Buy Xanax Without Prescription Best Prices Guaranteed

Don Herbert, best known as Mr. Wizard, passed away last week. Mr. Wizard taught and inspired two generations of children on his television shows Watch Mr. Wizard (1951-1965) and Mr. Wizard's World (1983-1990). [youtube]j_RJtkKGw4c[/youtube] More than just demonstrating how to measure the height of a tree from by its shadow, Mr. Wizard taught kids two very important lessons. First, he taught them that science is about how the world works, and the world doesn't always work the way you think it does. Second, he taught them that science was not just for old men in lab coats with millions of dollars of equipment, that a lot of interesting experiments and demonstrations could be done with household objects and a little adult supervision. This is a particularly bad time in our nation's history to lose Mr. Wizard, because science is being attacked on exactly those two points. First, you have the continuing saga of religious people trying to get creationism taught as if it were science. Dressing it up as "intelligent design" has been so effective because the public has such a tenuous grasp on how science works and what it is. Go back to your childhood and remember how Mr. Wizard would ask his youthful assistants what they thought was going to happen before each experiment. Sometimes they reasoned it out correctly, sometimes they didn't - the point is that Mr. Wizard would then test the hypothesis, and the results of the test trump any guessing, no matter how logical or earnest. To write creationism into science textbooks, we must rewrite Mr. Wizard's old episodes too. In the new version, the children make a guess, Mr. Wizard runs the experiment, and if the results disagree, we throw out the experiment and not the guess. Creationism and intelligent design might be interesting ideas, and many people might believe in them very strongly, but until they are willing to throw out their preconceived notions of the world based on new evidence, they cannot be called science. Second, you have various government efforts that have made it harder and harder for kids to actually do the kinds of experiments and demonstrations that Mr. Wizard was so adept at. For example, this post from Memepunks describes how the war on drugs and war on terror have made it almost impossible to get chemistry sets as good as the ones sold 20 years ago. It's not just the chemicals - in many states you must register to own common lab equipment. And you can forget about model rockets. Our efforts to protect the children are instead dumbing them down. No Child Left Behind required the addition of science standards by 2005-06. That's a good thing, right? Not if it means cutting money from high school labs and shifting science education toward the memorization of facts (which are much easier to test). America has lost Mr. Wizard when we need him most. For a little more insight into Mr. Wizard's show, watch the clip below from a 1982 episode of Late Night with David Letterman. [youtube]TLRxVwRClRg[/youtube]

What do we have against the metric system? Can anyone tell me why the good old US of A hates the metric system so much that it stands practically against the world in it's single minded "We're Number One" mantra? We stand alone with Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia. This doesn't bode well in the US's current stance in about any world wide political situation. I mean, when an argument could be won by almost any country by saying something school-ground childish around the lines of "well, we use the metric system, what do you use?" I think it becomes time to reconsider your standing point on the issue. Most people (except Americans, Liberians and Burmese) would agree that the metric system is much more useful and makes a lot more sense than a system that relies on body parts (length measurements such as feet and yards) and old fashioned carrying devices (peck, quart, pint). If you don't believe me that we stand alone in this war against reason, here is a pretty picture in which the red countries are the countries who do not use the metric system. Bottom line is, the metric system makes more sense, period.

Back in the day, I was huge fan of Sim City, Sim City 2000, and even Sim City 3000. So much so that I put up a small fansite and was constantly bombarded by emailed requests to download Sim City for free. Sim City was a great game but it never was a completely accurate city simulator. In Sim City 2000, for example, filling every square of land with high-rises would only get your population to 100,000 or so. In order to reach the millions, you had to wait past the far-flung future year of 2000 and build arcologies. Now we are seven years past 2000, so where are the arcologies? On their way. There a number of projects being proposed and built that could qualify. First, there's this huge pyramid proposed for Tokyo Bay. Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid is obviously an arcology, just take a look at this clip from Extreme Engineering: [youtube]vfsoBAT27pA[/youtube] Now Simizu may never be built, but another arcology-sized building, Burj Dubai, is well on it's way to completion. When it's completed, it will be the world's tallest building by a huge margin - the current tallest, Taipei 101, is 509.2 m / 1,671 ft. Burj Dubai will be 818 m / 2,684 ft. The tower will have a hotel, offices, apartments, and probably some retail. Still, you could make an argument that it's not intended to be a complete city in a building, so it's not a real arcology. If you include the nearby highrises and Dubai Mall, all surrounded by harsh desert and built in the last ten years, it's hard to argue that this is a totally different way of building human habitat. If you are despairing at the prospect of yet another world's tallest building going up outside of the United States, birthplace of the skyscraper, take heart. The Chicago Spire, planned to hit 609.6 m / 2,000 feet, shows that America is not yet out of the supertall game. This one is even less like an arcology, though, since it will be entirely residential. Apparently architect Santiago Calatrava skipped right on to Sim City 3000.

Does sorting bottles and cans really save the earth? You may have heard the rumor that the whole thing is a big sham - either a misguided to make ourselves feel better about our wasteful lifestyles, or worse a conspiracy of crystal-wearing, tree-hugging hippies. You may have noticed a number of geeky environment-related posts on Unsought Input. Some of our writers like to think of themselves as environmentalists. Now, before you click your back button, I should explain: no one here will ever tell you to stop driving and live in a cave! We are positive, progressive environmentalists who come to our green views through a love of innovation, efficiency, scientific progress, and yes, even market economics. So, is recycling a bunch of bullshit designed to make us all feel better about ourselves? Does putting glass and plastic in a green bin actually damage the environment more than help? Penn and Teller seemed to think so in an episode of their show, Bullshit. Bullshit is a great show, it's very entertaining, and they call out psychics and feng shui practitioners on their unsupportable claims. It's also filled with things that are less objective debunkery and more Penn and Teller opinion. The duo have a number of reasons for disliking recycling. For example, there is no shortage of landfills and believe recycling uses more energy than it saves. They liken it to a dogmatic religious practice. Are they right? should we give up and put throw our used printer paper in with the coffee grounds and litter box tailings? Well, according to The Economist, recycling is worth it in almost every case. For those of you unfamiliar, The Economist is hardly a bastion of feel-good hippyism. In American terms the magazine is notoriously fiscally conservative (which is sometimes called economic liberalism in Europe). In a recent article they report the results of a study by the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste:

The researchers then looked at more than 200 scenarios, comparing the impact of recycling with that of burying or burning particular types of waste material. They found that in 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.

If you live in a community that does single-stream garbage collection, you might wonder if they really do sort out the recyclables. Chances are they do, and single-stream systems can actually be some of the most efficient:

San Francisco, which changed from multi to single-stream collection a few years ago, now boasts a recycling rate of 69%—one of the highest in America. With the exception of garden and food waste, all the city's kerbside recyclables are sorted in a 200,000-square-foot facility that combines machines with the manpower of 155 employees.

The big question about recycling is really a series of separate, somewhat related questions. First, are we really running out of landfills? Of course not, we have several deserts and oceans just waiting to be filled. Now, to ask the actually meaningful question: are we running out of landfills near large population centers that generate the trash? That answer is a lot closer to yes. It turns out most people don't want to live next to a dump, so dumps are getting harder and harder to build. Suburban sprawl only makes it worse. Second, is recycling economically worth it? Recycling is indeed subsidized in most cities. But the answer to this question depends on things like commodity prices, new technologies and innovations, and whether or not you try to count the market externalities. Finally, does recycling have a net environmental benefit? This is actually a huge question, and life cycle analysis is not easy to do. How far back to you go? If you go all the way back to the energy expended on mining raw materials, transportation, etc., then the answer tends to be yes. Now, does this one study prove for all time that recycling is worth doing? Of course not - that would be rather dogmatic. But it is further evidence, with a thorough methodology. This is how science works. For example, here's another paper that examines the significance of assumptions in life cycle assessments like this one. When was the last time a religion or superstition publish a report examining possible issues in their underlying assumptions? Earlier I called Bullshit a great show, and it is. So how did they get it wrong on this issue? Penn and Teller are absolutely brilliant when it comes to debunking flim-flam artists, because they have years of training and experience as flim-flam artists themselves. Magicians and psychics (and the like) use the exact same techniques in their work --the difference is that magicians tell you it's a trick, and not supernatural god power. When the show ventures into other topics, though, the quality varies depending on the experts they rely on. [youtube]9oloM_dSoW4[/youtube] So, to recap:

1. Recycling? Good.
2. Dogmatic crystal-wearing, tree-hugging hippies? Bad.
3. Penn and Teller on flim-flam artists? Good.
4. Penn and Teller on scientific topics? Not so much.

Lately we have been uber-enviro-nerds with the talk of wind turbines, deep lake cooling and environmentally friendly roller coasters. I just felt the need to put up another nifty energy saving device that was invented by a Bloke from the UK named Peter Hughes. He has created a ramp that absorbs kinetic energy from breaking or slowing down while driving your car over regular roadways. The idea is simple, use the cars wasted kinetic energy to power the streetlights and stoplights. There are a series of plates installed under the road which the cars will drive over, more than likely around stop lights or other areas where the traffic will be slowed. The weight of the car slightly shifts the plates, causing kinetic energy to be created. The energy is stored and then used to power whatever. It is better described on the official site, so I will just do you a favor and quote it here.

The ramp is unobtrusive, silent in operation, causes no discomfort to the vehicles occupants and is entirely safe in operation. The Ramp is designed to require the minimum of maintenance and may be used for generating electricity to power street lighting, traffic lights, road signs, with the surplus being fed into the national grid. It also has the capability to store electricity within a storage battery facility.

I also found a video that you can watch that shows this in action. [youtube]uA0aiKFMSac[/youtube] I have high hopes for this technology; it is a very smart design and easily implemented for almost any roadway. The amount of energy spent operating the lights for roadways may not be much in comparison to other utilities we expect in our daily lives but this simple innovation will hopefully lead the way in other inventions to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels and ultimately reduce the amount of pollution because of this. I think this technology is only currently being implemented in the UK but hopefully American cities will become aware of this power creating device and take advantage of it's obvious benefits. Also, since America is the largest contributor to pollution world wide, it couldn't hurt to try to change the image for the better by fully embracing any new technology that could possibly make a worthwhile difference.