Jennifer Nix, 08.20.2008
Obama Nation is a pathetic excuse for a book and is just one more example of how the right effectively moves their lies into the national discourse while the left fails to do so with progressive ideas.
Marty Kaplan, 08.14.2008
In physicists' quest for the "God particle," mystics get a new machine .
Gary Marcus, 06.30.2008
Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design is one simple basic fact: the human species isn't intelligently designed.
Art Brodsky, 08.15.2008
McCain's internet policy is the product of a team of advisors that gives lip service to consumers, but when the rubber meets the road, it's the corporations that get most of the goodies.
Larry Gellman, 08.19.2008
In just a few years Pickens has moved from being a totally partisan political animal to a man who is looking for the partial truth in the disparate views of a variety of people.
Howie Klein, 08.19.2008
I often have songs stuck in my head throughout the day. Levitin explains that this is actually a clue as to the evolutionary origins of music.
Bella DePaulo, 08.19.2008
The New York Times has William Kristol on its opinion page, and the Wall Street Journal now has Thomas Frank. What Kristol writes could be called scho...
David Weinberger, 08.15.2008
McCain's internet policy is the same as his energy policy: hand a key resource off to big corporations whose interests are fundamentally out of alignment with ours as citizens.
Steve Parker, 08.15.2008
GM is promoting the non-existent Chevrolet Volt, telling Olympics viewers it will be manufactured in 2010, but that's not definite. They say its gasoline powers a "generator" which keeps on-board batteries juiced-up.
Raymond J. Learsy, 08.18.2008
One solution stands out that would be singularly effective in contravening our seemingly helpless dependency on fossil fuels.
Joanna Stern, 07.10.2008
Tempted as I have been in the past year to snag an iPhone and switch teams, it will still be me and my BlackBerry. Why? Because I learned a few things about the iPhone the first time around.
Steve Rosenbaum, 08.17.2008
Fuel prices drive up the cost of physical goods -- and shift the economy to digital goods. Just in time.
Maura Judkis, 08.13.2008
Aside from being a welcome distraction for office drones across the country, Facebook applications can do some good.
Dr. Michael J. Breus, 08.18.2008
We've learned a great deal about how skin is like the brain's twin. It can create messages for the brain to respond to without needing it to act first.
Bob Ostertag, 08.15.2008
Today the journal Science published new research which shows that the number of marine "dead zones" around the world has doubled about every 10 years since the 1960s.
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smart boys. minimal foot print both enviromentally and carbonwise. long term payback. now if they would spend the cash to bury them, the elk would say okay!!!
This is FANTASTIC " we need so little room really to harvest solar energy " just the confidence to back this new (well actually very old) energy source.. We can all help to make wise climate change resource decisions " read the emergency triage response to current climate change crises at
ClimateTriage
In all the recent heated discussion about solar vs wind vs nuclear vs more oil drilling geothermal has gotten short shrift. Every dollar that oil goes up it becomes that much more economical to drill deeper for heat, and if you drill far enough every place on earth has geothermal though obviously some places are better than others.
Plus it is perfectly green, endlessly renewable, and doesn't take a lot of land area from other uses or nature.
Point of use "geothermal" which taps into the steady temperature of the earth, not into boiling water, is a fantastic pre-heating and pre-cooling solution for existing and new structures. You can get a radiant floor fluid to roughly 60 degrees, then heat or cool it a bit from there to your desired temp... Some estimates say it can cut heating/cooling energy use by more than 50% even after the pump is accounted for.
That is really the only "perfectly green" use of geothermal. there are too many issues with other deep uses, like sulphuric acids, lengthy transmission, collapsing aquifers, excessive water use, flushing of heavy metals, etc.
Geothermal does not replace oil any more than nuclear energy does. It is a fabulous technology for places that have easy access to hot geological layers with good thermal conductivity.
I wouldn't call geothermal truly renewable. Average geothermal heat flow from below is something like 60mW/m^2, i.e. it's nearly four orders of magnitude below solar energy flux. Admittedly, there might be enough heat capacity in good sites for centuries to come, but once that heat is gone, geothermal will run "out of steam" pretty much like oil does.
Thank you Google for stepping up to the plate!
Now if more people can just put their money where there mouths are maybe we can pull ourselves out of this energy mess.
gee, Google, thanks. because if anyone needs more R & D, it's Big Energy Monopolists!!! why not invest in the kind of tech that will DO NO EVIL, as in, will give INDIVIDUALS INDEPENDENCE from Chevron, Pickens, Edison, Sempra, etc? all you are doing by diverting all that money to centralized solutions, is investing in destroying our open spaces, bleeding taxpayers and ratepayers dry, and ensuring that the 21st century follows in the exact footsteps of the 20th - with Robber Barons manipulating our energy supplies and prices.
with friends like Google, we don't need Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Electric!
do the right thing, Goog, and start investing in something that will help PEOPLE, like point of use renewables, smart meters and conservation tech, and stop investing in projects that will make 20 people rich while socializing all the costs onto the planet, ratepayers and taxpayers...
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