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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   energy and carbon sequestration
Wednesday, July 29 2009
I worked on the well in the greenhouse some more this morning, surprising myself occasionally with how much stone I could remove. In general, though, the stone on the floor of the well is obdurate and gives itself up only a sliver at a time. I don't know how the Incas did it, but I do know that the hill folk of Appalachia commonly resorted to dynamite when hand-digging their wells.
A huge band of rain came through later in the day, terrifying Sally with occasional rumbles of thunder. During this period, I was hungry and found myself making a freaky-though-delicious salsa using vegan meatloaf, tomato salsa, and mushrooms. In search of more mushrooms, I went out with an umbrella but found nothing obviously edible (though there are now plenty of mushrooms evident, most of them having gills instead of pores, and many of these are members of the genus Amanita).
After the a heavy shower had passed through and all the usual rivulets were once more running with water, I went down to the greenhouse to see if any water was entering the well. A tiny trickle had just begun from strata two-thirds of the way up from the bottom; as one would expect, the deeper strata are less responsive to surface precipitation just as they are to surface temperature fluctuations.

This evening I re-watched the beginning of the movie The Matrix, which I'd just downloaded using a BitTorrent client. I'd seen the The Matrix precisely once before (soon after it had come out a little over ten years ago), and I mostly just wanted to see up to the part of the movie where Morpheus finishes explaining what the Matrix is to Neo in that awesome white-backgrounded simulation "space." As before, I groaned at the brain-destroying thermodynamic idiocy of using humans as batteries (real batteries don't need to be entertained with a matrix, and besides, the actual energy is supposedly coming from fusion). When you spend the kind of money that was spent on The Matrix, you shouldn't cut corners on the writing, particularly the research of the scientific premise. Science knowledge is poor enough in this country, with school science programs so bad that most people get their intuitive sense of science from Bible stories and movies like, well, The Matrix. This thermodynamic ignorance will have ramifications for generations and pervade all strata of society.
To take one example, these days there are actual scientists who think we can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground, which (from a thermodynamic standpoint) is the reverse of burning coal. It involves extracting carbon dioxide from the air and putting it in the ground through the expenditure (as opposed to production) of huge amounts of energy. Where does that energy come from? And does it make any sense when people are still building coal-fired power plants doing precisely the opposite? Inventors of carbon sequestration equipment were featured a week or so ago on Nova Science Now, and though there was a mention of the energy required to power electric fans, there was no mention at all of the enormous amounts of energy required to manufacture sodium hydroxide, used in an early version of the equipment. Sodium hydroxide is a highly-reactive substance, which it has to be in order to react with something as inert as carbon dioxide. In so doing, it is destroyed, requiring a constant production of more sodium hydroxide. (Later in this Nova Science Now segment we learn that the inventors are using something other than sodium hydroxide in their final design, and that the substance is "a secret." This doesn't give me much confidence that it can be made with any less energy.)


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