Leaderboard

That book emphasizes that so much of our economy is dependent on oil - not as a fuel but as a raw material. We make fertilzer, plastics, clothing, rope, paint, asphalt, lubricants, medicines, solvents etc etc from oil and gas. Which is the best argument that we should not burn it all as fast as we can.

I've been searching hard for an answer to this question and I'm just not able to find it. It seems to me based on all the various cutaway videos I've watched (very scientific, I know) that diving line twists almost never happen on reserve canopies. Can anyone give me the technical explanation for why this is the case? Is it something to do with the aspect ratio or trim of reserve canopies? Should this knowledge inform anything about I fly reserve canopies (ex. if trim is different)? Thanks in advance!

The use of the terminology hard deck and decision altitude should be avoided. So many convinced of what it obviously should mean but it isn't so obvious.

And I am convinced the solution to that is education for women. There is a direct correlation between lack of education and births per woman.

The Mango Mussolini makes Tricky Dick Nixon look like a shining example of dignity, integrity, honesty and decency by comparison. 40 years ago I would have doubted that such a thing was possible.

"Always look on the bright side of life" is that an inept leader was ousted in less than 2 months. We were stuck with Trump for 4 years.

That is as valid as any other belief. In other words an interesting but worthless guess at what can not be known.

Houston we have a problem. Some corpse is stuck to the lander. Should we try and shake it off, or blast it off ! ?

If you want to ignore the pretty settled science you could believe that is possible I suppose. Another 5 billion or so till the Sun is in a different phase. But if you know anything about the history of life on Earth it is hard to imagine the era of human life lasting for more than a small fraction of that.

Or catalytic cracking Actually no, you can pretty much make the entire range of materials from any hydrocarbon. Cracking to reduce hydrocarbon length, polymerisation to increase hydrocarbon length, then various other reactions for other structures (esters, alcohols, benzenes, etc) and then fractional distillation for purification. The only restriction is the energy needed to make a particular material, i.e. the cheapest way to make polyethylene is to start with ethane distilled directly from crude oil. But you can also make it from heavier naptha, or even without using crude oil at all - coconut oil, for example, but there will be a lot more steps (and energy used) in between.

We actually can; we do it already. For example, we need oil primarily to make gasoline right now. But if you just use a fractionation tower to get the right light fractions to make gasoline from crude oil, you can only use about 5% of the barrel for gasoline (and naptha, and kerosene, and butane, and the rest of the lighter fractions.) To increase our production of gasoline, we do something called cracking. We use either thermal or steam cracking to reduce the length of the hydrocarbons in crude oil so that a greater percentage of them can be fractionated out into gasoline. As a result, 45% of a barrel of oil can be used for gasoline, and over 50% can be turned into those lighter fractions. We adjust this process (pressures, temperatures, dwell times) to produce a feedstock with the fractions we want. We can adjust this in either direction, to get more heavy fuels/products (bunker fuel, asphalt) or more lighter fractions.

Good news and bad news. The good news is that it was a $300 linkage. Fixed already. The bad news is that it was an expensive trip to get there. But had I taken it down the road to Joe’s Transmission and Bait Shop, he might have told me it needed replaced and then messed it up. Best news is that we have enough resources that this is a discussion, and not a worry. That, and that my husband isn’t starting to think that the van is reaching the end of its life. Wendy P.

Attempt to clean up KK5-1. Pretty damn hard to do without a clean nose or mouth.

That's the real point in my view. If we don't blow ourselves up we have, the cosmos willing, maybe 4.5 Billion years to go. It's not too soon to start conserving our 100 years supply, seems to me. Of course, in another billion years Amazon Galactic may be delivering complex molecules overnight through Prime worm holes. So there's that.

Hi Ken, I agree. Some of us have been talking about this for a very long time: The Limits to Growth - Club of Rome Just as a gut guess, I think we need to reduce the world population to about 1/3 of what it is today. I'm thinking that is about the number for continued sustainability. YMMV. I do think you would like this book: The Long Emergency - Wikipedia I consider it a very fascinating read. Jerry Baumchen PS) As I read all of these posts & the one Winsor posted the other day, I think we can all agree that the long-term future is not going to be pretty. PPS) I agree, escaping from this planet to somewhere else to live is a pipe-dream. It is a nice concept, but ultimately, one has to face reality.

Because it isn't true, for a start. In WW2 Asian Americans probably didn't feel very unified from their internment camps and black soldiers in their segregated units may not have felt it either. Muslim Americans during the height if the war on terror, same thing. A whole bunch of people were sure as hell giving a shit about ethnicity during all of that time.

I guess the same reason police hate responding to domestic violence cases. Often the fighting parties turn on the newly arrived 3rd party.

No, rockets don't emit a lot of carbon, just because there are so few of them. They're a rounding error. well, in an enclosed space, you REALLY don't want to be running any gasoline or diesel engines. Electric is definitely the way to go.