Month: December 2008

Yes. Solar has a very bright future. A long as the subsidies keep coming. If estimates hold up, by 2030, 2000-GW-scale power plants will be necessary to meet new electricity demand, and a potential need will arise to replace a large number of obsolete power plants. Demand on this scale, coupled with industrial and consumer…

Laurie Anderson

As is probably obvious to most regular readers, I have had less than no time to blog lately. Major deferred-maintenance-style repairs plus Christmas issues in a very limited amount of time means that I can barely check email, much less write posts. However, I am unable to resist certain things, and Justin directed me to…

Here’s how it looks here:

There seems to be a lot of angst about wishing people a Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays seems to be in vogue. And of course we have The Holiday Season. I propose we put an end to this kind of non-sense once and for all. We should refer to the holiday by its original name. The…

Suzanne Willis sent me this e-mail. She was responding to something she read in the Dallas Morning News. If, as Mr. Schram says, drug violence is due to Americans’ appetite for drugs, drug violence would have begun when Americans began using drugs. It didn’t. Americans have used cocaine, morphine and marijuana since the first Europeans…

The speaker is Daniel J. Mitchell. He has written a book: Global Tax Revolution: The Rise of Tax Competition and the Battle to Defend It. You can also learn more at freedomandprosperity.org Cross Posted at Power and Control

Yesterday I was looking at oil prices and found something interesting. The price of WTI oil was about $7 or $8 below the price of the other two contracts listed. I asked if any of my readers could explain such a big difference in prices and reader Bill came to the rescue. Yes it is…

Meanwhile in Deetroit, this baby Aardvark was born: Story: The Detroit Zoo welcomed a baby aardvark this month. Zoo officials are awaiting DNA test results to determine the sex of its newborn aardvark, Amani (Swahili for “peace”), born at 1:05 a.m. Dec. 8 to mother Rachaael and father Mchimbaji. The 23-inch infant arrived hairless, weighing…

Locating breaks in buried water pipes is a major pain in the ass, but I spent a couple of days excavating a 20 foot trench three feet deep until I found the leak, then cut out and replaced the bad section (which was so clogged that I could see light through a tiny hold only…

There are two kinds of politicians in Illinois. Crooks and those who haven’t been caught. When voting in Illinois how do you know which candidate is the most honest? The most honest candidate is not on the ballot. How can you tell which is the crookedest candidate? Easy: the crookedest candidate is the reform candidate.…

The picture you see above is a steam driven fusion reactor. I know what you are thinking. This is some kind of joke. It is no joke. General Fusion has a design that I think has an outside chance of working. I was discussing it with some of the boys at Talk Polywell and I’d…

I was just having a look at the oil market and came across something interesting. Nymex Crude Future 38.74 Dated Brent Spot 37.43 WTI Cushing Spot 30.52 Now I have been following this market intermittently for the last few months and as I recall there was at most a few dollars difference between the different…

It seems like the kids at a high school in Maryland have invented an awful new game called Speed Camera Pimping. As a prank, students from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county’s Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past,…

Wind power is currently limited by the fact that there is a minimum wind speed required for a wind turbine to begin operation. We could harvest a lot more energy from the wind if that minimum speed was lower. Plus it would help a lot if the wind passing the turbine was speeded up to…

I’ve been doing a huge amount of labor and haven’t been online for several days, but I’m still not completely out of touch. Nor are my friends. An especially insightful friend thought I’d appreciate some bread during the festive season. Not just any bread, mind you, but a very special, cake-like bread. So special that…

H/T Dean Esmay Cross Posted at Power and Control

I don’t agree with Roseanne Barr about much but she nails this one: The War On Drugs is a war against poor people on street drugs, waged by rich people on prescription drugs. — Roseanne Barr I did a post on this very topic a while back but Roseanne nails in a sentence what it…

Let us do a thought experiment. Alternative Energy is a Good Thing. But the energy it produces costs more than electrical energy from coal fired plants. Now we want to make our alternative energy equipment the lowest cost way possible – so we will have to burn coal to make the equipment – because if…