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Surely everybody acknowledges that fossil fuels are an un-ideal, transient stage in our (hopefully) development. It's just a question of when you think we should be getting off that train and on to something sustainable, and what exactly defines "sustainable". For example I saw an interesting article a while back from a study that was suggesting that nuclear, and maybe even geothermal cannot be the permanent answer, and at best could be a better than fossil fuels stop gap simply because they will still cause global warming eventually. The vast majority of damage from fossil fuels comes from acid rain and the greenhouse effect causing excessive heat from the sun to be trapped, but at the end of the day even if we get to practical fusion in time, we will still be causing global warming. All that energy we will be making has to go somewhere and except for the minute percent radiated into space as light or other EM emissions, ultimately it will all end up as heat in the atmosphere. Eventually we have to source all our energy from the sun, directly or indirectly, since that is is energy that would end up in the earth's system anyway. Obviously stopping greenhouse emissions would buy us probably several centuries of time to come up with ways of harvesting the sun's power, since direct heat emissions from us using energy is only a tiny fraction of the current cause of global warming, but it still made me think about just how incredibly fragile we are on this world, and how very little leeway we have for fuckups. Assuming of course that we haven't already irrevocably hosed up and it just takes such a vast system longer than current estimates to demonstrate we are on a downward spiral.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:21
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TipsyMc posted:Nah,I was born in 1965...I'm sure there are some older goons than us. I think it's genesplicer now.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:34
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goatse.cx posted:
Wait, what? Why?
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Dec 15, 2014 00:40
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tokaiis done got banned so you're probably the oldest goon now
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Solice Kirsk posted:Well most of our advancements have happened pretty damned quickly. Just 150 years ago there was no good way too move electricity, no planes, no cars, no xrays, terrible medicine, terrible surgery, no cheap refrigeration, and (possibly the worst) no Barqs root beer. As far as human history is concerned the last 200 years have been a whirlwind of scientific and medical advancements, much of which would seem like magic to people just a few decades in the past. True, but we had a lot of advancements in math, language, writing, engineering, construction, etc., over the past six thousand years, with incremental progress and some backsliding at times. I'm just amazed that we are able to advance so rapidly versus our hominid ancestors.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:40
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13Pandora13 posted:Wait, what? Why? Having an encyclopaedic knowledge on age of consent laws around the world and how to circumvent them.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:48
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13Pandora13 posted:Wait, what? Why? He was real real concerned with ensuring everyone knew the difference between a pedophile and an ephebophile. It seemed to be critically important to him.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:49
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Pharnakes posted:Surely everybody acknowledges that fossil fuels are an un-ideal, transient stage in our (hopefully) development. It's just a question of when you think we should be getting off that train and on to something sustainable, and what exactly defines "sustainable". Source the article, because it sounds like pile of nonsense. According to the wiki article and its source, the earth receives 174 petawatts of power from the sun. In other words, 174 petajoules every second. Human civilization consumes 18 terawatts of power, in other words, 15 terajoules per second. 1 petawatt is 1000 terawatts. The energy blasted from the sun onto the earth vastly outstrips what we burn from fossil fuels, and the downside of that is not the direct heating, but the indirect heating from the planet retaining more heat from the sun.
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Dec 15, 2014 01:06
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Yeah Bro posted:Having an encyclopaedic knowledge on age of consent laws around the world and how to circumvent them. Prokhor Zakharov posted:He was real real concerned with ensuring everyone knew the difference between a pedophile and an ephebophile. It seemed to be critically important to him. God loving drat it. It sucks he ended up being lovely, his stories were really cool.
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Dec 15, 2014 01:08
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Phobophilia posted:Source the article, because it sounds like pile of nonsense. According to the wiki article and its source, the earth receives 174 petawatts of power from the sun. In other words, 174 petajoules every second. Human civilization consumes 18 terawatts of power, in other words, 15 terajoules per second. 1 petawatt is 1000 terawatts. The energy blasted from the sun onto the earth vastly outstrips what we burn from fossil fuels, and the downside of that is not the direct heating, but the indirect heating from the planet retaining more heat from the sun. The fun part is, how do you get off the planet with solar power?
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Dec 15, 2014 02:02
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Actually that's not hard, store some of that energy as synthetic chemical fuels, and use it as reaction mass.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:47
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[original unsuitable for thread] I give you Brugada Syndrome, which causes apparently healthy young men to develop heart arrhythmias and drop dead. Most victims are of Hmong descent. The syndrome was originally called Sudden unexpected death syndrome; it was renamed after the Brugada brothers who figured out what was going on. The Wiki page for sudden unexpected death needs editing, because it makes it doesn't clarify the difference between whatever is going on in the Philippines and the sudden unexpected death whose cause has been identified. Arsenic Lupin has a new favorite as of 08:32 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 03:37
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Phobophilia posted:Actually that's not hard, store some of that energy as synthetic chemical fuels, and use it as reaction mass. Is there a way to convert solar energy into a synthetic solid or liquid fuel? That sounds absolutely fascinating.
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Dec 15, 2014 04:43
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel (And this isn't even particularly efficient)
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Dec 15, 2014 04:46
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I might have posted this at some point in either thread, but the case of Marie Hilley. It starts off as your run of the mill arsenic poisoner, then it takes a soap opera-ish turn when Hilley jumps bail and creates a false identity, then kills herself off and returns as the twin sister and tries to make it with the same man. Then there is another twist when she escapes prison again. e: Messed up a detail. RC and Moon Pie has a new favorite as of 06:05 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 04:47
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Solice Kirsk posted:Is there a way to convert solar energy into a synthetic solid or liquid fuel? That sounds absolutely fascinating. Nothing used in the (for example) space shuttle and its launch system used anything derived from petroleum products or that couldn't be prepared in a chemical plant with just simple stuff and electricity as an input. At that point it doesn't matter where the electricity is coming from so it could be solar or wind or nuclear or coal or whatever. The shuttle's main engine just used liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen which can be made through electrolysis of water. The hydrazine monopropellant for the thrusters can be produced by mixing bleach or hydrogen peroxide and ammonia together. The solid rocket stuff is ammonium perchlorate (made by ammonia and perchloric acid) is mixed with aluminum (most common metal on Earth by composition) and a binder. You're not going to get into space by mixing household cleaners together in a bucket but chemical plants really aren't that far off from that in concept.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:10
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Literally Kermit posted:Not for nothing, but there was a second company between the waste disposal guy and the facility that produced the waste. They paid the former $125 a load and were paid by the latter $3000 a load to get rid of waste they had no idea what to do with (which is why they sold it to a local waste oil business to begin with). Yeah but at the same time, animals were dying by the load in places where Bliss (the guy subcontracted to dispose of the waste) sprayed, including birds falling straight out of rafters in barns, and he was up-and-down denying his spraying contributed to it. You'd think if you're buying barrels full of miscellaneous waste from large corporations and everywhere you're spraying it is making people and animals incredibly ill, maybe you'd loving stop and look into it instead of forging ahead and taking more contracts. Refusing to question or investigate your own actions when you're obviously causing harm is in itself a sort of evil, due to the effect it can have on others. It's a selfish impulse to protect one's own ego and it cost other people their health and potentially their lives. Bliss is an example of how cocksure ignorance is much more dangerous than any mustachioed villain.
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Dec 15, 2014 13:10
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Phobophilia posted:Source the article, because it sounds like pile of nonsense. According to the wiki article and its source, the earth receives 174 petawatts of power from the sun. In other words, 174 petajoules every second. Human civilization consumes 18 terawatts of power, in other words, 15 terajoules per second. 1 petawatt is 1000 terawatts. The energy blasted from the sun onto the earth vastly outstrips what we burn from fossil fuels, and the downside of that is not the direct heating, but the indirect heating from the planet retaining more heat from the sun. I don't think it was seriously trying to say we are going to cook ourselves any time soon, it was more making the point that what we are looking forward to as sustainable is only being measured in very human timescale, assuming we want to survive as a species indefinitely we are eventually going to have to start thinking in millions of years, not hundreds. If we continue to grow our energy demands and keep doing it for thousands and thousands of years, then presumably eventually that will all add up to something significant. I'm sure the direct heat released from human activities is negligible so far, but we've only been doing it for a couple of hundred years.
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Dec 15, 2014 13:12
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Pharnakes posted:I don't think it was seriously trying to say we are going to cook ourselves any time soon, it was more making the point that what we are looking forward to as sustainable is only being measured in very human timescale, assuming we want to survive as a species indefinitely we are eventually going to have to start thinking in millions of years, not hundreds. If we continue to grow our energy demands and keep doing it for thousands and thousands of years, then presumably eventually that will all add up to something significant. I'm sure the direct heat released from human activities is negligible so far, but we've only been doing it for a couple of hundred years. I think you have a seriously tortured understanding of global warming if you think anthropogenic heat is going to be a contributing factor to it. We're talking about a scale where minor changes in snow albedo from carbon pollution are causing the sun to melt the Arctic ice but a CANDU power plant putting 2 gigawatts of heat into the surrounding environment only raises the lakewater by a couple of degrees for a half-kilometer radius. Our generating capacity is not going to increase infinitely either, it will foreseeably only multiply by several times before reaching a maximum due to several possibilities - we kill ourselves off and it drops like a rock, it stays there because Earth has reached a carrying capacity and everyone has reached an industrialized quality of life, or we take conservation seriously and it drops to a newer maximum. It's not like 30,000 years in the future Earth will host a population of 7 trillion consuming a million times more energy, releasing enough heat into the environment to melt the crust or something. BattleMaster has a new favorite as of 13:24 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 13:19
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bonestructure posted:I was born in 1965 and I work in IT. Computers still seem like magic to me, in the best possible way. The things I dreamed about as a sci-fi-reading kid are real and now I get to work with them every day. It's quite true - things that were appearing in science fiction, even into the 90s, are now part of everyday life in a way that makes the SF look strange. In the film "Until the End of the World" (1993?), they use a search engine, the cars have talking navigation and everyone carried around and fetishized electronic gear in a way that contemporary critics jeered at. In the novel "Neuromancer", the hacker Case has to fumble around with adaptors so he can plug his computer in. "Person of Interest" shows pervasive surveillance that's only slightly ahead of where we are. The future happened to us and we just didn't notice.
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Dec 15, 2014 13:49
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It's amazing how quickly we've adapted to it as well. I'm just old enough to remember when having a mobile was uncommon enough to comment on. Now we don't even think about it; the opposite is true!
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Dec 15, 2014 15:53
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Pharnakes posted:I don't think it was seriously trying to say we are going to cook ourselves any time soon, it was more making the point that what we are looking forward to as sustainable is only being measured in very human timescale, assuming we want to survive as a species indefinitely we are eventually going to have to start thinking in millions of years, not hundreds. If we continue to grow our energy demands and keep doing it for thousands and thousands of years, then presumably eventually that will all add up to something significant. I'm sure the direct heat released from human activities is negligible so far, but we've only been doing it for a couple of hundred years. This is not true. If you take every single metric and plot it linearly, you might get such numbers, but such numbers would also be dumb.
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Dec 15, 2014 16:06
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As long as we're looking for problems in the distant future, we should keep in mind that we are not, strictly speaking, at the mercy of Earth's ability to radiate heat. There's no theoretical reason why we couldn't "air condition" the Earth, moving heat away from the planet and into space. Not that I have any practical idea for how you'd do that (gigantic radiator towers?) but hey, if we're generating Earth-cooking levels of energy from wind, tide and geothermal alone, I imagine we have the resources to investigate equally extreme solutions! not entirely serious
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Dec 15, 2014 18:02
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Pesky Splinter posted:It's amazing how quickly we've adapted to it as well. I was one of the first among my peers to have a mobile phone when I was 11 or so. I needed it because I had recently moved a town over but did want to finish primary school with my friends, so my mum (who worked near my school) would take me and pick me up every day but gave me phone in case of emergencies and stuff. I distinctly remember talking with my about how some day our kids or grandkids would be able to watch tv on their phones. Nowadays nobodies even watches tv on their phone anymore because gently caress having to adhere to someone else's scheduling. You just stream what you want when you want it.
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Dec 15, 2014 18:32
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I was born in 1961.
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Dec 15, 2014 18:36
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Cat Army
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drat, son, you old
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Dec 15, 2014 19:13
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MightyJoe36 posted:I was born in 1961. Mighty Joe Old
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Dec 15, 2014 19:27
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bonestructure posted:drat, son, you old In this group, yeah. I'm old enough to remember stuff like rotary phones, black & white TV, and stores being closed on Sunday. I'm also young enough to appreciate being able to call my son in another country and not have to wait until Sunday night to do it so it only cost $2. a minute, being able to watch any TV program or movie I want, when I want, and to have every record, tape, and CD I ever owned fit on something smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:27
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MightyJoe36 posted:In this group, yeah. I'm old enough to remember stuff like rotary phones, black & white TV, and stores being closed on Sunday. I'm also young enough to appreciate being able to call my son in another country and not have to wait until Sunday night to do it so it only cost $2. a minute, being able to watch any TV program or movie I want, when I want, and to have every record, tape, and CD I ever owned fit on something smaller than a pack of cigarettes. I laugh that I'm somehow the old fart among most of my friends, and occaisionally I regale them with stories of the horrors of early videogaming (16mb of blazing power!!) or the brain crippling sights and sounds of the early 90's,..And then make them very jealous when I get nostalgic and talk about how arcades used to be all over the place and even every convenience store would most likely have a couple machines to donk around with,... Guess I don't have anything scary or unnerving at the moment, just basking in my semi old fart memories.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:12
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It wasn't scary or unnerving, but it was a little weird after the last general election when I realized that for the first time in my life, I'm older than the President.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:21
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MightyJoe36 posted:It wasn't scary or unnerving, but it was a little weird after the last general election when I realized that for the first time in my life, I'm older than the President. I was born in 1976, which doesn't make me old per se, but dating women born in the 80s is always kind of odd. You can't just make a reference to Mary Lou Retton or Reagan getting shot without sounding like grandpa. I learned how to type on a manual typewriter and can still replace a ribbon on an electric IBM Selectric with my eyes closed. The first computers I used ran off cassette tapes. My great-grandparents were still of the horse-and-buggy era here in the rural mid-south but lived to see the moon landing. Anxious to see what we standing apes can accomplish in the next few decades.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:54
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ravinghobo posted:I laugh that I'm somehow the old fart among most of my friends, and occaisionally I regale them with stories of the horrors of early videogaming (16mb of blazing power!!) or the brain crippling sights and sounds of the early 90's,..And then make them very jealous when I get nostalgic and talk about how arcades used to be all over the place and even every convenience store would most likely have a couple machines to donk around with,... Here, this both gets us back on topic and lets us bask in our old-fart memories.  Polybius quote:Polybius is an arcade cabinet described in an urban legend,[1] which is said to have induced various psychological effects on players. The story describes players suffering from amnesia, night terrors and a tendency to stop playing all video games. Around a month after its supposed release in 1981, Polybius is said to have disappeared without a trace.[2] There is no evidence that such a game has ever existed.[3] sick orthographical  there, Dunning
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Dec 15, 2014 21:24
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Stop posting about how old you are, that's not creepy at all.
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Dec 15, 2014 22:14
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Stalin McHauntler posted:Stop posting about how old you are, that's not creepy at all. Sometimes it is. Like, when people your age start dying of things other than accidents, or when you watch a football game on Sunday and realize you're about 10-15 years older than the "old" players. Back on topic, here's an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_List quote:On November 9, 1971 he killed his wife, mother, and three children in their home at 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield, New Jersey, and then disappeared. He had planned the murders so meticulously that nearly a month passed before anyone noticed that anything was amiss. A fugitive from justice for nearly 18 years who assumed a new identity and remarried, List was finally apprehended on June 1, 1989 after the story of his murders was broadcast on the television program America's Most Wanted. List was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced in 1990 to five consecutive terms of life imprisonment. He died in prison in 2008. I was in the fourth grade and lived about 20 miles south of Westfield at the time. I remember them talking about finding his car at JFK Airport and assuming he fled the country. MightyJoe36 has a new favorite as of 22:28 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 22:20
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hey OLD PEOPLE. This is the scary and unnerving article thread, we don't need to hear anymore about how OLD YOU ARE BECAUSE ITS CREEPY! UGHH!
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Dec 15, 2014 22:28
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Last Chance posted:hey OLD PEOPLE. This is the scary and unnerving article thread, we don't need to hear anymore about how OLD YOU ARE BECAUSE ITS CREEPY! UGHH!
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Dec 15, 2014 22:51
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can we talk about scary ghost poo poo and murder mysteries and stuff some more. or maybe accidents involving caves, as i find caves unnerving and unpleasant i tried searching "scary cave deaths" on wikipedia but that did not abide
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Dec 15, 2014 23:00
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A Spider Covets posted:can we talk about scary ghost poo poo and murder mysteries and stuff some more. or maybe accidents involving caves, as i find caves unnerving and unpleasant This may have been posted in here before but I've been to the place this happened [url] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/what-lies-beneath-mossdale-caving-disaster-794268.html [/url]. It's a beautiful place. quote:For more than 20 years hardly anyone went near. Even its gauntlet epithet – the most strenuous cave known – attracted few contenders. Endless water-filled crawls with names like the Marathon, Kneewrecker and the descriptively painful Oomagoolie Passage made it, for most cavers, like a boxer so brutal that no sane person would take the fight.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:08
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A Spider Covets posted:can we talk about scary ghost poo poo and murder mysteries and stuff some more. or maybe accidents involving caves, as i find caves unnerving and unpleasant Well, there's the Devil's Kettle, which features a vertical shaft into which a river flows. And nobody has any idea where the water goes or what geologic processes could have formed a pothole that conducts water away laterally to someplace or other:  That's the mystery hole there on the left. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_C._R._Magney_State_Park#The_Devil.27s_Kettle quote:The park is best known for an unusual waterfall located on the Brule River 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from its mouth.[4] The river splits in two to flow around a mass of rhyolite rock. The eastern flow goes over a two-step, 50 foot waterfall and continues downstream.[2] The western flow surges into a pothole, falling at least 10 feet (3.0 m), and disappears underground.[11] It is believed the water rejoins the main channel of the river or has a separate outlet into Lake Superior, but it has never been located.[6][8] Researchers have dropped brightly colored dyes, ping pong balls, and other objects into the Devil's Kettle without result.[12] There is even a legend that someone pushed a car into the fissure, but given that the Devil's Kettle is wholly inaccessible by road, most commentators dismiss this as hyperbole.[5] I'm pretty sure I read about it in a previous iteration of this thread, but it's still plenty scary to me. I guess there are no confirmed cases of people falling in, but there's a thought for you to consider tonight as you're trying to drift off to sleep.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:20
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theflyingorc posted:The last 3-4 pages had a bunch of stuff where people were (usually wrongfully) convicted partially because "they didn't behave like they were supposed to". This might be the most irritating idea to me in crime. There's no standard human response to trauma! Judging somebody because they weren't upset enough is a super crazy dumb thing to do! Yeah, this bugs me too...there's no real "standard" way a person can react when being interrogated, everyone is different. Hell, as an example I got pulled over a few years ago for speeding and the police officers ran me through all the field sobriety tests because they suspected I might have been drinking (it was around 2am, so understandable I suppose). Even though I was innocent and was the designated driver, I was still pretty shaky during the tests (and passed them all) and the breathalyzer came back all zeroes. Didn't stop me from stressing the gently caress out and shaking despite knowing I was innocent. Now, take that situation and put anyone else into it, and I'm sure you'll get all sorts of reactions from freaking out, screaming and crying, to anger or aggression, to the most calm, cool, rational person that knows they're innocent and won't bat an eyelash. Nobody reacts the same identical way in a stressful situation.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:31
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A Spider Covets posted:can we talk about scary ghost poo poo and murder mysteries and stuff some more. or maybe accidents involving caves, as i find caves unnerving and unpleasant http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705347362/Man-trapped-in-Utah-Countys-Nutty-Putty-cave-dies.html There's a good segment on it in Curious And Unusual Deaths but I can't find it anywhere.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:45
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