Lugal Zaggesi

Lugal Zaggesi's Journal

July 28, 2013

Francois Nicoullaud doesn't like to brag, but

he can actually read the minds of his adversaries, in Farsi - such is the power of his French mind compared to the lowly Third World Iranians.

"Of course, Iranians could not admit to a foreigner that such a program ever existed, and I cannot name the officials I spoke to."

They could admit nothing - in words - but Francois had undreamed of powers at his disposal.

"Uranium enrichment was the visible part of it but there was a hidden section, the manufacture of a nuclear device --once they had produced enriched uranium, how to put it on the head of a missile and how to deliver it to 'friends' in the region --that's the programme Rowhani stopped," the former ambassador said.

Praise be to Allah - I feel this Frenchman reading my innermost thoughts on our secret nuclear weapons programme !!! I better warn Hassan Rowhani about this extraordinary Ambassador who has found us out !!!

July 24, 2013

Your world frightens and confuses me

I'm just an unfrozen Republican Caveman Lobbyist.

Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic makes me want to get out of my BMW, and run off into the hills, or, whatever.
I don't understand how the little demons make ceiling fans angrily swirl when they command it.
Why does the planet keep getting warmer?
I don't know. My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts.

But there is one thing I do know - the Energy Department should not be enforcing energy efficiency standards for electric consumer appliances. People should be free to purchase the absolute cheapest crap available, without regard to future electricity consumption. A dollar saved today is worth a hundred dollars saved next year.
It is a sad state of affairs when even our ceiling fans aren't safe from this administration.
Thank you.

July 23, 2013

Do you really think Ryan Braun was NOT doing PED's in his college career

at the University of Miami Hurricanes baseball team (2003 to 2005), a homerun's distance away from Anthony Bosch's Biogenesis "anti-aging" clinic ? Or probably in his high school career too? It turned out that Marion "I never tested positive for PEDs" Jones started her doping in high school.

Why do you think such a PED (Performance Enhancing Drugs) clinic was located next to the University of Miami ?

A-Rod was born and raised in Miami.
Yasmani Grandal, the former star catcher for the University of Miami Hurricanes, was also linked to Biogenesis, and banned for 50 games after a great rookie season for the San Diego Padres.

Indeed, there are two patterns to the names of athletes in Bosch's records: (1) Most have direct ties to Miami and often to the UM Hurricanes baseball program, and (2) a number have already been caught doping — which suggests that either Bosch isn't particularly gifted at crafting drugs that can beat performance tests or his clients aren't careful.

At least one UM coach makes an appearance as well: Jimmy Goins, the strength and conditioning coach for the Hurricanes baseball team for the past nine seasons. Goins is recorded in multiple client lists; in one detailed page dated December 14, 2011, Bosch writes he's selling him Anavar, testosterone, and a Winstrol/B-12 mix and charging him $400 a month. Another, from this past December, includes sales of HGH and testosterone.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2013-01-31/news/a-rod-and-doping-a-miami-clinic-supplies-drugs-to-sports-biggest-names/5/

I honestly believe that if guys like Ryan Braun did NOT do PEDs in their high school and college careers,
they would never HAVE attorneys and big multi-year contracts in MLB.

A-Rod, if he were "clean" in high school, would probably be running some landscaping business in Miami now...
Now that MLB, starting in 2013, can do blood tests of athletes during the season, old, injured guys like A-Rod and Jeter just can't seem to "recover" from their injuries. Probably just a coincidence that this is the first year of a new MLB drug testing era.

July 23, 2013

2013 is certainly too early to rule out FTL travel as "impossible"

But I wouldn't expect much progress in the next 200 years.

I'd be much happier if they just threw some serious resources towards former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz's VASIMR propulsion system:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1006/01vasimr/

That's doable, right now.
Fission power on spaceships - that's doable, right now.

Fusion power on spaceships - hopefully that's doable within 30 years.
Get to 1/10 the speed of light this century, and I'll be impressed. 1/2 c, and I'd be floored.

Get to work on antimatter as a way for storing energy for starships - I'll be even more impressed this century.
http://www.space.com/17537-antimatter-fusion-engines-future-spaceships.html
(although this technology would probably be commandeered by the Generals for awesome weapons - let's not destroy Humanity before we reach the stars, shall we ?)

This century, if they can get some spaceships to the Kuiper Belt (30 to 50 AU away from Sun, about 7 light-hours) - I'll be happy.

Faster-than-light travel - if they make NO progress till the 22nd century, I won't be surprised.

July 23, 2013

Chemists Work to Desalt the Ocean for Drinking Water, One Nanoliter at a Time

Here's a nicer writeup of this development in the University of Texas at Austin's own "Texas Science News":
http://web5.cns.utexas.edu/news/2013/06/desalting-the-ocean/
Thursday, June 27th, 2013

It's a nice start, but they have a few hurdles left:

Thus far Crooks and his colleagues have achieved 25 percent desalination. Although drinking water requires 99 percent desalination, they are confident that goal can be achieved.

OK, maybe they can put these chips in series, desalinate the desalinated water...

The other major challenge is to scale up the process. Right now the microchannels, about the size of a human hair, produce about 40 nanoliters of desalted water per minute. To make this technique practical for individual or communal use, a device would have to produce liters of water per day. The authors are confident that this can be achieved as well.

At least the authors are confident...
40 nanoliters of 25% desalinated water per minute.
Let's assume they get it working to 99% desalination. “This was a proof of principle,” said Knust. “We’ve made comparable performance improvements while developing other applications based on the formation of an ion depletion zone. That suggests that 99 percent desalination is not beyond our reach.” OK, let's say that's doable - and doesn't slow down the process too much.

Now, the speed - there are 1440 minutes per day.
"nanoliter" is 1 billionth of a liter.
A billion of these 'water chips' could do 40 liters per minute, or 57,600 liters per day.
Divide by 1000 - a million of these chips could give 57.6 liters per day.
Let's say 100,000 chips - that would give 5.76 liters/day. About 1.5 gallons of water.

That's still a lot of store-bought batteries.
If they could make each chip desalinate 99%, and 10 times faster, that's still 10,000 chips needed working 24 hours to produce 5.76 liters of potable water. How much power ? How long before the chips clog or degrade ? Did going from 25% to 99% desalination make the chips slower, not faster ? How reliable is the tubing taking seawater (already de-sedimented) into thousands of tiny human-hair-width microchannels ?

Most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. The membrane-free method we’ve developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system.”
True - I like that the approach involves no vaporization/condensation or membranes.

still needs to be refined and scaled up - yes, and let's hope it is still affordable when it is.
Good luck.

July 22, 2013

Our "image abroad" ?

Sorry to burst your happy propaganda bubble, but this is exactly what the USA has "stood for" for over a century, to acquire and maintain it's position of wealth and power. The big difference now is US authorities can't control the information that interested US citizens get so easily, because of the Internet and digital cameras and videos.

e.g. Philippine–American War - 1899-1902 (after 1902, the "insurgents" were declared "brigands", so the "war" was over) - hundreds of thousands of dead women and children

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_kramer?currentPage=all

Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn’t censored. Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”

Still, the subject of what was called, with a late-Victorian delicacy, “cruelties” by U.S. troops arose a few days into the hearings...

During his court-martial, Waller testified that he had been under orders from the volatile, aging Brigadier General Jacob Smith (“Hell-Roaring Jake,” to his comrades) to transform the island into a “howling wilderness,” to “kill and burn” to the greatest degree possible—“The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me”—and to shoot anyone “capable of bearing arms.” According to Waller, when he asked Smith what this last stipulation meant in practical terms, Smith had clarified that he thought that ten-year-old Filipino boys were capable of bearing arms.

More generally, some people, while conceding that American soldiers had engaged in “cruelties,” insisted that the behavior reflected the barbaric sensibilities of the Filipinos. “I think I know why these things have happened,” Lodge offered in a Senate speech in May. They had “grown out of the conditions of warfare, of the war that was waged by the Filipinos themselves, a semicivilized people, with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics, with the Asiatic indifference to life, with the Asiatic treachery and the Asiatic cruelty...

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