The Last Ephor

Brother, Can You Spare 22 Terawatts? However, Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes a sobering analysis of the challenge of supplying adequate energy to the world in 2050. In his article, "On the Future of Global Energy" in the current issue of Daedalus (unfortunately not online), Nocera begins with the amount of energy currently being used on a per capita basis in various countries and then extrapolates what that usage implies for a world of 9 billion people in 2050. For example, in 2002 the United States used 3.3 terawatts (TW), China 1.5 TW, India 0.46 TW, Africa 0.45 TW and so forth. Totaling it all up, Nocera finds, "the global population burned energy at a rate of 13.5 TW." A terawatt equals one trillion watt-hours. Nocera calculates that if 9 billion people in 2050 used energy at the rate that Americans do today that the world would have to generate 102.2 TW of power—more than seven times current product...

Click here to find out.

Brilliant!

This week's propaganda video is apparently an attempt to encourage young people to buck peer pressure. The tag line is a riot: "When you give up the ability to decide for yourself...You give up what makes you, you." From the very people who deny you the ability to decide for yourself.

Can we put this guy on 24/7?

Brother, Can You Spare 22 Terawatts? However, Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes a sobering analysis of the challenge of supplying adequate energy to the world in 2050. In his article, "On the Future of Global Energy" in the current issue of Daedalus (unfortunately not online), Nocera begins with the amount of energy currently being used on a per capita basis in various countries and then extrapolates what that usage implies for a world of 9 billion people in 2050. For example, in 2002 the United States used 3.3 terawatts (TW), China 1.5 TW, India 0.46 TW, Africa 0.45 TW and so forth. Totaling it all up, Nocera finds, "the global population burned energy at a rate of 13.5 TW." A terawatt equals one trillion watt-hours. Nocera calculates that if 9 billion people in 2050 used energy at the rate that Americans do today that the world would have to generate 102.2 TW of power—more than seven times current product...

Like the Mystery Shopper now there's a Mystery Worshipper! Reviews of church services by secret attendees, what a brilliant idea. (I know this is highly subjective and I think the caveat is that cross-denominational reviews would be problematic at best.)

Britain wants UK break up, poll shows The United Kingdom should be broken up and Scotland and England set free as independent nations, according to a huge number of voters on both sides of the border. poll results A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland , an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone. It seems the English want the Scots to leave more than the Scots want to go There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Scottish voters also back an English breakaway with 58 per cent supporting an English parliament with...

Quiz time: You are a system administrator. The long Thanksgiving weekend is coming and your company is closed both Thursday and Friday. One of your three production servers is severely fragmented as a result of maintenance performed the day before. Do you: B: Run defrag routine overnight on Wednesday? B: Run defrag routine sometime over the weekend? C: Ignore fragmentation, migrate one of your other servers to a new subnet which you have not admin rights to and forget to inform the subnet owners who don't know they have to assign an IP address to your server which then sits in limbo until they finally find out while simultanously taking one of the other production servers offline and rebuilding it on a UNIX box because the current configuration doesn't support VB which is widely used by production reports? If you answered C, congratulations! You think like my manager. Incidentally, server load is also 200% of normal. Quick to the Wayback machine: Circa October 14th, 2006...