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2009, June 18, Thursday. It's feeling a little Weimar today. Here's our ever-increasing supply of money. Soon, we'll all be millionaires! Some links: Wretched puff-piece about Hydrogen Cars from the UK indo. Read the article for ONE critical question about this amazing gizmo: cost; technical problems; battery technology (the weak link). None will be found. This is a PR document maskerading as journalism. Lesson #1 in hack school these days is CTRL C - CTRL V, apparently. Thankfully, one of the commentators on the site is a bit more savvy than the journalist: Unfortunately there is no hole in the ground from which one can extract hydrogen. It has to be produced, usually by splitting water into its two components. It is expensive to do this, using huge amounts of electrical energy to generate the hydrogen. The best way to view hydrogen is as an energy carrier. It is not a source of energy. The second problem is that hydrogen, transported as an extremely cold liquid, does funny things to metal. Pipes, tanks and other equipment are not easy to make or maintain, either in the vehicle or in the supply infrastructure. The third fly in this expensive ointment is that experimental hydrogen based power cells are really old hat. They have been developing them for years. Full of promise, not one of them has actually proved economically useful. Other than that, what a wonderful idea. Will it still be around in two years, doubt it very much. Put it on the list of other good ideas that have sunk without trace. Permalink 2009, June 16, Tuesday. The US concern with the Iranian election is amusing, no? OMG! Riot police attack pro-democracy protestors!!! In Georgia, a US ally. Expect round the clock coverage and a constant drumbeat about the evils of tyranny in Georgia, a US ally. Wink, wink. Police in Georgia beat opposition protesters. Masked police beat dozens of opposition protesters in the Georgian capital on Monday in the latest flare-up during a weeks-long street campaign against President Mikheil Saakashvili, witnesses said. Dozens of black-clad police officers armed with truncheons confronted a protest of about 50 people at Tbilisi's main police station demanding the release of six opposition activists detained since Friday, a Reuters photographer said. He said several protesters and a photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency were severely beaten. Senior opposition official Zurab Abashidze was admitted to hospital. What If Ahmadinejad Really Won? It also has been curious to see U.S. news organizations care suddenly about legitimate elections when most of them ignored, ridiculed or covered-up evidence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election in 2000 and possibly in 2004 as well. In Election 2000, Florida – a state controlled by Bush’s brother Jeb and Jeb’s cronies – was the scene of widespread election irregularities. Then, when a recount was attempted, the Bush campaign sent well-dressed hooligans from Washington to Miami to stage a riot aimed at intimidating vote counters. Finally, Bush got five partisan Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes and award the White House to Bush. Yet, the U.S. press corps was extraordinarily passive about this well-documented election theft. Even when it became clear that Al Gore won the popular vote and would have carried Florida if all legal ballots had been counted, major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and CNN, misrepresented the facts to protect Bush’s “legitimacy.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Gore’s Victory.”] Badastronomy.com has some links to HD videos of the moon taken by the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya. Kunstler on high speed rail. The sad truth is it's too late now. But the additional sad truth, at this point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that !). The tracks are still there, waiting to be fixed. In our current condition of psychotic techno-grandiosity, this is all too hopelessly quaint, not cutting edge enough, pathetically un-"hot." The fact that it is not even considered by the editors of The New York Times, not to mention the governor of California, the President of the United States, and all the agency heads and departmental chiefs and think tank gurus and university engineering professors, is something that will have historians of the future rolling their eyes. But for the moment all it shows is that we are collectively too stupid to survive as an advanced society. He's right of course. Whenever I repeat this point to people, I can sense their disagreement...but they don't articulate it. They suffer from the post-Apollo techno delusion described in this paragraph. For them, it's high speed rail or nothing. Well, I ride the rails as-is, and JHK is correct: the current trains take 30 hours to travel from LA to Portland, Oregon. 10 or 11 from LA to San Francisco. We're lucky if the train goes faster than 50mph, and for some spots has to pull over to wait for others to pass. Halving that transit time (making trains competitive with cars, not planes) is doable. This isn't a grandiose enough goal in the modern age of course, so we twiddle our thumbs and do nothing instead. Madness. BP: World oil reserves fell for first time in 10 years. Interesting piece, which denies the possibility of oil production peaking. Some quotes (with comments): Oil reserves totaled 1.258 trillion barrels at the end of 2008, compared with a revised 1.261 trillion barrels a year earlier, BP said in its annual Statistical Review of World Energy posted on its Web Site today. The world has enough reserves for 42 years at current production rates, BP said... Whenever you read the words "at current production rates", beware. The world economy grows at 3% a year - meaning that it will roughly double every 20-25 years. To find the double time, divide the growth rate into 70 (the Rule of 70). "At current rates of consumption" is one of the most deceptive phrases in the field of energy. “Our data confirms the world has enough reserves of oil, natural gas and coal to meet the world’s needs for decades to come,” BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward said in his introduction to the report. “The Challenges the world faces in growing supplies to meet future demand are not below ground, they are above ground. They are human, not geological.”... If so, then why was the peak of US oil discovery in the 1920s? Why was the peak of World oil discovery in the 1960s? Why was the last year in which we found more oil than we used 1980? Saudi Arabia’s reserves, the world’s largest, stood at 264.1 billion barrels, little changed from 264.2 billion a year earlier, BP said. The Middle East as a whole holds 754.1 billion barrels, compared with 755 billion barrels last year... Firstly, Saudi reserves are UNKNOWN. They are a closely guarded state secret. Second, in the late 1980s most OPEC producing nations "discovered" miraculous new reserves - largely regarded as imaginary - in order to meet OPEC production quotas. This makes it likely that Saudi's reserves are half those mentioned here. Third, Ghawar (Saudi's massive oilfield, the world's largest) seems to be peaking. Including Canadian oil sands deposits of 150.7 billion barrels, total global reserves stood at 1.409 trillion barrels, the review said... Ahhhh - this is how you came up with the "42 years" of oil supply - by classifying sludge like Tar Sands as oil. Hell, why don't you classify asphalt roads and roofs as oil while you're about it? That way, we'll be saved forever! Oil's rise and fall and rise. Even a glut doesn’t change the nature of a finite resource, just how fast it’s depleted. One reason oil companies journeyed to second-tier sources is that formerly prolific fields are drying up. The most spectacular example: Mexico’s relatively young Cantarell field. Only a few years ago, it provided more than 2 million barrels a day, but 2009 estimates have tumbled into the 600,000 range. If the realities of geology are disturbing, geopolitics present another kind of risk. In Nigeria, a guerrilla war poses a chronic threat to exports, and saber rattling in the direction of Iran still dependably hikes the price of crude. American politics bores the shite out of me. Irish politics has many defects, but at least we can elect Trotskyists to the European Parliament without the roof falling in. Go Joe! Permalink 2009, June 10, Wednesday. Some links: Permalink 2009, June 9, Tuesday. Well, finally back in Portland - time to turn my back on commercial work and focus on my own. More on that anon! Some links: New "Smart Gun" to shoot through walls, THEN explode. Yes, but will there be smart soldiers to use said weapon? Here's a lunar probe mission with some interesting features: # LRO's imagery will help show detail on the condition of all six Apollo landing sites and the Apollo flight hardware left on the moon by 12 American astronauts between 1969-72... # Lunar Mission Mysteries: LRO's new images should help solve some old mysteries, like where did the first Soviet Lunokhod rover end up. The eight wheeled, 1 ton marvel drove for 322 Earth days and about 6.5 miles before dying so suddenly that its control team was unable to configure its laser retorreflector that would have yielded an exact location. The images may also show what ever happened to the U. S. Surveyor 4 lander that in July 1967 stopped transmitting just before landing and presumably crashed-but nobody knows. And LRO may show what happened to the Soviet unmanned lunar sample return spacecraft that crashed in mid July 1969 trying to beat Apollo 11 with the return to Earth of at least robotically obtained Moon dust. If the Apollo 14 astronauts scuffed up the soil enough, LRO may also show how close Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell got to the rim of Cone Crater. Exhausted they were forced to turn back only an estimated 100 ft. from what would have been one of the great scenes of Apollo, but invisible to them due to the looming drop-off. Permalink previous posts - about me - contact