When it comes to “renewable energy” some ideas work better than others.   At least with wind and solar power energy can be generated – it’s expensive and you don’t get much of it, but working poorly is at least better than not working at all.  There are other ideas which just plain won’t work.   Some of these fall into the category of free energy or perpetual motion.   Others are somewhere between unworkable and impossible.

Here’s a new one (at least to me):  barometric pressure energy.   Point of fact you could gather a tiny amount of energy from changes in local barometric pressure, if you had a large enough piston to move every time the air pressure changes.  This idea, however, is based on the concept of using pipelines to connect distant areas.    (and I don’t mean wind power, which in a sense, does work in this manner)  When these areas have different barometric pressure, air will flow through the pipeline and spin a turbine.

Or at least that’s the idea…

Via “Cold Energy Technology”:

ACM is a system for the generation of energy based upon differences in the atmospheric pressure at geographically spaced sites, and comprises at least one long conduit – in the order of many miles long. In operation, the air flow in the conduit will accelerate to a high velocity wind without the consumption of any materials and without the use of any mechanical moving parts. A power converter, such as a wind turbine, in the conduit converts the high wind velocity generated by even small pressure differences into energy of any desired type.

The opposite open ends of the conduit are located at geographically spaced sites, selected on the basis of historical information indicating a useful difference in barometric pressure. A plurality of conduits, each having open ends in different geographically spaced sites, may be interconnected to maximize the existing pressure differences, and will produce higher and more consistent levels of energy production. The ACM conduit configuration of the invention can transform even barometric pressure differences in the order of one tenth pound per square inch into wind velocities in the sonic range.

Now who wants to explain why this absolutely will not work?

Somehow the following idiotic press release managed to actually get reposted on several major news outlet websites.

Via the San Fransisco Chronical (reprint off of PRWeb):

How natural medications affect the brain

How does medicine affect our brain? Prof. Dr. Wilfried Dimpfel from the Justus Liebig University in Gießen, Germany, uses electricity to come up with the answer. He measures brain waves with the help of an electroencephalogram (EEG) to characterize the impact of pharmaceuticals. Using one of the homeopathic medications produced by the pharmaceutical company Heel as an example, he examined its effects, compared it to other medications and created a differentiated profile.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is an approved standard method in medical diagnostics. It measures the electric signals that nerve cells in the brain use to communicate. Based on the region of the brain and the frequency of these electrical activities, the psycho-pharmacological effect of medication can be described, among other information. Each drug produces an individual reaction pattern.

The pharmacologist Prof. Dr. Wilfried Dimpfel examined the effect of a medication that contains several natural active pharmaceutical ingredients in homeopathic dilution, including passion flower and oats. Within an hour after taking the drug, the brain activity in certain regions already becomes more intense. It then reaches its peak after two to three hours and gradually decreases.

Yes, EEG is a valid medical technology that has diagnostic value, but in this case, the actual results are meaningless. It does not seem as if there is any placebo group, and in fact there is no control group at all. Whether or not the activity on the EEG is at all related to the fact that the homeopathic concoction was taken is impossible to tell. It could be that just sitting there for two hours causes the activity in certain areas of the brain to increase.

But it gets worse:

“Although the active pharmaceutical ingredients in the homeopathic preparation are highly diluted, the brain shows a strong reaction,” Dimpfel says. “The low dosage possibly even has a higher impact: In pre-clinical experiments, the brain’s response was even stronger if the dose was half of a pill per kilogram of body weight instead of a whole pill,” he adds.

Am I the only one who sees some pretty astounding logical paradoxes here?
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This is one of the most breathtakingly idiotic and downright scary stories I’ve read.   Persecuting scientists for not predicting something they absolutely cannot predict seems like the kind of thing that might happen in the middle ages.   When I saw the headline I immediately thought it must be coming from some backwater place in Africa or perhaps Haiti.

But no, it’s Italy, a fully industrial country that actually has running water, electricity and where everyone should know better than this.

Via the Sydney Morning Herald (Associated Press Story):

Italian scientists arrested over deadly quake
ROME: Seven scientists and other experts have been indicted on manslaughter charges for allegedly failing to warn residents sufficiently before an earthquake that killed more than 300 people in central Italy in 2009.

Defence lawyers condemned the charges yesterday, saying it was impossible to predict earthquakes. Seismologists have long concurred, saying no big earthquake has been foretold.

The judge, Giuseppe Romano Gargarella, ordered members of the national government’s great risks commission, which evaluates potential for natural disasters, to go on trial in L’Aquila on September 20.
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The judge reportedly said the defendants ”gave inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” about whether smaller tremors felt in L’Aquila in the six months before the April quake should have constituted grounds for a warning.

Prosecutors focused on a memo issued after a meeting of the commission in March 2009 called because of mounting concerns about seismic activity. The memo – issued a week before the big quake – said experts had concluded a big quake was ”improbable” but could not be excluded.

Commission members later stressed to the media that six months of low-magnitude quakes was not unusual in the highly seismic region and did not mean a big one was coming.

In one interview included in the prosecutors’ case, a commission member, Bernardo De Bernardis, responded to a question about whether residents should just relax with a glass of wine. ”Absolutely, absolutely, a Montepulciano doc,” he replied, referring to a red wine.

Such a reassuring opinion ”persuaded the victims to stay at home”, the indictment reportedly said.

The 6.3-magnitude quake killed 308 people in and around the mediaeval town, which was largely reduced to rubble. Thousands of survivors lived in tent camps or temporary housing for months.

Defence lawyers contend that since earthquakes cannot be predicted, accusations that the commission should have sounded an alarm make no sense.

Although earthquakes cannot be predicted, after Japan’s recent devastating quake experts said an early warning system in place there to detect the Earth’s rumblings before they could be felt helped save countless lives.

But as recently as this month Italy’s national geophysics institute insisted earthquakes could not be predicted in a bid to dispel a widely reported prediction of a huge quake that was due to strike Rome on May 11.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.

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As mentioned on this site before…

It’s really no surprise.   Aside from a few really really wacked out fundamentalists and the commenter named “anonymous” – who pretty much believes the sky is falling all the time, it would seem that predictions of the end days are not coming true.

Now to be perfectly fair, the 21st is not entirely over and they were a little vague on what time this would all go down.   According to some sites it’s 6 o’clock PM, but others just seem to say it’s May 21.      Then there’s the little issue of time zones.   Obviously the world does not experience May 21 at exactly the same time.   In fact, as of this writing, may 21 is already over for much of the Pacific, as May 22 dawns across the International Dateline.

According to Harold Camping, the old fool who came up with this idiocy it actually will follow the time zones.

Via the Times Union (quoting Camping):

I have learned that Judgment Day will begin in one part of the world, when they arise on May 21, about six o’clock Standard Time. And then every time another city or an area of the world comes to May 21, at about six o’clock, they will be in the Day of Judgment. And so the rest of the world that has not arrived there yet will know that it is occurring, many hours before it comes to their nation. On May 21, beginning at the International Date Line, the moment that first earthquake happens, the whole world will know that Judgment Day has come. It will follow the sun, from east to west.

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What determines why some people are heterosexual and others homosexual?   Is it genetic?   Environmental?   Developmental?  Is it a combination?

To be honest I really don’t know, and I don’t care that much.   However, I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with soy.

Yes, soy, as in the bean and products made from it.

No, there’s no evidence for this in terms of studies or empirical data.  However, one guy with an enormous forehead thinks that the reason there are so many gays out there is a direct result of the consumption of soy.   (Amazingly, in Southeast Asia, where soy has been a staple of centuries, there are actually still a large number of heterosexuals.  No explanation for that one.)

Via WorldNetDaily:
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Every once in a while you read something that is not just wrong, but wronger than wrong, in fact, it’s not even wrong.   Sometimes it’s so much worse than wrong it either makes you laugh at the ridiculousness of it or cry at the knowledge that people actually can believe it.

This is one of those cases.

From the Site “Hawaii Health Guide”:

Big Island Dairy Farmers fight radiation with Boron
An open letter from dairy farmers on the Big Island of Hawaii shares some solutions for working with radiation problems in milk.

Dear Milk Share Members,
Our goal to offer high quality safe food to our community has recently been challenged in the reality of the radioactivity being released into our environment. In the past weeks radioactive levels have increased in Hawaii, with high spikes and a more current leveling off of radiation levels. Milk from the large dairies in Hamakua and Hawi has shown elevated levels of radiation, from 400 to 2400 times the recognized safe levels.

Why is milk contamination significant in the world of agriculture? Because milk represents the overall condition of the entire food chain, since cows consume grass and are exposed to the same elements as crops. So, when milk tests positive for radiation, it indicates the entire food chain is contaminated since cows eat grass. When grass is contaminated everything grown in the same soil is contaminated. This has proposed a serious concern to us farmers, with us asking what can we do? After much consideration, research, and conversations with much appreciated experts in the field of biological farming and human & animal health, we have found some things which we are able to do to protect our soil, animals, and bodies.

But wait. It gets better. Here comes the best (or worst) part…

Aside from the much recognized supplement potassium iodine as a protection against radioactive iodine, there are a number of ways we can help. We have remembered our friend, elemental boron and the position it plays on the earth. Boron is the only mineral capable of accepting and ionizing radiation that never changes the innards or the nucleus of the cell. Spoken simply, boron can take radiation and release it without upsetting its own very delicate balance.

WTF? Accepting ionizing radiation that never changes the innards or the nucleus of the cell?

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Via the Associated Press (From Germany – Surprise Surprise!) (Presumably the dollar figure was translated from Euros for reprinting in the US)

Insurance cost vs. nuclear power risk
BERLIN — From the United States to Japan, it’s illegal to drive a car without sufficient insurance, yet governments around the world choose to run more than 440 nuclear power plants with hardly any coverage whatsoever.

In the United States, every nuclear power plant is required to maintain a minimum of $300 million in privately paid liability insurance. This is about the maximum that anyone can really hope to effectively get from private insurers, since much more would risk the insurance company itself would be unable to pay out. In addition to this, every plant operator pays into a shared risk insurance pool, which now totals over twenty billion dollars. Anything above that is government underwritten, since no private entity ever could guarantee such massive insurance burdens. Obviously these amounts are significantly higher than one could ever hope for most plant operators to ever be able to come up with on their own.

I don’t know the specifics of other countries, but most have some kind of insurance requirements.

Japan’s Fukushima disaster, which will leave taxpayers there with a massive bill, brings to the fore one of the industry’s key weaknesses — that nuclear power is a viable source for cheap energy only if it goes uninsured.

Governments that use nuclear energy are torn between the benefit of low-cost electricity and the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, which could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country.

The bottom line is that it’s a gamble: Governments are hoping to dodge a one-off disaster while they accumulate small gains over the long-term.

It is a cheap source of energy even when heavily insured, which it generally is.

The Japanese have a huge bill from a Tsunami and earthquake. This may have been made worse by the fact that the government is continuing to enforce an unnecessary evacuation area, even after nearly all the iodine-131 in the reactors is gone, decay heat has been reduced and cooling is stabilized. But that’s the Japanese government’s fault if they want to continue to support the evacuation.

The cost of a worst-case nuclear accident at a plant in Germany, for example, has been estimated to total as much as $11 trillion, while the mandatory reactor insurance is only 3.7 billion.

11 trillion? Now you’ve gone from wrong to complete absurdity. You could completely destroy much of Germany and rebuild it all for less than that. We know. We’ve actually done it. Even if you adjust for inflation it comes nowhere close to $11 trillion. Even if you consider the increased costs of labor, infrastructure construction and the fact that there were costs that were locally-paid, it does not even come close.

I’d love to hear where this $11 trillion figure comes from. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.

From there on, the article pretty much says the same thing, claiming all nuclear plants should carry insurance for amounts of money that don’t even exist and adding in a few dramatic statements from “experts” on the matter.   There is also the high and mighty claim that it’s unethical for a society to have to be burdened by the risk that a nuclear plant will suffer a cooling system failure and thus bankrupt superpowers.

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We know the approximate dosage that workers at Fukushima have been exposed to is not extremely high.  All but 28 workers have been exposed to less than 100 mSv, while only two workers have been exposed to levels as high as 170 mSv.  Thus far, nobody has been exposed to more than 250 mSv.

This is really not much radiation at all.  It’s more than the average person is exposed to and is more than nuclear plant workers are normally exposed to under normal operating conditions.   Still, 100 mSv is only about 10% of the minimum dose required to cause even minor, temporary radiation sickness.

Despite hazardous conditions, there have been no life-threatening injuries at the Fukushima plant since the quake and tsunami hit on March 11.  The worst case that workers might face is a slightly elevated risk of cancer in the years to come, although even that is not a certainty, and as it stands, even those exposed to the highest doses would have only a tiny increase in total risk.

So why on earth would anyone make a fuss about a worker being exposed to 17.55 mSv?   That level may be bellow the (extremely conservative) standards for exposure under normal operations, but it’s not high at all.  It’s not high enough to cause any detectable health problems.   It’s about the same exposure someone might get from a few CT scan examinations.

The reason everyone is all bothered is that the person in question had two X chromosomes.

Via Fox Business:

TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501.TO) said Wednesday that one of its female employees at the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was exposed to radiation exceeding three times the legal limit of 5 millisieverts in a three-month period, Kyodo News reported.

The woman, who is in her 50s, has no health problems, but the government’s nuclear safety agency said that two more female workers may also have been exposed to radiation in excess of the limit. The agency called on the utility to investigate the reason and take measures to prevent a recurrence.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told a press conference the situation was “extremely deplorable,” but added that all female employees had left the radiation-leaking plant on March 23.

According to the plant operator and the agency, a total of 19 female Tokyo Electric employees were working at the six-reactor complex following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the plant, and one of them was exposed to a total of 17.55 millisieverts of radiation.

The woman was found to have suffered more internal than external radiation exposure, with the internal exposure reaching 13.6 millisieverts.

Another agency official said that TEPCO needs to explain why the worker suffered so much internal exposure.

TEPCO and the agency said that the woman had been refueling fire trucks and working inside a building on site. She had been wearing a mask, but may have inhaled radioactive material when putting it on or taking it off.

An TEPCO official acknowledged during a press conference that its radiation-dose management should have been more stringent.

Under Japanese law, radiation workers are not permitted to be exposed to more than 100 millisieverts over five years, or more than 50 millisieverts in one year.

For female workers, the limit is 5 millisieverts in a three-month period, considering they may become pregnant. For the general public, the limit is 1 millisievert per year, excluding exposure from medical procedures.

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What would happen if you removed all herd immunity by intentionally creating a population of children who are not vaccinated, because their parents don’t believe in vaccination? What would happen if at a young age, when especially vulnerable to a disease like pertussis? What would happen if this highly contagious disease were then introduced to said population?

Pretty much what you’d expect to happen.

Via sethmnookin.com

This week, there is an example in Virginia of the ways in which a concentrated number of deliberately unvaccinated children can effect (or infect, depending on your perspective) the health of an entire region: Earlier today, The Roanoke Times reported that the Blue Mountain School, an “alternative” private school in Floyd County, had to shut down for a full week after twenty-three of its forty-five students came down with pertussis. According to the Times, every single one of those children was unvaccinated. The school’s administrator, Shelly Emmett, was quoted as saying, “Many of the families and staff at our school understand that some people choose not to vaccinate their children. We’re not requiring that they do.”

Emmett seems to be saying that the school’s administrators have decided they are exempt from Virginia law, which requires schools and day care centers to have documented proof that children have been vaccinated. (There are religious exemptions available in Virginia, as there are in 48 out of 50 states; Emmett’s quote implies that some, but not all, of the school’s unvaccinated students obtained such an exemption.)

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What country is going to win the award for being the stupidest in their response to the events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant?   Could it be Australia, where ignoramuses who were more than 75 miles from the plant are whining about possible radiation poisoning?   Could it be the United States, where idiots are frantically calling government officials to ask if its safe to go outdoors?   How about China, where morons are buying salt thinking it will protect them from radioactive iodine?

Excuse my name calling, but the sheer stupidity of this is starting to really get to me.   It seems that South Korea is now vying for the title of being the most radiophobic nation of complete and utter idiots by closing schools out of fear of radiation.

Via CTV:

SEOUL, South Korea — More than 100 South Korean schools have cancelled or shortened classes over fears that rain falling across the country may include radiation from Japan’s stricken nuclear plant.

The Education Office of Gyeonggi province said it allowed schools to decide whether to open Thursday.

The prime minister’s office said radiation levels in the rain were low and posed no health threat.

Still, officials said that 126 schools in Gyeonggi province, near the capital, Seoul, shut down and 43 others shortened class hours as a precaution.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said only a few schools outside Gyeonggi cancelled classes Thursday.

Radiation levels fall quickly as you move away from the source, and officials have cleared the 12-mile (20-kilometre) radius around Japan’s crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex.

Recent progress at the plant — which was damaged by a March 11 tsunami — appears to have slowed the release of radiation into the ocean. This week, technicians there plugged a crack that had been gushing contaminated water into the Pacific. Contamination in waters off the coast has fallen dramatically since then.

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