Does The Global "Thermostat" Have a Governor?

A relatively recent study of the atmospheric impact of water vapor in the tropics has come to a decidedly unique conclusion: once temperatures hit a certain point, the infamously powerful greenhouse gas called 'water vapor' has a cooling effect. Read more:

During the composite oscillation’s rainy, tropospheric warming phase, the longwave flux anomalies unexpectedly transitioned from warming to cooling, behavior which was traced to a decrease in ice cloud coverage. This decrease in ice cloud coverage is nominally supportive of Lindzen’s ‘‘infrared iris’’ hypothesis. While the time scales addressed here are short and not necessarily indicative of climate time scales, it must be remembered that all moist convective adjustment occurs on short time scales. Since these intraseasonal oscillations represent a dominant mode of convective variability in the tropical troposphere, their behavior should be considered when testing the convective and cloud parameterizations in climate models that are used to predict global warming.

The full study, in PDF format, behind this link.

To rehash:

[...]the longwave flux anomalies unexpectedly transitioned from warming to cooling[...]

[...]Since these intraseasonal oscillations represent a dominant mode of convective variability in the tropical troposphere[...]

A Rant You've Heard Before

Over on Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov (whose surname I once again "insist" is almost conspiratorially close to Asimov) gave us all the pleasure of pointing out the 'joys' of one Annalee Newitz's comments about Extropianism.

Now, let me start off by saying that she got her terminology wrong; extropians are a group as a whole focused on augmenting intelligence; on creating or finding greater intelligence either in humans or in machines. Her comments were with regards to Immortalists and transhumanists in general; but poorly aimed at extropians. Honestly, even a cursory examination of the title would reveal this: extropy is defined as the 'force' that causes organization within a group of things. This is inverse to entropy, which is the increasing disorder of things over time.

It's really an extremely subtle point, but one worth making. Now, as to the nuts and bolts of Annalee's comments; near the end of the article Michael references, she makes the following "end statement" by way of justifying her entire opinion:

And let there be no doubt about it: the extropian agenda is creepy. Who wants to live forever in a world where only the richest people in developed countries will become immortal? It's not as if there's going to be a special cryogenics fund for everybody in Kenya and Chile. In order for people to live forever in the transhumanist future, some people will still have to live like trash. Sounds sort of like entropy to me.

There it is: the continued, pervasive belief that only the richest people will enjoy these technologies, so they ought not be developed or possessed at all, by anyone, ever.

And frankly, this is a lot like saying, "Ebola will kill everyone in the city. We could develop a cure, but only the richest people in the city could afford it. So we're just going to let everyone die, because that would be unfair to the poor." Nevermind the fact that once the once the cure exists -- much like every other cure that has been developed -- if given long enough the cost could be brought down to the point where everyone could enjoy it. At the end of the day, that's a simple truth; over a long enough timeline, the cost for any new technology will be reduced to the point where a sufficiently great number of people can enjoy it. It may take five hundred years, or five thousand, but that is simply not an excuse to forbid it to anyone. Should I live to be a thousand, I will never understand the objection that "only the rich and powerful will enjoy this!"

It doesn't matter what you want to look at: Originally, good food and the luxury of a warm bed every night was something only the richest of the rich could be guaranteed. Today, it takes only a moderate income -- the American poverty level -- to ensure that. And as to Kenya and the rest of Africa? The problems there are less economic than they are political. You can hardly call something the failure of the capitalist system when the capitalist system has never been applied there. But I digress.

I'll use a more modern example to once again disprove the "fixed pie" myth: rapid prototyping technology, also referred to "home manufacturing" equipment, has always been exorbitantly expensive. But thanks to the folks at RepRap and Fab@Home, that will not remain true in the very near future. All that will remain exclusive is the knowledge to use them. An exclusivity which, much like the Linux operating systems for computers, or the Wikipedia 'free' encyclopedia, is fastly vanishing: both RepRap and Fab@Home are "open source" projects: their hardware & software designs are free to the public for any purpose, licensed under multi-national GNU. More and more colleges are offering free to the public college courses on a variety of topics -- online courses, of course. But if your goal is simple self-erudition, you can achieve it for between 5 and 40 bucks a month, depending on how much your internet connection costs. (Hell, go to a public library in the US and you don't even have to pay that.)

While Corporatist-style commercialism continues to run roughshod over the promotion of human decency and liberty, there is little to no question that advances in technology will very realistically play a major part in the solution to that problem. Youtube and the Peer-to-Peer networks have already cut a chink in the armor of the "Entertainment industry"; (the adult industry faces similar 'peril' from such glamourous sites as YouPorn, and XTube) and as to reaching these outer communities, the poorest portions of the world...

India and China have both presented to the world the Will to Industry. This despite the difficulty in achieving that state. With projects like RepRap and Fab@Home being developed by a very dedicated, if minor, community there is simply no question: while the disparity between haves and have nots may not close for decades or even centuries to come, any advancement in one area will have ancillary benefits that will affect everyone.

In the end, it seems utterly selfish to complain that only the "rich" or the "powerful" will acquire access to technologies providing extended life or increased genius; for all such complaints detract from how soon they will come around at all. And if any historical analysis of technological advancement is to be our guide at all, there is one simple truth:

Once something is invented, sooner or later anybody who wants it can have it.

Bionic Knees?

So, here's the deal: there is more interest today than ever before in harnessing the natural rythms of the body for kinetic-electric conversion. What you're about to see (should you choose to click "play") is a video that shows a new avenue for electrical generation which could with capacitance and battery storage provide -- assuming, of course, the bulkiness is overcome -- all the whirring joys of extended battery life for all the wearables or gargoyling that may come to pass.

Financing the Near Future:

With the fears of recession calling down on the heads of Americans, and general market destabilization coming with the collapse of the sub-prime real-estate market, a lot of people have been asking themselves: how am I going to pay for all of this?

Now, there are a lot of directions you can go in to make that happen: You can get a loan; which may or may not be the route for you. It's important to know the difference between unsecured and secured loans; know your options. More likely -- as most people who need loans today don't seem to have the resources for them -- you could get a credit card; at which point you'll of course need to compare credit cards.

Now, given that the national median income is some 44,000 for all households, please consider the following: with political solutions such as Ron Paul's out of the competition, with the upcoming Presidential contest seemingly between two mild fascists (Obama and Clinton) -- "Corporatist" if the word "fascist" is still too severe for you -- the consumerist society isn't going away anytime soon. Credit isn't a bad thing; but don't forget that credit isn't the same thing as money. Use it to get your feet under you -- but don't forget that when you use credit, you always pay.

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Hulabaloo: Have Biofuels Really Failed?

There has been news all over the press about how the biofuels "solution" to the 'global warming crisis' just hasn't worked out. You can find it in a number of more conservative news journals, of course, such as New Zealand's Stuff -- which is of course owned by Fox-With-A-British-Accent. But if it's also hit Wired Magazine, then you know there's something to it.

Quoth said Wired article:

Several studies have intimated it, but two blockbusters published in the lofty journal "Science" yesterday confirm that biofuels cause more emissions than fossil fuels when everything is taken into account.

Both studies take a detailed look at the effects of converting large tracts of land worldwide into cropland used to raise fuel. While it is true that biofuel crops such as sugarcane, corn, switchgrass and the like absorb greenhouse gases as they grow, they absorb far less than rain forests and even scrubland. Also, turning plants into fuel creates its own emissions, especially when transportation is figured into the equation.

The "Science" article, "Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change," (subscription), maintains that the clearance of grassland for fuel releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved the fuel made annually on that same land. Of course, not everybody agrees with the study.The Renewable Fuels Association, a coalition of ethanol producers, called the researchers' view of land-use changes "simplistic" and said the study "fails to put the issue in context."

[...]

This is of course a major issue. But the question is, how much of one is it, really? There are of course a number of angles -- a wide number of them -- that one could take to approach the problem that, apparently, biofuels produce more CO₂ than they pull out of the air. So what, then, are we to do? Is the world doomed to turn into a charred cinder thanks to the human contribution?

Obviously, such hyperbole answers itself: No. For one, no person who was serious about biofuels looked to corn ethanol or palm oil as even a viable solution to the fuel problem. Certainly, this author saw through that deception quite some time ago (at least, "quite some time ago" in political terms -- who remembers anything more than two years ago in that arena?):

To compare, the most effective gallon-per-acre biofuel crop right now is palm oil, which hovers around 680 gallons-per-acre. So this is more than triple the amount -- and it's good ol' fashioned gasoline to boot! Here comes the number crunching. In 2004, the US used approximately 318 billion gallons of oil. At 2,000 gallons per acre, that comes out to roughly 159 million acres of arable land -- and this is assuming that the cellulosic starch problem can be overcome -- for which there are no hypothetical solutions yet available. According to the CIA's "World Factbook", the US has 9,161,923 square kilometers of land, 18.01% of which are arable. That's 1,650,62 square kilometers. 1 acre = 0.00404685642 square kilometers, so the US has 407,739,281 acres of arable land. To maintain the energy usage levels of 2004 purely from biofuels derived from this process would require ~40% of all arable land in the nation.

For the record, the cellulosic ethanol problem has been pretty much licked -- or so the press reports would tell us, thanks to many different approaches, one of which piques this author's amusement simply because it calls on the same bacteria you'd find in the gut of a termite: moorella thermoacetica (depicted in abstract crystalline form below). The process is simple enough, yet of course that's only true if you're a science geek. From Biopact.com:

ZeaChem replaces yeast with a type of bacteria called Moorella thermoacetica, which can be found in a number of places in nature, including termite guts and the ruminant of cows, where it helps break down grass. Instead of making ethanol and carbon dioxide, the bacteria convert sugars into a component of vinegar called acetic acid, a process that releases no carbon dioxide.

To convert acetic acid into ethanol, ZeaChem turns to chemistry.

(The entire process is explained over at BioPact. H/T for this to Al Fin).

This development of course means that starchy or "woody" materials -- such as, oh say, wood) can be harvested for ethanol production. But there are easier, cheaper solutions than ethanol production: algal biodiesel is something that seems cannot be harped enough: Rather than a mere 2,000 gallons per acre, the current expected yields of the startups building factories or putting their factories into production now is 30,000 gallons per acre. This would reduce the needed landmass for energy production to .0036% of the available landmass (arable and non-arable combined).

Is it even necessary to worry at all? Well, current weather patterns would seem to indicate otherwise -- but don't expect to hear that from the mainstream media.

Tissue Engineering in Mainstream Media

With the recent advances in stem-cell derivation research -- such as the use of genetically "reprogrammed" cells to create fetal stem-cells from adult cells -- it's important to recognize that there has been significant advancement in the field of tissue engineering, the "next step" from simply 'harvesting' stem-cells. The below video, however, represents something else altogether: the beginning of comprehension of this research by the common man.

Credit Repair Concerns

With all the economic concerns and fears of a recession, it would be easy today to fall into fears about places offering bad credit loans or the like.

It is important, therefore, to realize that there are resources which can provide for you the ability to keep on your toes; to know what you're getting into. The site linked to above, "Creditloan.com", is one resource -- perhaps only a starting point; but a resource none-the-less.

It cannot be reinforced enough: keep your head about you -- these days, you can't get past the demand for financing in your own life, and too few people can understand it let alone use the system to their advantage. Consider that link a resource for your use.

This post paid-for via PayPerPost.

Dystopian: Pretend to Be a Time Traveler

The following is, apparently, a video that is meant to be an ad for Dennis Kucinich -- though you don't discover that until the end. I find it quite entertaining, however, whom the only politician actually mentioned was. You industrial fans out there -- be prepared to be amused.

Scientists Find Source of Cosmic Dust

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- Scientists in California have uncovered the best evidence yet that cosmic dust in the early universe mostly came from the explosions of giant stars.

The Spitzer Space Telescope recently detected large amounts of space dust, 10,000 Earth masses worth, in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A located 11,000 light-years away.

The discovery comes two months after Spitzer found freshly made dust in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes.

Astronomers believe both supernovae and quasars are responsible for the dust that helped seed early stars. Dust is essential in the cooling process to make stars, which are predominantly gas.

Researchers at NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology used a telescope instrument to analyze infrared light from the supernova and construct maps of the dust to determine the quantity and composition.

Results will be published in the Jan. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

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Source

Video: South Korea Clones "Glow In The Dark" Cats

I am struck by the recollection that only recently the news was made that you just can't clone a calico cat. That being said, it would seem that once again our poor benighted felines are doing their part in the advancement of cloning science. Check this video for more:

The reasoning behind this act was that it was meant as a proof-of-concept for the breeding of cats, which are supposedly genetically quite similar to humans, with specific genetic disorders unique to human beings. This would qualify, then, as quite the genetic-science breakthrough.

Yes, it's unfortunate that animals need to be used for such research, but there reaches a point where you can only study genetic functions in a functioning genetic machine -- that is, an animal. Here's to hoping that the Green-Peaces and Animal Liberation Fronts of the world don't stop this vital and fundamentally important work.

Nanosolar Press Release

Nanosolar Ships First Panels
December 18, 2007

After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today.

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

- the world's first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;

- the world's first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;

- the world's lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;

- the world's highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

[These are obviously not the first three we ever produced – we have produced loads for testing – but these are the first three of what we consider our commercial panels.]

Take that, you vapor-ware claiming bastards!