Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Site Redesign

I am in the process of redesigning my website and making all the pages a consistent design, including the blog. You can see the new design on the home page. I’ll get around to the others sometime this week. 

We’ve Got Plenty of Oil

I’ve discussed this before, but don’t believe the peak oil hype. The US has massive amounts of oils in capped wells and in oil fields yet untapped. And when you count oil shale, we have massive amounts not even touched yet.

There is an estimated 2 trillion barrels of oil buried beneath parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Geologists, petroleum companies and the federal government have known about these massive deposits for nearly a century. The trouble has always been: how do you get at it?

It is believed that the shale deposits in the Green River region of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming are holding the equivalent of approximately 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil. Called “oil shale” or “shale oil,” according to scientists and petroleum companies, much of it cannot be recovered with current technology due to the costly processing involved and the depth of the deposits buried beneath the Rocky Mountains.

Still, if only half can be extracted, scientists believe the amount is nearly triple the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.

New processes are being developed to refine oil shale. It’s actually a better idea than biofuels which cut into our food supply and raise food prices across the board.

We should be working on ways to tap these resources and wean our dependance on foriegn oil and use part of the profits for R & D into alternative energy. But of course, that would make too much sense. 

Great Books on Figure Drawing

Back in the day I used to hang out with Astro City artist Brent Anderson, who turned me on to an artist who influenced a whole generation of comic book illustrators. Andrew Loomis. His books have been passed around the Marvel Comics offices and elsewhere. Yet, many were out of print. Fortunately, you can download them as PDFs from here. There are also some other classic illustration books. 

Yikes

Disturbing

Also kind of disturbing. Man, that’s a tiny hole.

Good Grief!

More Repression of Free Speech

The denial of reality by so called “advocate groups” is sinking to increasingly subterranean depths in their pressuring of TV and film studios to ban things from the screen that they don’t like. Today it’s smoking. Tomorrow, pizza?

The biggest studios are usually like-minded when it comes to what is fit to portray on screen. But they have become divided lately in confronting one of the entertainment industry’s touchiest issues: smoking in movies that reach the young.

Under pressure from an antismoking lobby unsatisfied by a promise that the industry’s trade group made in May to consider tobacco use as a factor in film ratings, the six largest studio owners have been patching together individual responses to those who want cigarettes out of films rated G, PG or PG-13.

Smoking opponents view the result as surprising progress toward a virtual ban on tobacco images in all but films with R or NC-17 ratings.

Yet Hollywood is also waking to the realization that a committed band of advocates is rapidly changing what is permissible in the movies. And that precedent could embolden other groups campaigning to rid movies of portrayals of gun use, trans-fat consumption or other behavior that can be proved harmful to the public.

“It’s a chilling idea,” said Bill Condon, who wrote and directed “Dreamgirls” for the DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures units of Viacom.

This is the kind of crypto-fascism we should be concerned about. Because it doesn’t involve laws being passed, just the pressuring of the few corporations that control an industry into walking lock step with some ideology.

Our society has become increasingly under the sway of tiny pressure groups who dictate what’s acceptable. These groups are largely made of extremists. And they are managing to get laws passed that are stifling our liberties.

In New York city the mayor passed a law banning trans-fats. When major cities or states enact such laws it emboldens other political hacks to follow suit, thinking it will make them look like effective do-gooders. But in each case, it removes choices from people’s lives.

They always start with things most people agree with. Like smoking. Smoking is bad for you. Therefore, who is going to complain if it gets banned. Only smokers. And they’ve effectively, slowly made smokers pariahs. Forcing them to smoke in limited areas like Jews penned in a Ghetto. And we all know what they did to the Jews after they penned them in.

Once they get their way with one thing, don’t think they’ll stop there. The self righteous always have an axe to grind. Another freedom they want taken away from others. What seems mild at first becomes serious over time.

I remember when no smoking areas were a suggestion. Wait’ll you starting having to pay high taxes on junk food and then have to go to certain parts of town to get a hamburger because of zoning laws. Don’t laugh.

UPDATE: Hugging banned at a school. Stuff you never imagined is getting banned all over the place. We live in an epidemic of intolerance. 

Clinton Approves of Torture

The self righteous left who want to paint the US as worse than Saddam have another punching bag to pick on besides Bush now. Bill Clinton says torture is OK, y’all. As long as its off the book.

What the nation needs is some good Jack Bauer agents, says Bill Clinton.

Bill and Hillary Clinton apparently no longer think torture has a place in U.S. policy, but Bubba sure hopes a “24"-style cowboy steps up if someone ever nabs a terrorist who knows a bomb is about to blow.

“If you’re the Jack Bauer person, you’ll do whatever you do and you should be prepared to take the consequences,” Bill Clinton said yesterday.

In Fox’s hit show “24,” actor Kiefer Sutherland’s character Jack Bauer is regularly confronted with the ticking-time bomb scenario - and makes his own rules about how to save the country.

Pointing to the show, Clinton argued on NBC’s “Meet the Press” it was better that way because any law that approved torture could be abused.

“If you have any kind of a formal exception, people just drive a truck through it, and they’ll say, ‘Well, I thought it was covered by the exception,’” Clinton said.

“When Bauer goes out there on his own and is prepared to live with the consequences, it always seems to work better,” he said.

So, a law enforcement type that breaks the rules and tortures suspects is effective, but having carefully considered, approved techniques is not?

I just have to see if there is any cry of outrage over this from the usual suspects. Or will we hear crickets chirping as usual. Whenever Clinton does something outrageous, like get accused of rape,the Dems circle the wagons. If a Republican even utters a stupid statement, they forced out of their job.

Of course, Clinton is out of office, but his wife wants to be President. Let’s see if there is any backlash. 

Monday, October 01, 2007

30 Year Battery

This has to be seen to be believed. But I hope its real.

Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.

Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they’re not, they’re neither use fission/fusion or chemical processes to produce energy and so (do not produce any radioactive or hazardous waste). Betavoltaics generate power when an electron strikes a particular interface between two layers of material. The Process uses beta electron emissions that occur when a neutron decays into a proton which causes a forward bias in the semiconductor. This makes the betavoltaic cell a forward bias diode of sorts, similar in some respects to a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Electrons scatter out of their normal orbits in the semiconductor and into the circuit creating a usable electric current.

The First Robot-American