npts2020

The public forum is the reason he is in office. IMO how he manages it now that he is there will have more to do with his effectiveness than congressional action or inaction. With the proper use he may well be able to effectively change congress in 2 years if they are reluctant to support him.

When I lived right outside Washington D.C., there was a metrobus stop right in front of my house and metrorail was about a two minute bicycle ride away. During those 15 years I didn't own a car but rarely used public transportation becase most places it went, that I wanted to go, were as fast for me to ride to on my bicycle. Transfers from one train to another or train to bus is the main reason for this as it is relatively rare to use the system and not have to make at least one transfer. If there was an automated system with car sized vehicles no transfers would be necessary and you wouldn't have unoccupied vehicles going any further than needed for refueling/recharging. Rails can be efficient but they are very expensive to build and require heavy use to be worthwhile. Finally, it would probably be easier for Detroit to retool for automated vehicles than to build railcars.

Well I can conceive it. I can also conceive a great number of other not-so-well-defined things that may or may not exist in reality, branes, ghosts, and god come immediately to mind.

Well, IMO exploration and scientific advancement are inseparable. Science without exploration is simply philosophy. I guess it comes down to the motivations for doing the exploratory part. If you are doing it just to compile a cool list, it might be said to not be science but if you have a particular goal, like the notion that knowing how the human genome is sequenced might somehow be useful for many branches of science, I don't see how you can't call it science.

Another thing that doesn't get mentioned enough is the pace the warming is happening, unprecedented for as far back as measurements can be extrapolated or at least several hundred thousand years.

drdanger; It's a great idea. You don't want them looking too much like the stuff evangalists hand out or a lot of people will throw them away without even looking. You aren't related to Thomas Paine ("Common Sense") are you? (He was a famous pamphleteer in Revolutionary times for those that need to ask.)

If this is too tame for you, I highly recommend building your own model rockets (ala Estes) for initial experiments. These rockets will not reach orbit but they will give you some ideas about how to move toward that and are not very expensive to try out.

Is there any other kind of existence?

Spectrum lines are a measure of photon absorption of a substance. Hydrogen effects more than one energy level of photons and thereby has more than one absoption line in the spectrogram.

I for one am glad of the length of this thread, it is a very good and fairly intelligent discussion. Personally I would be much more sympathetic if the big 3 were the ONLY auto manufacturers but they are not. Some other automakers are not asking to be bailed out, those are the ones that should be entrusted to keep building cars. The current situation brings to my mind a college student who sends in for every credit card offer he recieves, maxes all of them out, then goes back to his parents for a bailout because he can't afford the loans. Why is it that ALL of the finance options for Detroit have been shut off if giving them money was such a good idea? Apparently investing in automakers is even less attractive than sub-prime mortgages and other "liar's loans".

I would think that all such things are included in what we call science. Discovering a new species or planet automatically inspires questioning in a scientific mind about how it fits into the greater scheme of things. SETI, WMAP, and the LHC are doing basically what you describe and I defy you to explain to me how any of those are not science.

If a guitar string exceeded the speed of sound, wouldn't it make a sound like a whip rather than a musical note (at least till is slowed below the speed of sound).

Why aren't the financial institutions who have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal government "to keep liquidity in the credit market" not loaning them the money?

Where's King Yertle when you need him?

I can assure you as well that zinc will rust in seawater even at near freezing temps. The only thing that changes with the temperature is the rate of oxidation, faster at higher temp.

Well, they did scale back the "requisition request" from stupidly ridiculous ($34B) to just ridiculous ($15B). Notes to MrSkeptic, CaptainPanic, and others. 1) When mass transit becomes similar to personal transit in convenience and cost, people will switch to mass transit but seems to me unlikely to ever happen (especially in the US) with todays modes. The way around this is to make mass transit more like personal transit i.e. automating the system. A minimal system would only require a master controller, guidance devices imbedded in the road, and vehicle control. This does not address the problem of locomotion, however, which needs a better source like electricity generated from renewable sources. 2) Much of the current infrastructure could be used with little modification other than repairing wear and tear. The problem with this is that the new system would be much the same as the old system, only automated (brings to my mind Steve Martin in "The Jerk" buying his family a new house). In addition, there is a substantial percentage of Americas highways that now need major repair or replacement, so why not to begin to put into place something that would actually be better i.e. enclosed to be faster, incorporating a new power grid, powered by solar and wind, prefab roadway sections for faster building and repairs etc. This should be competitive with rail systems for cost and would be a much more flexible system. 3)AFAIK no system like an automated personal transit system has ever been built. There are rail (Morgantown W. Va.) and guideway systems (Heathrow Airport) but nobody has yet built a system with a central control system that tells all of the vehicles what to do. I believe this control scheme to be best suited for a large scale system with millions of vehicles (someone please disabuse me of this notion if there is a better way) on a flexible (not all vehicles going the same speed in a single lane of traffic) road system. 4) All of the technology required is available and proven.

Yep.

Here is a site that posts information on various ongoing green energy projects and other related issues on nearly a daily basis. http://peakenergy.blogspot.com

This is why you hardly ever see mosquitos in a dry climate.

An automated system would significantly address the reasons for this, as low speed infrastructure in cities or suburbs would not require enclosure needed for high speed intercity and interstate travel, and could be done fairly inexpensively and quickly. The system could be made so that you could own your vehicle or use public ones. It can also be made so that the vehicles will get as close to a person's residence as a car could, either on a schedule or within a few minutes of being summoned by phone, internet, or some other means. I believe that most people don't use mass transit more because of the reasons stated in my last post, are there others that I am not addressing? The opportunity to get something like what I propose done is being handed to us on a golden platter, if only we can see it in time to take advantage. IMO Detroit is not going broke tomorrow nor are its problems going away any time soon, so there will a little time to come up with a good plan. Having said that, the window of opportunity will be definitely finite and the longer we wait, the more expensive and more difficult it will be to make happen.

Barry Commoner in the 1970's (I think in "The Closing Circle") predicted that global warming would increase size, strength, and possibly frequency of hurricanes and other destructive storms. The logic being, that as you put more energy into the atmosphere, the more activity you have. I am not sure what the current state of the science is, but it does make perfect sense to me.

Are you sure that isn't what really leaves your brain like porridge?

Waves automatically bring ratcheting to my mind. You could use the paddlewheel from a riverboat (or something similar) with a ratchet. Orient the paddlewheel in the direction of the waves and each wave will give you a push with the ratchet keeping you from losing energy on the return. Attach that to any kind of pump you want and with a large enough wheel you could pump pretty much all you are likely ever to need and at as high pressure required for anything other than the grandest scale projects.

There is something that kind of bothers me about the explanation of creativity on this thread and may all come down to definition of terms and semantics. To say that whatever is created has to be based on whatever the creator knows I believe to be a reasonable postulate, but then to say that whatever is created is not novel goes a bit far. Salvadore Dali certainly saw clocks and saw things melting, the novel, or creative, part comes in putting the two together because it is doubtful he ever saw a clock melting. Somewhere there has to be a new thought that has never been thought before (I wish I could state that better), this being how new discoveries are made. If my thinking is wrong somehow, why is it that humans ever progress from their former condition?

I think the new "New Deal" ought to be automating our transportation system and powering it with wind and solar energy. That would provide millions of jobs for a long time. If there was an economics forum it might be interesting to delve into the monetary implications of something like this.