Campaign Statements from Iraq’s Candidates

“I’m Mustaf Al Zharkoum, and I approve this message. Unless I’m not and I don’t.”

Hey, we had free elections here. You got to vote, didn’t you? Just because your vote may or may not have gotten counted doesn’t mean it wasn’t a free election. You were perfectly FREE to come and go as you pleased. You’ve just got to know what words MEAN, Deno.

Oh, David! Ahmid Kalamiti! That’s really good!

Leslie

Leslie, good point. Yes, I did have the opportunity to vote and yes, I did use it. What I’m referencing is the oft-quoted (but not enough in my opinion) voting irregularities. Perhaps I haven’t thought this through as far as I need to, but to me, keeping people in line for hours due to lack of machines or whatever excuse the powers-that-be have is a similar problem to scaring persons off from voting. The problem is not so nearly severe here as in Iraq, but if people want to invoke their right to vote (as we keep telling the world everyone has that inaliable right) and can’t, for whatever reason, the phrase, “free election” suddenly is not so free. Now, the degree of this problem is so much higher in Iraq than here; perhaps I shouldn’t have used that as my example.
Still, what good is your voting do if no one counts it? Democracy is the power of the people, which, presumably, everyone is a member of. If you don’t choose to vote, that’s different. But if you do vote, and it’s not counted (or better yet, your grandparents vote but they’ve been dead for the past decade), that’s a crime. Someone’s been cheated, either you or the memory of your dearly departed family.
Again, I might sound more caustic than I mean to be. Chalk that up to stupidity of youth and the fact that emoting online is a skill I haven’t quite mastered.

Deno,

Leslie’s tongue was firmly locked in her cheek.

If you live in Ohio, you should be pissed. I live in Florida. You be black, you a student, you even smell like a Democrat….

We here in the South, like our soulmate the secretary of state of Ohio, understand who should and should not be enabled. Voters might, as Cheney reminded us, elect the wrong candidate.

Of course, how in the hell would you know in Iraq?

This message courtesy of the Voting Machine Gamers for God

Deno,

On democracy, a quote from Rachel’s, an environmental newsletter (rachel.org and click on rachel’s). Don’t search rachel’s - you’ll get the “gentlemen’s restaurants. It’s in the current issue, #805. “How can we claim to have a democracy when 1% of the people own 40% of everything? Does money not translate into political power? Who are we kidding?

Love your political movement.

I understand there is a nascent Baghdad Body Parts Party.

Rummy says not to worry - 70% of Iraqis are still intact.

“In truth, some of my environmentalist friends don’t like to acknowledge it, but even solar energy requires us to rip up the earth and build more platforms and towers and cables and substations to capture and transform energy and transmit it to where it’s wanted.” -Rachel’s News #805

How true. The amount of energy from the sun impinging upon the earth is a constant. The totality of all life dances around this zero-sum gain in a balancing act. Each time we increase the size of our footprint with roads, homes, shops, wind turbines, solar energy farms, etc., something has to die. It has to. Paving over paradise does not merely push nature aside. When photosynthetic capacity is reduced, creatures must die as a result.

Wow. That’s sufficiently shifted away from the thrust of this blog entry’s topic! We now return to our regularly scheduled blog.

This just in from CNN: The ‘Future Iraqi Assembly’ is paying for ads promoting such things as a united Iraq, peace for all, and general goodwill. Life is good, ja?
Well…actually, no one really knows who the hell these yahoos are. There’s no mention on their website (aside from a general, we are made of good, honest people disclaimer) if this is a group of expats, nationals or foreign businesspersons.
Although I believe that such ads are a very good thing, I’m leery of trusting ‘anonymous.’ Maybe I’m just too cynical.
Here’s the article:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/01/22/
iraq.vote.ads/index.html
Real cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Murray,

It’s not the size of the facility that matters. And it’s great that you have solar heating/power. Props to you.
However, Rusty’s point, as I read it, wasn’t the size of the facility, it’s the fact that the panels have to be made. It’s a verson of entropy- you can’t get more energy out of a system than initally exists. As you probably know, solar panels take an enormous amount of energy and raw material to produced. Of course, once they’re there, they continue to produce power for a very very long time, given proper matainence. But in order to process the raw material into the shiny black rectangles that run your electronics, a lot of energy is expended. That energy comes from burning coal or gas, or heating water to hundreds of degrees by way of radioactivity, any of which causes harm to the environment. That’s Rusty’s point. Not only that, but after the solar panels have degraded enough (as they will), you have to dispose of them somehow. Luckily, they’re fairly pure silicon, so it’s not a terrible terrible pollutionary problem. However, it’s the indirect pollution caused by making them, shipping them and installing them that makes it a hassel.

Aw Deno, ya messed me up. I go offline to write a reply and you’ve already moved the argument along…. Well, that’s what I get for being a slow typer.

Here’s my post, anyway.

Hey Murray,

You’re right that solar heating would not increase the footprint of constructs that we require, anyway. I’d do it if housing ordinances here allowed it. However, heating is only a small part of the nation’s energy budget (though it doesn’t feel like it today!). I was thinking more in terms of solar energy for electrical generation which has a much lower conversion efficiency than straight heating. We have the technology to satisfy all our energy needs now via solar if we wanted to dedicate surface area to it.

Let’s see. The Dept. of Energy reports that the total 2002 US energy budget was 70.946 Quadrillion Btu. That’s equal to 20.780 billion kilowatt hours. At the Earth’s surface, the radiative flux is about 600 watt/m^2 and since we only get about 8 hours a day of good light, we could collect 8 hr * 600 watt/m^2 or 4.200 kilowatt hr/m^2. Soooo….. assuming there was 100% efficiency in electrical conversion in a solar cell and realizing that there are 4045 m^2 per acre…. I get 1,223,144 acres though I’m being liberal with my significant figures. HA! Liberal! That’s funny.

Anyway, taking into account that solar cells are about 30% efficient and the power grid is about 60% efficient, the required acreage jumps to around 7 million. That’s about a third of Tennessee. Are we really ready as a nation to sacrifice Jack Daniels for sound environmental policy?

So, the Rachel paper is right. You’d have to dig up and refine a hell of a lot of ore for the metals to create the solar panels. Most of those metals would come from Africa which is war-torn, in part, by our desire for tiny electronic devices (google “Coltan”). You’d have to build a massive support system to handle the weight and movement of the panels. Who the heck would clean them? Lastly, solar heating is little more than copper tubing, black paint, and a pump. Electrical solar panels, in contrast, are not cheap.

Our footprint is going to grow. That I don’t doubt. Oil and gas are going to be a thing of the past. People might as well get over that now. We will have to come up with some other arrangement for energy production if we wish to remain a modern society. I’m just pointing out how our footprint affects the earth as a whole.

If you want to do an interesting calculation, figure out how much energy you (i.e., your body) consume annually just to exist, and then figure out how much land that HAS TO BE set aside solely for you. Actually, for each and every one of us. If that space weren’t available or the conditions that year weren’t amenable for arability, well, you’d die.

Deno,

Took a couple of tries (I’m only partly in the game), but I did get to read the article. Couldn’t seem to find any discussion of how the campaigning is going in, or how many polling stations are in the works for, Fallujah (and now representing the 8 people still sentient and huddled together in the one semi-habitable house in Fallujah, Councilperson Webin Dizpozesd).
Was there a parable about Blessed are the bombed out?

Ok, I’m a freshman (but with sophomore standing) at University of Colorado at Boulder. I’ve heard the arguement for switching over to purely solar power both in my home town and (usually more intellegently disscused) elsewhere in sci-fi collections.
The happy happy joy joy hyrdogen-based energy economy that is thrown around is science fiction, at least for the moment. The magical energy source for the massive electrolysis that would be going on: Fusion. Which, although there have been tremendous strides made in the last 5 years, is still 20 years out from being a viable energy source. But, once we get there, the sheer amount of energy will make almost every other source obsolete/useful only as a backup. Even with fusion (which, of all energy sources, is the least destructive), there’s still damage being done by way of power lines, transfer stations, sub-stations, etc.

Sorry that this is so far off the blogging subject, but this stuff is in my field and I like to talk about it. We now return to the regularly scheduled blog (with apologies to whomever typed that first).

No apologies needed, Deno. Least, not for me. Adam, maybe. He may visit your house some dark night with whips and chains and unpleasant metal implements that poke in terrible ways for committing the heinous crime of Going Off Topic. But that’s his right as owner/moderator of FA. And after the first twenty minutes, it’s actually kinda fun. Er, or so I’m told.

But so far as I can tell, it’s one of those subjects that we’re all interested in to one degree or another (alternate energy, not adam in black leather). And it grew out of an earlier comment. So your whipping should be fairly minimal.

But will be available on the internet for a nominal fee.

Don’t blame me, I voted for Mahmoud al-Kodos

OK

I read Rachel’s article, As best I can tell she is saying that growth cannot go on for ever. And that even very benign forms of energy will eventually cause pollution and waste. I think that she is advocating a system were growth is controled and one were the rich help the poor.

Good luck Rachel.

I agree, I have felt for years that any growth, no matter how little cannot be sustained into the future. What will we have left after 100 years, 1000 years, 100,000 years? The sooner we slack off from our exponential growth the better the world will be. It is a mathematical certainty that it cannot go on forever.

There are several small scale examples of what happens when human’s resources run out. Easter Island is one. A rich society which could spend its time building large statues, eventually cut all of the trees, no longer had fuel, and the soil eroded. When resources become very scarce, people fight over them, and wars broke out. Eventually the society collapsed, leaving a barren island.

I think that this is a parable for all of us. My guess is that the Easter Islanders had people who could see that cutting the trees would end with no trees and that couldn’t be good. And I’m sure that some people benefited in the short term by cutting them. Guess who won?

But beyond saying we can’t grow forever what does Rachel want us to do?

Yes, I believe that our resources are finite. That is why I owned an alternative energy business back in the early ’80s. (Low oil and energy prices killed it)

You don’t need a foot print of any size for some energy savings.

Merely placing the majority of your windows on the south side of your house provides solar gain in the winter and prevents it in the summer. This is a no cost energy saver. Greater insulation requires less energy. I got to rebuild my house in MD 11 years ago and by upgrading the insulation, increasing the south facing glass, replacing the windows with low-e and argon, solar hot water heater and wood stove, I was able to reduce my energy consumption by between 90 and 95% compared to the previous owners. (Using their old energy bills for comparison). So for every house similar to my old one you could have 10-20 heated like the new one. This gives a lot breathing space until we run out of resources.

The only figures I can find by the US Dept of Energy say that residential energy use is 21% of the American total (34% industrial, 27% transportation, and commercial 18%). However for most people heating their house is by far the largest portion of their energy budget. Reducing that can be a big deal.

Off topic! That’s great with me.

A couple of points about energy. It’s always useful to keep banging home the “you can’t get something for nothing” point, because people keep forgetting it. That’s what’s led to all this hydrogen overhype, as Deno pointed out.

But until reliable, cost-efficient fusion comes along, it’s important to keep in mind the primary advantage of solar power: Unlike petroleum, coal, and natural gas, we’re not taking it from the Earth. And we’re not “using up” the sun. We’re just harnessing an ever-arriving resource. So despite the currently daunting start-up costs, the Zero Sum Game rules don’t really apply.

Two things need to happen: More homes need to be retrofitted like Murray’s [we’ll call that the Murray Model]. I’d guess that stealing the money from all that “clean coal research” in the budget should help us get started. The second component is research. Personally, I’d be willing to sacrifice a third of the area of Tennessee to power the entire country. Just not in Tennessee. Never in Tennessee. God no. Not Kentucky or Scotland either. Or Ireland.

But there’s a lot of land out there, and a lot of it is desert. Why, I bet we could lease some of someone else’s desert if we needed to…

But we need to be able to collect, store, and transmit the energy more efficiently and cost effectively. Again - this is not the zero sum game here, just a design task. [The orbital solar collector ideas I’ve read about are fascinating too, but they sound about as far off as fusion.]

Anyway, I love this off-topic turn. Nobody needs to worry about a leather-clad me showing up at your door. Unless you ask nicely.

When I look out over the Phoenix metro area, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if all those roofs were made of photovoltaic cells.

I don’t know what the official size is now, but it must be at least 5000 sq miles of blazing hot desert that’s already around 90% covered. Murray: any notion of how much wattage that could produce?

I’ve run the numbers twice (they may be off; given the powers of ten being thrown around, it’s understandable. Feel free to check), and I get about 10 billion kilowatt/hrs, making all the assumptions that Rusty made above, including the inefficiencies. Wow. Here’s what I did:
90% (actual coverage) x 5000mi^2 x 27878400ft^2/mi^2 x 0.095m^2/ft^2 x 0.6 kW/m^2 x 8 hrs x 30% (solar panel efficiency) x 60% (grid efficiency)
which give us 1.03 x 10^10 kW-hrs. Trust the math, my profs keep telling me. Half of the US power needs IN ONE DAY. Impressive? Hell yes.
Now it’s a simple matter of logistics. Someone else’s turn now.

Yes, we Americans are slobs. Whatever happened to treadmill-powered toasters?
“Hurry up kids, your father wants his toast dark, not ‘lightly-browned’ like yesterday.”

And that’s the sign of a civilized civililization. If we make it to Type I (and that is a huge if), we will have survived the poisoning of ourselves and (hopefully) be able to flock to wide-ranging parts of the galaxy.
I’m not sure about the whole supernova-surviving ability. Unless of course what is implied is the smarts to be far far away when it strikes.
Oh, there’s not a limitless amount of hydrogen (and thereby fuel for fusion) in the oceans. There’s roughly enough of the right isotopes (deuterium and tritium) for about 300 or so years of use. This is making a bunch of assumptions. TANSTAAFL.

I’m saying that yes, the hydrodgen (H for shorthand) gets used up. More specifically, I’m saying that fusion (whose by-products are helium, a neutrino and energy) takes 4 H and makes 1 helium, leaving 2 hydrogens to start over. Given the exponential growth of our energy consumption, the amount of the ‘right’ isotopes of H (deuterium and tritium - which aren’t that prevalent on Earth) and fusion (if we can get it down), then there’s about 300 years’ worth of H in the ocean. That’s using the easiest form of fusion. If we manage to get proton-proton fusion down, then, yes, there is for all intents and purposes an infinite amount of energy. But as of right now, we can only handle the deuterium-tritium branch. And that doesn’t give us back what we need to continue the reaction (ie, we get H back, which doesn’t have the right number of neutrons).
Hydrogen cells are a poor energy source. Compared to a klunkier internal combustion engine, hydrogen cells look like child’s play. At best, they’re an acceptable replacement for poisonous IC engines until we get fusion down to incredibly miniaturized forms. For example, an IC engine producing 65hp (not terribly much…) weighs in at about 110 lbs. For a hydrogen cell set-up to produce the same power, it’d have weigh well over 1 TON.
So, while they may be clean, they don’t have an incredible power-to-weight ratio.
Back to the fusion bit. Fusion kicks every other possible energy source’s ass. That’s the bottom line. While solar power (in heating especially) is a good thing, it pales in comparison to fusion. Hence my seeming obsession with it. Solar power does have one advantage over fusion - there’s so much power from the Sun than could be produced on Earth that we might as well build a Dyson Sphere…but when we need that much power, we’ll build the thing.

Err….wtf?

A “second mortgage” blog? Sounds fascinating.

It was a cry for help from future generations traumatized by THE PRESIDENT WHO HEARS TO VOICE OF GOD, and sets fiscal policy like he really believes his naked ass is going to rise into the air on Rapture Day, set to coincide with Presidents Day in the fourth year of the second term of the reign of said Divine Right President, leaving his Ford F-150 Crawford fake reality ranch pick-up truck driverless.

Hi There! … Did you change this blog lately? Something looks different.

hello. nice to see you again

k says hi

Survey Says!….