Author: Dave

There is a move afoot in Congress to require new wind turbine project developers to do envionmental impact statements on potential bird kills by turbines and to monitor wind sites for bird deaths. The Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act, a wide-ranging energy bill introduced this month, would create new standards for the placement and…

Here are a couple of Youtube videos with Freeman Dyson talking about Global Warming mania. He starts out in the first video (on the left) talking about vegetation. He says you can’t do good science without good data. He notes that the data on vegetation is sparse (as in almost totally non-existant). The money went…

Over at The Astute Bloggers Avi Green is discussing the planned attack on JFK Airport in New York that was foiled by an informant who was recruited by the police with the offer of a lienient sentence on a drug crime. Reliapundit has this to say in the comments: if drugs were made legal as…

Here is the full page version which has much better resolution. What is this all about you ask, other than some pretty pictures and nice music? Here are some answers: Bussard Fusion Reactor Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion Polywell – Making The Well Nuclear Fusion – wiki Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

Here is a link to some lectures on physics by Nobel Winner Richard Feynman. If the chunks are too long for you or you don’t have the right video player Lubos Motl has some links to the whole thing segmented in shorter clips. Feynman is very wise to do what I normally do. When he…

Eric and I met up again in Rockford, This time we went to the Octane Lounge. Eric will be posting pictures on his return. In our long and rambling discussion we talked about the nature of blogging. I can think of no finer introduction to the world of competitive blogging than the movie His Girl…

Women in Art. H/T Don Surber

The Captain’s Quarters has a story up on the fall off in small donations at Republican National Headquarters. The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political donations to all parties and affiliated committees, confirms that the Republicans have a fundraising problem. The smaller donors with whom the RNC’s call center interfaced have decreased their contributions…

I have been hinting around about what our Grand Strategy should be in the War On Islamic Fascism. Some of the hints can be found at: Islam vs American Morality and In The Long Run Their Struggle Will Be Hopeless and The New Middle East. So what should our strategy be in plainer terms? We…

I have been doing a lot of thinking about nuclear physics the past couple of days and I didn’t want to post it here until I got the illustrations correct. I’m working on that. I might also add that politics seems to lose its interest when you can do some serious thinking about hard physics…

Lubos sent me an e-mail thanking me for Clouds In Chambers and suggesting I have a look at Sunspots. He shows the correlations between sunspots and global temperatures. Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers

A short video that schematically shows how a Bussard Fusion Reactor works. The video was done by Foger Rox. A short technical explanation can be found at Bussard Fusion Reactor. A more detailed look with social implications can be found at Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion. Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers

Last night I had a blogger meet up with Eric of Classical Values at the Irish Rose Saloon in Rockford. My first mate was there and so was Harmonica Joe. Needless to say a very good time was had by all. When Eric returns to Philly he will be posting pictures of the usual suspects.…

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We…

China is set to becone the #1 CO2 producer in the world. China’s rapid industrialization along with its low economic productivity is causing its energy demands to rise at a furious rate. China is on course to overtake the United States this year as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide producer, according to estimates based on…

Take a close look at the photo at the left from Little Green Footballs and see if you can detect anything unusual? First check out the rubber boots on the steering gear. They are intact with no obvious signs of fire. Second look at the dust on the tires. It looks like the car was…

Tom Ligon, an engineer who worked with Dr. Robert Bussard, is giving a talk on fusion powered rockets at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas. Here is a link to Tom’s Power Point Presentation at ISDC. Scroll down the page and click on the button in the lower right. In other news Tri Alpha…

What do you do when you want to study clouds and all you have is balloons because airplanes are not very reliable and they are expensive? Like any good scientist you try to make clouds in your lab. Which is exactly what C. T. R. Wilson did in 1912. The study of high energy particles…

I’ve been obsessed with the climate change debate recently (you noticed?). And did a piece on the uncertainties in the IPCC numbers on expected global warming from human CO2 emissions. However, the spam filtering software seems to gag on the post. Probably too many models in the text. If you want to read it you…

Bio Fuels may be good for corn growers, but they are bad for corn eaters. Policymakers and legislators often fail to consider the law of unintended consequences. The latest example is their attempt to reduce the United States’ dependence on imported oil by shifting a big share of the nation’s largest crop – corn –…