I have both an iPad and Kindle. A few things with the iPad...I touch a word, the dictionary entry comes up. This is quite helpful. I am used to referring to the progress bar so sequence recall isn't a problem. Some books have x-Ray enabled, and that helps with story cohesion. Basically, after I've spent a lot of time with the iPad reader, I find it as good or better than paper. Except for the beach.

The reactors are fine during an earthquake because they are effectively bolted to bedrock, and the move with the earth. There was a serious earthquake a few years ago at the Kashiwaszaki-Kariwa site, and the primary systems didn't move at all. There was a lot of damage to the switchyard and non-safety systems, and there was some water sloshed out of the spent fuel pool, but the reactor started up fine after all systems were requalified.

Down four, buy more!

Semiconductor plants use a relatively small amount of electricity to continuously spin large flywheels, when they lose power, the generators start up almost immediately.

I'll update a couple of points, when a plant loses off-site power, it immediately scrams and they have to remove decay heat (the neutrons stop reacting), which drops exponentially from 6-7% core power to less than 1% in about a day, and far less than 1% in 10 days. The generators are normally sized to handle shutdown cooling until power could be restored (but your comments are true, everything can fail, in the case of Fukushima, the entire emergency generator system was destroyed by the tsunami). I would also note that most plants are designed to react the hydrogen in a more controlled manner, the Fukushima 'explosions' were actually by design, although granted the videos don't appear that way.

I saw a lecture in 1991 about the issues of living on the moon, and the underground habitat was a given. The issues that were showstoppers (among other things) were 1) water, 2) ability to manufacture concrete, 3) ability to safely do construction (power, tools, people moving things around in spacesuits). This talk was geared to a large scale habitat, something much bigger than the Mars One.

With no atmospheric shielding, heat transport via radiation energy is still very high. If the sun is shining on an object that doesn't have 100% reflectivity (or zero adsorption), it'll get hot.

I'm in my early 40's, and I'm just now seeing the Powers That Be (PTB) do and monitor things that I had only envisioned in my paranoid fantasies in the 80's when I first read '1984.' Throughout the whole time I was always modestly comforted by the 'safety in numbers' idea; if I'm not out shooting people or blatantly planning the overthrow of the government, then the PTB won't have the human resources to go after me and I should be left alone.

But now it's getting scary because the PTB don't have to watch me, the digital monitoring, and more importantly the digital analysis, has made it to where they can keep tabs on everything you do without spending human resources to do it. There is no longer safety in numbers because the algorithms can build the list and it can be executed efficiently.

So what's next? I'm not thrilled with some of my activities prompting which browser ads that I see, but I am bothered that companies could change their pricing strategy based on whether or not I'm motivated enough to change to another vendor when I'm not satisfied. I'm even more bothered that insurance companies know my private health records and could deny me coverage because of them, even if they were obtained with the expressed statements that conversations with your doctor are private.

Crap, I always used to roll my eyes at the Wearers of the Tin Foil Hats, but maybe technology has caught up to their paranoia. It's not going to be long before a fly lands in a printer and someone mistakes my name for someone else and my life is ruined.

“Gentlemen, the officer who doesn’t know his communications and supply as well as his tactics is totally useless.” -- General George S. Patton, USA

Remember before criticizing the US Army, it's considered the best in the world, largely because of quartermaster capabilities.

In theory, everything works in practice. In practice, it doesn't.

One where I see it is 'Hay Day' on the iPad. I downloaded it to play with my nieces and nephews (the Daughter loves it too at five years of age). It's a farm resource management game, and they have inventories that can only be upgraded when you randomly receive objects. However, if you pay for diamonds and money, you get the upgrades. Only once did I pay to get my daughter something, and I realized that this would be a never-ending money pit.

It is a pretty fun game if you're into that genre though.

Heh, me too. My first read on that potential haiku made me think he was a jazz drummer.

According to NREL, it varies but is roughly 8 acres per megawatt for large stations. 22 gigawatts is 22,000 megawatts, so that's about 176,000 acres of land.

Re 5: The CO2 concentration is controlled by the temperature and pH of the oceans. The pH is not driven by CO2 as it's a weak electrolyte, and the overall pH of the ocean is about 8.0 (which is alkaline). CO2 equilibrated water pH is about 5.5. If air CO2 concentration is rising, it's because the ocean (which may be warming from something like undersea volcanic activity or dozens of other natural phenomena) belches it out.

Re 6: False. Check the data (http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/the-carbon-cycle_a224#). Natural sources are 90 gigatons from the ocean interactions, 60 gigatons from land based sources. 10 gigatons at most from human interaction. There are 750 gigatons in the air.

Nobody said the climate isn't warming, we're in a 10,000 year warming period compared to recent history. The question is what humans have done to influence it, and that question is far from resolved. I agree it warrants further study, and the overall the effects of reducing pollution are positive, but let the questions be answered by the scientific method, not rhetoric and politics.

It's not a mystery. The solubility of CO2 in water decreases with increasing temperature (dissociation constant of water increases, increasing hydrogen ion concentration, which pushes the equilibrium of carbonate towards molecular H2CO3, then CO2). Anyone who has opened a can of cold soda and let it get to room temperature has seen this.

Regarding inventories: The ocean inventory is 155,000 gigatons with 1,000 gigatons in the thermocline, and there is 150 gigatons annually of exchange. Human contribution is 10 gigatons annually, which would be in the measurement error of the other sources.

We need to reduce pollution, so if the climate change arguments will drive a large population that is generally uninformed towards greater efficiency, then great. But don't slaughter legitimate scientists for being appropriately skeptical. That is, after all, the fundamental tenant of the scientific method.