Month: July 2009

Bill Gates puffing about advanced science: “That’s right. We’re going to make the cows that don’t fart. You name it, we’ve got it under control.”

Not so much.

New diets and feedlot management plus enhanced manure controls will be helpful, but breeding a magic hindgut will not help.

Gas from cows is the burping of ruminant livestock, not so much back-end emissions. It’s methane created by fermentation bacteria breaking down feed in one of the animal’s stomach chambers.

Treehugger points to capturing burps into tanks connected to the cows’ stomachs through a tube!!

About 32% of agricultural gases is nitrous oxide from fertilizers with cow gases in second place at 27%.

A cow burps 75 gallons per day, but the carbon in this gas is not new carbon.

Our ‘atmospheric challenge’ isn’t the re-releasing of carbon that was already adapted on the earth (livestock, plants and forests), but the unearthing of massive volumes of stored carbon sources (oil, gas and coal) and then adding these to the atmosphere decade upon decade.

p.s. I’m teasing Bill Gates. As you’ll read in the interview, he’s contributing a great deal. Some say the free videos of Richard Feynman lectures are not to be missed. [Silverlight required]

Worldwide, around 11,000 new substances are registered every day.

Almost all these substances find their way into our water.

And water holds tight.

LBL Berkeley reveals a cross section of water around a nanometer particle, in blue. Pink and red indicate the way water molecules layer around it.

Switzerland’s Federal Office for the Environment points out that along with non-toxic titanium dioxide, the color white, paint is preserved with antimicrobial silver nanoparticles that are destroying algae and fungi in our waterways as it seeps from our property.

Studying 37 pesticides that mix together after leaching into water, 30% transform into new products as toxic as or even more toxic than the parent compound.

Our waters are capturing a cocktail of contaminants and our wastewater treatment plants were designed mainly to remove nutrients rather than chemicals – industrial chemicals, pesticides and biocides, medicines and birth control hormones, cleaning agents, flame retardants for furniture and plastics – the list could be extended indefinitely.

Cornell University displays the media news cycle during the 2008 election. Please notice the shallow issues, er, sway of sentiment, er, talking points offered to the American voter. Full size here.

Is Exxon following in the footsteps of Monsanto by developing proprietary algae for fuel processing? Patents as an alternative to oil wells?

A warning about runaway algae by David Haberan at the Biomass ’09 Fuel, Power and Chemicals Workshop:

“Exxon made a recent announcement that they would spend $600 million on the genetic modification of algae in pursuit of biomass-derived biofuels.

“Of that, $300 million is for in-house work, and the other $300 million is intended to go to an industrial team led by a team called Synthetic Genomics. For those who know this, this is run by the gentleman who was credited with decoding the human genome approximately 10 years ago.

“I’d like to remind everybody that algae play a very specific and special role in our environment.

“Algae produce 50 percent of the earth’s oxygen and serve as a primary life interface between the oceans and the atmosphere.

“Algae have an extremely diverse existence on this planet, he added, and scientists have determined there may be up to 50,000 different species.

“The issue is what can you do with naturally occurring algae, or rather, what can’t you do with it? The answer is that nobody knows.

“The rush for genetic modification has very little to do with any real understanding with what the real environment has to offer today.

“There is a complete lack of regulation and information in the genetic modification of algae, and many who are aspirants have no capabilities, experience or resources to mitigate the associated risks.

“There is a distinct lack of knowledge surrounding algae’s role in ecosystems and food chains. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. We don’t know, to a great extent, what algae do in our biosphere.”

Algae Bloom, copyright 1994, Simon Walker

That earth was made for turnin’
And that bush was made for burnin’
Turn them gullies into dumps
Cut that cow up into rumps
Bathe the flats insecticide
Let that topsoil start to slide
And from mother natures womb
We’ll let that blue green algae bloom

Algae Blooooommm
Looks kind of pretty from afar
But them blue green tints of sapphire
Makes the water taste bizarre

A commercial firm is offering a 460 page report which may have required a few years but certainly is oddly described as massive research:

Algae-based biodiesel, biocrude, and biomass-derived green chemicals and plastics will start to enter early-stage commercial production by the end of 2011.

Algae 2020 presents a survey of findings from a massive, multi-year research project based on more than 20 site visits and 50 direct interviews with emerging technology companies and R&D labs, including industry leaders Solazyme, Sapphire Energy, Solix, Algenol, Algae 2 Energy, PetroAlgae, Aquatic Energy, OriginOil, SBAE, and several other innovators now producing algae in pilot and pre-commercial stage demonstration projects.

For an increasing number of private companies, algae is no longer a research project.

As of the summer of 2009, more than $1 billion in private and public investment commitments since 2007 have contributed to the acceleration of a surprising diversity of algae-based biofuels technologies, business models, and product strategies. Oil and gas majors Chevron, Shell, British Petroleum have already demonstrated their commitment to algae for biofuels in research labs and private ventures.

As if a portent of runaway algae, a huge blob of Arctic goo was seen floating off Alaska. At this point, no one knows what it could be.

Folks are definitely worrying:

MASS tree planting across Australia’s farmlands could provide feedstock to supply 90% of the nation’s transport fuel by 2030.

via CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.

Just jump and evolve:

The part of the brain wanting pleasure is different from the part of the brain experiencing pleasure.

“I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, ‘Well, this is Obama’s economy,’”

the president said before an overwhelmingly supportive outdoor crowd at Macomb Community College.

“That’s fine — give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe.”

The jab was not included in his prepared remarks, which focused on an announcement that the administration was proposing to spend $12 billion to bolster the nation’s network of community colleges. Community colleges are heavily attended by working adults, some seeking new expertise, others remedial instruction on the way to four-year college.

So the administration’s proposal should have particular resonance:

Commie-in-Chief Obama to give billions to community colleges in effort to make us into Socialist Hippie China Pinkotown.

Study reveals votes are glued to contributors.

“I’m continually surprised by how direct the relationship is between the supporters of the bills, their financial backers and the correlations between campaign contributors and votes.”

I’m not surprised.

Sad.

This is not just an abstract concept – money and politics…

What our analysis suggests is that there’s a good reason these special interests spend thousands of dollars – they get something in return.

My favorite eco- grass-fed cow snippet found via food safety wiz Doug Powell at Kansas.

a crafting of diplomacy:

🙂

Richard Heeks’ exploding last moment of a soap bubble.

In mid-June, Vito Congine, 46, an Iraq war veteran, began flying the flag upside down – an accepted way to signal distress – outside the restaurant he wants to open in Crivitz, a village of about 1,000 people some 65 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

He said his distress is likely bankruptcy because the village board refused to grant him a liquor license after he spent nearly $200,000 to buy and remodel a downtown building for an Italian supper club.

Congine’s upside-down-flag represents distress to him.

Here’s the rub: Hours before a Fourth of July parade, four police officers went to Congine’s property and removed the flag under the advice of Marinette County District Attorney Allen Brey.

Neighbor Steven Klein watched in disbelief.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ They said, ‘It is none of your business.'”

Family member Levi Johnston says a little more on the NBC Today show. Interview and video is here.

“We had tons of offers coming in from everybody out there and just all kinds of ridiculous things.

“There’s been talk about it would be nice to just take the money and run,” anywhere from $7 to $9 million. “It’s up there.”

“She’s very smart, but I just don’t think she can handle the stress level as governor – I don’t think she can handle it as president or vice president.”

Here’s Jolie, Lohan, Theron, Foster, Aniston and Witherspoon. The New York Daily News is wondering which actress should play Sarah Palin in any upcoming biopic.

I have never understood why we haven’t replaced wet porcelain and slippery flooring.

A new national study finds kids are being hurt in bathtubs and showers at a surprising rate.

Experts at Nationwide Children’s Hospital say slips and falls are far too common, sending more than 43,000 kids a year to the emergency department.

That’s an average of 120 kids every day who are hurt in the tub or shower.

In most cases, parents are watching their kids, but it doesn’t matter.

Via the Doc Gurley Institute of Skeptical Paranoia, ‘Is mass drug-company advertising a form of collective placebo?’

http://www.docgurley.com/2009/07/09/embrace-your-placebo-effect/

Oh, the wars for oil go on and on:

The increasing importance of the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang autonomous region as a source of the energy and minerals needed to fuel China’s booming eastern cities is raising the stakes for Beijing in its battle against separatists agitating for an independent state.

“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oilfields, it became absolutely impossible.”

The desert around the city is punctuated every kilometer or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground. [Financial Times 2008]

In the list for 2009, 140 companies are American, the lowest number on record. Seven of the top 10 firms are oil companies

From the Asia Times:

And this doesn’t even count the inflation in other costs, such as how my health insurance went up by another 8.8%, taking me to over $13,000 a year in premiums, which doesn’t count the $2,000 deductibles that my wife and I must each pay, or the co-pays, which means I am out of pocket over $15,000 a year before they start picking up any of my needed medical costs!

Obama:

I am confident that the United States of America will weather this economic storm. But once we clear away the wreckage, the real question is what we will build in its place. Even as we rescue this economy from a full-blown crisis, I have insisted that we must rebuild it better than before. For if we do not seize this moment to confront the weaknesses that have plagued our economy for decades, we will consign ourselves and our children to future crises, sluggish growth, or both.

We must continue to clean up the wreckage of this recession, but it is time to rebuild something better in its place.

The Conflict Minerals Pledge calls on electronics companies to ensure that their products are conflict free.

By signing the pledge, companies commit to tracing and auditing their supply chains, so that when we as consumers buy an iPod or cell phone, we can be certain that our purchase is not funding crimes against humanity.

Consumers can endorse the pledge and add their voice to the thousands of people who have already called on these companies to practice their due diligence.

Getting it on with primate cousins:

While evidence of humanzees has been scant, there is no longer much doubt about real attempts to create one, and in some cases in rather spectacular fashion.

Secret documents recently uncovered in state archives after the fall of the Soviet Union have revealed that in the mid-1920s Joseph Stalin enlisted Russia’s top animal-breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, the father of artificial insemination, to conduct a series of “interspecies hybridization experiments” with the intention of creating what Stalin envisioned as an invincible “Planet of the Apes”-like army of humanzees with superhuman strength and stamina.

Put in the form of an official request from the Politburo to the Academy of Science in 1926, the plan was to create both a “living war machine” to bolster the then beleaguered Red Army, and a new labor force for the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan to build a modern industrialized and egalitarian society.

“I want a new invincible human being,” Stalin is quoted in Russian newspapers as having instructed Ivanov, “insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

Ivanov arranged an expedition to the western African nation of Guinea in March 1926 to conduct his experiments. Despite repeated failures at impregnating chimpanzees with human sperm, Ivanov was reportedly convinced that he’d have no trouble enlisting local women to be inseminated with chimp sperm, but could find no one willing to participate.

Upon his return to the Soviet Union, Ivanov continued his hybridization experiments at a newly established primate station in Sukhumi, Georgia. He had intended to impregnate five human volunteers there, but the only mature male chimp at Sukhumi died before the plan could be carried out.

Senior Exec of Cigna health insurance turns coat:

BILL MOYERS: You told Congress that the industry has hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street. You said, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.” How do they satisfy their Wall Street investors?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, there’s a measure of profitability that investors look to, and it’s called a medical loss ratio. And it’s unique to the health insurance industry.

And by medical loss ratio, I mean that it’s a measure that tells investors or anyone else how much of a premium dollar is used by the insurance company to actually pay medical claims. And that has been shrinking, over the years, since the industry’s been dominated by, or become dominated by for-profit insurance companies.

Back in the early ’90s, or back during the time that the Clinton plan was being debated, 95 cents out of every dollar was sent, you know, on average was used by the insurance companies to pay claims. Last year, it was down to just slightly above 80 percent.

So what’s Sarah Palin’s first appearance since resigning? She chose ‘Firearms Friday’, a gun rights show on KFAR radio in Fairbanks. She said wanted to free herself of the constraints of the governor’s job so that she could “get out there and fight”. Gee whiz.

Or as Andrew Sullivan writes in the Times:

The idea of Sarah Palin, though, is sadly not the reality of Sarah Palin. The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity.

…
And this helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry.

From Fox News to talk radio to conservative publishing houses, it has created an alternate and lucrative media reality that is worth a fortune to those able to exploit it.

Alas, these alternative media thrive on paranoia, hatred of liberal elites and growing extremist rhetoric made worse by a hermetically sealed echo chamber of true believers.