Posts Tagged ‘We're saved’
Lots and Lots of Monday Night Links
* ThinkProgress reports solar is surging. We’re saved! Krugman has more, and so does Steve Benen.
* Via my dad: Soviet Bus Stops.
* Occupy my dad: Class war is intergenerational war.
* Rortybomb: Two Steps Toward Tackling Our Current Student Loan Problems. Robert Cruickshank: …any student loan reform proposal that does not include some form of principal writedowns is not likely to be very effective.
* Tor reviews Stephen King’s 11/22/63. I’m much more interested in his pitch for what sounds like a truly horrifying next novel: Occupy Bangor.
* A new AAUW study shows there’s an easy way for young women to avoid sexual harassment in schools: just avoid being either pretty or not pretty.
* Polling shows Americans have begun to realize Republicans are intentionally sabotaging the economy.
* Anti-vaccination fever just got a little more crazy. Via MeFi.
* Marriage equality increases property values. Is that a good enough reason?
* Also on the equality front: Dan Harmon kind-of, sort-of apologizes for the way Community treats gay and trans people.
* Everybody still hates Romney. Poor guy.
* And Bors memorializes one of the windows broken during the Occupy Oakland protests last week.
230
GM says the Volt will get 230 miles per gallon in city driving. More astounding, Nissan says its electric car (the Leaf) will get 367 mpg. Of course the carbon cost of electricity generation (*cough* *cough* coal plants) needs to be accounted for, which will make the Volt roughly equivalent to a 55 mpg vehicle—still a potential gamechanger in a nation addicted to the automobile.
Friday Politics
Friday politics roundup.
* Early returns from the Iranian elections suggest things could get heated, with both sides declaring victory.
* On the day Jon Kyl threatened a Republican boycott of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearing, George H. W. Bush cautioned his party not to go overboard.
“I don’t know her that well but I think she’s had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings. Not – [it’s] like the senator John Cornyn said it,” [the elder former President Bush] told CNN. “He may vote for it, he may not. But he’s been backing away from these…backing off from those radical statements to describe her, to attribute things to her that may or may not be true.
“And she was called by somebody a racist once. That’s not right. I mean that’s not fair. It doesn’t help the process. You’re out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it.”
* Kos analyzes party ID, empathy, and the generation gap.
* High-school student discovers plastic-eating microbe. We’re saved!
Monday Links
Getting everything together for the big roundtable this Friday is keeping me fairly busy, so it’s just links tonight.
* Sad news: Eve Sedgwick has died.
* Matt Yglesias luxuriates in the deliciousness of Richard Burr’s low approval ratings. So say we all.
* ‘Pentagon Prioritizes Pursuit Of Alternative Fuel Sources.’ With the military-industrial complex at our back, we can’t fail!
* St. Augustine vs. the pirates.
In the “City of God,” St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, “How dare you molest the seas?” To which the pirate replied, “How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.” St. Augustine thought the pirate’s answer was “elegant and excellent.”
* The mutants walk among us: ‘Woman has developed an imaginary, but useful, third arm.’
* New fiction on the way from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.
* 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs. What could possibly go wrong?
Tuesday Links
Tuesday!
* Cold fusion is back. More here. We’re saved!
* Radiology art. (Hat tip: Neil.)
* My pursuit of all Wes Anderson-flavored cultural ephemera has led me to this video from Company of Theives, as well as Tenenbaum Fail. Via Fimoculous.
* The first eleven episodes of Quantum Leap are up at NBC.com.
* Who was dead at your age?
A Rare Treat
A rare treat: good news on climate change. A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said. Of course, it’s good news on an objective level, but perhaps bad news politically, as this is just now other isolated data point for the ignorant, the deluded, and the actively dishonest to latch onto in their efforts to deny real progress.
Here Comes Fusion
Here comes fusion: While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun. We’re saved!
‘Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes’
The headline reads, ‘Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes.’ What could possibly go wrong?
The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
We’re saved!
We’re Saved!
We’re saved, part 2? Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a new way of storing energy from sunlight that could lead to ‘unlimited’ solar power.
(Here, I suppose, was part 1.)
Wait, Are We Actually Saved This Time?
No joke, we may actually be saved this time:
Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun’s visible light energy. The material is comprised of a hybrid of plastics, molybdenum and titanium. The team discovered it not only fluoresces (as most solar cells do), but also phosphoresces. Electrons in a phosphorescent state remain at a place where they can be “siphoned off” as electricity over 7 million times longer than those generated in a fluorescent state. This combination of materials also utilizes the entire visible spectrum of light energy, translating into a theoretical potential of almost 100% efficiency. Commercial products are still years away, but this foundational work may well pave the way for a truly renewable form of clean, global energy.