Greenies want to burn more fuel.

 

The greenies are pushing to remove natural gas from buildings and homes.  They think the all electric home produces less carbon dioxide emissions.  This story was front page on yesterday’s Wall St Journal.  This idea is a looser in the real world.

   The electricity has to be generated by real power plants.  Fake power plants (wind and solar) cannot be depended upon to produce electricity when needed, leading to blackouts like they had in Texas last winter.  Real power plants burn something (natural gas, coal, wood chips, anything) to make steam to drive steam turbines which drive the generators.  Due to unbreakable laws of thermodynamics, only 40% of the heat energy gets turned into electricity.  The other 60% is carried off by the plant’s cooling system.  And the same 60% loss occurs in gas turbine plants. 

   Whereas a gas stove or water heater puts almost 100% of the heat energy into heating pots on the stove or water in the water heater.  Natural gas burning appliances will save 60% of fuel compared to electric appliances.  And gas stoves are better than electric stoves, they will boil water faster and when you turn down the heat, it goes down right now.  Turn down the heat on an electric stove and it takes a while before the pot cools off, leading to burned food or boil overs. 

Dr Seuss is still #1 Best seller

 Second week in a row.  Best seller in hard back fiction.  Take that Amazon. 

Improvements in police work

In the face of a storm of criticism of law enforcement, I beg to differ.  Cops as a rule are conscientious public servants, polite, brave, skilled, good people.  There are however a few things we could do to make things better.

1.  Forbid no-knock raids.  Bust down someone's door at 0'dark thirty, and they will shoot to kill, every time.  Most of the time the cops shoot the victim, occasionally the victim manages to shoot a cop and gets himself put on trial for murder.  The original excuse for no-knock raids was to prevent drug dealers from flushing the drugs down the toilet to prevent them from being used as evidence against them.  That is not a strong enough reason to justify starting a gun fight where someone gets killed just about every time.

2.  Look for more non-lethal weapons.  Tazers seem to have worked out.  Tear gas works.  Flash bang grenades are used.  There are probably other things out there.  We ought to find them and make them available to cops on the street.  It's worth spending money on equipment that saves lives. 

3.  Repeal as many non essential laws as we can.  Eric Garner was killed during his arrest for selling single cigarettes on the street.  Far as I am concerned American citizens have a right to sell anything they like.  Garner died because the police were enforcing a law that should not have been on the books. There has got to be more laws like that which we could repeal.

Prevagen

 I have been seeing the ads for this stuff on TV.  They claim it improves your memory.  That sounded interesting, I am getting older and my memory is getting worse. So, first couple of times I got to the medicine section of Walmart I could not remember the name of the stuff.  I did remember it was made from jellyfish, but that didn't help find it on the shelf.  Anyhow I did remember the Prevagen name when I got to Walmart just the other day and found it on the shelf.  $60 for a bottle of 30 pills.  $2 a pill!  That's a ripoff.  So I didn't buy.  After I got home, I googled on Prevagen and up popped a lot of really negative comments and reviews.  FTC and FDA and AARP and others are against the stuff.  So much for magic memory cures.

Where do UFO's come from??

 Good question.  Asking this question only make sense if you think UFO's are space ships with live crews on board.  If you think they might be mirages of some kind, then they don't have to come from anywhere.  Other than Earth, nowhere in our solar system looks like it can support much life.  Mercury is airless, waterless, and very very hot.  Venus is not much cooler, the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead. Mars is nearly airless and cold.  Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface anywhere near the top of the atmosphere.  Jupiter's satellites are unpromising for life.  Ditto for Uranus and Neptune.  Uranus satellite Titan might support some weird kind of life that lives at temperatures far below water ice.  Pluto is frozen solid, colder than frozen. 

   Perhaps they come from another star system.  The physics we know now limits everything to traveling at light speed or less.   There might be an advanced physics that permits faster than light travel but we have not found it  yet.  The closest star is Alpha Centauri, four and a skosh light years away.  The others are all much further.  Gotta wonder about what sort of culture sets out on four year or more (each way) trips all that often.  

   Suppose they have faster than light?  I would expect an alien ship boosting up to light speed or braking down from light speed to show a very bright glare from her engines.  Something easily seen from earth.  Some years ago we launched a Saturn 5 after dark.  The glare from it's engines, just kerosene and LOX, lit up the entire east coast of the US.  I have no idea how faster than light engines might work, but I expect they would use more power than simple chemical engines. And there is always some waste energy that comes out as light.  Which is why I expect an alien faster than light drive to be super obvious in operation.

We should not allow Amazon to buy up MGM

 Amazon is too damn big already.  Now they want to buy up MGM for $9 billion.  Anti trust should forbid it.  MGM is plenty big enough to operate on it's own.  If they could get back to making good movies, they will do just fine.  Amazon has gained control of the on line market place.  You want to buy anything on line, you are probably buying it from Amazon.  We don't need Amazon to get any bigger.

Dr. Seuss is #1 best seller in Hardback Fiction

 This from Saturday's Wall St Journal.  "Oh the Places you'll go"   I remember that Amazon was out to zap Dr. Seuss a while ago.  Looks like the good doctor is still hanging in there.