Recent Comments

1. over 1 year ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   The Earth is the cradle of mankind … but one cannot live in the cradle forever.

2. over 1 year ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Indeed. The X has an overbar. Google quickly advises that this means, in modern notation, ten thousand, not ten and not minus ten.

3. about 3 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Correct.

4. about 3 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Unfortunate. The just-plant-trees error is a bad penny that keeps turning up.

   Fortunately, there is enhanced weathering of silicates. The result, alkaline earth carbonate and silica, is rock. It does not need to be buried and it’s down for good. Please also see https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/163140/

5. about 7 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   There’s a video: https://youtu.be/ow9JCXy1QdY

6. about 7 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   “Material being prepared, ostensibly, for reactor cores may also be used for bomb cores instead” — obviously untrue in the case of reactors that, like the ones powering this computer, fission unenriched uranium.

   “Where will they get the missiles to deliver the power reactors to their targets” — if Orchid is alluding to 235-U bombs from an enrichment facility that was built in an unnecessarily underhanded, underground manner, missiles would not be necessary. 235-U, a material that exists abundantly in nature because its atoms’ mean lifetime before decay is over a billion years, has a concomitantly very low degree of radioactivity. Very easy to smuggle. Asimov wrote a short story about this, I think it may have been called “Let’s Get Together” (because the smugglers smuggled multiple subcritical amounts).

7. about 7 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Nuclear bomb seekers have never needed reactors.

   Power reactors destroy bomb cores, safely and forever, like nothing else.

8. about 10 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   It reminds me of what the old gypsy lady said when she saw me in my crib.

9. over 10 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Actually, lower taxes specifically on fossil fuels would be very helpful, because government’s large net incomes on these fuels motivate it to see climate deniers as a more equal set of citizens than the rest of us.

   Hansen, of the Kharecha and Hansen duo that last year published a “Prevented Mortality” paper in Environmental Science and Technology, has proposed a “Fee and Dividend” deal where government’s fossil fuel income would all be given to the citizens in equal dividends.

   Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to understand that this income is already very large, and a proposal to divide it back out to the people would do well at election time; he proposes an added Fee, which would not.

10. over 10 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

    Who took away the kitty’s six-shooters?