USSR's Big Bang Anniversary

Forty-eight years ago today, the U.S.S.R. (today known as The Russian Federation) tested the largest thermonuclear weapon ever. This bomb known as the Tsar Bomba had a capacity of 100-megatons of TNT. Damage was observed as far away as about 600 miles. Good thing it was only effective enough to be equivalent to 50-megatons. Those were the days.....

Top Ten Food Ingredients To Avoid

Holistic Nutritionist, Paula Owens lists her top 10 food ingredients to avoid at Channel 15 in Phoenix. I would have to say that I would agree, but then again, I'm a hypocrite when it comes to white flour and sugar. A lot of this junk is added to 'processed foods.'

Raw Broccoli Best For Anti-Cancer Potential

More evidence for eating raw food to gain maximum nutritional benefit.

Left Brain vs Right Brain Test

This is an interesting test to determine if you are predominately left brained or right brained.

Why Nukes? Why Energy Independence?

Here is something by John Tierney on energy subsidies and energy independence. Is it better for the USA to benefit from cheaper competition from overseas?

The Rise Of The Machines

Was the financial crisis caused by too many PC's?

Another Home-Made Electric Car

A teenager in Texas builds his own electric car for $10,000. Detroit and Tokyo should be ashamed that they can't do better.

How Much Oil Is Left?

How much oil is actually left on this planet?

Nuclear Energy From Thorium?

Could thorium solve the world's nuclear waste problems?

100 Best Southern Food Map

This is very cool. Sent to me by my buddy JR. Click on the "100 Best Southern Food Map" link in the upper right. You can select different types of food on the legend in the lower left. Interesting magazine too.

Buckypaper - Nanotechnology Breakthrough

Buckypaper looks like regular cotton paper but it is 10 times lighter and maybe 500 times stronger than steel when stacked and pressed into a composite. The Florida St. researchers are working on a development path for manufacturing techniques. This will be big for the aerospace industry, electronics, and all kinds of transportation vehicles.

Amazing Photos of our Sun

Click here for a link to some amazing photos of our Sun. We are currently observing over 200 days with almost no sunspot activity and the solar wind is the lowest observed in the last 50 years. What's the significance? No one is certain just yet. Some speculate that there may be a global cooling as a result. We shall see.

Computer Circuit Builds Itself

An important first step was achieved recently in an effort to develop self-assembling computer circuits. The analogy is similar to the way DNA works. It is still relatively primative, but we may start seeing breakthroughs in the near future. The implications of this are something to think about.

What The Candidates Won't Talk About On Energy

I found this link on Glenn Reynolds blogsite which is from a NYT column on energy and politics.

Digital Conversion PSA

Southern Synergy Blog Comments - The Lack Thereof

A friend of mine commented today that he finds it strange that there are NO comments to any of my blog posts. I have been wondering why myself.

I thought that maybe the comment link did not work. I ran a test a few minutes ago and found that it works just fine.

I appears to me that to make a comment you must have a Google account or make the comment as "Anonymous". That is no big deal in getting a Google account and there is not cost.

I would encourage everyone to at least make an Anonymous comment. You can still leave your name if you like.

Let's get some dialogue going here. I would appreciate the feedback. I am think skinned enough to deal with disagreement.

Thanks,
Stan

ATM-Bot

Here is a clever illustration (cartoon) that you may like.

Henry Hazlitt On The Bailout

Here is a summary of Henry Hazlitt's book, Economics in One Lesson that is dead-on in it's analysis of how a free market is supposed to work. I have this book and I highly recommend it to EVERYONE.

IMHO, this should be taught to at least every high school graduate in this nation.

South African Electric Car

Here is a story about a hot electric car from South Africa that created quite a buzz at the Paris Auto Show recently. This looks promising and much more affordable than the Tesla sports car. How does 250 miles per charge at less than $30k sound?

Maybe it is a good time to attempt to corner the world market on lithium?????

New Harris Poll On Nuclear Power

The new Harris Poll on nuclear power finds a generation gap. Go figure.

Computer Intelligence Turning Test Update

The Turning Test results indicate that the computer came up just a little short, but it was close.

Bond Market Collapse Is Imminent

Adrian Douglas is predicting that the bond market is on the verge of collapse. This is certainly not my area of expertise, but I'm trying to pay closer attention to economic issues.

Excluding derivatives, the bond market is the biggest market in the world. When this market starts to tank, trillions of currency will go seeking a safe haven. A percentage will most certainly go into precious metals and elevate them to very high levels.

"The authorities keep saying that they will “use all tools available to them”. They only have one…it’s an electronic version of the printing press. They will spin it in many different ways using jargon like “increased liquidity” and “injection of capital” and “buying equity stakes” and “buying toxic debt” but it all translates to “create more money out of thin air”. Gold and silver and the mining equities will be the place to be and soon thereafter commodities in general."

I've been thinking about this $867 billion bail-out and the effect it will have if all that credit is but into our financial system. Logic indicates that this would be highly inflationary. Too much money in circulation. This could be devastating.

Tennessee Man Converts Truck To Run On Batteries

Here is some ingenuity out in west Tennessee. He was spending $100 a week on gasoline and decided to do something about it. Good for him!!

Life Way Down At 1.7 Miles Below

The tenacity of life is amazing. A bacteria living at a depth of 1.7 miles at temperatures of around 140 deg. F. and NO oxygen.

I recommend a very good book that contains some good information about this tenacity and other great stories about biology and other studies of the universe. The title is "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. It is a great read, funny is will not be over the heads of those who don't feel science is one of their strengths.

Our Electric Future

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, wrote an interesting article on the effort of the USA to become energy independent back in the summer. I should have posted it back then but it somehow fell through the cracks of this blog site.

The oil prices plunging, we are beginning to see funding dry up for biofuels production. This is unfortunate since we will eventually need biofuels to supplement petroleum production while we work on electric transportation. I like to use the analogy of putting money into a savings account. If you don't start early, even when times are hard and money is tight, it is difficult to build up much of a nest egg.

World Undergoes A Nuclear Renaissance

Here is the South African perspective of the world's nuclear renaissance. They plan on building large nuclear power plants by 2025. They will also build a few additional pebble-bed modular reactors (PBMRs) in a few years. John McCain says he wants to see 45 new nuclear plants built by 2030.

Where will the industry get the skilled workers to construct and operate these plants? We are seeing an increase in undergraduate and graduate nuclear engineering degrees in the USA in the last few years.

About 35% of the current nuclear power workforce will retire in the next 5 years. There are currently about 8000 nuclear trained engineers. By 2020 we will need about 12,500 and about 21,500 in 2050.

Tennessee This Week - Prof. Harold Black

More from Prof. Harold Black on this week's (Oct. 5, 2008) Tennessee This Week with Gene Patterson. This is a very informative 11 or so minutes and is highly recommended. What a shame this man doesn't have the ear of all those clowns in Washington District of Corruption and Wall Street.

Aftermath of Hurricane Ike

With all the craziness of the past couple of weeks in politics and the financial markets, the victims of Hurricane Ike have been almost forgotten. From this article, it sounds like the people in the Houston/Galveston area are wondering why they have been forgotten.

If we keep having these weekly 'disasters' I'm concerned that the commutative effect may be devastating for this country's economy and psyche.

Energy Innovators - An Update

Here is an article from USA Today that describes the efforts of 4 alternative energy innovators (Nanosolar being one).

Nanosolar Raises Record Funding in 2008

Nanosolar announced a little over a month ago that it raised $300 million for production facilities in Germany and the US, which is the most for any solar start-up this year. They hope to manufacture enough panels at it's San Diego factory to generate about 430 megawatts of electricity. In California the rule of thumb is that 1 megawatt will power about 750 homes.

"Intelligent" Computers Put To The Test

Six computer programs are about to take the "Turning Test" in order to determine whether computers can 'think.' $100,000 is offered for the winning design by the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence.

The Design of Extremely Large Telescopes

Astronomer Jerry Nelson was thinking out of the box on a new design of an Earth based telescope that in some ways is better than the Hubble Space Telescope. This is opening the way for even larger and more advanced telescopes.

Prof. Harold Black On The Economic Mess

Hallerin Hill had Prof. Harold Black of the Univ. of Tenn. on his radio show this morning to discuss his analysis of the current and on-going economic mess.

This is about the best analysis I've heard to date and I highly recommend that everyone take the time to listen to this interview.

Again we find that we don't always get all the information on the network talk shows. I think this guy is pretty sharp. Check it out.