Reminds me of a joke I heard years ago ...

A Greek king and a Persian king got into an argument over man's "natural" language. The Greek king insisted that it was Greek, of course, and the Persian king insisted that it was Persian. So they proposed an experiment -- the kind that only kings could get away with. They took a newborn baby boy from its mother and carried him off to be raised by a hermit high in the hills, far away from any other people. The hermit -- who was a deaf-mute -- provided the baby with goat's milk and raised him to the age of twelve. At that time, the two kings stopped by to see how their experiment had turned out. When they knocked at the door of the hermit's cabin, the boy answered the door. The two kings silently glanced at each other, and then nervously waited for the boy to speak. Finally, the boy opend his mouth and gave voice to: Baaaaaaaah!

(This is a fun joke to tell, if you can do a convincing goat bleat. )

A qualified yes. The process for making carbon fiber is indirect and somewhat expensive ...

There is no direct conversion of graphite to carbon fibre which is practical on a large scale, though graphite "whiskers" can be produced this way on a very small scale -- more of a laboratory technique than a process suitable for production.

Carbon "nanofibres" can be grown from hydrocarbon precursors such as methane, and methane can be made from CO2 and H2. So if the H2 is "green", you've got a way to convert CO2 to CH4 to carbon fibre, but the conversion will be many, many times slower than the production of CO2, and consume quite a bit of energy as well.

Currently, carbon fiber is made mostly by pyrolysis (high-temperature decomposition) of carbon-containing precursors such as polyacrylonitrile. Acrylonitrile is made from propene, ammonia, and oxygen, with propene coming mostly form petroleum, so either one needs to find a competing process, or find a way to convert CO2 to propene. Some propene has been made from methanol, but I don't have details of this (it's probably safe to assume it's the methanol-to-gasoline process invented by Mobil a few decades ago) -- presumably a mixture of products is formed.

It's quite conceivable one could obtain propene from agricultural byproducts (which are just captured CO2) such as acetone (obtained by starch fermentation); but currently it is cheaper to go the other direction, and make acetone from propene, because of the artificially low cost of heavily-subsidised petroleum.

IF we can recover the CO2 economically, and IF we can obtain enough H2 in a renewable and economically competitive fashion, then CO, methane and methanol derived from CO2 will become just another stream of simple precursors to feed into the process streams built around inputs of coal, natural gas, and petroleum. The problem at this point is that the deck is stacked in favor of petroleum-based inputs.

Bear in mind that only a few percent of petroleum goes to make materials -- the majority is burned as fuel. So even industrial-scale conversion of CO2 to materials would only offset a tiny part of CO2 production from burning fossil fuels. Probably it would be better to convert CO2 into fuels such as methanol or dimethyl ether, which would at least form a closed carbon cycle when burned, without the need to bring more fossil carbon to the surface.

Also, if you're thinking of building "big stuff", keep in mind that carbon fiber is combustible -- you might want to think twice before using it in buildings, bridges, etc. in place of non-flammable steel and concrete.

Well ... you come from a *relative* of this. :)

It's very unlikely that any particular fossil organism is our direct ancestor, even if it's from the right phylum, class, order etc. The best we can say is that it's from a genetic population that's very close, *possibly* identical, to the one that led to us.

("If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" is the question to which this is the answer. We evolved from particular populations of primates, none of which exists today, but some of which split from the ancestors of surviving primate populations. The more recent the split, the more similar our genomes to those surviving primates. But none will have a genome identical to our direct ancestors -- those genomes evolved into us, or into other well-adapted, hence relatively long-surviving, primate populations.)

This is **IMITATION** pot, not "synthetic" pot.

A pox on the fools who got the "synthetic" label established. This is not a synthetic version of a natural product, or a modified natural product. It is (one or more) totally synthetic "analogues" which bind to the same receptors (more or less) as THC but in significantly different fashion. The perceived effects are somewhat similar to MJ but the differences are more significant than the similarities.

The active ingredients are *NOT* those found in natural MJ, and some of them are much more pharmacologically active. These compounds have found a market in an effort to circumvent anti-MJ laws, but they appear to be immensely more dangerous than MJ itself. It would be much safer to legalize MJ than to try to block the market in cannabis imitators. Cannabis imitators have sent a number of people to emergency rooms and one is clearly implicated in at least one death. Given the short period of time these drugs have been available, and the smaller number of users compared to MJ, they are clearly the sort of public danger that opponents of MJ always wanted MJ to be.

HA ha ! Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" is #234 in sales on Amazon.com

#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Government > Civics
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Current Events > Civil Rights & Liberties
#15 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics

Does Gingrich have a secret stake in the publisher ? He's done more to get people to read Alinsky than anyone else in the last 30 years.

Hardball did a spot on Alinsky's "Thirteen Rules", and it's obvious that Gingrich is using many of them. NG is obviously pissed that someone else came up with these "Big Ideas" first. But I'll bet his really big gripe is that SA helped blacks in their organizing efforts.

The Wiki on SA is worth reading. He avoided joining political organizations, and is generally regarded as a "leader of the nonsocialist left". Here's a prescient -- and worrying -- excerpt:

The disruptive future of {3D} printing (BBC)

Imagine a school where a student could sketch out an idea for a new design of bicycle and not only draw it in 3D using a computer-aided design package but actually create a scale-model and test it out, using inexpensive materials and a special printer that they can build themselves in the classroom.

That's the vision put forward by Ben O'Steen, a software engineer with a social conscience who is thinking about the implications of a world where 3D printers are no longer just expensive prototyping systems for large companies but have fallen into the hands of the masses.

He has been inspired by the RepRap, a desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic parts by extruding a heated thermoplastic polymer under computer control, which then sets as it cools and makes a usable object.

The RepRap project was started in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer, who teaches mechanical engineering at Bath University.

The schematics and all aspects are freely licensed for anyone to implement or adapt, and the current version, called "Mendel", can be built for around £350.

It makes objects from a cheap plastic made from corn starch, so is well within school budgets.
***
more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10089419

http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.thingiverse.com/

The highest price: deaths of coal miners.

I've just been approved as Host of the Science Group.

Power going to my head in 3 ... 2 ...

Seriously, not much is going to change. I would like to suggest importing the SOP from the DU2 Science Forum -- it is a bit more emphatic about what constitutes acceptable "science-related discussion" and what is not. Not that there is any need to split hairs, or impose rigid guidelines -- I just see it as more detailed, and I would hope, clearer. I think the admins may have deliberately cut the length of the SOPs in the belief that smaller is better. I do find the original SOP not just more emphatic in discouraging pseudoscience, but also more welcoming to non-specialists.

One of my favorite episodes from the "bad science" files ...

first read about this in "Betrayers of the Truth". http://www.amazon.com/Betrayers-truth-William-Broad/dp/0671447696 The University of Nancy had just been established at great taxpayer expense and the faculty felt a need to justify the investment, so were quite anxious to discover something important. Not a good situation re. scientific objectivity.

Worth reading: http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/signs.html and