Big hair, pasty make-up, loud ties and announcer voices which grab your attention and slap you around a bit, no matter how banal the news item.
Perhaps growing up with the BBC and the CBC has biased me but that sounds like American journalism to me.
Just that being able to make fuel out of crops wouldn't mean that petroleum would stop being used in fertilizer, so that may be a small concern.
In terms of efficiency, it's insane to turn petroleum into fertilizer to grow crops to great a biofuel, you might as well just burn the damn fuel in the first place.
You don't have to worry about the CO2 emissions. One of the benefits of bio-fuel is that the carbon in the plants was taken out of the air. With bio-fuels you only add as much CO2 to the air as you take out.
Only if the means of production is also carbon neutral. Fertilizer, machinery, transportion etc.
That one guy knows a guy who knows a guy who is totally stoked about 8.1!! I hear he also owns a Kin and a turd-brown Zune. He's still longing to find someone to squirt songs with.
Pervy Zune fancier!
The original part of Wall-E was the non-human, almost entirely non-speaking POV. That's pretty rare in both Hollywood and literary sci-fi.
It's been done, so not original, but yes rare and very effective.
The great thing about CO2 emissions for plant-derived biofuels is that they won't modify the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Think about it for a moment: what you're doing is extracting carbon from the atmosphere, turning it into complex hydrocarbons using energy from the sun, and then burning it to release that energy. Any CO2 released was *already in the atmosphere* to begin with, so biofuels net zero greenhouse emissions (to first order at least, maybe there's some weird combustion products or whatever). Hard to get much lower than that.
Well, yes and no. Biofuel will only be carbon neutral if all the production, transportation and fertilization was done with biofuels as well. A great goal, but I don't think it's been realized anywhere yet.
And of course, that still leaves the whole fuel vs. food issue open. Now if we could manage to come up a biofuel production process that includes the net fixation of atmospheric CO2 (net reduced or zero carbon footprint), with close to zero ecological impact that is not using precious agricultural land then I'd be all over it. But at the moment it's a bit of a pipe dream.
Miriam Kramer writes at Space.com that in the new movie Elysium, Earth is beyond repair, and the rich and powerful have decided to leave it behind to live in a large, rotating space station stocked with mansions, grass, trees, water and gravity.
So, Wall-E?
Or one of dozens of SF stories from the 50s, 60s or 70s, Wall-E was great art, but hardly an original theme or plot.
Totally fascinating insight, we also don't know if the Hospitallers used M-16s in 1066 because we weren't alive back then. Or you know, we have this study called history that tells us things about the past without us having been personally present.
Exactly, any student of European weaponry will tell you that they would have naturally gravitated towards the FN FAL instead of the M16.
My question: Is ground for growing food crops affected by this? If farmers all grow switchgrass/hemp/$whatever and make more money selling that for fuel, then it will spike food prices, which can cause major problems down the line (people can put up with a lot of injustice, but if they are starving, all bets are off.)
Ethically, I can't support a fuel that takes food out of people's mouths, even though ethanol has a number of decent advantages.
Excellent question, this is already subject to debate.
There are three major areas of concern here, food vs. fuel, CO2 emissions/footprint and the ecological cost of production.
In my opinion CO2 emissions is the elephant in the room for biofuels. Extensive production and consumption of biofuels may ween us off fossil fuels but it does nothing to address just how stupid it is for us to be modifying the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Note that the process of biofuel production does not exist in a vacuum, like any other agricultural activity it has a direct ecological impact furthermore the vast majority of current agricultural practice involves burning fuels (tractors and other farm equipment) and the use of inorganic commercial fertilizer which also has a wide variety of impacts such as the seepage of phosphates in runoff leading to downstream agae blooms.
IMHO, the development of biofuels is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. While other alternative power sources are less efficient, more costly or less power dense the vast majority of systems that are currently in production, (wind, water, solar) are both profitable and significantly better for the environment.
"Anti-american?" No, read your link. Anti-current-us-foreign-policy. So if you parse that out, it's a double-negative, anti-anti-american.
Wikipedia is being nice, he's pretty out there.
What's stranger though is the anti-jewish fruit-loop groups that oppose him... in some cases the enemy of your enemy might need medicating.
The "lying about it" link comes from a website run by an anti-american consipracy theorist who writes nonsense like this
So you mean to tell me all those people in the passing lane, who are driving significantly slower than the speed limit, weaving from side to side within their lane, and have their head tilted over, looking down, with their cell phone clamped to their ear are safe drivers?????
This must be the same researchers that are telling the world that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere has no impact on climate.
Remember in the 70's when the tobacco companies trotted out expert after expert to tell us that smoking was safe?
Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health?
Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.
*sigh*.... Freedom Fries....
They're sophisticated if you put vinegar or mayonnaise on them
Sometimes I like fancy food myself, but can you honestly tell me you don't like french fries?
Alors! Si on n'avait pas les patates frites, comment est-que on peut avoir la Poutine!
(At any given moment there's more high-speed equipment waiting to depart at Gare du Nord than exists in all of North America.)
But can you buy Freedom Fries on the train?
True story:
My whole family has a passion for food, both preparing and consuming, we live for the exotic.
I was visiting Paris with my 14 year old daughter and spent most of a day at Versailles, so we decided to have lunch in one of the restaurants in the gardens. This was our second full day in the Paris area and we're loving it, the previous night we had done up the Eiffel tower to see the city of lights spread at our feet and then walked back to our hotel both spellbound by the magical aura that the city seems to evoke.
A few minutes after we have been seated and given menus a young American couple (late 20s?) arrives at the next table and says a few pleasant and sociable things... "Where are you from? Enjoying your trip? Lovely day? "... and so forth.
We all order and are eventually served, the young lady next to us has ordered some kind of salad which looked fabulous to my eye... two minutes later she sighs and flops back in her chair and says somewhat petulantly: "Everybody talks about the how good the food is in France but honestly, the only thing that has been consistently good has been McDonalds".
We try not to choke on our appetizers... I look my daughter in the eye and begin speaking French: "I think you now see how your family is a little sophisticated."
*sigh*.... Freedom Fries....
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
