Ambivalent Engineer

From " SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY ": Former Navy General Counsel Albe...

Since this is my first posting about the pool, let me show you around a bit.  South is to the left.  You can see all along the south side ...

This graph , from the New York Times, shows the extent of U.S. financial commitments made over the last year to deal with the credit crisis....

That white paper got me thinking: what if the government made a bunch of other sensible decisions? They might shut down Yucca Mountain, and ...

Stephen Chu, the current director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the guy that Obama just fingered to be the new Secretary of Ene...

We have a consensus among politicians in this country that we must spend our way out of this recession.  Of course, there are many things to...

I've just listened to a discussion on KQED about whether the US government should bail out the auto industry. The reason the solution h...

The $700 billion bailout is about the same size as the dollar cash money supply in North America (that is, excluding dollars held as reserve...

The $700 billion Paulson plan is too expensive and fixes the wrong end of the problem.  A better solution is obvious: bail out the mortgages...

I watched the first presidential debate last night, as I expect many of you did. My basic takeaways: I was surprised to find myself liking O...

A friend asked for a rundown on dichroics, which are the coatings we put on optical glass (and sunglasses) to optimize the transmission prop...

Now I've read Andy Grove's plan (at The American , or via Wired ) to fix our energy dependence national security mess. Mr. Grove th...

The electricity that arrives at your home or business is extremely reliable (if you live in the U.S.). The electricity that comes from a wi...

I watched the YouTube video , which shows launch through 6:16 indicated (T+2:11). Two comments: Can we please get a heater on the on-rocket...

Jesse Ausubel has a pretty good essay which describes what he thinks the future of power production will look like. It's a somewhat ro...

Tim Kruger at Cquestrate has an idea for sequestering large amounts of CO2: dump quicklime (CaO) in the ocean . The basic idea is to convert...

Check out the guy's website , if you haven't already. There is not a lot of meat there. Basically, the idea is that if we build en...

I found some numbers for the oil cost of burning coal. Freight trains in the United States burn 1 gallon of diesel to move a ton of frieght ...

I have summarized for your convenience the top 7 consumer killers in the United States in the year 2001 , and swimming pools, for comparison...

Sometimes, the underground reservoirs that store natural gas explode. Drilling wells into them makes this more likely. When wells explode,...