That process is already running in pilot plants in Germany. They're generating methane using a Sabatier process driven by excess renewable energy. The methane is injected into the national natural gas pipeline network. Typically national natural gas pipeline systems have a buffer of several days to weeks of supply.

The Wikipedia article is labeled Power to Gas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... There's a section for hydrogen and another section for methane. And of course, once you have methane and CO, you have feedstock for Fischer-Tropsch processes that provide liquid fuels.

While it isn't completely impossible for some sort of coating material to have solved the problem, it would be inventing technology that was almost certainly unknown at the time.

In the 1800s even under the copper plating, the seams were caulked with oakum soaked in pine tar, driven in place with a caulking mallet and a caulking iron, putty was then applied to the hull seams and the deck seams were payed with melted pine pitch. The weather deck of the ship had to be as water-tight as the hull or waves breaking over the deck would founder the ship in short order. That's another thing that the typical Ark description gets wrong.

The pictures I've seen of the interior of modern Ark replicas look more like barn framing than ship framing. Wooden cargo ship frames from the 1800s were large. For example, the Flying Cloud had floor timbers (think ribs) that were sided(along the length of the ship) 12 inches, moulded (outside to inside) 17 inches at the keel (typically white oak or live oak), space between the frames was typically the same as the sided dimension (12 inches in this case). The keel of the Flying Cloud was 3 layers of rock maple, moulded 44 inches, and sided 16 inches, with additional keelsons and sister keelsons, the ship was nearly 9 feet through the backbone. And, it was all bolted through and through with 1 1/4 inch copper and iron bolts. Even the garboard strakes (outside hull planks) were from 4 1/2 inches to 7 inches thick, The ceiling (inside hull planks) was a minimum of 4 1/2 inches up to 7 inches thick. Most of the planking and ceiling were southern pine.

The key phrase that describes something the purported size of Noah's Ark built from wood, is "Works like a wicker basket".

If you can't keep the hull from flexing, every time a section of the hull passes over a wave the frames and strakes will bend, the seams will open, and the sea will come in. Then, unless you have high volume bilge pumps running constantly, down the ship goes.

That depends on whether you know where the stored reading glasses are. I spent a couple of hours one time searching for my glasses because I hurriedly put them on top of the refrigerator and then couldn't see well enough to spot them. I felt a lot of sympathy for that character when I saw that episode again.

Someone above mentions exporting a video stream to handle remote sessions. I think that's actually a strong contender for a new User Interface system, but it discusses nothing about how that actually happens.

It the GPU exports an MP4 video stream that can be delivered directly to any display (local or remote) that deals with the last connection bottleneck. It's a standard, its ubiquitous, and its implemented in hardware. The return channel for user interaction needs to be done, but that doesn't have the performance issues that the presentation does.

The other piece of the system that needs to be handled is the API for the interface to the GPU hardware. A contender for that seems to be an API tied to EGL ES (if I read the acronyms right), and there should be others. That assumes the Khronos Group is doing something useful there. How many implementations are there of EGL ES to GPU hardware drivers?

The layer in the system between the user applications and the hardware interface is the place where QT, GTK, Windows graphics api, and all the other graphics toolkits go. Those toolkits shouldn't care too much about the hardware details, just the published capabilities of the GPUs.

Just some thoughts

It seems like there's a strong possibility that the replacement for remote X-Windows could be something conceptually simpler but could require one massive block of processing. (And I think Nvidia is most of the way there).

The remote presentation could all be done with an mpeg 4 stream, direct from the GPU. That chooses one standardized mechanism for presentation, and I think it should be sufficient for almost any sort of application. The presentation space in the GPU would be written with a number of APIs, but as the time came to present that image to the user, the GPU would transform the presentation space into an appropriate mpeg 4 frame and push it out some serialization interface for delivery to the end device.

The only additional interface required is for the user input device, which is non-trivial, but doesn't require the brute processing capacity that presentation requires.

Speculation, I know.

Comfortable as in sheltered, warm in the winter, fed any time I feel like it any time of year, and dry when a thunderstorm has knocked out the power and is dumping on us.

To restate. Critical being the heating boiler (LP), some lights, the kitchen (except the electric oven), a sump pump, and a circuit for the living room and master bedroom. I grew up without running water and with wood stove heat. The current setup is way better than that. And it does last for days without starting up the generator.

Sure, the inverter/ATF is a Xantrex SW4048. The model has been replaced with other models. I've never had a problem with it, although I've heard some complaints about components in the newer models. The main service tie is a 30 amp 110 circuit, and there's a secondary input that I can drive with a generator or other 15 amp 110 source.

The batteries are Fullriver DC310-6 gel-packs which are supposed to deal with hydrogen out-gassing. I think the model number translates to 6 volt, 310 Amp hours. They're connected in series to yield 48 volts DC to the inverter.

The system was sized to run the critical circuits in the house for 3 days. (Critical being the heating boiler (LP), some lights, the kitchen (except the electric oven), a sump pump, and a circuit for the living room and master bedroom.

A demonstration plant for conversion of electricity to feed the natural gas network was ready in Germany in 2012. There should be more details here. http://www.zsw-bw.de/infoporta...

I've got a "whole house" battery backup that I installed several years ago for about $ (usd)8k. It has 8 batteries (6 volt gel packs in series) and a 3 Kw inverter with integrated auto transfer switch. That's been enough to run the critical systems in the house for 3 days (from experience). It doesn't run the air conditioning, but everything else works just fine.

No. Simply No. This is wrong. In almost every particular

The continents are masses of rock that are on average less dense than mantle rock. So, the continents are floating on the mantle rock. Upwelling plumes from the mantle are most often associated with volcanic activity and aren't "lifting the land up" at least in anything approaching a continental area. When ice melts off a continental area, that part of the continent will rebound, floating higher on the mantle rock. Some areas on the periphery of the land mass will sink due to the changing orientation of the mass, but the general motion is upward. All of this takes place over millennia. Parts of North America are still rebounding from the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet. The convective cells in the mantle have some effect on the height of different land masses, but those changes take millions of years to be measurable.

It has been observed for quite a while. At the Panama Canal, the Pacific Ocean average sea level is about 8 inches higher that the Atlantic Ocean average sea level.

Here's a prime example of someone speaking with absolute certainty and near complete ignorance.

The "extremely nasty" chemicals in the battery are aluminum and oxygen. Solid aluminum metal will yield 8kWh of electricity per kilogram of aluminum mass when reacted with oxygen. When aluminum first became an affordable material it was referred to as "solidified electricity" because of how much electricity the Bayer process consumed to refine bauxite. Also, the aluminum is basically consumed by being transformed back into aluminum oxide. But, if you run the alumina back through the Bayer process you get aluminum metal again. Pretty much a closed cycle.

Possibly from something more like an egg-laying mammal (see Monotreme). Although there is evidence that Cynognathus and Thrinaxodon (before the dinosaurs), had fur, may have been warm blooded, and may have given live birth.

They all lost out the the dinosaurs and only occupied the mouse like environmental niches until the dinosaurs went extinct.

I've seen this, (a while ago it's true). I was curious about why some GTK applications had such terrible remote performance. When I ran the applications through xscope, before the first window materialized, I saw thousands of calls to XGetGeometry(). What made that doubly silly is that any window geometry change is provided to the client as an XConfigureEvent. So, a local copy of window geometry information can be easily kept up to date.