Tag: june

February 24, 2016 0

Where environmentalists did need to change their tune

By News Desk

( Source ) Nuclear power proponents keep saying that environmentalists should sing a nuclear tune, and a few enviros agree. Personally I remain "meh", maybe even moreso (moremeh?) over the years as the price of renewables and storage keep dropping. I know that nuclear power cost breakthroughs are scheduled for South Korea and China, but we’ve all heard that one before.

February 20, 2016 0

Water Vapor, Water Vapor Everywhere and It All Absorbs in Air

By News Desk

Tweet Elementary quantum mechanics quickly shows that harmonic oscillators (shown by the dotted line in the figure to the right) can only absorb or emit light associated with a transition between neighboring quantum levels such as between v = 0 and 1.  To the extent that molecular vibrational motion is harmonic, this is an absolute rule. Oh yes, there also has to be a change in the dipole moment between the two levels of the transition which explains why homonuclear diatomics (N 2  , O 2 , H 2 ) don’t absorb in the infrared

February 10, 2016 0

Nigel Persaud Dons His Eyeshade and Audits the Auditor

By News Desk

Tweet Some time ago Nigel Persaud took up the trade of auditor and inquired about this and that.  Somebunny known here and abouts took up the challenge, only to find that careful examination showed that most of the inquiries were, shall Eli say it, perhaps about nothing at all, but that there were a couple of lacuna, things missing.  They eventually were noted in the appropriate place. On the scale of errors, there are blunders, there are errors, there is over clever data selection, and there is ignorance.  There might be more , Eli will await word from Willard, but blunders occupy a special and deep circle of academic hell. One of the auditors, Ross McKitrick, has an impressive case of the blunders.  Tim Lambert made a hobby of finding them.  There was, of course the famous confusion of degrees with radians in Michaels and McKitrick 2004 (MM04) and much much more

February 8, 2016 0

A Little Travelling Music

By News Desk

Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves.