posting to this

It has been about a year since I put anything up here. I started this blog when I was recovering from my knee injury and had tons of time to sit around on my butt. I was gonna delete it, but decided I might start it up again, as I has ( what I thought) was some really cool stuff posted. Anyway... maybe more to com e later

The NAtional Association of Broadcatsers will do anything it can to kill satellite radio.

The NAtional Association of Broadcatsers will do anything it can to kill satellite radio.



From Reason.com:


While satellite radio still seems to be figuring out how to make a profit, it's soaring in popularity, winning over 14 million paid subscribers in just a few years. Of course, that may not be a reflection of XM or Sirius' quality so much as the mundanity and drollery of Clear Channel America. With only two business models to choose from, it's unlikely that satellite radio has come anywhere close to fulfilling its potential.
So when XM and Sirius announced a highly-publicized merger this year, everything changed for the NAB. Clearly, the two startups it so feared for so long were floundering. And with no other licensed satellite providers around, the NAB's position on the merger became clear: What's bad for satellite is good for the NAB. So the NAB would oppose an XM-Sirius alliance.
Problem is, the only colorable argument against the merger that it would create a monopoly for satellite radio. XM and Sirius cleverly (and probably accurately) headed that objection off by noting that satellite radio competes with a variety of technologies for the listerner's ear. This put the NAB in an awkward position. The lobby would have to argue that despite its 15-year effort to derail satellite radio, satellite radio was not a competitor. Of course, the harder the NAB fights and the more money the NAB spends to promote this message, the clearer it becomes that the NAB fears the competition posed by an XM-Sirius alliance. In effect, the more the NAB fights the merger, the more it undermines its own argument against it.

Read the whole thing: Dinosaurs vs. Satellites

Lower the drinking age?

IMO, the number one reason to lower the drinking age is that a person that is old enough to marry, enter into a contracr, or go to war should be able to choose whether or not to have a drink.

More reasons:

Straight Talk: Time to Rethink the Drinking Age

Hydrogen fuel isn't all it's cracked up to be

Basically, using hydrogen in incredibly expensive, and yields very little energy after you consider the energy costs to create, contain, and transport it, and then the total pollution created is equal to or more than if you burned fossil fuels

From an article in The New Atlantis:
The wholesale cost of commercial grade liquid hydrogen (made the cheap way, from hydrocarbons) shipped to large customers in the United States is about $6 per kilogram. High purity hydrogen made from electrolysis for scientific applications costs considerably more. Dispensed in compressed gas cylinders to retail customers, the current price of commercial grade hydrogen is about $100 per kilogram. For comparison, a kilogram of hydrogen contains about the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline. This means that even if hydrogen cars were available and hydrogen stations existed to fuel them, no one with the power to choose otherwise would ever buy such vehicles. This fact alone makes the hydrogen economy a non-starter in a free society....Because hydrogen is actually made by reforming hydrocarbons, its use as fuel would not reduce greenhouse gas emissions at all. In fact, it would greatly increase them....So for the same amount of carbon dioxide released, less useful energy has been produced....The situation is much worse than this, however, because before the hydrogen can be transported anywhere, it needs to be either compressed or liquefied. To liquefy it, it must be refrigerated down to a temperature of 20 K (20 degrees above absolute zero, or -253 degrees Celsius). At these temperatures, the fundamental laws of thermodynamics make refrigerators extremely inefficient. As a result, about 40 percent of the energy in the hydrogen must be spent to liquefy it. This reduces the actual net energy content of our product fuel to 792 kilocalories. In addition, because it is a cryogenic liquid, still more energy could be expected to be lost as the hydrogen boils away during transport and storage....No, we would get no benefit at all. As discussed above, hydrogen is actually produced commercially using fossil fuel energy, much of which is lost in the process, meaning that more fossil fuels need to be burned, and thus more carbon dioxide produced, to provide a vehicle with a given amount of energy using hydrogen than if the vehicle were allowed to burn fossil fuels directly. Even if we ignore costs completely and generate hydrogen for vehicle fuel using water electrolysis, that would also increase pollution, since most electricity is actually generated by burning coal and natural gas. Even if the electricity in question came from nuclear, hydro, wind, or solar power, wasting it on hydrogen generation would still increase overall carbon dioxide emissions relative to the alternative of simply putting the power into the grid.


Read thew whole thing: The Hydrogen Hoax

Candiru fish can actually swim into your urethra

No kidding. A fish actually swam into this guy's penis:

Candiru Fish

Small dogs share "small dog" gene

no comments from me here. Just kinda cool

What Makes Small Dogs Small
Small breeds share a gene variant that limits their growth

Key stem cell patents revoked

In 1998, a university of Wisconsin researcher was granted patents on several stem cell lines. Those patents were recently revoked by the US patent office. The issue was pushed by researchers to say that innovation and research was being stifled because of the fees charged by the patent owners.
IMO, the real issue here is: Can someone really own stem cells? I'm not sure if i think anyone should be able to own a naturally occurring substance or biological building block, even if the methods used to extract the substance is novel. If you find a new species of ant, along with a unique way of catching that ant, then do you own all the rights to the ant?
This is actually an issue with microbes found in the ocean. Companies that discover new deep sea organisms claim to own the organisms and the chemical compounds that may be extracted or made from them. Can you really own something that you discovered but did not create?
Patents were originally given out to unique inventions rather than processes, and his seems to make the most sense. On the other hand, companies will be reluctant to spend money on research if they think they have to share the rewards with someone else and this may stifle research considerably.



Key stem cell patents revoked