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Friday Link Salad
Oct. 28th, 2011 09:39 amBecause they're piling up:
1) Water will become the new oil because the Ogallala Aquifer is running dry. When that water's gone, it won't come back until after the next Ice Age. Most of the agriculture of an area from North Dakota to Texas is dependent on it. Solutions can be found (pipelines and solar desalinization) but they are not cheap nor will the free market magically build them.
2) A remarkable video of a remarkable device: an airplane that flies like a bird. Speaking of airplanes, here's a spherical model that can fly horizontally and take off and land vertically.
3) From the archives, the pharmacology of zombies. Basically, the same neurotoxin found in the Japanese fugu fish - tetrodotoxin - is blamed.
4) On the solar power front, this fellow argues that current photovoltaic cells, running at 14% efficiency, are more than sufficient for our long-term needs. Basically, all of our current sources of energy average out at around 20% or so.
5) From the same blog as above, and probably where I got the inspiration for yesterday's golfing with God post, an argument that space colonization is not in our near future. Although the author makes the very cogent point that the distances involved are ginormous, the problem is not distance but economics.
1) Water will become the new oil because the Ogallala Aquifer is running dry. When that water's gone, it won't come back until after the next Ice Age. Most of the agriculture of an area from North Dakota to Texas is dependent on it. Solutions can be found (pipelines and solar desalinization) but they are not cheap nor will the free market magically build them.
2) A remarkable video of a remarkable device: an airplane that flies like a bird. Speaking of airplanes, here's a spherical model that can fly horizontally and take off and land vertically.
3) From the archives, the pharmacology of zombies. Basically, the same neurotoxin found in the Japanese fugu fish - tetrodotoxin - is blamed.
4) On the solar power front, this fellow argues that current photovoltaic cells, running at 14% efficiency, are more than sufficient for our long-term needs. Basically, all of our current sources of energy average out at around 20% or so.
5) From the same blog as above, and probably where I got the inspiration for yesterday's golfing with God post, an argument that space colonization is not in our near future. Although the author makes the very cogent point that the distances involved are ginormous, the problem is not distance but economics.
