Tag Archives: photos

Flooding the Zone on Ebola

by NFRJacklyn Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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For the record, I want to note that the top five stories currently featured on the Washington Post home page are about Ebola. If you count related pieces, it’s the top nine. That is all.

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Flooding the Zone on Ebola

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Is Clean, Green Fusion Power In Our Near Future?

by MauriciDoherty Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fusion is the energy source of the future—and it always will be. That used to be a Unix joke, but in various forms Unix has actually become pretty widespread these days. It runs the server that hosts the web page you’re reading; it’s the underlying guts of Apple’s Mac operating system; and Linux is—well, not really “popular” by any fair definition of the word, but no longer just a fringe OS either.

So maybe fusion is about to break through too:

Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.

….Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet….Lockheed said it had shown it could complete a design, build and test it in as little as a year, which should produce an operational reactor in 10 years, McGuire said.

Over at Climate Progress, Jeff Spross is containing his enthusiasm:

At this point, keeping the world under 2°C of global warming will require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak in 2020 and fall rapidly after that….So by Lockheed Martin’s own timeline, their first operational CFR won’t come online until after the peak deadline. To play any meaningful role in decarbonization — either here in America or abroad — they’d have to go from one operational CFR to mass production on a gargantuan scale effectively overnight. More traditional forms of nuclear power face versions of the same problem.

A WW2-style government mobilization might be able to pull off such a feat in the United States. But if the political will was there for such a move, the practical question is why wait for nuclear? Wind and solar are mature technologies in the here and now — as is energy efficiency, which could supply up to 40 percent of the effort to stay below 2°C all by itself.

Jeez. I get where Spross is coming from, but come on. If Lockheed Martin can actually pull this off, it would mean huge amounts of baseload power using existing grid technology. It would mean cheap power from centralized sites. It would mean not having to replace every building in the world with high-efficiency designs. It would mean not having to install wind farms on millions of acres of land. It would mean not having to spend all our political efforts on forcing people to make do with less energy.

More generally, it would mean gobs of green power at no political cost. That’s huge.

The big question is whether Lockheed Martin can actually pull this off. Lots of people before them have thought they were on the right track, after all. But if they can, it’s a game changer. Given the obvious difficulties of selling a green agenda to the world—and the extreme unlikelihood of making that 2020 deadline with existing technologies—I’ll be rooting for Lockheed Martin to pull this off. Cynicism can be overdone.

Source – 

Is Clean, Green Fusion Power In Our Near Future?

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Tom Cotton Is Upset That Democrats Ended a Free Money Stream for Banks

by Shirleen7471 Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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The latest from the campaign trail:

Republican Tom Cotton said during an Arkansas U.S. Senate debate on Tuesday that “Obamacare nationalized the student loan industry.” The first-term congressman added, “That’s right, Obamacare grabbed money to pay for its own programs and took that choice away from you.”

Huh. Does Cotton really think this is a winning issue? I mean, it has the virtue of being kinda sorta semi-true, which is a step up for Cotton, but why would his constituents care? Does Cotton think they’re deeply invested in the old system, where their tax dollars would go to big banks, who would then make tidy profits by doling out risk-free student loans that the federal government guaranteed?

That never made any sense. It would be like paying banks to distribute Social Security checks. What’s the point? The new student loan system saves a lot of money by making the loans directly, and that’s something that fiscal conservatives should appreciate. Instead, they’ve spent the past four years tearing their hair out over the prospect of Wall Street banks being shut out of the free money business. Yeesh.

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Tom Cotton Is Upset That Democrats Ended a Free Money Stream for Banks

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It Doesn’t Matter Which Diet You Choose

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the category of “news you can use,” Emily Oster summarizes a new study that compares weight loss on various diets. After cutting through all the muck, we get the chart on the right. The answer, it turns out, is that all of the diets are about equally effective.

So which one you choose is mostly a matter of preference. If you think you can stick to a low-carb diet, choose one of those. If you like vegetables, choose a veggie-based plan. If you think you can tolerate low fat, go for one of those. What matters isn’t so much the mechanics of the diet, but whether you can stick with it over the long haul.

(If your doctor recommends a particular diet because you suffer from some particular condition, then of course this changes things. And remember, “don’t be an idiot” is always an unvoiced component of all diet and health recommendations.)

As for me, I’m on the three-quarters diet. I do this about once a decade or so and then spend the succeeding decade gaining back the weight I lost. This is my third go-around. As you might guess, it’s a pretty simple diet: eat less food. In particular, I try to eat about three quarters of my usual meals and snacks. I’m finding it much more annoying this time than in the past—partly because I’m working at home, where temptation is ever present, and partly because my motivation and self-discipline have deteriorated over the years. However, the precipitous collapse of my body over the past six months is providing at least some short-term motivation, and yesterday I learned that my sleep apnea is apparently much worse than it was a decade ago. Maybe weight loss will help with that. I hope so, since I had no luck with a CPAP machine back then, and I kind of doubt I’ll have better luck this time around. But we’ll see.

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It Doesn’t Matter Which Diet You Choose

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Darrell Issa is Finally Going Off His Nut

by LynellLamothe Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Darrell Issa’s latest jihad is also one of his most peculiar: he’s accusing the EPA of working too closely with environmental groups. Seriously. That’s it. Here’s a report from the New York Times about the “cozy” relationship between EPA administrator Gina McCarthy and David Doniger, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council:

Republicans say the most vivid example of a cozy relationship is an email exchange … celebrating legal maneuvering that provided Mr. Obama with something both the E.P.A. and the environmental group wanted: a court-ordered deadline for release of a 2012 E.P.A. regulation curbing greenhouse gas emissions on future power plants — a precursor to Mr. Obama’s announcement in June. (The environmental group had joined with others to sue the E.P.A. to force the regulation, and the E.P.A. quickly settled.)

On Dec. 23, 2010, the day the settlement was announced, Mr. Doniger emailed Ms. McCarthy, “Thank you for today’s announcement. I know how hard you and your team are working to move us forward and keep us on the rails. This announcement is a major achievement.” He added, “We’ll be with you at every step in the year ahead.”

Ms. McCarthy responded, “Thanks David. I really appreciate your support and patience. Enjoy the holiday. The success is yours as much as mine.”

Reacting to the email exchange, Mr. Vitter said in a statement: “Who is working for whom? The key example in all of this is the settlement agreement on greenhouse gases when the N.R.D.C. sued the E.P.A., the E.P.A. settled, and the two celebrate the agreement. It doesn’t get any more blatantly obvious than that.”

Explosive! “Thanks David. I really appreciate your support and patience.” Truly a smoking gun of improper influence. They used first names and everything!

Issa must really be getting desperate. I mean, normally I understand the supposed malfeasance in his investigations. I may think his charges are foolish, but at least I get it. But this time? Even in theory, what’s supposed to be wrong here? An environmental group expressing pleasure at a court ruling? The EPA administrator sending back a polite note? Everybody knew all along that both sides wanted the same thing, so this is hardly a surprise. And certainly light years from scandalous.

Issa must be going off his nut because his investigations keep failing to excite anyone. Or maybe this is just designed to provide some fodder for fundraising emails for the upcoming election. It’s hard to figure out what else could be going on.

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Darrell Issa is Finally Going Off His Nut

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There’s No Ebola Vaccine Yet Because We Cut the NIH Budget Ten Years Ago

by MariettWorden Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

As we all know, the federal budget is bloated and wasteful. It needs to be cut across the board. Right?

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has “slowed down” research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe.

“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'” Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

Collins obviously has some skin in this game, but he’s probably right. What’s more, even without a vaccine we’d probably be better prepared to react to the Ebola outbreak if we hadn’t spent the past decade steadily slashing funding for public health emergencies. The chart on the right, from Scientific American, tells the story.

There are consequences for budget cuts. Right now we’re living through one of them.

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There’s No Ebola Vaccine Yet Because We Cut the NIH Budget Ten Years Ago

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

by TawnyaSherwood Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Catblogging has become harder recently. There’s no shortage of cuteness, obviously, but getting good pictures of the cuteness is tricky. The problem is simple: 55-year-old human reflexes combined with cheap-camera shutter lag are simply no match for 10-month-old kitten reflexes. This produces lots of pictures like the one on the right. You’ll just have to take my word for it, but that’s Hopper carrying around one of her stuffed mice. I’ve muted all the chirping sounds from my camera, which reliably caused them to turn their heads just as the autofocus finally whirred to its proper setting, but even so I have hundreds of photos like this one.

Still, they slow down once in a while, so catblogging isn’t completely lost. On the left, Hopper is behind the drapes trying to chase down an errant bug. On the right, Hilbert is majestically surveying his space.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

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5 Percent of Religious Americans Routinely Try to Fool God

by IleneHainqgu Posted on October 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Speaking of phone surveys, surely a survey conducted by LifeWay, a Christian retailer based in Nashville, TN, should be one that we can rely on. So what was LifeWay curious about? Prayer. In particular: how often you pray; what you pray for; and whether your prayers are answered. The chart on the right, perhaps one of my all time favorites, shows what people said they prayed for.

Some of these are unexceptionable. Praying for your enemies is supposedly a Christian sort of thing to do (assuming you’re praying for their redemption, of course). Praying to win the lottery is pretty standard stuff. And despite mountains of evidence that God doesn’t really care who wins the Super Bowl, there’s always been plenty of praying for that too.

But finding a good parking spot? Seriously? There’s also a fair amount of Old Testament vengeance on display here. But my favorite is the 5 percent of respondents who prayed for success in something they knew wouldn’t please God.

This is great. Apparently these folks are more willing to be honest with a telephone pollster than with God despite the fact that God already knows. If it displeases Him, then that’s that. You aren’t going to fool Him into making it happen anyway. I’m also intrigued by the 20 percent who prayed for success in something they “put almost no effort in.” That’s fabulous! Not that they did it, mind you. That’s just human nature. But that they were willing to fess up to this to a telephone pollster. Is there anything people aren’t willing to confide to telephone pollsters?

Anyway, another chart tells us that 25 percent of those who pray say their prayers are answered all the time. All the time! This is terrific, and I want to meet one of these people. God has not been noticeably receptive to me lately, and I could use some help from someone with a 100 percent batting average.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, is it really possible that virtually none of these folks ever prayed for their health to improve? Or is that too risky to admit, since usually it’s fairly obvious when it doesn’t work?

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5 Percent of Religious Americans Routinely Try to Fool God

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Support for Ground War Against ISIS Keeps Growing

by JoshuaCBAwm Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

“So much for war weariness,” crows Ed Morrissey today, and unfortunately it’s hard to argue with him. Here’s the latest:

This is a Fox poll, so maybe we have to take it with a grain of salt. Question 22, after all, is about whether Barack Obama has been too tough or too soft on radical Muslim extremists, and that probably primes the ol’ military aggression pump a wee bit. Still, these are the highest favorability ratings I’ve seen yet for ground action against ISIS, and they seem to rise with every new poll.

So will these numbers just keep going up, until the whole country is good and lathered up for Iraq War 3.0? Or, after a few months, will Americans get tired of the whole thing and lose interest? The evidence of history can point either way. In the meantime, however, I reserve the right to remain very, very nervous about Obama’s ability to hold out against the tide of war.

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Support for Ground War Against ISIS Keeps Growing

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Would You Pay $20 For a Non-Reclining Seat in Front of You?

by jcxftrrly Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Slate has a great example today of the endowment effect, aka status quo bias:

In an online survey, we asked people to imagine that they were about to take a six-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles. We told them that the airline had created a new policy that would allow people to pay those seated in front of them to not recline their seats. We asked one group of subjects to tell us the least amount of money that they would be willing to accept to not recline during the flight. And we asked another group of subjects to tell us the most amount of money that they would pay to prevent the person in front of them from not reclining.

….Recliners wanted on average $41 to refrain from reclining, while reclinees were willing to pay only $18 on average….When we flipped the default—that is, when we made the rule that people did not have an automatic right to recline, but would have to negotiate to get it—then people’s values suddenly reversed. Now, recliners were only willing to pay about $12 to recline while reclinees were unwilling to sell their knee room for less than $39.

When the status quo is a reclining seat, people demand a lot of money before they’ll give it up. But when the status quo is a lot of knee room, people demand a lot of money before they’ll give that up.

So what would happen if this experiment were done in real life on a large scale—and without any messy face-to-face negotiation? Suppose an online booking service offered non-reclining seats for a $20 discount and the seats behind them for a $20 extra charge? Would the market clear? No? Then try $15. Or $25. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take too long to find the market-clearing price, and I’ll bet it would be somewhere around $25 on most flights. (Though possibly much more on red-eyes.)

The authors of the Slate piece note that in the online experiment, the status quo would have changed only about a quarter of the time. But that’s to be expected. I’d be likely to pay for the legroom because I’m fairly tall and I sometimes want to use a laptop on my tray table. But for anyone of average height or less, it’s probably not that big a deal. Likewise, some people care about reclining and others don’t. I mostly don’t, for example. Put it all together, and I’d guess that if you offered this deal on a long-term basis, less than 20 percent of all seats would be affected.

Now, would any airline find it worthwhile to do this? Probably not. There’s no money in it for them, and enforcement would be a huge pain in the ass. But it would certainly be an interesting real-world experiment if anyone were willing to give it a go.

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Would You Pay $20 For a Non-Reclining Seat in Front of You?

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