Would you like some tomato ketchup with that?

The E-Cat would be an amazing device if it worked as claimed, it goes against what most experts reckon about nuclear fusion so its evidence has to be very good. In the report the most interesting piece of evidence are the isotope changes in the spent fuel, which point to some sort of nuclear reaction. Even though no radiation was detected coming from the device, how is that possible?

The dummy reactor was switched on at 12:20 PM of 24 February 2014 by Andrea Rossi who gradually brought it to the power level requested by us. Rossi later intervened to switch off the dummy, and in the following subsequent operations on the E-Cat: charge insertion, reactor startup, reactor shutdown and powder charge extraction.

Oh. More independent research without Rossi's involvement please! Yeah I don't believe it works but I am open to changing my mind if the evidence warrants it which this report does not.

The abstract says, "A low-carbohydrate (<40 g/d) or low-fat ( >30% of daily energy intake from total fat [>7% saturated fat]) diet.".

If I am reading this correctly the low carbohydrate diets only had 40 grams of carbohydrate, or less, per day. This is a major change from the typical American diet, one medium size potato contains about 40 grams of carbohydrate. With such a low bar the usual habit of eating lots of bread, pasta, potatoes and rice is not possible and you really have to try changing your diet. As one of the major failings of the modern Western diet is too much processed, simple to digest carbohydrates the changes they made were probably exactly the right ones to make.

While the low fat diet stipulates less than 30% fat, the average American diet gets about 35% of their calories from fat. I can imagine that these people only slightly tweaked their diet. Maybe they ate as before but consumed lower fat versions of the same meals, a recipe to eat more sugars and other processed carbohydrates.

So I am not convinced by the simple description that this study shows more fat is better, I think it is really shows that too many simple carbohydrates are bad.

Well that is how I read the study, what actually happened may be different.

Current cosmology theories suggest that only 5% of the energy content of the Universe is matter. We assume that dark matter which accounts for 84% of matter is boring stuff that only interacts with gravity. What if we are missing out on most of the Universe because dark matter has its own dark forces meaning that dark matter is as varied as our matter?

In this case most aliens are made of dark matter, we can't see them and they can't see us.

In order of precedence.

1. 1. Don't Crash
2. 2. If crashing is inevitable then crash as safely (slowly) as possible.
3. 3. Obey the laws of the road.

Solar wind dude.

"That's why the south pole is colder than the north pole; it's farther away from the sun in winter than the north pole is in its winter."

The main reason why Antarctica is colder is because Antarctica is land and therefore elevated. Combined with its one mile thick ice sheet it is the highest elevated continent on earth. The lack of land at the Arctic means the ice is less stable and therefore makes it much harder for that amount of ice to accumulate. The difference in sunlight reaching the Earth due to its elliptical orbit is about 7% so not a large factor.

Well according to the article, in those 650,000 years the highest CO2 levels were at 380ppm, we are now at 390ppm with no sign of slowing down. The temperature highs in that period were a little higher than now, but not by much. So we would not expect the methane to be released yet but sometime in the future. As we have done so little to slow down our CO2 contributions that time could be pretty soon.

A great site for this is The Discovery of Global Warming.

Also note that the last IPCC estimate did not include the effect of melting glaciers and ice caps as they felt the predictions were not accurate enough. The next IPCC report is bound to include them so expect that estimate to be dramatically higher than the one before.

Exactly!

First thought is, will adding new features actually be productive? I sense that the problem is probably not a lack of features but either poor selling or a small market. Adding more features will not fix these business problems.

My 2nd thought is that if you are asked to work 10 hours day it has to be for a limited time as it is not sustainable. Therefore you need a good reason and a goal. If this deal is open-ended what is most likely to happen is all this work generates no extra revenue and burnt out workers.

You're not a teenager obviously. :)

Really?

In you compiler example you cannot keep speeding it up - the fastest it can be is instant. You may argue that the economy can be expanded by creating new industries but again with finite people this cannot go to infinity. A 1% growth rate is a doubling in 70 years this cannot go on for more than a few centuries.

What will happen is that growth will slow and keep on slowing.

Snowball Earth is an interesting hypothesis and shows us some things about the climate system of Earth - that it is a complex dynamic system with many variables.

The more recent snowball Earth glaciations are thought to have happened as three or four glaciation events with the most recent, the Marinoan, happening about 650 million years ago. At the beginning of these glaciations the CO2 was relatively low for the time and the continents were distributed around the equator.

The mechanism which started the cooling periods is not known, but if they are cold enough the resulting ice can spread down to close to the equator. As ice has a higher albedo, about ~60% compared to the sea which reflects about 6% of incoming light, we get a "positive" feedback where cooling reflects more of the suns energy away from the Earth causing more cooling. This locked the Earth into a frozen period for millions of years. This poses a problem how can the climate system unfreeze now most of the Sun's energy is reflected away?

With much of the Earth frozen, CO2 will build up as there is very little rock weathering as it is all covered by ice and not much photosynthesis either. By the end of the snowball Earth period, CO2 may have risen to 12,000 ppm. The warming effect of the CO2 would have been weaker in this frozen state then it is now, because CO2 traps infrared radiation while most of the sun's light was being reflected in the visible part of the spectrum. This is why the CO2 level had to raise to such a high level to bring us out of this cold phase even though we are presently in a much warmer climate with less CO2. This is physics!