Nobrainer’s Think Tank

At least Will Ferrell was funny when he impersonated George W. Bush. I just saw a skit making fun of W. The Tony Blair character was funny. The W character was sad and grasping. Aside from pandering to a liberal audience for laughs, the whole skit was less than laughable. Without a hometown New York, Hillary Clinton loving crowd, the set would have more quiet than a mute in space.

I can only imagine which will occur first:
(a) SNL is funny
(b) NBC cancels it for a better product (which is probably can’t produce)

PS - Get rid of the scary chick without a chin.

1. I have added numerous links the NeuBlog. I think most of you engineering/science types will enjoy junkscience.com.
2. You’ll notice I pre-dated my election status post. So you’ll have to scroll down a bit to find my actual new posts.
3. I think I got almost 11 hours sleep last night. It was everything I thought it could be.
4. I should have settled for 6 hours sleep and left for Clemson at 3 this morning to watch the game. I’m definitely not getting any work done right now. Hopefully that’ll change this afternoon.
5. In the way that a “couple” refers to two items, and “few” refers to a group of three, what are the terms for quantities from 4 thru 11? I smell discrimination.

Again, I’m referring to John Kerry, and not myself Kerry.

Of course what began as a publicity stunt, the Football Fans for Truth appear to actually inflicting some damage on the liberal Senator from Massachusetts. Good ol’ Kerry claims to have been at the Game 6 loss by Boston to the Mets in the ‘86 World Series. The FFT says differently. Apparently Kerry was at a banquet in Boston the night of the game in New York… interesting indeed.

He’s in a location. He’s not in a location. Perhaps he is opposed (now) to the war in Iraq because he began to think that he is actually deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. Perhaps he thinks he’s in France all the time.

I’m not sure, but I don’t trust Kerry (again not myself) nor his lush wife THK.

Have you ever clicked on the link on the upper right corner of the webpage? Yes, the one that says “next blog.”

On a whim I clicked it. I read a while, and repeated. Read. Click. Repeat. Read. Click. Repeat.

I did that about 10 times. There are some truly frightening blogs. Perhaps even more frightening than anything that could involve Todd Horton… terrifying indeed.

So for some entertainment, click “next blog” a few times and you’ll appreciate your own life a helluva lot more.

-nobrainer

I am by no account a hunter. Perhaps the only way someone could construe me as a hunter is to establish that cars driven by me have hit some furry little animals. Please do not consider me to be an animal rights person. PETA frightens me. I admire their marketing skills, but little else.

John Kerry, today, was out hunting in Ohio. I suppose that he has the left-wing-hippie animal lover vote wrapped up. Surprisingly, Kerry made one good campaign decision. He went after one of the worst animals in the world… geese.
I thoroughly hate geese. They seem to primarily poop all over golf courses and do little else. They make a lot of useless noise, tresspass, act righteous, and drop a lot of shit. Remind you of any political groups?

But if John Kerry wanted to win my vote in Ohio (which is a literal impossibility at this point), he’ll have to kill a helluva lot more geese than one.

For a while, many of us have known the drawbacks of hydrogen, or H2, powered and fuel cell powered cars. The storage of H2 is difficult. Liquid H2 must be kept incredibly cold and gaseous H2 is amazingly combustible. There seems to be an ingenious solution from a real genius. Stan Ovshinsky is the brains behind what may be the most innovative company anywhere. I’ll save my commentary on metal-hydride technology for another day.

However, I’m frequently left to ponder the need to switch to a hydrogen based economy? It surely is nice to think that vehicle tailpipe emissions would be reduced to simple water vapor (actually that thought scares me, too). The sad reality is that nothing will likely significantly improve our environment or bank accounts. The only advantage is that we’ll be implementing a huge system to avoid importing a bunch of oil… maybe.

Let’s not forget that H2 doesn’t just automatically appear in huge tanks all over the world. Read the fact sheet from the White House. Hidden in that statement is the admission that H2 power isn’t all neat and clean like some people want you to believe. There are even concerns that excess releases of H2 gas could be as detrimental to “global warming” as anything else.

Hydrogen is all around us. However, it must be converted to what we need, H2 gas. It can easily be derived from vegetable oils and ethanol. I’m not sure we can come close to having enough agricultural output to support our need for this clean fuel. Would you rather eat or drive? Consider this commentary from the Weekly Standard where I noted that “John Kerry Wants You to Starve”. If all our cars burned ethanol, we would need nearly 10 times as much corn as our country currently grows!

It can also be taken from natural gas. Why derive it from natural gas when we can just burn natural gas? Alas, some experts even recommend pulling H2 from our good ol’ buddy, Gasoline. Does this sound like a great solution to you?

Let’s not forget the byproducts of removing hydrogen from compounds that contain mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Yeah, that pretty much leaves a lot of waste carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

I’m sure that you astute observers and amateur scientists have noted my glaring omission. Hydrogen, H2, is abundant in what else? H2O. Correct. Apply electricity to H2O and yield H2 and O2. Of course this reaction is exactly opposite of what happens in fuel cell. It takes a huge amount of energy to make it happen. Where does that energy come from? Mostly from burning fossil fuels of course (granted the current plan is to burn American, not foreign, fossil fuels). As of last year, less than 10% of our power came from clean, renewable (albeit often expensive) energy sources. You may not need raw materials for these renewable forms, just perfect environmental conditions. Which means we must make amends with our other old friend, nuclear power.

I thought a hydrogen economy was going to clean our air and solve all our problems. Hydrogen may be renewable and available from American sources, but it surely isn’t going to be enough.

At this point, I don’t see us solving any problems, just spending a lot more money.

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More interesting sources:
-“Are we there yet? As hydrogen fuel cell technology evolves, alternative fuel sources are being considered” - From ‘The Brown and White’ at Lehigh University
- FuturePundit
- or google for “hydrogen fuel sources”