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Recent Posts
- Climate Change dominates news coverage at expense of other existential planetary boundaries
- Excerpt from “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars”
- Homes & Buildings
- Book Review “The Outlawed Ocean” by Ian Urbina
- Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
- Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil
- “More and More and More” one of the best books on energy ever written
- The staggering destruction of knowledge by Christians in the Roman Empire
- The staggering cost of Net Zero in Britain
- Why the R/P Reserves to Production ratio does not show when oil will run out
- Catton on Collapse “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse”
- Book Review of Grain Brain: Extraordinary claim not backed up by evidence
- Why did everyone stop talking about Population & Immigration?
- What would happen if trucks stopped running?
- How to survive a nuclear winter
Category Archives: Critical Thinking
Colonization of Mars & The Moon: a book review of “A City On Mars”
Preface. There are so many difficulties to overcome to colonize Mars. If the astronauts can even survive the bombardment of radiation on the way there. Where would the energy come from? There is no flowing water for hydropower. Wind and … Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Hopium, Human Nature, Planetary Boundaries, Where to Be or Not to Be
Tagged asteroids, astronauts, colonization, hopium, Mars, Moon, space
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The Biblical Revelations, critical thinking, and how this affects us today
Preface. This is a book review of Ehrman’s 2023 Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End. Ehrman is a very devout biblical scholar who explains brilliantly what Revelations and other verses in the bible mean within their … Continue reading
Posted in Critical Thinking, Religion
Tagged bible, critical thinking. religion, Rapture, Revelations
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What percent of Americans are rational?
Preface. Why does rationality matter — what’s the harm in believing there’s a fat “Santa Claus” God in the sky noting down every time any intelligent creature in the entire universe is naughty or nice on the trillions of inhabited … Continue reading
Mental Health. Coping with the future: notes from Jackson & Jensen’s “An Inconvenient Apocalypse”
Preface. Because I’d been reading non-fiction since college across every section in bookstores for decades before I stumbled on Peak oil in 2000 (full story in about), I understood the horror and tragedy of energy decline and was depressed for … Continue reading
Posted in Critical Thinking, Health What to do
Tagged denial, ecology, hope, jackson, jensen, optimism, population, rees
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Why is everyone afraid of AI or thinks it will solve all our problems?
I question how useful and existentially threatening AI really is. I am not denying that AI can do marvelous things, especially finding patterns, which is terrifically useful across many fields. It is best when it has very narrow objectives, such … Continue reading
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Critical Thinking
Tagged AI, artificial intelligence, critical thinking, hallucination
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Hydrogen hopium: Storage
Source: Russel Rhodes (2011) Explosive Lessons in Hydrogen Safety. https://appel.nasa.gov/2011/02/02/explosive-lessons-in-hydrogen-safety/ Preface. What is hopium? Irrational or unwarranted optimism. An addiction to false hopes. A metaphorical substance that causes people to believe in a false hope (H + opium). And Hopium … Continue reading
Posted in CAES Compressed Air, Drought & Collapse, Electric & Hydrogen trucks impossible, Hopium, Hydrogen, Trucks
Tagged CAES, drought, embrittlement, explosive, hopium, hydrogen, salt dome, storage
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Hydrogen hopium: green hydrogen from water
Additional energy consuming steps not shown: pumping water to the electrolyzer, purifying the water, compressing or liquefying to -423 F, pumping into storage container, the trucks to deliver H to stations costing $75 million each, since pipelines are super expensive … Continue reading
Posted in Energy Production, Hopium, Hydrogen, Peak Water
Tagged electrolyzer, energy storage, hopium, hydrogen, utah, water
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QAnon and Witchcraft. Hard to tell them apart
Preface. I just read Schiff’s book “The Witches: Salem, 1692”. As I read it, I kept thinking that these Christian witch killers weren’t much different from QAnon believers, who are also mostly Christians (evangelists). I’m not the first to think … Continue reading
Posted in Critical Thinking
Tagged critical thinking, QAnon, superstition, witchcraft
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Predicting who will become a violent terrorist
Preface. This study was clever in predicting the political and religious outlook of people using abstract tests that were not political or emotional, such as memorizing visual shapes. This study of worldviews was able to predict political preferences 4 to … Continue reading
Book Review: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight & Loose Cultures Wire Our World
Preface. A must-read book for those who want to understand themselves, their family and friends, their culture and the world. A new framework that gives clearer vision, rather than muddying it up by giving false understandings like astrology or seeing … Continue reading
Posted in Critical Thinking, Human Nature
Tagged human nature, pandemic, politics, Trump
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