1. Comment #175660 by eclampusvitus on May 5, 2008 at 7:52 pm

Thank god (so to speak) for TED.

ECV

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2. Comment #175662 by SPS on May 5, 2008 at 7:57 pm

Fascinating. An engaging fellow. It's nice to see that kind of subject matter presented in layman's terms with that sense of awe. One unexpected thing I learned is that intelligence does not guarantee a flattering haircut.
Great presentation, nonetheless.

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3. Comment #175665 by Goldy on May 5, 2008 at 8:09 pm

One unexpected thing I learned is that intelligence does not guarantee a flattering haircut.

Combine with this http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/science/06dumb.html?8dpc and one can go places no discussion has ever gone before ;-)

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4. Comment #175667 by Rtambree on May 5, 2008 at 8:27 pm

Take about hype. The LHC is being talked up like Deep Thought in Hitchhikers - the answer to everything, will solve all problems! What isn't it going to find? Supersymmetry? Dark matter? Higgs bosons? Mini black holes? Evidence of string theory? Other dimensions? My missing favourite sock?

The genome project was hyped in a similar way in the late 1990s - and the payoffs haven't quite materialised. I'm sure they will sometime this century.

Anyway, back to the LHC - my prediction is they won't find a thing - perhaps a couple of fleeting minor exotic mesons. It's not sensitive enough, need more time, blah blah.

And certainly, no answer is also an answer, of sorts. That's the way science works. So it's not all wasted even if it finds nothing of interest - the technology spin-offs themselves might be worthwhile.

I just wish these projects don't get all hyped out of the proportion - as the public will become jaded when reality repeatedly doesn't meet expectations.

Where's our customised medicine? Holidays in space? Supersonic scramjet travel? Smart houses? Self-driving cars? Robot servants? 10 hour working week? Internet as heads-up display in your sunglasses? Paperless office? AI? Resurrection of extinct species?

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5. Comment #175670 by cam9976 on May 5, 2008 at 8:34 pm

Brilliant!

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6. Comment #175680 by HourglassMemory on May 5, 2008 at 9:10 pm

I'm constantly visiting TED's website to see if there are any new talks.
This one is no exception. I've watched this a few day ago. I love hearing presentations like this.
Brian Greene with his explanation of String Theory is also extremely fun to watch, and damn informative.

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7. Comment #175689 by Aegisofreason on May 5, 2008 at 9:54 pm

why does everyone have a cool British accent but me :(

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8. Comment #175692 by gd_edi on May 5, 2008 at 10:13 pm

Ah, so refreshing after that Expelled interview in the last post!

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9. Comment #175694 by yyuryyub on May 5, 2008 at 10:13 pm

TED is always a tonic. Especially if, like me, you just tried to sit through the Stein/Beck (no relation to the author) interview.

Cleansed the deamons.

glad someone else thought so too, gd_edi

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10. Comment #175697 by Andrew Stich on May 5, 2008 at 10:23 pm

I just posted a comment nearly identical to what follows, but it didn't take... sorry if I end up double posting.

Rtambree:

"Where's our customised medicine? Holidays in space? Supersonic scramjet travel? Smart houses? Self-driving cars? Robot servants? 10 hour working week? Internet as heads-up display in your sunglasses? Paperless office? AI? Resurrection of extinct species?"

Science is a separate entity from technology, and does not exist merely to fuel the latter.

As to your prediction, are you a physicist? I am not, and I rather doubt that I will become one between now and this summer. Under these circumstances it is only prudent to say "I don't know" and to not extrapolate based on irrelevant precedents. If you are indeed a physicist or are otherwise learned in physics, please expound your position that I may better comprehend the subject.

"I just wish these projects don't get all hyped out of the proportion"

That's a perfectly fair and understandable concern.

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11. Comment #175700 by AKirkland on May 5, 2008 at 10:43 pm

Hey, isn't this the guy who worked on that movie Sunshine? Pretty sure it is.

Quite a good speaker, and an engaging talk. Here's hoping it all works properly when they turn it on! I see that this was filmed in March, however - have they turned it on yet, and if so, did it work? I doubt we'll get published results for quite some time.

Comment #175667 by Rtambree on May 5, 2008 at 8:27 pm
"Take about hype. The LHC is being talked up like Deep Thought in Hitchhikers - the answer to everything, will solve all problems! What isn't it going to find? Supersymmetry? Dark matter? Higgs bosons? Mini black holes? Evidence of string theory? Other dimensions? My missing favourite sock?"

Well, it has been hyped up a bit, but with good reason! Did you see the size of that thing? It's massive! Even if they found nothing, it's still a terrific feat of engineering and yet another sterling tribute to the genius of the human mind. But there's no need to be cynical before they even turn it on! And besides, nothing like this has ever been tried before, so fatuous comparisons to totally different projects in different areas of science cannot justify a lack of faith (word chosen carefully!) in some of the world's most intelligent and ingenious men and women!

EDIT:
Another point to remember is that this project won't necessarily make us robot servants, or AI computers... to use Richard's phrase, it isn't "non-stick fryingpan" science. Even if we were to discover a theory of everything tomorrow, there's no assurance that it would lead to a new wave of technological genius, because there's such a big leap from understanding the theory, and understanding its consequences. This is where chaos theory screws us all over. Rather, this project is for a greater and nobler cause than fryingpans... it is to understand the very nature of the universe at its most fundamental level. Don't you think that's rather worth getting excited about? I mean, if that presentation didn't send shivers down your spine then that's a monumental failure of your imagination!

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12. Comment #175703 by auralblip on May 5, 2008 at 10:51 pm

In answer to the point about LHC being hyped out of proportion:

I agree that some times big experiments like these get completely blown out of proportion in the PR but I don't think this is one of them. I was able to visit CERN on their last open day a few weeks ago and I have to say it's scarily impressive what they are doing. It's difficult to really get the scale just from reading and watching these presentations. We visited the atlas detector (looking for the Higgs boson amongst other things) and once you are up close you realise how much effort has gone into just this alone. It's huge. But even the mundane stuff is a major engineering feat. The construction of the beam line itself is stupidly complicated, e.g. they have spent almost a year just heating up and cooling down the beamline to test everything is ok.

All this aside the real reason this is important is the fundamental questions the LHC is attempting to provide an answer too. Remember they are trying to understand why particles have mass, investigate cp-violation and many more fundamental physics questions.

While this is just another experiment, I would say that if they get answers to even one of the issues they are investigating it will enrich our understanding of the universe, isn't that worth it?

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13. Comment #175708 by Teratornis on May 5, 2008 at 11:13 pm

Comment #175667 by Rtambree:

Take about hype. The LHC is being talked up like Deep Thought in Hitchhikers - the answer to everything, will solve all problems! What isn't it going to find? Supersymmetry? Dark matter? Higgs bosons? Mini black holes? Evidence of string theory? Other dimensions? My missing favourite sock?

How about a source of energy capable of running the thing, let alone the countries surrounding it?

The genome project was hyped in a similar way in the late 1990s - and the payoffs haven't quite materialised.

I don't know. The crime shows are pretty good, and they would be even less plausible without DNA technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_(genre)

I just wish these projects don't get all hyped out of the proportion - as the public will become jaded when reality repeatedly doesn't meet expectations.

We put a few men on the Moon, briefly, and yet we still have problems. Funny how that works.

Where's our customised medicine? Holidays in space? Supersonic scramjet travel? Smart houses? Self-driving cars? Robot servants? 10 hour working week? Internet as heads-up display in your sunglasses? Paperless office? AI? Resurrection of extinct species?

How about a solution to peak oil?

I don't mind the overhyping of a science project so much as all the carrying on about stuff that could look laughably irrelevant in as little as five years as the world drives off the peak oil cliff.

If all those physicists were working on, say, quantum dot solar cells, we might have economies able to support high energy physics research in the coming decades.

The sheer blithering ignorance of what the real immediate problem is, even among some of the world's smartest people, is more frightening than almost anything else that comes to mind.

Comment #175703 by auralblip:

While this is just another experiment, I would say that if they get answers to even one of the issues they are investigating it will enrich our understanding of the universe, isn't that worth it?

If the collapse of industrial civilization was not potential and imminent, we might have the luxury of entertaining such questions.

If even the medium-case scenario of peak oil turns out to be correct (never mind the worst case), we'll be looking back at almost everything we spent money on that didn't produce renewable energy as a catastrophically unacceptable opportunity cost.

Of course the Iraq war probably squanders more investment capital in one week than all of physics gets in what, a year?

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14. Comment #175743 by fatcitymax on May 6, 2008 at 12:44 am

Ridiculous hairdo and excess giggling.

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15. Comment #175766 by LaTomate on May 6, 2008 at 2:16 am

I saw this talk before, and loved it. I don;t care much about peoples' hairdos :)

Concerning the fact that it costs a lot of money, well so does a lot of other stuff. The internationally funded and run experimental fusion reactor in France is costing a lot, but you'd say it may be worth it (possibly cheap and abundant fusion energy), wheras for the LHC it is not really so since it does not solve any problems.

I have to disagree... even though practical applications of the research done there won't arrive so soon, it is through theoretical physics and experiments supporting the theory that we make the biggest advances in technology and it seems to me that the LHC won't be an exception to that rule.

Humans have almost always been in crisis of one sort or another. I agree that the latest one, climate change, is a great one, but it's not a reason to reject all scientific research to sort out other science problems.

If people invested their time and money on these sorts of projects rather than wasting time and ressources on their religions we wouldn't be having so much trouble funding proper science.

If the major powers invested half of their military budget on pure scientific research we weouldn't be having a discussion about funding priorities either I'm afraid.

Comment #175689 by Aegisofreason

why does everyone have a cool British accent but me :(

I have a horrible mix of American, Irish and Scottish, with a hint of French. Terrible :(

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16. Comment #175789 by davem on May 6, 2008 at 3:27 am

My missing favourite sock?

The missing sock problem has been solved. Throw away all your socks. Buy 20 pairs of your favourites. Sorted. Can I have a Nobel prize for that?

Now on to the LHC...

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17. Comment #175801 by rod-the-farmer on May 6, 2008 at 4:28 am

Now I am a big fan of science, in all its' forms and varieties. But this guy annoys me something fierce. We are supposed to believe he is a 'real' scientist, not just a TV personality who would not know better. And there he is, in living colour, and the man cannot even pronounce units of distance properly.

There is no such word as kil AW meter. The unit of linear distance for 1000 meters (and I prefer metres myself) is kilo-meter. Kilo is a prefix meaning one thousand. Kilometer does NOT rhyme with any of the following

speed Ometer
tach Ometer
Therm Ometer
od Ometer
spectr Ometer
micr Ometer
ped Ometer
dos Imeter
Polar Imeter
Phot Ometer
Calor Imeter
Pyr Ometer
Alt Imeter
Man Ometer
Potenti Ometer
Bar Ometer
Anem Ometer

These are all nouns describing devices for measuring things. The emphasis is on the vowel sound preceding the suffix meter, as in a "meter" for measuring things.

Kilometer is one of the words like

milli GRAM
centi GRAM
kilo GRAM
nano MEter
micro MEter
milli MEter
centi MEter
kilo MEter

which represent units of length, mass, etc. Note the emphasis is on the suffix.

I hate to be pedantic, but why don't scientists at least get this sort of thing straight. Just because most people mis-pronounce the word does not make it correct, nor acceptable.

What would you think of a person who said he had just bought a car, a Chevrolettt Corvetteeeeee ? A few bricks short of a load. And just because he owns one does not make his mis-pronunciation right.

Rant over. Sorry.

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18. Comment #175827 by beeline on May 6, 2008 at 6:04 am

Good job there aren't any other irregularities of pronunciation in English that confuse us as much as kilOMeter.

There is no such thing as 'correct' pronunciation, as a quick listen to any of the tens of thousands of English accents on Earth will testify. And there aren't any rules that dictate whether there should even be any consistency or systematisation to pronunciation.

The only simple rule is that people pronounce words in the way that they've heard them pronounced, and will generally pick up pronunciation patterns from those they respect, or like, or that appear to have some authority.

Language is utterly fluid. Your grandparents would hate the way that you speak, and you will hate the way your grandchildren speak.

Accept it, or spend your remaining years ranting! :-D

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19. Comment #175832 by Sharrow on May 6, 2008 at 6:13 am

Rod-The-Farmer writes...

Now I am a big fan of science, in all its' forms and varieties. But this guy annoys me something fierce. We are supposed to believe he is a 'real' scientist, not just a TV personality who would not know better. And there he is, in living colour, and the man cannot even pronounce units of distance properly.

Sorry Rod, I am usually a fan of your quotes but in this case you are way off the mark. Brian Cox is one of the best - a leading expert in high energy physics and an all-round role model for science. I should know, we interviewed him once for our site (www.scenta.co.uk) when he was scientific advisor for the movie Sunshine.

He is going places and deservedly so. He is certainly no spokesmodel. We shold be grateful. It's people like him who will help get more talent into science.

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20. Comment #175858 by huzonfurst on May 6, 2008 at 6:54 am

Gawrsh, rod-the-farmer, yew shore dew git upset over the small stuff. And there ya go spelling "its" with an apostrophe!

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21. Comment #175897 by rod-the-farmer on May 6, 2008 at 8:04 am

Sorry about the apostrophe. Can't edit it out, either. I was typing in a hurry, as I had just seen yet another clip of Shrub talking about 'nukelar' weapons. To me, this is as much a statement about his personal intelligence, as it is about his choice of advisors. None of whom seems to have been able to change him, or worse, has not even tried. Perhaps they don't know themselves ! Small stuff ? Maybe. But when the man has at his fingertips the button to launch enough of them to wipe life off this planet, I figure he should at least be able to say the name.

And as for the idea that since so many people use kilOmeter incorrectly, it is therefore 'acceptable', I refer you to the reason we are all here on this web site. Just because billions of people believe in a supernatural being who created the universe, does not make it true. I tried to use logic to show why kilOmeter is incorrect. You can accept or reject it as you see fit. I am may start mis-pronouncing the names of people who can't say this word properly.

Here is another.....preventative. No such word. Preventive, just like INventive. We don't say 'inventative'. And the plural of processes is NOT process-ease. I guess some think this makes them sound edumicated. But then I have a number of biases.

Etymological pedant, signing off. Now, back to our normal programming.

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22. Comment #175916 by huzonfurst on May 6, 2008 at 8:37 am

I get irked by the same bad grammar as you do, but I just couldn't resist the apostrophe comment. Don't agree about the pronunciation of kilometer, though, as linguistic evolution is not in the same category as rational vs irrational world views.

I don't have a problem with different pronunciations of "processes" either but have a personal bias against pronouncing the Latin diphthong ae as "ee" instead of "eye" (spelled wrong in Latin itself, as it started out correctly as "ai"). And the next person who says "between you and I" will have his head handed to him on a platter!

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23. Comment #175921 by Veon on May 6, 2008 at 8:40 am

Sorry Rod but you are just plain wrong about the kilOmeter thing. People are free to pronounce it like that. I won't argue the fact that it sounds better the way you want it to be pronounced though.

Your other examples are spot on and a great annoyance to me as well.

EDIT: To add that Brian Cox reminds me of Noel Fielding (which is funny.... to me)

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24. Comment #175943 by Styrer- on May 6, 2008 at 9:03 am

Thank you - this was an absolute joy to watch.

Cox's enthusiasm for and love of science are extremely infectious. A highly engaging chap, he was able in this short appearance to re-awaken in me the awe and wonder we should all feel at our place in this universe which faithoholics everywhere (esp. those visiting this site in recent weeks) seem determined to suck out of all of us.

Bloody marvellous, and a much-needed tonic.

Best,
Styrer

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25. Comment #176018 by miaka on May 6, 2008 at 11:33 am

"Anyway, back to the LHC - my prediction is they won't find a thing - perhaps a couple of fleeting minor exotic mesons. It's not sensitive enough, need more time, blah blah."--Rtambree

I don't know of any high energy physicist who thinks that the LHC won't at least discover the Higgs boson. In fact, probably the worst thing that could happen is that they discover the Higgs boson but nothing else. If they don't discover anything new, as you predict, then that itself would be an amazing revelation, because it would imply that there was something wrong with the standard model.

I would rank the possible scenarios from best case to worst case as:

best case: they discover SUSY as well as Higgs.
next best: no new discoveries.
worst: Higgs discovered, but nothing else.

Another thing: it seems that when scientists don't explain their work to the public, they're accused of conspiracy. When they do explain their work to the public, they're accused of hype.

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26. Comment #176028 by Sleep of Reason on May 6, 2008 at 11:53 am

They might know what happened 1 billionth of a second after the Big Bang but they still don't know what happened at the beginning :o)

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27. Comment #176106 by Teratornis on May 6, 2008 at 2:50 pm

Comment #175766 by LaTomate:

Concerning the fact that it costs a lot of money, well so does a lot of other stuff.

High-energy physics also costs brains, namely, a big chunk of the tiny minority of the people with the high intelligence and technical training necessary to save civilization from collapse as we drive off the peak oil cliff.

Money is a lot more plentiful than the people who can do what high-energy physicists do. So the real opportunity cost is in terms of what those people happen to find uninteresting at the moment.

It's not solely a question of funding. The physics community has a lot of clout for setting its own priorities. Politicians generally don't know science, so they have to trust the scientific community to tell them where the science funding should go. The near-term survival of industrial civilization may depend on how many scientists come to the same realization as CalTech's David Goodstein. Namely, peak oil is the problem that matters right now, and if we don't fix that one, then nothing else we're doing may matter much at all.

The internationally funded and run experimental fusion reactor in France is costing a lot, but you'd say it may be worth it (possibly cheap and abundant fusion energy), wheras for the LHC it is not really so since it does not solve any problems.

Hot fusion is a longshot, something like investing in lottery tickets, but there is a finite chance the lottery could pay off. Probably not soon enough to cushion the landing when we drive off the peak oil cliff, however. It might make more sense to delay the hot fusion research for a few years and have those people help figure out some things that could work sooner, like quantum dot solar cells, or algae fuel.

I have to disagree... even though practical applications of the research done there won't arrive so soon, it is through theoretical physics and experiments supporting the theory that we make the biggest advances in technology and it seems to me that the LHC won't be an exception to that rule.

I agree that if industrial civilization remains stable and prosperous enough to support the LHC for a long time, useful things should come from it. But here is the salient question: how much research will occur at the LHC when the price of oil hits $400/bbl?

(For comparison, today the oil price hit $122/bbl on NYMEX, yet another record in a long run of records so far this year. That's up from around $20/bbl in 2003.)

There are already some questions about how the global economy will manage with oil at the current price, let alone the prices that folks like OPEC and Goldman Sachs are predicting.

The question is not whether the LHC research may provide long-term value - it probably will, if it continues for a long time. The question is whether the research will continue.

Many large businesses find it important, at some point, to vertically integrate their supply chains. Similarly, scientists need to think about their own supply chain, i.e. the industrial economies which generate excess wealth to spend on science. Scientists, better than anyone else, have the ability to anticipate and mitigate threats to industrial economies. A few scientists have, in fact, predicted the peak oil crisis, and some of them even got pretty close on the timing. But this tiny group of people weren't able to get the issue into the general conversation in the same way the global warming folks have done.

Humans have almost always been in crisis of one sort or another. I agree that the latest one, climate change, is a great one, but it's not a reason to reject all scientific research to sort out other science problems.

I'm not talking about global warming. Peak oil is not global warming, although the two are related in the sense that ending our need for fossil fuels would solve both of them. Global warming is a longer-term problem - it will probably take humans at least a few decades to pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to trigger the next anoxic event which might exterminate most if not all humans. Peak oil, in contrast, seems to have already occurred in 2005 or 2006, which if true casts some doubt on the survival of industrial civilization over the next 10 or 20 years.

Almost everything we do depends in one way or another on the availability of cheap, abundant petroleum. Almost everything we want to do, such as improve the living conditions for poor people, depends on expanding our use of petroleum.

When nature tells us we have no more cheap petroleum, and we have to steadily reduce our use of expensive petroleum on nature's schedule - not ours - then we have a very serious problem. It appears we are already in the early stages.

If people invested their time and money on these sorts of projects rather than wasting time and ressources on their religions we wouldn't be having so much trouble funding proper science.

That's true, but we can't expect religious people to think rationally. Religion is inherently about rejecting rationality. Scientists, on the other hand, should be able to recognize the correct priority ordering of our problems.

If scientists cannot think critically and reason from the available evidence, then who can?

If the major powers invested half of their military budget on pure scientific research we weouldn't be having a discussion about funding priorities either I'm afraid.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next quite a few big-spender nations combined. During the Cold War, the impetus for military spending was superpower rivalry. Now that the U.S. is the last remaining superpower, the impetus is petroleum.

This is another reason for self-interested scientists to focus their efforts on making the U.S. self-sufficient in energy, especially to eliminate the U.S. dependence on foreign oil i.e. Islam. If the U.S. had no energy-supply worries, think of the vast resources that would be available for all sorts of useful things. The Endless Petroleum War in the Middle East is screwing up priorities.

New Orleans had lots of problems before Hurricane Katrina. Shoring up the sagging levees was just one crisis among many competing for the same limited resources.

While everyone acknowledged the city was at risk, nobody could predict exactly when a hurricane might strike, so people's focus went elsewhere, and kept leaving the levees for "next year." Then nature demonstrated its utter indifference to human schedules, and obliterated most of the city.

Peak oil is a much worse problem than a hurricane, because one cannot simply move up the river to Baton Rouge. Peak oil is a problem everywhere people depend on petroleum, which is pretty much everywhere people are these days.

Peak oil is like having a house on fire. Regardless of how many other important things you need to do, you should probably attend first to the fire.

If we solve the current energy problem, we will have the stable productive society which can afford to play around with particle accelerators.

If we don't solve the energy problem, the few people who survive the dieoff may be reduced to pre-industrial subsistence farmers, who won't be doing any science for a long time.

Other Comments by Teratornis

28. Comment #176109 by Rational_G on May 6, 2008 at 3:05 pm

Too bad some of you folks don't appreciate pure research. You would think "a clear thinking oasis" would know better. Apparently not. Better to comment on hairstyles and accents. Or tell people what they should be working on instead. I'm disappointed.

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29. Comment #176115 by Jiten on May 6, 2008 at 3:30 pm

Rtambree and Teratornis,

Scientists don't do science for the spin-offs,they do it out of curiosity.

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30. Comment #176140 by Geoff on May 6, 2008 at 4:58 pm

He's exactly the right kind of guy to be up there "promoting the public understanding of science".

Popularising? Yeah, why not? He clearly knows his stuff, but can put it across in a way that not only attracts funding, but attracts people to science.

And he has my accent, which is another plus.

Well done Brian Cox.

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31. Comment #176150 by Mitchell Gilks on May 6, 2008 at 5:17 pm

Excellent talk, I really enjoyed it. Loved that Sagan quote, I will have to remember that. Though every word Sagan ever said was worth remembering. No one inspires like he did.

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32. Comment #176189 by Goldy on May 6, 2008 at 8:21 pm

Teratornis

...peak oil...

Read some interesting letters in Arab News today. Here, I'll share...

Oil Price

This is regarding the report, "Oil Price May Go Up to $250, Warn Experts" (May 2). But your theory as to why the price of oil collapsed in the 1980s has no basis in fact whatsoever.

Here is what actually occurred:

In the early 1980s there was a concerted effort in the US to develop alternative forms of energy to counter the ever-increasing price of oil. Does this sound familiar? Those alternative energy programs involved solar, geothermal, wind, shale oil, coal, hydro, even nuclear power. We actually flew an F-16 on fuel derived from oil shale rock in 1980 at Hill AFB in Utah.

It was in the early 1980s while I was working and living in Riyadh that Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani made his memorable speech to the OPEC that signified the death knell for alternative energy in the US. In his speech Yamani said that the price of oil was too high and that the West was being driven toward alternative energy and away from its reliance on oil, and if that should occur it would be the end of OPEC as they knew it. Yamani went on to say that what was needed was a price that would keep the West relying on oil, provide a fair and sustainable return to OPEC, and make alternative energy uneconomical.

None of the other oil ministers in OPEC agreed. Within months Saudi Arabia increased its oil production from 2 million bpd to 10 million bpd. The result was a precipitous drop in the price of oil from $34 per barrel to $12 per barrel, the shutdown of almost every alternative energy program in the US, the capping of marginally productive wells, and the termination of most oil exploration in the US. No US energy venture could be made profitable against a figure of $12 per barrel for imported oil.

Additionally, the other members of OPEC upped their daily production to make up for the lower cost per barrel that further flooded the market.

All of the above is why the price of oil fell in the 1980s, it had absolutely nothing to do with a "drop in demand and your dreamed up 10X price theory", and everything to do with the West's drive to develop alternative energy.


Gene Cirillo, United States published 7 May 2008


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oil Price [2]

$250 a barrel is within range and faster than predicted if supplies are reduced or even suggested that they are going to be reduced. Why would I pump one million barrels a day if I only had to pump 500,000 and get the same return or more?

America is going to have to wake to the fact that China and India are not complaining but are locking up supplies by investing in areas nobody else will venture into. Their only request by investing is that they are able to have first right of refusal on product found and any partner is going to accept this requirement as they are not seeking a discount, only first shot at purchasing.

America wants cheap gas but has not built or allowed to be built any new refineries in over 30 years.

Threats to bring in a windfall tax against big oil will only make big oil sell their production overseas through another company.

It is time for some lateral thinking leaders to take charge of this great country and the three available are not going to be any different. America needs a general manager to run the show as a business. The free trade agreement between Mexico, US, Canada is a great idea for Mexico, OK for Canada and lousy for the US.

America needs to get their dollar back to its high position and to do this the people are going to have to go back to work and produce something. Make the farmers who get paid to grow nothing show that they are able to grow, make them produce the corn for the ethanol and get the other corn back into the food chain where it belongs. Learn how to sew and produce your own flags with "Made in America" rather than the "Made in China" tags. Yes, we have allowed things to get to this stage, shame on us; we will pay for our ways unless we wake up.

Don't cry at six-dollar gas; the rest of the world has been paying it for years.


MR, United States published 7 May 2008

Coupled with a few articles I read in such publications as the NY Times, seems it's not so much the amount of oil that is at issue but the processing.
Of course, oil will run out - but no one seems unduly concerned. Even during my days researching methods of plating a decent paladium alloy on a ceramic tube so that it would purify hydrogen for a decent length of time, it seemed that petroleum sources for said hydrogen were to the fore. We'd still be using petrol, but we'd reform it to its constituents before taking the hydrogen out...which did seem an arse about tit way of doing things...

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33. Comment #176217 by njwong on May 7, 2008 at 12:11 am

Boy, did I enjoy Brian Cox's talk. In fact, I found his presentation so educational and delightful that I just had to read up on what exactly a "Higgs Boson" particle was. I wrote down my understanding of "what is a Higgs Boson" at my blog (it's the second half of the blog entry). If you are like me, and do not have a strong background in particle physics, you might find my simplified explanation helpful:

http://njwong.blogspot.com/2008/05/lhc-and-higgs-boson.html

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34. Comment #176458 by Fenriswolf on May 7, 2008 at 11:36 am

I saw Brian Cox speaking at the Edinburgh Science Festival last year, and he was just as good then. Nothing new in this talk, except it's a bit more recent, but still enjoyable to watch. He's the sort of person to get young folk interested in science, given enough exposure.

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35. Comment #176797 by theillestatheist on May 8, 2008 at 3:31 am

Is anyone else not able to connect to atheist nation.net. I`ve not been able to for a couple of weeks now.

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36. Comment #177049 by Rawhard Dickins on May 8, 2008 at 1:53 pm

Complexity momentarily aquired the ability to ponder itself, then it had to go and do something stupid!

Book your summer hols early this year!

Shopping list: Must get high factor sun cream this year.
#2 Don't forget to pack welding goggles.
#3 Extra scuba tanks

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37. Comment #177510 by bluebird on May 9, 2008 at 8:05 am

Cool, thanks for posting this! I'm familar with Brian May, but not Brian Cox. It would be great if Mr. Cox could take time from his busy schedule to visit U.S. schools; help jump-start kid's interest in science and the universe they live in.

On a superficial note... great shoes, delightful accent, not so great hair.

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38. Comment #184722 by JeremyH on May 26, 2008 at 3:37 am

This is quite possibly the most important and incredible piece of news ever, and yet all I'm seeing on the idiot box is Britney bloody Spears!
I'm going to take a survey to see how many of my friends have even heard of this massive particle accelerator to get an idea of how blind the public is to these kinds of scientific achievements.

*EDIT

And what was with the New Zealand joke? I'm a kiwi and it blew right past me...

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