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  • Quote without comment

    Number of comments: 1
    From user Zenster commenting at Gates of Vienna: The nearly unanimous inability for anyone, be it the media, army command, law enforcement or this nation's political administration, to identify the Fort Hood massacre as a terrorist attack is symptomatic of the free ride that Islam gets, like some societal lamprey, on [...]
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    Posted: November 16, 2009, 11:21pm EST
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Beyond disgusted

    Number of comments: 5
    Part IV of Dittmar's essay has been up at The Oil Drum for the last few days.  I've been reading it as fast as I can stomach it. To say that I'm disgusted by that tripe is a gross understatement.  I am bitter, locked in disputes with the editors over the [...]
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    Posted: November 14, 2009, 11:13pm EST
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Potent things come in small packages

    Number of comments: 6
    I have been reading the PhD dissertation of Vaclav Dostal for information and inspiration, and I came across a graphic which shows the difference between the bulk of a steam turbine system, a helium turbine (proposed for high-temperature nuclear reactors) and a CO2 turbine system (a cheaper alternative to the [...]
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    Posted: October 29, 2009, 5:29pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Stimulus flops - who knew?

    Number of comments: 0
    It turns out that the stimulus has produced many fewer jobs than claimed.  In some cases, stimulus money produced no jobs at all or simply prevented employees from jumping ship for better pay. When the histories are written, I suspect that the stimulus (and TARP, and the Federal Reserve's immense expansion [...]
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    Posted: October 29, 2009, 5:15pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Religious whinging in Florida

    Number of comments: 0
    The Associated Press reports via Yahoo News that a Florida man, fired from Home Depot because he would not adhere to the company uniform, is suing for religious discrimination. It appears to me that the company has an airtight case.  FTA:"This associate chose to wear a button that expressed his religious" [...]
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    Posted: October 29, 2009, 5:02pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Speculation on limits to growth

    Number of comments: 3
    If I may offer a science-fictional scenario for techno-cornucopianism, the limit for earth-based society is when it becomes something like a living system which can reproduce its components from the local resources.  The elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) are available just about everywhere in various proportions, and [...]
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    Posted: October 05, 2009, 9:07am EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • YOU LIE!

    Number of comments: 1
    In the news today is President Obama's health-care plan: Obama defended his proposed health care overhaul, including a key point of the various health care bills on Capitol Hill: mandating that people get health insurance to share the cost burden fairly among all.So some people are going to be forced to [...]
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    Posted: September 20, 2009, 3:25pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Energetics of cultivation: draft animals vs. combustion engines and the Haber process

    Number of comments: 0
    Abstract The energy use by the agricultural sector of the economy has been widely discussed and debated in the peak oil community.  The amount of energy used directly at farms is not very large; typical claims for the fuel required to cover a field with a plow or other implement are [...]
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    Posted: September 19, 2009, 1:52pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • The death of Cantarell

    Number of comments: 0
    This graph says a great deal, and it is very worrisome: [...]
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    Posted: September 11, 2009, 12:03pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • What's up with energyfromthorium.com?

    Number of comments: 1
    I am quite annoyed with them right now.  Not only does the registration process fail with an error message which is obviously incorrect, the e-mail address for the administrator bounces! How stupid do you have to be to delete the account for your administrator?  This makes the site look like it's' [...]
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    Posted: August 22, 2009, 10:25pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Evading Yahoo's irritating demands

    Number of comments: 0
    I have what I believe is a way to get around the Yahoo Mail redirect which demands personal information for the password recovery. It is a simple process: Delete Yahoo cookies.Go to the Mail login page.Delete Yahoo cookies again.Then enter user name and password as normal. This appears to go straight [...]
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    Posted: August 22, 2009, 5:38pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Dammit, Yahoo, can't you take a hint?

    Number of comments: 0
    Aside from the total capitulation of the core of the business to Microsoft, Yahoo's fate appears to be sealed by the fact that they Just Don't Get It. Take this impertinent quiz forced onto unwilling Yahoo! Mail users.  It asks a bunch of personal questions so that someone can get into' [...]
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    Posted: August 15, 2009, 12:36am EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • EPA economy ratings vs. the GM Volt: A square peg in a round hole

    Number of comments: 0
    What a difference a number makes. The projected EPA economy rating of the GM Volt has set off a storm of criticism across the Internet.  While a number of blogs played the story straight (1, 2), the Good Math blog attacked it as nonsense, which got picked up by Reddit.  Critics [...]
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    Posted: August 12, 2009, 10:15pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • The Federal Reserve acknowledges peak oil

    Number of comments: 0
    Coming late to this, but in case you missed it, Lou Grinzo notes that another piece of the government has reconciled itself to the inevitable—even if it is written in almost Greenspannish understatement. Go read it. [...]
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    Posted: July 09, 2009, 11:01am EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Steorn: Epilogue

    Number of comments: 0
    In an announcement which should have surprised no one (least of all me), a jury of international experts has declared that Steorn's "free energy" device has shown no evidence of working.  FTA:“The situation was we had engaged them in February 2007 and went through a process with them,” Mr McCarthy [...]
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    Posted: July 06, 2009, 11:22am EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • The 2012 oil crunch vs. Cash for Clunkers

    Number of comments: 5
    Via the UAE comes a warning from Saudi Arabia:  crude oil prices are likely to spike above last year's record high.  "If others do not begin to invest similarly in new capacity expansion projects, we could see within two to three years another price spike similar to, or worse than," [...]
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    Posted: June 15, 2009, 2:38pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Yahoo! Mail Classic "upgrades" making it unusable

    Number of comments: 0
    How do I hate Yahoo's "improvements"?  Let me count the ways: Yahoo upends the way Mail operates with no rhyme or reason.  For instance, my mail folders used to open to the most recent messages, in time-stamp ascending order.  For a while, folders opened to the oldest messages instead, with no [...]
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    Posted: May 30, 2009, 7:48pm EDT

  • Stick a fork in Freedom Car... it's done

    Number of comments: 1
    Roughly 100 days into the Obama administration, Steven Chu has announced that the hydrogen fuel cell will not be a practical power source for cars in the next 10-20 years and does not merit the emphasis placed on it.  Funds for vehicle development have accordingly been cut off. That didn't take long.  (Pity Europe' [...]
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    Posted: May 14, 2009, 10:58pm EDT

  • Well, it's something.

    Number of comments: 0
    From Green Car Congress: The researchers found that Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use the current to convert carbon dioxide and water to methane without any organic material, bacteria or hydrogen usually found in microbial electrolysis cells. “We have a microbe that is self perpetuating that can accept electrons [...]
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    Posted: April 01, 2009, 1:11am EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Washington bunraku theater

    Number of comments: 0
    The furor over the AIG executive bonuses is, as others have already noted, largely misplaced.  Why should anyone care about the disposition of less than 1/10 of 1% of the total bailout money?  The whole thing is less than a day's expenditures in Iraq; it doesn't amount to a hill' [...]
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    Posted: March 26, 2009, 9:40am EDT

  • Electric generation chart

    Number of comments: 4
    Posted to be linked elsewhere. Nothing to see here, move along. [...]
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    Posted: February 19, 2009, 7:36pm EST

  • Mr. President, follow that just a bit further

    Number of comments: 2
    In news today, President Obama implies that faith used as a tool to divide people is being mis-used and says there is no faith in the world that is based on hatred. Will he then note that Islam states in no uncertain terms (Sura 98:6) that "those who disbelieve, among the" [...]
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    Posted: February 05, 2009, 11:05am EST

  • Saint Gasoline on art

    Number of comments: 0
    Saint Gasoline has produced an entertaining little exposition on the evolution of art.  An excerpt:Then something happened in the past century that changed art. Artists sort of went apeshit. James Joyce made novels full of jibberish and vague allusions to Greek myths. Picasso painted portraits of people made out of [...]
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    Posted: December 30, 2008, 4:27pm EST

  • Not energy-related, but worth reading

    Number of comments: 0
    Mostly because it's Dave Barry's year in review, and it's laugh-out-loud funny (okay, that's redundant). [...]
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    Posted: December 29, 2008, 10:38pm EST

  • AC Propulsion removes white papers

    Number of comments: 2
    AC Propulsion used to have a very useful collection of white papers and other things on their site.  I cited this stuff all the time. The other day I went to cite some of their V2G work related to reactive power... and it was all gone!  The entire resources directory had [...]
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    Posted: December 23, 2008, 9:28am EST
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Efficiency standards: No public comment?

    Number of comments: 5
    This is the season of bailouts.  A great many people did foolish things with other people's money, and now Congress is putting the US taxpayer on the hook for it. The $700 billion bailout of Wall Street is the biggest of these, but far from the only one.  With Congress handing [...]
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    Posted: November 07, 2008, 11:51am EST

  • Looking for plans/instructions

    Number of comments: 0
    Sometime in the distant past, I recall seeing ads for plans to convert an automotive A/C compressor to a steam or air motor.  These were supposedly simple enough that they could be done with a drill press. Now that I'm interested in playing with something like this, I can't find a [...]
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    Posted: October 23, 2008, 9:53am EDT

  • On the hazards of ignorance of thermodynamics

    Number of comments: 5
    Wherein the author continues a discussion as an essay Over at The Oil Drum, a discussion subthread about gas turbines as energy converters ended with this late-arriving statement by Cyril R.: Non-combustion gas turbines are not proven. They're mostly in pilot/research stages. You say that the conditions in non-combustion lower temp operation [...]
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    Posted: October 01, 2008, 12:07am EDT

  • Nature abhors anything below sea level

    Number of comments: 0
    [...]
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    Posted: August 28, 2008, 10:32pm EDT

  • Among the living, or the dead?

    Number of comments: 0
    We interrupt our regular schedule of energy blogging and rants for this special bulletin. Does anyone know if Möbius Stripper is on-line even the tiniest bit?  It's been two years since the last post on Tall, Dark and Mysterious, and I miss the acerbic humor and take-no-hostages approach to the follies [...]
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    Posted: June 05, 2008, 11:21pm EDT

  • Useful questions re: CAES

    Number of comments: 19
    CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) is being promoted as a way to smooth the delivery of intermittent supplies of power from e.g. wind.  This would increase its ability to displace other supplies of electricity and reduce carbon emissions from the same. Of course, pumping lots of air around is going to [...]
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    Posted: May 31, 2008, 1:20am EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Inspired by Picasso

    Number of comments: 0
    Pablo Picasso once said, "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."  He was right.  Correct answers to the wrong questions get you nowhere. The crisis in commodities is feeding back into the cost of energy.  The amount of raw materials (both steel and fuel) required to bring new oil [...]
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    Posted: May 28, 2008, 11:30pm EDT
    by Engineer-Poet

  • Sauer-Danfoss: A rant

    Number of comments: 3
    I've been suffering with the products of a company called Sauer-Danfoss.  This company makes industrial controllers and displays, programmed with a proprietary graphical system resembling ladder logic.  Here is my litany of complaints (addressed as an open letter, because I would like the world to know what a pain this [...]
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    Posted: May 06, 2008, 12:24am EDT

  • Quote without comment

    Number of comments: 3
    Biology is under attack in the US right now — there are a great many people who are utterly ignorant of the subject who have decided that no, sir, they don't like it, they don't want to be a descendant of no monkey, and Jesus tells 'em everything they need [...]
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    Posted: January 26, 2008, 8:55am EST

  • Losing context

    Number of comments: 4
    I've been so consumed with a very few blogs and activities of late, and realized that there were at least a dozen that I'd been neglecting (easy to do, because they're bookmarked on a computer not currently connected to the Internet and with a screwed-up USB automounter).  I thought about [...]
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    Posted: January 05, 2008, 2:35am EST

  • An irritation of trolls

    Number of comments: 9
    Once upon a time, the English played a game of creating collective nouns.  It is from this that we get "a gaggle of geese", "a murder of crows", and so forth. The Internet creates a need for terms to describe new things and phenomena.  I nominate "an irritation of trolls" for [...]
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    Posted: December 13, 2007, 10:50pm EST

  • Presentations on thermal conversion

    Number of comments: 4
    Robert Rapier received 3 PDF files on Changing World Tech's thermal conversion process (TCP, formerly thermal depolymerization) from a correspondent.  Since they have become hard to find on the web, I have put them up at The Ergosphere's formerly-undisclosed location, ergosphere.wordpress.com. [...]
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    Posted: April 14, 2007, 11:11am EDT

  • This thing is still on?

    Number of comments: 3
    (Title references this, BTW.) I logged in to post comments elsewhere, and got a surprise:  the dashboard page, which I never thought I'd see again.  At least per superficial appearances, no action on my part was required to keep going past... what, exactly?  Was the blog converted?  Is this now a [...]
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    Posted: March 31, 2007, 12:34am EDT

  • Two easy pieces

    Number of comments: 16
    The difficult parts of the emerging renewable energy economy are the high-efficiency biomass converters and new energy storage.  (The biomass-to-electricity converter is a sine qua non for the Sustainability scheme.)  These are essential; without high efficiency the energy yield of biomass is too low to support a high standard of [...]
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    Posted: February 11, 2007, 12:50am EST

  • Goodbye to Blogger?

    Number of comments: 13
    On my sign-in just now, I got a notice that I can go straight to my Blogger dashboard without converting to the new Blogger and making a Google account — but I can only do this once.  After this I must have a Google account if I want to post [...]
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    Posted: February 11, 2007, 12:05am EST

  • The art of propaganda

    Number of comments: 12
    Being sick and somewhat out of sorts, I only half-listened to the SOTU speech (text) on Tuesday.  But what I heard did nothing to change my opinion of our lame duck President. I heard plenty of weasel-phrases, and the anemic goals reminded me of "the soft bigotry of low expectations".  Twenty [...]
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    Posted: January 26, 2007, 1:16am EST

  • The pols sit still for the message

    Number of comments: 5
    Maybe there's hope after all. Via Yahoo news (h/t:  The Oil Drum) comes word that Peter Barnes, founder of Working Assets Long Distance, made a presentation on greenhouse-gas abatement to the Vermont legislature. That the legislature received the presentation is itself progress, but the specifics are noteworthy: A statewide carbon cap, implemented via [...]
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    Posted: January 18, 2007, 1:24am EST

  • Exhausting the non-options

    Number of comments: 20
    Men will behave reasonably when all other options have been exhausted. Nowhere does this appear to be more true than in interest-group politics.  Agricultural interests, trying to prop up their commodity prices, may finally create the condition of crop scarcity that they've always sought to secure their profits.  Per the NYTimes, [...]
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    Posted: January 08, 2007, 2:06am EST

  • 2006 post summary

    Number of comments: 0
    Subject index Administrivia 2006-01-06   Pleasing the crowd 2006-01-06   And speaking of tip jars.... 2006-02-17   Ergosphere subject index, 2005 2006-02-27   Test 2006-03-21   On hiatus 2006-04-13   I have returned 2006-04-25   Coming soon 2006-05-02   Spam attack 2006-06-17   We apologize for the inconvenience 2006-11-22   Worth the wait Allies 2006-01-07   Thomas [...]
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    Posted: January 07, 2007, 11:55am EST

  • Why unit analysis matters

    Number of comments: 10
    "The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."  Every time I start to forget this, something comes along to remind me.  Sometimes forcefully. I forget what prompted me to write Unit Analysis.  This time, it was a clown who can neither calculate the area of Earth's disc [...]
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    Posted: December 19, 2006, 12:41am EST

  • Very important read

    Number of comments: 3
    I have just finished a very thoughtful article at Energy Pulse, Playing with Fire – The 10 Tcf/year Supply Gap -- Part I.  I highly recommend that everyone read this article to see what kind of trouble we're looking at. [...]
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    Posted: December 16, 2006, 11:17pm EST

  • Open letter to the USA: Be careful what you ask for

    Number of comments: 4
    Because even if you get it, you may not like paying the bill. The US energy situation is suffering — actually suffering — not from too little oil, but arguably too much.  The costs of getting what we have are far greater than the pump price, and going upwards. But that's not [...]
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    Posted: December 07, 2006, 11:58pm EST

  • More progress I just learned about

    Number of comments: 3
    It looks like my spec for 50% efficiency in the gas-to-electricity step in Sustainability may have been pessimistic; Fuel Cell Today had an article last year which claimed the possibility of 80% efficiency (see page 4).  (I claim overwork as an excuse.  Yeah, that's it.) Further, this is not from a [...]
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    Posted: December 04, 2006, 11:16pm EST

  • Renewable energy and the auto industry

    Number of comments: 3
    Of all the surprises I've had this year, the biggest was probably these words from the head of GM: First, electricity offers outstanding benefits... beginning with the opportunity to diversify fuel sources upstream of the vehicle. In other words, the electricity that is used to drive the vehicle can be made [...]
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    Posted: December 03, 2006, 12:27am EST

  • It comes almost too fast to keep up

    Number of comments: 7
    Evidence accumulates that the biofuel recycling step in Sustainability is not only feasible, but here today:  Greenfuel just announced production of commercial-quality biofuels from CO2 scavenged from an Arizona powerplant (h/t:  Cervus @ GCC). Further, they mentioned that the CO2 capture efficiency is as high as 80% during daylight hours.  This [...]
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    Posted: December 01, 2006, 12:30am EST

  • Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy

    Number of comments: 55
    What, me worry? One of the biggest threats the USA faces today is a serious shortage of energy.  Vulnerabilities in our system have been made glaringly obvious several times; since the 1970's the USA has had social and economic upheaval due to the actions of foreign oil producers, and two hurricanes [...]
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    Posted: November 25, 2006, 11:54pm EST

  • Worth the wait

    Number of comments: 4
    I'm working on an extensive piece which has kept me busy for the last three weeks. It's huge.  It's currently up to 6690 words, and still not quite done (but getting very close). [...]
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    Posted: November 22, 2006, 12:12am EST

  • Micro-AE experiment

    Number of comments: 1
    I've not had the available facilities to do much in the way of alternate energy stuff, but a happy coincidence made an experiment possible. Some time ago, I bought a cheap AM/FM radio which claimed you could power it 3 different ways:With solar energy (its lens across the top proclaims "SOLAR [...]
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    Posted: October 17, 2006, 12:50am EDT

  • Open letter about the ethanol lobby

    Number of comments: 3
    While "The money-grubbing mendacity of the ethanol lobby" has been linked to Alpha Centauri and back, it doesn't make the concise case for discounting ethanol as a solution to the USA's petroleum woes.  The people coming here through searches are probably looking for that, so here it is as a [...]
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    Posted: October 15, 2006, 1:48am EDT

  • Great strides

    Number of comments: 3
    More evidence proof that events are getting ahead of me: GE has a SOFC fuel-cell stack which hits 49% efficiency. The GE stack is estimated to cost $254/kW for a 5.4kW system (under $1400 for 5.4 kW), exclusive of fuel reformer and electronics. It's not clear if the efficiency is for [...]
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    Posted: October 14, 2006, 11:49pm EDT

  • Another "holy crap!" moment

    Number of comments: 6
    After investigating a couple readers who had clicked in via a Google search for "ethanol lobby", I was floored to see that The Ergosphere has the #1 hit for that phrase. How the hell did that happen?! What's depressing is that my polemic gets lots of links, but more technical pieces like [...]
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    Posted: October 11, 2006, 11:35pm EDT

  • The real scandal

    Number of comments: 9
    It's amazing what does - and does not - move the body politic these days. To paraphrase Stalin, exploiting one person is a scandal, exploiting 300 million is a statistic. Rep. Mark Foley is accused of sending provocative e-mails and instant messages to teenage Congressional pages. He appears to have done [...]
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    Posted: October 05, 2006, 10:34pm EDT

  • Scamwatch: Steorn

    Number of comments: 8
    When things get tough, people get desperate. Desperate people will grasp at straws for solutions to their problems. Consider the worthless remedies obtained (sometimes at ruinous cost) by people with cancer. Laetrile and "psychic surgery" just begin the list. The money spent on these nostrums has made some of the [...]
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    Posted: September 06, 2006, 11:17pm EDT

  • Signposts

    [...]
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    Posted: August 21, 2006, 11:43pm EDT

  • The new me

    [...]
     | Rate | Archive
    Posted: August 21, 2006, 7:23pm EDT

  • Search me

    [...]
     | Rate | Archive
    Posted: August 19, 2006, 11:09pm EDT
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