres. "
So what am I breathing here at ground level?
Give him a break...he's suffering oxygen deprivation.
Lack of lab-to-lab reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean it's a hoax, although it can be a warning. I'd be a little more concerned about reproducibility on the original apparatus, but even that isn't a deal-breaker.
I recall sitting in a seminar on ultrafast laser pulses during my undergrad days and hearing about how some of the top labs in the world couldn't reproduce a particular piece of work. Eventually they discovered that some of the optical elements in the original test setup had a particular property that made it work (negative dispersion I think, but I don't remember for sure). No one, including the original researchers, realised it was important until everyone else's attempts failed and they started really looking at what the differences were between their test setups.
I had an economist friend years ago who calculated what songs would cost on the radio per airing, and it came out to $.05USD. At that price, I would buy large quantities of music.
If you were dealing with 15-20 songs an hour, 24 hours a day I would expect the record companies would happily do business with you.
But truthfully if you're paying a nickel per play like the radio stations then you'd be renting, not buying, large quantities of music. For any music that you expect to play more than nineteen times you'd be better off going to iTunes.
reading that, it becomes clear that the problem is that the Quebec system uses DC power transmission instead of the AC usually used.
I thought the same when I first read the article, but this is not the case. The transmission system is 735 kV AC. It was the eddy currents themselves that were DC. The Wikipedia article uses some funny comma placement, but you'll see further up that the system is definitely AC, except for a single high-voltage DC link that was completed much later.
So, after looking up what happened in Quebec, I'm left with the question - Why was only Quebec affected this way?
Quebec is situated on the Canadian shield, which is primarily composed of insulating igneous rock. Eddy currents generated by the fluctuating magnetic fields that would normally dissipate in the ground in other parts of the world were instead directed into the power system, where they caused overloads.
The Wikipedia article on the Quebec electricity system for a slightly more detailed discussion.
PURGE COMPLETE.
