It's a Glorious Day for Science!

OK, I admit it, I stole that line from Girl Genius.

But via the GG mailing list on Yahoo!, here's some interesting news on a potential source of new power, fresh water, and even better crops.

The key to Craven's cool world is converting the ocean's thermal energy. The first step: Sink a pipe at least 3,000 feet deep and start pumping up seawater. The end result: an environmentally sustainable, virtually inexhaustible supply of electricity, freshwater for drinking and irrigation, even air-conditioning. Here's how it works:

Refrigeration:
Cold seawater circulates through a closed loop of pipes that replace the coolant and compressor found in conventional air-conditioning units.

Irrigation:
Pipes carrying cold water run beneath fields of crops, sweating freshwater to irrigate plants and chilling their roots, promoting faster crop cycles.

Desalination:
Cold seawater passes through Craven's "skytowers," which contain closely packed radiator-like networks of pipes. The frigid pipes sweat in the tropical heat, producing­ freshwater condensate.

Power Generation:
Pipes draw warm water from the ocean surface and cold water from the seabed. The warm water enters a vacuum chamber and is evaporated into steam that drives an electricity-producing turbine. The cold water condenses the steam back into water for drinking and irrigation

Now, my only question is, when we return this no-longer-as-cold water to the ocean, is this going to end up screwing up the ocean anyway? This is a question I didn't notice was being addressed anywhere in the article -- even to say that it would have no effect.

Yet Another Attempt to Make NC Look Like A Bunch of Idiots

Story here. I'd put the picture on here, at least, but I'm at work and can't run Hello to do so.

I love NC. I really do. I've been to several other places, albeit briefly in each case, and I still prefer living here. Granted, the reasons I love NC are disappearing, as the developers around here seem to be determined to pave over everything in sight in order to put up a new shopping box, but I still love it. The only other place I've been that I liked as much was the Northwestern coast, and that was just too damn cold for my taste.

But when I see things like this I just want to take some of the people that live here and shake some sense into them. It doesn't help that I'm pretty much of an atheist, or at least an agnostic, and know that the bible that this preacher reveres so much was not handed down by his god, but rather was assembled from a lot of sources -- and that many other sources from the same time period were ignored because they didn't fit with what the editors wanted to say. So saying that someone else's holy book should be flushed because it's not his holy book just makes me want to slap him. I might not believe in his holy book but that doesn't mean I'd suggest it was only fit to wipe my ass with, whatever my opinion of it was.

Something Different

Something different from the usual stuff I put on here, anyway.

I found these years and years ago, so I forgot how I originally stumbled across them, but Yamaha Motor Company produces beautiful .pdf files for lots of paper models. You print them out on cardstock, cut and paste (with real sissors and glue), and assemble your model.

Go find them here.

The format is unfortunately in A4 size paper, which I can't seem to find anywhere here in the states, but I'm pretty sure you can get your PC to adjust the size to fit U.S. standard letter-sized paper and the models will still work. I've tried my hand at a few paper models over the years and usually get frustrated and give up about half-way thru when I can't get the pieces to line up, but I keep getting tempted to print out some of the motorcycle models and give it a go. :)

Just Another Harmless "Fraturnity Prank", No Doubt

There's a story in the NY Times from a leaked 2000 page Army investigative report into deaths at a prison camp in Afghanistan. It makes for some very difficult reading, or at least it did for me. The utter callousness the military showed for the lives of their prisoners just floors me. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
[skip two paragraphs]
At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.

Deeper in the story it explains that a popular form of physical abuse at the Bagram Collection Point (BCP), where this took place, was the "common peroneal strike", a potentially disabling blow given to the side of the leg just above the knee. When Mr. Dilawar cried out "Allah" upon being given one of these, his captors found it so amusing that they came by and gave him, by one guard's estimate, at least 100 of these over a 24 hour period, just to hear him cry out. The coroner that did the autopsy said the tissues in his leg had been "pulpified", much as if he had been run over by a bus. That was the coroner's simile, by the way, not mine.

The best part of this whole story? Are you ready for this? His captors were pretty well convinced that he was innocent.

News of the Wierd

Or at least odd. Seems a lake in Russia disappeared overnight.

MOSCOW - A Russian village was left baffled on Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.

NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.

Although officials are not entirely sure what happened, they do have some theories -- such as the lake spontaneously draining into an underground river. However, some of the locals have their own ideas:

"I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us,” said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.

Those wacky pranksters over at the CIA -- what will they think of next?

Galloway Rips into Senate Committee

George Galloway, Bethnal Green and Bow MP, came to Washington to respond to accusations that he has profited from the "oil for food" scandal. But rather than merely refute the evidence brought against him, he used the opportunity to turn the tables on his accusers and point out their own perfidities:

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

Complete text is on The Daily Kos -- go read it.

Man, you gotta love a guy like that. And apparently he's not considered all that much of a firebrand back home, from the way the BBC World Service was talking about him tonight on their broadcast. As Tom Tomorrow said, you only wish more of our own politicians would grow some balls and talk this way. Anyone talking any bets on how much of this you get to hear on American news programs?

Bill Moyers on the CPB

Bill Moyers gave a great speech at the National Conference on Media Reform, mostly on how Kenneth Tomlinson is working hard to turn PBS into FOX, apparently. The speech is filled with wonderful lines, so much so that I would happily repeat the whole thing here if I could, but that would be a bit excessive. I think one of my favorite bits is this one, though:

One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

(emphasis added)

To me, that last bit really says it all about the present state of "journalism" as practiced by most of the news organizations today. Someone pointed out the other day that it's become extremely difficult to know what to think on any given issue because all you hear is the expert for one side presenting their argument, then the opposition presenting theirs, and no one that you can believe is more-or-less impartial comes along to point out the holes in either side.

Now, past history has me leaning towards the belief that if it's from the right, and their mouths are moving, then they must be lying. This attitude has undoubtedly kept me from hearing some valid points of view from that side of the political spectrum. On the other hand, when it seems like 90% of what they tell you is bull, it's not too hard to ignore that other 10%. This is sort of like the reason I stopped reading Usenet groups many years ago -- the signal-to-noise ratio got too bad. It stopped being worth my time to sift out the nuggets amid all the dross that poured forth. In the same sense, listening to most of the right to see if they have a valid point isn't worth the rise in my blood pressure that comes from hearing all the lies and smokescreens they put out to keep the real stories from getting out.

Anyway, this is only one small point that Mr. Moyers makes in the middle of a speech that shows how this administration is on the road to succeeding in silencing one of the few sources for actual news that we in America have remaining to us. Go read it, and take it to heart.

You Know That Commenting System Everyone Complains About?

And yet most everyone uses? Well, now I'm using it too... I just changed the commenting from Blogger's default system to Haloscan. Well, I say "I" changed it, but really all I did was sign up with Haloscan and click on the little link that said, "automatically install Haloscan on my BlogSpot blog." Poof, here it is. I am hoping that the two or three people that have looked at my blog (literally! my site meter consistently shows about 4 hits a week) might be more likely to leave comments if it's less hassle to do so.

Of course, those comments may very well be, "you suck!" But ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances.

Still wondering when I'm going to get off my ass and learn enough HTML to edit my template and put in a bunch of permanent links in the sidebars, though... I at first tried to manually update this to Haloscan and despite the cut and paste instructions managed to screw it up, so that did not exactly fill me with confidence. But I imagine if I would just print out the code and actually look at it I could probably puzzle it out eventually.

Who Left the Lights On?

OK, so it's been quite a while between posts.

I started to put one up a few days ago, but it got eaten by a boojum and I didn't feel like trying to reproduce it. But I'm trying again today.

This one is definately a random musings sort of post... I've been spending quite a bit of time playing "Neverwinter Nights" (NWN) -- once again I have waited until I could buy the original game plus its supplements for less than the original went for at release. I just hate spending $50.00 or more for a computer game, so I rarely buy them as soon as they come out. This is why I just bought "Grand Tourismo III ASpec" less than a month ago, when GT-IV is already out. NWN, for anyone who doesn't already know, is a game built on the AD&D 3rd edition ruleset. You build and develop your character just as you would for AD&D (except that you use points for stats instead of the more traditional 3D6 roll), and combat and magic are resolved just as they would be in an AD&D game. There is even an on-line component where you could run an on-line campaign just as you would a face-to-face one, but I haven't explored that option much. It's my son's favorite part, though -- he's not really interested in any game that won't let him get on-line and play with other people. Me, I'm more old-fashioned -- I think computer games should be played by yourself in a dark basement, at least metaphorically speaking; and that if you're going to play an RPG with other people you should set up a big table, get out your Magic Map and set of Sharpies, a bunch of dice, and have all your buddies over to play face-to-face.

I miss playing real RPGs... I was never much of a D&D fan, but there were lots of others I played -- Champions, Earthdawn, GURPS, Twilight 2000, and Shadowrun, just to name a few. Champions was probably my favorite -- I've always been a big fan of the old spandex-clad superhero genre, and Champions was about the best version of a supers RPG out there. I'd love to find a campaign out there somewhere I could join (hint, hint, if anyone reading knows of one in my area... ;) ). My son is a bit interested in RPGs, to the horror of his mother, but I think mostly he just wants to be a gun bunny rather than doing much in the way role-playing. By the way, his mother is an ex-role-player -- her horror stems from her perception that RPGs will have him ending up an anti-social nerd with bad hygene, despite that neither of us really ended up that way. Well, I'm a bit anti-social, but I was that way long before I played RPGs. I think RPGs were more of an effect than a cause. If anything, playing games probably made me socialize more than I would have otherwise.

Well, I'm off to Jesus' General to see if I can't stir up some trouble. Ya'll take care, and I'll see you around.