DougO

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• Commented on The Devil's Kettle
  Upper Proxy Falls on a tributary of Oregon's McKenzie River east of Eugene disappears underground. The water falls into a pleasing pool, but the pool does not have a surface outlet. It's very odd but many people don't even notice....
• Commented on Kevin Kelly reviews The Deniers
  minority viewpoints need to be considered, but "the deniers" in the climate debate keep bringing up the same tired arguments over and over and those views and lines of evidence have been considered over and over and in the end...
• Commented on Understanding the economics of climate change mitigation
  I stumbled on this earlier this week. Seems relevant to the discussion. "What is the economist’s bottom on global warming? The fundamental problem is the climate-change externality – a “global public good.” Economic participants (millions of firms, billions of people,...
• Commented on Downwind faster than the wind - Part 4
  This just shows that gears of different sizes can move a machine faster or slower than the transit of the drive shaft circumference, but it does not say anything about the energy it takes to move the cart or the...
• Commented on Scientists mostly don't know what a "theory" is, but should they?
  Consider my favorite definition of science: "Science is the total cumulative results of an open-ended search for natural explanations of observable phenomena." adapted from from draft education standards from the State of Kansas. * Science is the "total cumulative results"...
• Commented on Where does petroleum oil come from?
  #19 Rockdork and #26 Osprey101 are on the right track. It's just amazing to me that there was a net build-up of such an energy rich substance on this far from equilibrium planet. The principles described in the book "into...
• Commented on Bill Gates' 2003 flame email about Moviemaker
  I'd like to see the email he wrote two days after installing MovieMaker and finding how unstable and inadequate it is. MS seems to have done next to nothing to improve moviemaker since dropping that turd. I am also unconvinced...
• Commented on Scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2
  Haven't we been through this already? Maybe I am just having a deja vu moment. After much debate, the conclusion will be that we can't do thermodynamically better than a tree. It's solar powered, converts carbon to a solid form...
• Commented on Graph of world cement usage
  Three points: First, cement is VERY heavy (a 50 lb bag is about as big a two big loaves of bread) so it's probably not shipped long distances in large quantities. just as nearly every town has a gravel source...
• Commented on Untitled 1
  unable to form an opinion, but I thought I'd share it anyway......
• Commented on Chopping down trees to make books is good for the environment, provided you then line your walls with bookcases
  One problem with using books for insulation is that they are generally made of virgin fibers that come from trees and logging those trees results in a large pulse of carbon to the atmosphere which contributes to global climate change....
• Commented on 1972 Ideal "Bing Bang Boing" commercial
  I had this game when I was a kid and spent hours trying to master seemingly simple tasks, but it was very frustrating because the balls bounced ("boinged") all over the place. I think there was a very small sweet...
• Commented on Engineering approach to global climate change
  Nice post. Feedback loops make the engineering solutions more complicated. We have to keep in mind all the feedbacks between the atmosphere and the biosphere, especially forests. We could manage forests to help store carbon or we could exacerbate the...
• Commented on Fun chemical reaction video
  This is one of the classic demonstrations of a dissipative structure known as a "chemical clock" that demonstrates ordered behavior stemming from "far from equilbrium thermodynamics." See here: http://www.faidherbe.org/site/cours/dupuis/oscil.htm http://staff.science.nus.edu.sg/~parwani/c1/node60.html...
• Commented on Taxpayers pay for gold mining cleanup
  The Eugene Register-Gaurd recently published a five-part series on this problem: THE SERIES SUNDAY: The Formosa mine in Douglas County is an old-style mining mess that was created barely a decade ago by foreign investors. TODAY: Federal and state officials...
• Commented on Karlheinz Stockhausen, RIP
  My introduction to his music came with the query - what makes music? Sounds and .......... silence....
• Commented on Your body has 10x more bacterial cells than human ones
  Most of the bacteria are on the inside not the outside of our bodies, and most of the bacteria are "friendly," that is "not infectious." Instead of trying to wash bacteria off (futile by the way), we should be encouraging...