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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

One common trait among many of our civilization’s great thinkers is their humility.   Perhaps this started with Socrates and the line for which he’s so well known: “I know that I know nothing,” meaning that true wisdom is knowing you don’t know anything.

About 2000 years later, in the 1660s, we have this quote at left from Isaac Newton.

Of course, not all great minds through the ages were so modest.  Take, for example, the physicists of the late 19th Century who were convinced that everything of any real importance in their field had already been discovered.  A few years later we have Einstein, followed by quantum mechanics.  Oops!  That belief didn’t age well.

All this raises a series of unanswerable questions. Is there an end to physics, i.e. a point at which we honestly do have our arms wrapped around cosmology and all our puzzles have been solved: wormholes, time travel, dark energy and matter, string theory, unified field theory, parallel universes, another universe before the big bang?  If there is such an end, how close are we to it?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Our local National Public Radio affiliate broadcasts a weekly radio program called “The Reluctant Therapist,” in which the host interviews experts on subjects related to mental health.  Today’s subject explored the difference, if one exists at all, between religion and spirituality.

To me, this comes down in large part to how one defines the words.  The broad sense of the word religion, as it applies to practices like Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Jainism, seems indistinguishable from spiritualism, in that adherents hold belief systems to the effect that there are dimensions to human conscious that transcend the mental and physical functions of our bodies.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The author of the meme here makes a great analogy.

Of course, disseminating the Big Lie, i.e., that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump is far more difficult now that the right wing “news” media like Fox have learned that promoting this fabrication on the air can be extremely expensive.  The damages in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News came to $787.5 million.

So, if Trump wants to continue the lie, he has to do it more or less on his own.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

I grant that the concept here has merit, especially re: the use of otherwise useless land.  But bicycling under it doesn’t seem like a pleasant experience. And does the cyclist enter and exit?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

In this short and extremely general video, a representative of ExxonMobil explains Direct Air Capture (DAC), a set of technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Anyone seeking to solve this problem needs to deal with the challenge that the concentration of carbon dioxide is extremely low, about 400 ppm or 0.04%, meaning that 99.96% is something else, mostly nitrogen.  Thus, the enterprise necessarily involves sucking massive volumes of air through a filter, a process that itself has a huge carbon footprint, looking for something that’s very scarce.  The concept is doomed to failure, and everyone, including Exxon, knows this.

If Exxon were honest, they would admit it, and attack the problem from another direction, i.e., transitioning away from the consumption of fossil fuels.  But we’re talking about the company that has known since the late 1970s that their products were slowly destroying our planet but conspired to withhold that information from the world’s people, including the scientists who may have been able to deal with climate change before its ruinous effects set in.

Today, Exxon is throwing out more red herrings (like DAC) so that it can continue to bake the Earth.  As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “There are no words in the English language that describe acts like this.  The word ‘evil’ doesn’t even come close.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I honestly don’t know what would make an intelligent person say that.

Trump won in 2016, got more than 71 million votes in 2020, and is the runaway candidate for Republican nomination in 2024.

He’s a criminal sociopath, but he’s much beloved by almost half of the U.S. population. If we’re truly “better than that,” it’s time to start showing it.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Sadly, we live in a country where many people have neither, but they’re too ignorant to realize it.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

“Hate” is the wrong word here.

I don’t hate Trump supporters, though I certainly have a low opinion of them in terms of their capacity to reason and to feel compassion for others.

In a way, I feel sorry for them.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

If your kid is rejecting you as a parent because you believe that Satan is kidnapping him, maybe you’re the problem.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

As it turns out, the most lethal kind of cigarettes are those with menthol “flavoring,” and this has resulted in fierce efforts on the part of advocacy groups to force the U.S. federal government to ban the substance.

But guess what?  This is a long, slow progress, that, after close to a decade, appears to be going nowhere.  Big Tobacco has its own set of advocacy groups, i.e., lobbyists, that make it virtually impossible for consumer health groups to force Congress to pass laws that would reduce corporate profits.

There are thousands of people, most of them in Washington, working feverishly to ensure that the corporate giants whose products, when used as intended, cause death, are protected against government intrusion.

Many of them work in the same buildings as the oil lobbyists, whose jobs focus on ensuring that gasoline and diesel fuels remain dominant in human culture, regardless of the environmental collapse they’re causing.

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