EdEarl

medicalXpress.com (HealthDay)—The more fried food you eat, the greater your risk for heart failure, a new study says.

Polycarbonate is good and you can get it in single and multi-wall sheets designed for building roofs or greenhouses.

This question is illogical; thus, cannot be answered. No point in reading the remainder of your post.

There is no doubt that cool waters rising from the depths bring nutrients to the surface and cause plankton blooms. Anything that increases that flow from bottom to top presumably will cause a bloom, and the more the better.

I escaped being a Texas redneck, fortunately. I believe that open cycle OTEC vaporize seawater to generate electricity; as the vapor condenses it makes fresh water. IDK if open or closed cycle OTEC are more efficient. One might add a solar thermal array to boost the high temperature of the OTEC making it more efficient; it is also possible to store heat in a molten salt, to make it run 24x7 efficiently. This addition requires being located near where the electricity is needed. Another possibility is to incorporate a solar hydrogen generator, and ship the H2 to land for use in fuel cells. This kind of system could be located in remote areas with little need for electricity, but it depends on methods being developed to make H2 with price parity to gasoline.

By energy equivalent, a ton of coal is about 8,141 kilowatt hour and about 200.0 gallons [u.S.] of diesel oil. 7.8 barrels is about 289 gallons. The energy in 7.8 barrels of oil is, I think, much higher than in a ton of coal. Thus, I think your estimate of 393 $/ton is a bit high, by energy equivalent, but still in the ball park. You make a good point. It is possible to process coal into liquid fuels, but it isn't done in large amounts because petroleum is less expensive. There is a considerable amount of processing and cost to turn algae into oil. I don't know how coal liquification and extracting oil from algae compare in cost. Regardless, the cost of growing and harvesting algae must be reduced significantly to make it viable as a fuel.

Algae oil is the crown, but we will need to grow and harvest algae at very low prices for algae oil to be competitive with petroleum. I'm in favor of making an algae pellet alternative to coal. If we cannot do that, it is unlikely algae oil can ever displace petroleum. Moreover, it is simpler than making algae oil, and presumably a simpler less time consuming research project. If it works the payback is excellent, because existing coal burning power plants could convert to using algae pellets, a renewable CO2 neutral fuel.

I don't know of any successes that resulted in peer reviewed published papers. Related work has been done in Self Modifying Code, you can follow the references herein. I've seen papers discussing the ideas in the news a rag. Quines are interesting. I think everyone agrees that it will take the AI singularity to achieve a program that can write significant programs.

It has been tried, with limited success. When you examine the problem closely, there are challenges no one has been able to solve. For example, such a program needs to know whether a new program does something useful, and if it does, is the current program a better solution or not than one that already exists.

Think I'll go work on perpetual motion; too much emotion here.

If this experiment can be verified by an independent scientist or group, then current theories may be modified. IMO a slower photon would affect wavelength, but not necessarily frequency, but others are more qualified than I am to answer your question.

New scientific "paradigms" are difficult to sell to the community of scientists and to others. Once a person understands an idea, even if it is wrong and some might say especially if it is wrong, changing a person's mind, including scientists, to accept an alternative is difficult. For example, at one time slavery was legal in the USA and practiced by many, especially in the South. A civil war, millions of deaths, and 150 years after the war, there is still discrimination against descendents of former slaves. Life is a bitch and then you die. If you think that merely being right will make your idea sail through scientists, who cherish their right to be critical of ideas, (and who hate their ideas being criticized as much as you do) you really must embrace reality. Life is not fair, and you have to fight for every inch of credit you get. If you want your ideas to be accepted, you must provide undeniable proof, and usually do it is several ways. If your communications about your idea and proof of concept are not clear to morons, it may not be read. That is true for everyone, not just MomentTheory. Even acknowledged superstars, for example Hawking, know their work must be impeccable, and that it will be read critically and criticized if there are any imperfections.

Smog from LA blows across the US to increase smog levels in many places in the US, for example in Big Ben National Park, where there would be no smog except for imports.

You can define and use bit fields, but the masking operations (&& and ||) must be used to access bits. Thus, it is faster to use a byte or larger storage cell and waste the extra bits, unless you have an array of bits, in which case the masking operations can be warranted.

I only suggested keeping cars the size of the Model T, not keeping the Model T technology, which is clearly inefficient and unreliable. In fact, even smaller is more economical, e.g., Elio.

We also need to examine the quality of life and other factors. The automobile has improved the quality of life in some ways, but the oil used to move it is adversely affecting climate. If the automobile had stayed small as the Model T, instead of growing into a Hum-Vee and other heavy vehicles, we could have avoided emitting quite as much CO2. Moreover, Detroit sold many vehicles based on styling rather than technology improvements; thus, one might argue that jobs in the auto industry have not been entirely the result of automobile technology. Then there are things like the technology that led to tanning salons, which increase the chance of one getting cancer, IMO little or no positive value. So technology creates jobs, often ones that people hate, and sometimes that are bad for the environment. Can we do better?

"Rather the opposite," I don't disagree. "How many jobs are there that would have simply been impossible to do without modern computers?" Many.

I don't know of any evidence, except to track thousands of case histories of affected people, enough to be statistically significant. If such a database exists, I don't have either knowledge of or access to it. Even with that kind of data, it might not be possible to prove the case. I'd like to point out that lack of evidence that automation is removing jobs from the market, is not proof automation creates more jobs that it replaces. Increasing population increases demand in housing and all other markets, simultaneously automation occurs, and other factors such as minimum wage, average wage, weather, markets, climate change, etc. IMO understanding the limits, for example when automation can do all work for us, gives us a data point that we can understand, and that information helps clarify what our current policies should be to help the change from where we are to where we will be. People who do not try to understand where we are headed include climate change deniers. Focusing only on short term goals can lead to very undesirable consequences, but we can mediate undesirable effects, at least sometimes. Things will unfold in time, and we will be surprised at how fast they occur, if my experience with computers between 1970 and today gives any insight into the evolution of automation. I remember once saying, "I'll never need more than a 20MB disk." Changes that accumulated in computers as Moore's Law predicted have been astonishing, and several automation projects have been announced viable since Watson. I suspect it is a trend. One of the most recent ones claims AI vision processing is comparable in quality to primates. That capability is now a module that other programs can use. Processing speech has been available for a while. Even without sentience, automated machines can do many things that only people have done in the past. I don't know how fast these things will occur.

I'll support my data that there have been job losses with this article about underemployment of recent college graduates. Just for grins I divided job loss since 1964 (44.7 million) that I calculated previously by the current population (319.3 million), which is almost 14%. That is close to the 16.8% underemployment rate reported in the above article. It's a stretch, but the two aren't unrelated.

My contention was that automation causes job loss, not unemployment. Fewer jobs per capita producing an abundance of goods and services is enough for me. Although, there could be more jobs if the very young, infirm, and old people could afford care workers, whether or not there are people to fill the jobs is another issue. In the past, families cared for such people, but now families abandon them, and that's another issue.