Osmosis

Via GBM I find Statkrafts plans for osmosis power plants. An interesting idea and entirely new to me.

Statkraft are a bit coy about the costs. This chap says its too expensive now (I don't know if thats true, its only there for balance).

More like this

That's over at P3. But I've seen it elsewhere. The idea is that because we'll need to keep unburnt oil in the ground to hit (or rather, to not hit) a 2 oC commitment, a pile of oil companies are wildly overvalued, leading to... well, who cares what it leads to, because it doesn't matter. Via AS I…
Rod Dreher has an interesting post (building on a NYTimes article) about the glories of the art of confiture and why the obsessive creation of food-as-art is worth doing: When I went to Paris a year ago with my niece Hannah, I brought back some confiture by Christine Ferber. She makes some of the…
No, wait. This isn't yet another tedious post bashing Pruitt's dumb ideas. It's a post bashing mt2, which is far more interesting. I have two3 wildly exciting points to make about mt's post at ATTP. You people do need a red team If you stick to science, you generally get it right1. Oddly enough;…
What type of biomedical research costs the most? That is an interesting question. With the NIH asking for a 20% cut in everyone's grant, our lab has been looking into who spends what, and where can we cut costs. An interesting number set fell out of this internal audit: how much each postdoc in the…

According to my own analysis, millions of persons all over the world get the loan at well known banks. So, there is a good chance to get a sba loan in any country.

Dear William,

I one comment to Tamino's blog you wrote that one should not attribute this year's (whole) decrease in the arctic floating ice, because climate models do not predict so. I fully agree. But let me give an example.

We have an exceptionaly dry year in e.g. Siberia, partly contributed by clim. change. Huge amount of soot will be blown to Greenland ice sheet. The ice will get darker and the melting can be dramatically speeded up (I think this already happened in the past). One can say that this is not what climate models predicted, so this should not be attributed to climate change. Right?

But I guess, these kind of "unexpected" events (or non-linearities) could (should?) become more probable with further warming. Some peole say, that high uncertainty (or high variability of weather/climate in the past) should be reason for inaction. I think just the opposite. If we don't (exactly) know, it is a reason for caution...

Best,