Saturday, September 08, 2012

Arsenic and Odd Life

From Boing Boing, but Eli sorta remembers seeing it elsewhere.  Thee and Eli sorta remember the cold fusion follies, with a refresher course recently when Martin Fleischmann passed on to the great calorimeter in the sky, but all the bunnies know that politicians have too much to do to bother their pretty minds staying up on the state of the science, and Mitt has the added burden of being from Utah with all the native pride that that entails,  Now some, not Eli to be sure, would make a connection between what Romney said in a Washington Examiner interview (the other right wing rag in town the Washington Times is on critical life support with the passing of the Rev. Moon) and others surely might note that the remaining true believers believe themselves victims of a conspiracy.

As Stephan Lewandowsky might put it the beat goes on, and Mitt appears tobe humming along to the music on his iPod:

I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with -- with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.
Wanna bet?

9 comments:

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The first wake was more fun because in those days some people still believed in wake accelerators.

EliRabett said...

Eli used to go to those

Anonymous said...

Ground control to President Mitt.

~@:>

dhogaza said...

" It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it."

Sad and a bit humorous at the same time, sort of like their inability to find the gold tablets (which weighed enough to finance one or more central american governments ...)

Anonymous said...

I would find President Mitt...er...and... a bit gauling if truth were known.

Cymraeg llygoden

Gaz said...

Here's the rest of Mitt's speech:

"I believe in Karma, what you give is what you get returned
I believe you can't appreciate real love until you've been burned
I believe the grass is no more greener on the other side
I believe you don't know what you've got until you say goodbye"


THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Unfortunately, Brigham Young researchers baptized the gold tablets with heavy water in an effort to improve their legibility and they disappeared in a flash of palladium vapor.

Anonymous said...

BBC Horizon did a good documentary on Cold Fusion. Here is the link to Part 1

If I was going to scam people on an investment, cold fusion would be a great idea. If someone is gullible enough to think there is a govt. conspiracy to suppress free energy (including the scientists in India, China, N. Korea, and Iran) then I can't imagine they would be rational about investing their money.
-Dirt Girl

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Re 2

Since porous palladium exceeds even Raney nickel as an energetic catalyst for hydrogen reactions, many 4th of July quality flash and bang results ensued when unwary physicists tried packing hydrogen into palladium electrodes by elecrolysis

The oxygen being evolved at the counterelectode all too often found its way into contact with the souped up Pd , which had an energy density just this side of a stick of dynamite.

If palladium were cheaper, more grad students would have gone Darwin.