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Such interesting fuss over how we measure our world. :) Just play the video before I make a mass of myself.
Yesterday, I was worried that the bulbs I planted last fall had died over the winter.
Today, it’s like Annie Dillard says in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do.
These were simply not there yesterday.
Here they are today, coming right up through the snow.
And the more I looked, the more tiny shoots of green and red I could see, just waiting to spring into the light tomorrow. If it doesn’t snow.
Ah homeopathy, how we’ve missed you here at DWR. It has been at least a year since we excoriated your incredulous claims with the biting scourge of rationality, but let’s refresh our memories and let Cool Hard Logic, with his most apropos music selection, remind us how bugfraking nutz Homeopathy is.
One of the cheap rhetorical tricks that forced birth advocates often use is the idea that somehow “Science” (ya know science, that vast shadowy monolithic structure) supports their crappy arguments and thus lends weight to their assault on women and their rights. One of the easiest tells illustrating the rhetorical, rather than scientific vein of this particular argument, is that idea that we have a definite grasp of when “life” begins. Unsurprisingly, the anti-choice position relies on a gross simplification of what the bio-medical position actually is on when life begins. The irony is very rich as fetus fetishists often assign the label of “anti-science” to pro-choice people arguing against them and their misguided campaign for life.
I’m not really a fan of arguing from authority (This introduction is a perspective from an evolutionary biologist, for the record.), but I swear, if see one more out of context reference to a embryology text during an argument, I will practice immediate defenestration of the offender in question.
This next quoted section is from Blazer S, Zimmer EZ (eds):The Embryo: Scientific Discovery and Medical Ethics. Basel, Karger, 2005, pp 1– 20 (ed. minor formatting changes for effect)
”
[…]
This chapter began with the central ethical question of ‘when does life begin?’ The evolutionary answer to this question makes it devoid of ethical
implications concerning the sojourn from conception to birth (although it has other, profound ethical implications). Instead, the evolutionary and
genetic arguments presented in this chapter indicate that a more meaningful ethical question is:
Where do we place ethical thresholds in the continual process of human
individuality?
Biology provides no clear defining event to answer this question because diploid human individuality arises gradually during the mitotic phase of our life cycle and not at fertilization. Perhaps there is no single ethical threshold in dealing with the mitotic continuum and the attendant gradual emergence
of functional genotypes and individual traits. Although modern biology does not provide an answer to the above question, knowing what the question should be and what it should not be is the critical first step in any debate. Thus, modern biology, and particularly evolutionary biology and genetics, can play an important role in the ethical debates concerning the passage from conception to birth.
[…]”
So let the record be set straight that science doesn’t not precisely know when “life” begins and that very possibly it is the wrong question to be asking.
I’m not sure what it is with a British accent that makes a smack-down so much more viscerally satisfying, but whatever it is; it works. This video dismantles the tomfoolery surrounding the end of the world ballyhoo that was making the rounds in late 2012.
No preamble necessary, watch and learn folks. :)
This article on producing gasoline the air and water caught my eye as I was reading the news at Al Jazeera. Let’s be upfront here people, get your skeptical hats on because the process described seems to be a little short on detail (and verification) at the moment.
“A small company working in two converted shipping containers says it has found a way to make petrol from fresh air and water. Air Fuel Synthesis Chief Executive Peter Harrison says the process could help curb climate change by providing a cleaner alternative to oil.
“We’ve taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water and turned these elements into petrol,” he told Al Jazeera. “For a country like the UK it means we could create all the fuel you want from renewable energy.”
Limitless hydrocarbon based energy? Tell us more.
“Harrison explained that they use a 30 foot tower on top of their first container to capture CO2 from the air. The process of separation involves combining the air with sodium hydroxide and passing it through an electrolyser.
A similar method is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The CO2 and hydrogen are then synthesised to make methanol, and eventually petrol.
It cost them around $800,000 to build the plant. Since the mini-refinery was switched on in August, they have made 15 litres of fuel that could be used to power any normal car.
Philippa Oldham, head of transport at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, is excited at the breakthrough. “The process of making petrol from air is relatively straightforward and really does work,” she told Al Jazeera.
Of course, there is a downside at the moment.
“The barrier to expansion is that the process uses lots of power. Much more energy is fed into the plant, in the form of electricity, than is extracted from it.
Because of this, Lee Cronin, professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, is cautious about its potential.
“The bottom line – making very optimistic assumptions about their efficiency, if this company was to scale up to produce enough gasoline to meet demand in the USA, it would require half the world’s energy consumption every day,” he said. “That is clearly unacceptable.”
Mmmm….good point. There is a counter argument though.
Harrison believes Scotland’s ambitious targets mean there will be plenty of spare power. “There is a lot of renewable energy around at the moment that is wasted,” he said. “What we want to do is to catch all that spare renewable electricity and use it in other forms. Petrol is something that is very useful and easy to store.”
Now doesn’t that just lace things up nicely. One of the problems with renewable energy is how to efficiently store the energy when demand has been met. One could imagine that the excess energy during non peak times could be transferred to into this process, creating gasoline that stores energy very efficiently and is easy to stockpile.
I’d like to see some numbers as to exactly how energy intensive this process is as that will play a deciding role in the viability of this new technology.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
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