These people’s message to potential investors: “There is no reason to drill when you can capture CO2 directly from the air.” The concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is ~400 ppm, or ~0.04%. This is either a scam or …
Category: Renewables – Science
Qatar’s Spinning Resort and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Really? Where does the energy come from to spin the resort? Someone thinks they’ll get more energy out than they put in? I’m reminded of a business plan for generating electricity using hydrokinetics I reviewed long ago, whose author told …
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Tagged with: second law of thermodynamics
Faith and Reason
Throughout the millennia, most religious texts have attempted to blend faith and reason. Thomas Aquinas, for example, set out to prove the existence of God using only the laws of logic that had been propounded by Aristotle roughly 1400 years …
Tagged with: faith and reason
Thinking Rationally
This quote from Hippocrates reminds me of something astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said to an interviewer who asked him, “Well, if there is all this stuff in the universe that we don’t understand, why can’t that be God?” He replied, …
Tagged with: Thinking Rationally
More on the Future of Christianity
I mentioned my friend Glenn Doty, both a Christian and a chemist/physicist, in a recent post about the future of Christianity, in which I argued that religion is largely impervious to attacks from science, insofar as a significant percentage of …
Tagged with: Future of Christianity
“A Heating Device that Consumes Only a Small Amount of Energy”
Here’s a product for people with virtually no understanding of science. The efficiency of electric heaters is very close to 100%. If I were Elon Musk, I’d have a team of people hunting down criminals who were using my likeness …
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Tagged with: Small Amount of Energy
Technology Is a Double-Edged Sword
Tocqueville wrote this in the early 19th Century, and there is no doubt that he made an excellent point, given the times. Had he been alive today, however, I doubt he’d be singing the same tune. Technology, while it is …
Carl Sagan Would Be Rolling Over in His Grave
Carl Sagan left us in 1996. If this is what he thought while he was still on this planet, it’s hard to imagine the pity and contempt with which he would regard this nation in its current mentally defective condition.
Tagged with: Carl Sagan
Poor Thinking Causes Problems in America
Among the many reasons that American society is having trouble functioning right now is that many of its members don’t think very well. Take the meme here. Are proponents of a woman’s right to choose abortion saying that pregnancy is …
Tagged with: woman's right to choose abortion
The Origin of Religion
Twain was a humorist and not an anthropologist, and thus we can accept what he said here with a grin, even though it’s clearly untrue. Religion was one of humankind’s first attempts to explain natural phenomena, before science came along …
Tagged with: The Origin of Religion
