Bob Morris @ Feb 1st 2008 20:25 - Category: Election 2008 ;
Polls in multiple states are showing a pronounced shift towards Obama and away from Clinton.
What’s particularly interesting is that Clinton does not appear to have the support of the Democratic Party elite while Obama does.
Bob Morris @ Feb 1st 2008 15:30 - Category: Anti-war ;
Reports are the suicide bombers today in Iraq were retarded women and the bombs were set off remotely by cell phone.
Multiple news reports appear to confirm that the women were indeed retarded, which if true would certainly mark a stomach-burning absence of morality. But how could authorities possibly know the bombs were detonated remotely?
Any suicide or car bombing by any side for any reason is despicable because it deliberately targets non-combatants. I’m just wondering if the facts as reported here are accurate or not.
Bob Morris @ Feb 1st 2008 13:32 - Category: Unfiled Tags: Gaza Wall, Palestine;
Bob Morris @ Feb 1st 2008 10:30 - Category: Unfiled Tags: Fox News;
Fox News built their name by being partisan supporters of neocons and Republicans. Now their ratings are sliding as fast as those of George Bush.
However, I’ve always thought that Murdock’s devotion to profits will trump any political loyalty, so don’t be surprised if Fox News reinvents itself after the 2008 election and dumps their right wing “news” commentators.
Bob Morris @ Feb 1st 2008 07:06 - Category: Renewable energy, Wind turbines ;
The Aerogenerator wind turbine has a vertical axis, rather than horizontal, which means maintenance and repair becomes easier because the parts are more accessible. Plus it can harness the wind from any direction without the blades needing to be constantly positioned.
They will be mounted offshore, are 47o feet tall, and produce three times more energy than a horizontal turbine of similar size.
It’s amazing and gratifying to see how fast renewable energy technology is progressing. Imagine where it will be five years from now!
Bob Morris @ Feb 1st 2008 03:15 - Category: Unfiled Tags: fuel cells;
 
[Thomas] Wood, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M, successfully tweaked a strain of E. coli to get it to produce 140 times more hydrogen than it does naturally.
Wood is “is already confident of its potential to power the next generation of homes and vehicles.”
Genetic engineering is a) inevitable and b) quite obviously producing useful products. Will there be frankenmutations that escape and morph in the wild into something unexpected and not so useful? Dunno, but a tweak like this that produces enormous amounts of hydrogen could be a boon to the widespread adoption of fuel cells.
Bob Morris @ Feb 1st 2008 00:18 - Category: Unfiled, environment Tags: China blizzard, South Africa;
John Robb blogs about the current South Africa blackouts where the usual culprits of inadequate maintenance, poor planning, and bad management have, combined with bad weather, causing a massive electricity shortage that will take years to fix.
The blizzards in China have caused severe damage. The electrical grid, primarily fueled by coal, can’t reliably power major cities and transportation has come to a standstill.
The storms have reportedly resulted in the collapse of 107,000 buildings, and destroyed 42 billion square meters of crops.
And more storms are coming.
Again, bad weather (fueled by La Nina) may have been the precipitating factor, but clearly the infrastructure of China is ill-maintained and not able to withstand shocks. Let’s not be too smug and say it can’t happen here…
We need resilent communities, says Robb, to safeguard against such crises.
This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid.
Local power, local food production, and most of all, contingency plans are what a resilient community needs if the national grid gets disrupted. A decentralized system will always be more resilient and flexible than one that is centralized.
Subscribe
