Recipe:Sweet Potatoes with Goat Cheese Mallows Laced with garlic and rosemary and topped with pecans and goat cheese, this easy casserole gives a savory wink to the traditional sweet-on-sweet Turkey Day staple.
My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles Martin Gardner’s Table Magic Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends Relativity Simply Explained Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays A Bouquet for the Gardener: Martin Gardner Remembered The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications
Two test pieces. One a 10 cm square, the other a 12 cm square. For both, arranged 3 mm colored pieces over a 3 mm clear base, filled in gaps with medium clear frit. Tacked down the larger pieces with craft glue. COE 90.
Cleaned up frit that had fallen off and stuck to the edges with a Dremel.
Slump smaller square over a 10 cm bowl. Drape larger square over a 10 cm bowl upside down suspended on two small posts. Put kiln paper over the bowls to prevent sticking.
How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation by Alexey Guzey, link. Some insights.
Open Borders Made America Great. For most of U.S. history, all immigrants were undocumented. It’s a fact Democrats should embrace. by Aaron Freedman, link
The three technologies bioinformaticians need to be using right now. by biomickwatson, link BioConda/Docker/Singularity, SnakeMake/NextFlow, Cloud computing
Use a teflon spatula to remove warranty sticker without leaving the ‘void’ mark: youtube Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart, link
cǎonímǎ 草泥马 Grass-mud horse tank man.Mascot of Chinese netizens fighting for free expression, symbolizing defiance of Internet censorship.
A teachable moment in why Uber/Lyft can never replace public transportation. That Uber was oblivious enough for this self-goal explains why their stock will soon be worth less than monopoly money. link
True Crimes. Why it’s important to name names when discussing the climate catastrophe. by Billy Wilson.
Syphilis Is Spreading Across Rural America. Back in 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a plan to eradicate the sexually transmitted disease that totaled over 35,000 cases nationwide that year. While syphilis can cause permanent neurological damage, blindness or even death, it is both treatable and curable. By focusing on the epicenters clustered primarily throughout the South, California and in major urban areas, the plan seemed within reach.
Instead, U.S. cases topped 101,500 in 2017 and are continuing to rise along with other sexually transmitted diseases. Syphilis is back in part because of increasing drug use, but health officials are losing the fight because of a combination of cuts in national and state health funding and crumbling public health infrastructure.
In 2008, Johns Hopkins scientists urged doctors to advise parents of asthmatic children to get rid of their gas stoves or at least install powerful exhaust hoods.
The Myth of Fingerprints. by Clive Thompson Nonetheless, the reliability of fingerprinting today is rarely questioned in modern courts. One exception was J. Spencer Letts, a federal judge in California who in 1991 became suspicious of fingerprint analysts who’d testified in a bank robbery trial. Letts was astounded to hear that the standard for declaring that two prints matched varied widely from county to county. Letts threw out the fingerprint evidence from that trial.
The basic problem with carbon capture is energy, and energy is cost. When coal or oil is burned, heat and CO2 are produced. CO2 is a pretty low energy form of carbon. Turning it into something solid (calcium carbonate, graphite or coal) requires a lot of energy. Also, when CO2 is made by burning fossil fuels it disperses, and re-concentrating it requires energy. That’s why carbon capture proposals often include using exhaust gas, grabbing the CO2 before it disperses. The other main type of capture I’ve seen proposed takes the CO2, concentrates it to high pressure, and pumps it underground (and hopes it stays there). Compressors take a lot of energy, and so do pumps if the CO2 needs to be piped hundreds of miles to a place where it can be pumped underground.
The key number for carbon capture is, how much energy is required relative to the amount generated by burning the fossil fuel? I’ve never seen articles about it touting this number. A quick look shows one assessment being 30% – 35% of the energy (Zhang et al, 2014), another figures the production cost of electrcity with carbon capture being 62% – 130% higher (White et al, 2012, Table 6) Another article looks at the harder case, CO2 capture from air, and estimates the cost at $1000/ton CO2 (link). Burning the coal to generate a ton of CO2 (1/3 of a ton coal) generates about $80 of electricity.
So the best case cost of carbon capture–from power plant exhaust gas–is dismal, 25%, 75%, maybe over 100% of the value of the electricity. This number will translate directly to increased fossil fuel energy costs (+30%, +100%, etc.) if fossil fuel companies are required to capture the majority of the CO2 pollution they generate.
All the carbon capture projects are basically stalling actions. The fossil fuel companies pay small $$ to put together a pilot plant (or better yet, get the govt to fund it), run tests for years, but never implement CO2 capture on a coal or gas energy plant. This had been a very successful approach for the fossil fuel industry, they’ve managed to stall things for 50 years already!
