Recent Comments by jwray • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

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Annoying kid PWNED by t̵u̶b̶a̶ sousaphone player - “Next up: "Sousaphone Player Pwned by Annoying Kid's Mom."” read more by grinter

Recent Comments by jwray

Is McCain Tea-Bagging Lieberman?

I LOLed IRL
*comedy

written by jwray

| 15 hours 37 minutes 31 seconds ago | CH

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Sexy Dancing vs Peak Oil

U-238 breeder reactors work, but are more expensive to operate than U-235 reactors. As oil runs out, energy prices will go up, and more expensive ways of generating energy will expand. Fossil fuels are only dominant now because they're the cheapest. Uranium power generation based on breeder reactors could power the world's current rate of energy consumption for at least a thousand years with current proven uranium reserves, but nobody's even bothered to look at more expensive ways of recovering uranium. In the long run solar will have to be part of the solution. The earth receives 4*10^24 Joules of energy per year from the sun, while our worldwide fossil fuel consumption in 2004 was 4*10^20 Joules.

Solar thermal generator plants can store energy via phase change to be more reliable. For example, Solar Tres stores 6,250 tonnes of molten sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate (assuming a density of 3g/ml that's about a 10m x 10m x 20m tank). This is enough to provide a 16 hour buffer for the generator (600 megawatt-hours). So it can generate continuously at peak capacity except in winter. Electricity demand is always higher in summer than in winter, because in the winter your random electrical appliance electricity use supplements your environmental controls (almost all used electricity is converted to heat) while in the summer all of your electricity use works against your environmental controls (generates more heat that your AC has to remove).

If about 0.1% of the surface of the earth were converted to solar power stations, that could supply all of our current energy use. But the rate of consumption is increasing exponentially as population increases exponentially and THAT MUST STOP. Who's going to vote for the global 2-child policy that will probably be necessary to avoid annihilation of the environment and subsequent annihilation of mankind? Mankind needs another big round of moral progress to save itself from itself.

written by jwray

| 16 hours 32 minutes 14 seconds ago | CH

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Hawking radiation

If black holes could be formed by random high energy collisions of particles on a micro scale you would expect black holes to randomly, accidentally, be formed at any time during the life of a star. According to the maxwell-boltzmann distribution, in the core of a red giant, with a temp of 100,000,000K, a few protons per million would be moving at half the speed of light.

It might be the case that black holes don't really exist. That would solve the conundrum of how the big bang could ever have happened without forming an event horizon and collapsing back in on itself.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-black-holes-really-exist.html

It may remain slightly less dense than what is necessary to form an event horizon, by some quantum mechanical mechanism, but still cause enough gravitational redshift of outgoing light to render it almost undetectable.

written by jwray

| 17 hours 36 minutes 10 seconds ago | CH

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TYT: Teacher gets fired for witchcraft

http://www.local6.com/news/16169506/detail.html

Do you think the teacher just made it up? The news reporter makes no mention of trying to interview the principal of the school.

written by jwray

| 18 hours 11 minutes 15 seconds ago | CH

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extreme closeups

*beg

written by jwray

| 18 hours 45 minutes 17 seconds ago | CH

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Slow Motion Water

*beg

written by jwray

| 18 hours 46 minutes 15 seconds ago | CH

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Richard Feynman Physics Lecture

*beg

written by jwray

| 19 hours 27 seconds ago | CH

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Safe House - Pest Control

*beg

written by jwray

| 19 hours 55 seconds ago | CH

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India collides with Asia backwards (15 seconds)

*beg

written by jwray

| 19 hours 1 minute 9 seconds ago | CH

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Rain: Avoiding the sun

*beg

written by jwray

| 19 hours 1 minute 33 seconds ago | CH

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Colbert interviews Noah Feldman

*beg

written by jwray

| 19 hours 2 minutes 2 seconds ago | CH

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techno + art

*beg

written by jwray

| 19 hours 3 minutes 18 seconds ago | CH

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McCain on the Daily Show (may 2008)

*discard

written by jwray

| 20 hours 29 minutes 12 seconds ago | CH

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Star wars gangsta rap-- special edition

*dead

written by jwray

| 1 day 29 minutes ago | CH

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The Elements Forged in Stars

It would be interesting to find out what chunks of material ejected from neutron stars would decay into, and what nuclides would be formed besides hydrogen. It could be the case that certain nuclides which are never formed in ordinary stars can be the product of neutron stars.

written by jwray

| 1 day 1 hour 13 minutes ago | CH

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