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News Briefs 27-10-2009

By Jameskeon

Building fabrications…

Quote of the Day:

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.

Anon

Jameske
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15 Comments

    1. He’s gotten into
      He’s gotten into something….maybe a little too much moon dust has him going loony 😉 I like to think I can smoke pot and still have the presence of mind to see this guy, as much as he’s talking, has nothing to say.

      It’s incredibly hard to trust a resource that uses a jpeg of Laura Croft as the first thing you see isn’t it?

  2. electronic voting
    I’m not sure that electronic voting is necessary. Perhaps for the media it is nice to know within 5 minutes what the outcome of the vote is, versus 5 hours for a manual count. After all we elect people for terms measured in years, so why not take a day or two to count the votes?

    However, if we want electronic voting, make it open source. Tell everyone what programs are used, exactly. And let people verify that the advertised programs are actually the ones used.

    Computer programming is not, as the article says, “a technology inaccessible to all but a very few initiates.”
    There are millions of qualified programmers.

    Whatever methods are used, we need full disclosure of what is done, and by whom. Picking or outlawing any particular technology doesn’t prevent fraud.

  3. solar powered Sahara
    The idea of installing large scale solar power in the Sahara region makes sense to me. However, I would use the electricity to turn the place into an agricultural center.

    You know, sea water desalination, large scale irrigation, and the resulting wealth for the local population.

    Europe today has problems with illegal African immigration. Europe has problems with African starvation, piracy on the shores, etc etc. In a broad sense, this is because the Europeans have money and too many Africans don’t.

    So why not use some European money, and some oil money (hello Libya, Nigeria, Arabia…) to actually solve one of the real problems. These people could be rich.

    1. Water problem
      Seems one of the main problems for this project is having enough water in the desert to run the plant.

      Out in the Sahara, however, another problem has to be solved. Like a regular coal or oil-fired plant, a solar thermal generating station requires large amounts of cooling water to condense the steam after it goes through the generator’s turbines, and there are inevitable losses from evaporation. The solar trough plant in the Mojave desert consumes around 3000 litres of water for every megawatt-hour of electricity it produces, and others are likely to need similar amounts. That’s a lot of water to find in a desert. A typical Saharan solar farm would be expected to deliver abount 120,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year per square kilometre. That equates to some 350 million litres of water,or enough to flood its area to a depth of 35 centimetres – not much less than would be needed to irrigate a crop of wheat.

      But I assume that the liquid needed to condense the steam does not have to be drinking water, or water that could be used to irrigate a field.

      So, why not use an alternative solution? Urine, for instance.

      In fact, maybe someone could come up with a way to transform the urine that is used in the solar plant into drinking water. Kill two birds with the same stone, as we say here in Mexico.

      1. water sources
        What you do is build the solar power plants close to the ocean, oh say less than 500 kilometers. Then you use sea water, and desalinate that (didn’t I write that?).

        Forget about selling the electricity as the main goal. Sell the fresh water, and the salt. Forget selling electricity to the Europeans.

        1. The problem
          The problem with setting the plant near the ocean, is that it loses efficiency; near the ocean there is moist, and moist creates clouds (that’s what the article says anyway).

          That’s why they intend to build that plant in Africa: because there are no deserts in Europe.

          1. relative moisture
            Moisture is relative. They mean the desert in North Africa compared to England. England has 300 rainy days a year.
            There are plenty of bone dry places near the coast, all the way from Mauretania to Egypt. Of course the low sun angle in northern Europe doesn’t help either.

            But yes if they water the Sahara a little, the moisture would increase a little. But I doubt that this is very significant. It hasn’t been a problem in terms of changing the climate in California, where they have been irrigating on a large scale for a few decades.

            I’m pretty sure the only reason not to do what I proposed is money.

          2. You’re looking the wrong way! 🙂

            It hasn’t been a problem in terms of changing the climate in California, where they have been irrigating on a large scale for a few decades.

            I have read that irrigation in California & Arizona has brought deep ecological changes on the other side of the Rio Grande… some of them good, mind you. But it has also raised the salinity in some agricultural areas.

            So in the end, as always, when you gain something that means somewhere else something is lost.

            Is it preferable if the Sahara remains desertic? hard to tell, and it depends on whom gets the benefit. Maybe the Desertec project can give a surplus of energy to those impoverished areas. And living in a desert when you have A/C ain’t that bad 😉

          3. moisture
            My point was that the irrigation hasn’t made the weather more humid in California and Arizona. Of course it has reduced the water supply downstream the Colorado to practically zero, and dried up some other water sources as well. I know that Mexican farms have had salinity problems, supposedly due to doing the irrigation wrong. But I don’t know if that’s true.

            I do know that just pumping water out of deep wells in California has caused those wells to produce salt water after some years. The water table drops, and ocean water seeps in there.

            It wasn’t that long ago that people could grow a decent amount of grains in the northern Sahara.

            I don’t like Desertec for energy export. It’s another way for Europe to depend on energy imports. Let them do something else, like nuclear done properly. Use something like Desertec for local purposes. Doing it that way, the project doesn’t have to be as massive to be worthwhile. Build one big plant, start making water, and see the locals become filthy rich selling food to their neighbors.

  4. Nice one…
    I had never heard of Dr. Rauni-Leena Luukanen Kilde until now, thank you. I’m just watching her on you tube. I have a particular interest in all this stuff so its great to see professional people like her speak out.

  5. tatoos on mars
    I noticed that on a section of the dune that appears particularly steep, dark streaks appear which look as though they follow the fall-line. These dark streaks look very similar to streaks in other martian locations that have been presented as possible evidence for water on Mars.

    Since these streaks in this image are the same shade approximately as the “tattoos” drawn by the dust-devils, this might suggest that the streaks are in fact small landslides that have exposed the darker material underneath the thin reddish top layer of soil.

    If this is true, then this would cast doubt on the theory that the dark streaks found on some steep slopes on mars are cause by water seepage. They would simply be a dry landslide.

  6. The truth about (some) disappearing honeybees?
    A The rise of organic farming

    B Bees decline

    Are they linked?

    Organic farming is NOT chemical free, that’s a myth. Organic farmers use organic pesticides (think outdated) which are not as selective as synthetic.

    Hmmmmm

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