Chemists Seek to Desalt the World
To achieve desalination, the researchers apply a small voltage (3.0 volts) to a plastic chip filled with seawater. The chip contains a microchannel with two branches. At the junction of the channel an embedded electrode neutralizes some of the chloride ions in seawater to create an “ion depletion zone” that increases the local electric field compared with the rest of the channel. This change in the electric field is sufficient to redirect salts into one branch, allowing desalinated water to pass through the other branch.
Inexpensive fresh water from seawater is literally changes the world. Pound sand Malthus.
18 comments:
Read about this a few weeks ago. While TPTB are unwittingly fanning Rome's flames, there are selected groups doing fascinating work which really can change the world.
Technology will save us. I think the big thing will be room temperature superconductivity.
My biggest fear is linear diamonds. If molecular threads get out in the general population the entirety of the world's forests will be "harvested" in months.
Please elaborate on "linear diamonds"...
If Paul Krugman Didn't Exist, Republicans Would Have To Invent Him
Paul Krugman makes for an unparalleled intellectual foil. If he didn’t exist we’d have to invent him. Recently he has been vintage Krugman, slinging derp. “Derp” is new slang, or perhaps jargon, with which to ridicule opponents. It is making its way among the left wing hipsters, blogsters, and twitsters.
Krugman has rescued derp from Progressive Blogistan for our general edification. What is derp, you (you hick!) might ask?
Read More...
Orson Welles on Contracts and the Rule of Law
From...the edited transcripts of Orson Welles..:
"... My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn’t be illegal, but is...When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society. You see?"
Of course, the US today is a society in which every citizen is a lawbreaker, virtually all the time — and it’s often impossible to know which law you’ve broken until ex post facto, when a government official decides. What can the rule of law possibly mean in such a system?
Harsh words from the WaPo:
The only part of the Obama economy that has flourished because of Obama policy is Wall Street.
Only the trickle-down from the wealthy financial players, who have thrived off Obama’s conveyor belt of money as it travels from Washington to Wall Street, has had much of a positive effect on the economy as a whole.
The clock is running out fast on the Obama presidency. This is probably the last best hope for Obama to initiate any pro-growth policies whose effects will be felt during his tenure in office. But I’m not holding my breath. I think the president has an ideological point of view that is resentful of and punitive toward the private-sector economy, economic growth and wealth creation for anyone but the privileged few he favors.
"Right now (the standard unemployment rate) is misleadingly low,"
Hall, now with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told New York Post financial reporter John Crudele.
While it barely got mentioned by the mainstream media mob, Hall says the plunging employment-to-population ratio leads him to believe the real rate of unemployment is much higher than 7.6% — perhaps 10.6%.
How could that be? Ordinarily, during a recovery, the employment-to-population ratio actually increases as more people come off the sidelines and get jobs.
Not so this time. Hall notes that June's 58.7% employment-to-population ratio is actually lower than when the recession began at the end of 2007.
...the larger point remains: while intelligenceoperations must remain secret, a free and democratic society is not supposed to be governed by secret laws—and substantive judicial interpretationsare no less a part of “the law” than the text of statutes.
Whatever power the government has arrogated to itself by an “innovative” interpretation of the Patriot Act, it should be up to a free citizenry to consider the case for it, determine whether it is so vital to security to justify the intrusion on privacy, and hold their representatives accountable accordingly. Instead, Congress has essential voted blind—reauthorizing powers that even legislators, let alone the public, do not truly understand. Whether it’s location tracking or something else, this is fundamentally incompatible with the preconditions of both democracy and a free society.
I'm in Florida so posts will be spotty.
Wow. The tolls for the 17 miles between airport and hotel are the equivalent of a $3/gal gas tax.
Where in Florida?
the White House publicly announced its opposition to a House push to block the spy agency's bulk collection of ordinary Americans' phone records on Tuesday.
Reacting to a defense appropriations amendment sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) to curb the NSA's vast program of collecting and storing phone records, White House press secretary Jay Carney said, "We oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools.
I'm fairly sure it won't pass...too many spineless creeps in the center of Congress....
The decision to shutter "The Oil Drum," the leading website devoted to peak oil, has come to symbolize the end of an era -- and sparked a furious debate about whether the theory was all along based on a fundamental mistake. The site's authors and editors blamed the decision to archive it on the "scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors," according to a statement on July 3.
"Because of this and the high expense of running the site, the board has unanimously decided that the best course of action is to convert the site to a static archive," they noted sadly.
For critics, the site's demise marks the end of a flawed theory and more generally the fact the commodity supercycle has turned. "Peak oil theory has basically gone the way of the California Condor, from widespread existence and acceptance ... to near extinction,"
I suspect it will take a lot longer for AGW to die...
Nearly 1.2 million mortgage modifications have been completed since the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was first launched four years ago. Yet more than 306,000 borrowers have re-defaulted on their loans and more than 88,000 are at risk of following suit, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) found in its quarterly report to Congress.
In addition, the watchdog found that the longer a homeowner stays in the HAMP modification program, the more likely they are to default. Those who have been in the program since 2009, are re-defaulting at a rate of 46%, the inspector general found.
Winning!
Orlando until Friday. Venice after that.
Peak oil was always a scam. We ran out of $40 oil not geologic oil.
CAGW has taken some serious body blows recently. AR 5 leaked with vastly lower projections hat are still too high. Finding out the asshole at the Guardian works for big oil.
Which @$$hole? There are so many...enjoy your visit...it's pretty hot to be hitting the theme parks right now...
A cyclist has pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter after running down a 71-year-old pedestrian in what San Francisco's top prosecutor said appeared to be the first conviction of its kind in the US.
The new jerk at the Guardian is Dana Nuccitelli. They started a climate blog but the civility is so low it isn't worth it.
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