No, by crushing the earth you increase it's mass (density). As the mass increases the gravity surrounding it increases.

What they're saying is if you could compact the earth to that size, it would be so dense it's mass would be high enough to have enough gravity to create a blackhole.

>> ^rougy:
Resourceful stoners...what will they think of next?


hate to tell you... but we've just peaked!

great compact consolidation of a tried and true method.

much better then making out of a sobe bottle or plastic bottles...









... so you don't cut your hand when the cheap but sharp folding knife you were using while trying to negotiate the plastic into the appropriate shape for a huge gravity bong closes on your fucking hand but your friends wife who is a nurse but is too stoned to put the bandage on right keeps ripping the cut wider while you all stand around laughing even though you have stuff to do the next day that requires that area of the hand and you may need stitches but you're in the middle of the woods and poor and you end up going with duct tape...







not that anything like that has ever happened.

edit: ah, i just realized.. they need to add that little cyclone effect, like where you put two pop bottles together with the little thing and make a little whirlpool as it drains? also add LEDs. then it's finished. haha.

Compact Flourescents actually release less mercury into the atmosphere than an incandescent because the power generation causes more mercury released into the atmosphere (avg 5.8 mg in the life from power generation) compared to CFL (avg 1.8 in the life- 1.2 from power and .6 from power generation) Manufacturers of CFLs are also reducing the amount of mercury every year, and if recycled properly the mercury going into landfills is none. While LED's are great in some applications, the price is too high right now to make it practical and the light is very cold making it unattractive to the average person.

Yeah, mercury is bad for you. It is a very dangerous neurotoxin. I wrote more on the video post if you feel like reading it.

In reply to this comment by ponceleon:
Okay, so which is it... Is mercury bad for you or not? There's that one video on the sift where the guy is handling mercury and then there is this. Make up your minds dammit...

>> ^cyberscythe:
So the answer is, no, they are not.
The amount of mercury released in the atmosphere is a net loss compared to an incandescent if it's powered by a coal-fire plant. The natural mercury in the coal would be greater than the 15mLs in the bulb.


Atmospheric mercury pollution from coal-fire plants is nominal compared to other producers like various gold mines. Besides that, atmospheric pollution is not as dangerous to you directly as is the concentration in your home if a florescent light breaks, and in landfills where the toxin can run off into local rivers and enter the food chain.


>> ^ponceleon:
Okay, so which is it... Is mercury bad for you or not? There's that one video on the sift where the guy is handling mercury and then there is this. Make up your minds dammit...


And yes, mercury is bad for you. Very bad.

http://www.videosift.com/video/How-Mercury-Causes-Neurodegeneration-Brain-Damage

...but when those bulbs expire, dispose of them carefully.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Compact-Florescent-Bulbs-are-Bad-for-You

Whats sad about human achievement? Do you really understand the creativity and production which can occur with millions of man-hours? How do you think the compact fluorescent light bulb was created (86% power savings) or light emitting diodes (95% power savings) or photovoltaic cells, hybrid engines, or high efficiency generators, etc. etc.?

If you want to save the planet sell your car, sell your house, sell your light bulbs and go live in the forest; but why criticize or inhibit the engineering effort of humans which can reduce the environmental impact of a 21st century lifestyle?

That is the point Michelle Malkin is making, and I don't think there is anything sad about it.



>> ^littledragon_79:
>> ^rougy:
Of course, Michelle Malkin is already urging people to leave their lights on in celebration of "Human Achievment Hour."
(deep sigh)
I just can't believe those people, sometimes.

Checked that link out...pretty sad.

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/03/27/does-lighting-candles-for-earth-hour-defeat-the-purpose/

"Depending on where you live and what wattage bulb you use, lighting a candle instead of a CFL could result in a net increase of CO2 emissions. In California, a CFL will emit about 5 grams per hour. In Kansas, it’s almost 13 grams."

Looking at this map, if you live anywhere in a red or orange region, you will actually increase C02 emissions by using a candle rather than a compact florescent for lighting during "Earth Hour."

<embed src="http://i39.tinypic.com/raxf8i.png">

Saving the earth is a good idea...but make sure the physics make sense.

^ "In feudal Europe, corporations were aggregations of business interests in compact, usually with an explicit license from city, church, or national leaders. These functioned as effective monopolies for a particular good or labor.

The term "corporation" was used as late as the 18th century in England to refer to such ventures as the East India Company or the Hudson's Bay Company: commercial organizations that operated under royal patent to have exclusive rights to a particular area of trade. In the medieval town, however, corporations were a conglomeration of interests that existed either as a development from, or in competition with, guilds. The most notable corporations were in trade and banking.

The effects of a corporation were similar to a monopoly. On the one hand, the ability to have sole access to markets meant that the business was encouraged (e.g., the ability to be an exclusive trader provided an incentive to the East India Company to accept financial risks in exploration) and the negative effects of competition were avoided (to take the same example, exclusive patents cut down on merchants sponsoring piracy). Innovation was stifled, however, and prices were unregulated. (In the case of patent corporations, the town or monarch was ostensibly able to regulate prices by revoking the patent, but this rarely occurred.)"

wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_(feudal_Europe) Locate from search box under 'corporation'. Scroll to 'feudal europe'.

I get drinking water from a local water store, where it is sold for 25 cents per gallon. Not exactly the same realm as gas prices. Water stores like the one near me have all their filtration equipment on display behind the counter, and since their livelihood depends on keeping the filters clean, you can usually trust them. There are also some good filtered water dispensers in front of supermarkets that use a more compact filtration system. These places start with municipal water, then filter for the crap that gets dumped in "for our health", like chlorine and fluoride, or whatever leftover hazardous chemicals can get pushed through congress this week.

But in the end, it really comes down to what tastes better. And believe me, I wouldn't have bothered finding out all this information in the first place if LA water didn't taste like concrete.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more it seems gimmicky more than anything else. Much of what it shows you can already do, just with a wireless internet or WiFi phone. Yeah okay, it's nifty you can do it fully with gestures and without pulling a device out of your pocket, but I'd rather have that over having to stand in front of a wall for extended periods of times. Although it's still a nice idea, some things will definitely be more suited to this kind of interface.

The rest is predicated on the idea that it can take sensory inputs from where you are, correctly identify them and feed you back relevant information. If they can create a low cost, compact device that can do this and provide you will lots of valuable metadata, then great but I haven't seen a usable implementation of this yet and their demonstrated isn't exactly convincing enough by itself because it's obviously a simulation of what would be possible.

I think its unlikely touch screen will be normal , i think you could likely get a touch pad that's integrated into keyboards but touch on a screen will not become a norm due to comfortable viewing angles and the fact that Manny people use multi screen setups. tuch screen is relay good for small devices ore what i would call compact complete devices like laptops and phones,mp3 players.

so for desktop pcs i think the most likely thing that will happen is that you have a GUI that is very much like GUI,s today but every mouse ore keyboard will have a built in gesture pad that allows you to do i phone esk moments and selections.

as for this software i don't think much "thinking" has relay been put into it
in terms of it as a concept, within its self its really nicely implemented i defiantly think GUi,s should use a selection tool that's not a fixed square maby take from some of the tools in photoshop,

Moving freight, airplanes and battleships requires different solutions (in my opinion) then the problem of getting your kids to the hockey game.

The engines that run minivans are identical to the ones used by freight ships, freight trains, Farm implements, highway tractors, backup generators, battleships and prop planes. The same solution applies to them all. In fact, large enough ships like carriers and subs already run off electricity instead of oil because it is cheaper.


Even if energy storage technology was to rapidly become what we would need it to be, where would the energy come from if the source for more then half of our current use was to vanish?


We have enough sources of uranium and thorium to meet global energy needs for 100's of years. With any luck, we can develop renewable sources like wind,tidal and solar with that kind of time to get them ready. If we're really lucky, maybe we'll even get fusion power before that and then we are good for the lifetime of the solar system. As a bonus, nuclear is cheaper when developed on a large scale, France is making good money running over 80% nuclear power and exporting it's cheaper electricity to the rest of Europe.


A battery won't move an 18 wheeler. The only thing that will move an 18 wheeler is foreign oil, diesel and gasoline, and our domestic natural gas.

That is utter nonesense. Lookup Tesla motors, they've actually managed to use current battery technology to make a Lotus Elise that is FASTER than it's oil driven counter-part. The argument is as silly as when people felt automobiles where worthless because they couldn't go as far as a horse without a fill-up. Batteries don't need to improve too much more to be a viable replacement and then a landslide shift will take place to cheaper more powerfull electric vehicles.


In the mean time, let me know when you've found a battery that can power an ocean liner.


And this is your fundamental and underlying misunderstanding. The navy is currently using compact nuclear generators as giant batteries to power their largest ships more cheaply and without any dependence on oil. The problem for ocean liner's isn't building a battery that is big enough, it's building them SMALL enough. If a battery can be made small enough to replace the gas tank in a car, then you can power ANYTHING bigger than that car as well by using 2,10 or 1000 such batteries. Already with current laptop battery technology we are almost there. We don't need a breakthrough, a few small improvements to weight and cost and the solution is there. Anything to small to be powered by a compact nuclear generator can instead be run off of batteries without a loss in performance or ability.


The social attachment to oil is much deeper the powering the transportation to get to the grocery store or the beach. It is in every piece of food you get at the grocery store or bring to the beach. It is in the road you drive on, the oil that lubricates the engine as well as just the gas tank.


But moving goods is all still part of the transportation network. And ALL of those applications use internal combustion engines that can be replaced with only a moderately improved battery over those available today.


The agricultural attachment to oil is not just that it is used in the production and delivery of the fertilizer that grows the food to feed the citizen or just the fuel in the gas tank of the grain harvester and other farm machinery.


I grew up on a farm. The agricultural attachment to oil is again dominated by the use of internal combustion engines for machinery, which is easily replaced with a better battery.


The political attachment to oil is not just ensuring that a population have access to the cheap energy for their car, but the cheap fuel for the cheap power plant the provides the cheap electricity for to run the fridge for the cheap food brought from all corners of the earth.

Wrong, the cheap power plant runs off of coal, not oil. Coal reserves utterly dwarf oil reserves, that's why not even crazy people talk about 'peak' coal. In fact, many talk about converting coal to oil if necessary.


I'm sorry, but the entirety of the arguments you make NEVER go beyond the assumption that nothing can replace internal combustion engines and so when oil runs out everything using them is doomed. Fortunately that is not the reality we live in. Even with current technology, battery powered electric motors are begining to appear in automobiles. The military has been running their largest ships on electricty and independent of oil for decades. We are not looking at a dire need for a major breakthrough. We only need small, incremental improvements to battey technology to being able to replace internal combustion engines with batteries, and oil with electricity. Then we are free to simply expand the electric grid, which we have been doing for nearly a century already and are getting rather good at.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I'll come clean and say that I was the instigator for this change. I have to say that I really like it. It gives 5 promoted posts in a nice compact position AND in most cases a promoted post will be there for many more hours than before as 5 more promotes have to happen to bump it out.

So while the visibility is slightly less, it's balanced by the fact that a promote has more staying powere.

This knowledge passed down the old school way. It's an interaction we just don't really have anymore, the elders passing along their wisdom to the young.

I wish we had more of this type of knowledge transfer. Parents are too busy making a living and raising their kids that often I think they just pass along compacted primary knowledge. A grandparent/elder with more time can fill in the details, and often its the details that can make all the difference.