I recall some news that claimed (no idea if it is true) that some of the wounded at Ft Hood were victims of what is called "friendly fire", though.

For instance, if I come down with a cold, the sheer amount of prayers and rituals I have to go through is staggering. It's a non-stop day of rosary beads, praying to mecca, shedding Thetans, slaughtering goats, fasting and devouring live baby heads. And the tithing. Dear Lord, the tithing.

(Ignore all those doctors over there telling us that, left untreated, a cold persists for about a week, but if properly attacked with expensive pharmaceuticals, it will clear up in about seven days!)

Two other things remain to be seen: whether home charging will really become the norm, and what energy capacities will be found in the average electric-motor vehicle. Perhaps, rather than charging the batteries at home, the industry may converge on a battery-swap-at-"gas-station" model. This has some advantages (greatly reduced purchase price for a new vehicle, for instance) and some disadvantages. Perhaps the biggest advantage is not technical but political: gas stations can get behind this model, as it means that consumers will continue to stop and drop into the convenience stores at which they—the gas stations—make all their money (by selling soda etc).

If battery-swap charge stations become the norm, the house-level distribution system needs no changes at all, and we might use distributed electricity generation to provide these "gas stations" with the needed megawatts. (Personally, I prefer home charging, but the politics of the threat of the demise of the corner gas station must be considered.)

One can also see, via the LLNL "energy flow" diagrams (see, e.g., https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/energy/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2008/LLNL_US_EFC_20081.png) that "electricity generation" is a bigger energy sector in the US than "transportation" (and "transportation" includes all users, which means UPS and FedEx trucks, tractor-trailer trucks, buses, etc., not just consumer automobiles).

Moreover, the diagram makes it clear just how inefficient transportation is, as a user of energy: electricity generation takes in almost 40 quads of energy sources, and produces a bit under 13 quads of "useful" energy, for an efficiency of 31.7%. Transportation takes in almost 28 quads but produces just under 7 quads, for an efficiency of 25%.

Electric-drive cars are in general much more source-to-motion efficient than gasoline-powered cars, when run in battery mode (and still slightly more efficient when run in liquid-fuel-engine + generator + electric-drive mode). If we improve the efficiency of our electric generation (which is mostly a matter of ditching or repowering the 50-year-old coal plants that are at the end of their useful lives anyway), this only gets better.

(Incidentally, distributed electric generation, via the BCHP systems I mentioned above, runs in the 60 to 80 percent efficiency range, which means it more than doubles the useful energy output per input.)

Virtually all generation today is done by rotating machinery. (The one exception is solar PV, which is such a small amount of today's generation that it does not really matter.) You spin a turbine by having water at a dam fall through it, or by burning coal to boil water to drive a steam turbine, or by burning natgas to drive a turbine (directly and/or via steam), or by getting a nuclear pile hot enough to, yep, boil water and drive a steam turbine. Even concentrated solar power (CSP) plants generally boil a working fluid (such as Therminol) to drive a turbine.

The fancy new "integrated gasifier" (gasified-coal) plants work just like combined-cycle natural gas plants: you burn the gasified coal in a jet turbine, and then use the leftover heat to run a steam turbine, in what is called a "bottoming cycle".

The up-and-coming "building cooling, heating, and power" or "combined cooling, heating, and power" (BCHP, CCHP, or CHP) technology for distributed generation works by ... burning fuel in a turbine, which spins a generator, then using the leftover heat to run heating or air conditioning (you can use heat to run cooling systems; these generally use "double-effect desiccant" cooling—see here for an overview of desiccant cooling—to do the air conditioning). There are CSP plants that use the solar heat to run a micro-jet-turbine, and use the leftover heat for making building hot water, heat, and air conditioning.

In all these cases, though, the electricity generation step is done by spinning machinery.

At night, when demand is low, you can shut down many plants entirely. The ideal thing, from an energy efficiency point of view, is to shut down your least-efficient generators, and run your most-efficient ones to provide "base load". You also need some degree of "spinning reserve" (at all times, not just nighttime) so that you can handle the increased load if, e.g., someone wakes at night to go to the bathroom and flips on the lights to see what they are doing.

Power plants, however, are not run based on energy efficiency but rather on "dollar efficiency as defined by profits". In general, the most expensive generators are shut down. Ideally these are also the least-efficient generators. When incentives are perverted ("Enron-ed"), however, only the most expensive (generally the least-efficient) generators are used. So it's partly economic, partly political, etc., as to what actually happens.

As for those nuke plants ... well, with all thermal generation systems, there's a sort of "thermal inertia" effect, in which it not only takes time to heat up and cool down a power plant, it's also desirable to do it even more slowly to avoid thermal stresses on the pipes and machinery. So coal and nuke plants, which tend to have the biggest-and-slowest of these load-following characteristics, are ramped up and down slowly. The effect on nuke plants is so great that in some cases, nuke plants will actually pay customers to take electricity rather than try to ramp down the pile. There's also a minimum "pile burn rate" due to self-decay within the fuel (whether it's stored in rods, or "pebble beds", or whatever, it still has a self-decay heat emission rate).

In all cases, all plants have an efficiency range that depends on utilization level. In general, plants are most efficient when they are generating electricity at their maximum capacity. So your combined-cycle gas turbine, with a theoretical best efficiency of about 55%, will actually achieve 45 to 50 percent efficiency when it is running flat out. The more your ramp it down, the worse it gets. There's a rule of thumb (with some violations) that the faster a system can respond to load changes, the less efficient it is, too. Simple-cycle gas turbines are better at load-following than combined-cycle, for instance. (The big exception to this is hydroelectric, which is both near-instantaneous and enormously efficient.)

Nevada is loaded with dry lake beds, and there's a huge lithium deposit in northern NV near the OR border.

The dry lake bed in Bolivia is even bigger, but the point is, lithium is common and cheap to mine: there is plenty of it. It's the third most common element in the universe, in fact, behind hydrogen and helium; and unlike H and He, it does not escape via the atmosphere.

Rare earths are critical for the manufacture of high-efficiency, lightweight electric motors. At present, China is virtually a sole source for some of these, although mines are opening up in Australia."Rare earths" are not really all that rare either, but they are considerably more expensive and difficult to mine (in general) than lithium (since they're not just sitting there in the dry lake beds).

There are good rare earth deposits in equatorial Africa, which is probably a good thing for Africa since they are so poor otherwise, but (as with oil) it will be important to avoid government corruption. There are probably lots of rare earths mine-able in the US and Canada as well; it's really a question of price rather than availability.

Then again, I'm ... atypical. :-) I like to zig when others zag. I did a lot of "consumer"-type spending this year, and I was saving like crazy in the 1990s when the American savings rate was aiming for zero-or-under.

"Everyone knows" that small businesses create most of the jobs in the US. The Republicans trumpet it all the time (in the guise of the claim that tax increases on "the rich" will hit small businesses, which is silly since businesses that would otherwise be hit can simply restructure for IRS purposes). Despite this Republican claim, it's actually even true. But small businesses are hamstrung today by health-care costs. Fixing this could really improve the small-business climate, and with it, the jobs situation.

Genetics determines your range of possibilities. Diet, exercise, etc., determine where you live within that range.

The lucky few will live long and healthy lives no matter what they do (though longer and healthier if they eat right and exercise); the unlucky few will live short, unhealthy lives no matter what they do (but shorter and even-less-healthy if they eat badly and fail to exercise). Most, however, fall in that vast middle, where eating right and exercising will make all the difference.

In my job I personally run TSH's, and it costs (just for supplies) around $10 to run. That is before considering drawing the blood, and the human work involved, not including disposal of waste, etc.

If everyone were insured and there were competition in insurers, the "negotiated price" would be higher, your portion would be about the same, and nobody would pay the ridiculous list price (so that the list price could be the more reasonable "negotiated price" in the first place).

So, the recession is over, but that does not mean things are better.

In this particular case, it means things are no longer getting worse. If we can all hold out another year or so, they should be getting noticeably better by then. They should be "not that bad anymore" (noticeably better than now is still bad) by some time in 2011.

To give an unrealistic, but illustrative, example, imagine that all but one person (the System Operator) is replaced with a Magical Computerized Nanotech System that can produce, robotically, all the goods and (via building robots) services that the entire economy uses. The one remaining employed person's productivity goes so high so fast, it shoots way past the moon ... but now everyone in the country (save one) is unemployed. Meanwhile GDP stays the same or increases.

(This is unrealistic for many reasons, the most obvious being that that one person would still earn minimum wage while all the profit from the mega-merged GeneralElectricBankAmericaGoldmanChase-etc-etc-etc would go to the CEO ... who would then be unable to comprehend why nobody has any money and is thus unable to buy any of his company's products. He'd call for a gigantic bailout....)

In practice, of course, this does not actually happen ... and even if it did, we could adapt by setting the "normal work week" to "one second per lifetime", where you earn your life by pressing the right button, once, on the Magical Computerized System. :-) So "productivity" is something we can adapt to. (We're not actually doing it now, but we could.)

American productivity rates are very high compared to the rest of the world, which is one reason why we have such a small manufacturing sector (compared to the rest of the world) yet produce so many manufactured goods (compared to the rest of the world: the rest of the world does produce more, but using way more workers). The high productivity rate really means we should probably have a shorter "standard" workweek (than the 40 hour one we finally got thanks to unions almost a century ago now), but that's another battle entirely....

In this particular case, we will see significant/"obvious" employment growth (and unemployment reduction) eventually, probably in 2011. But GDP can grow while employment stays steady or shrinks, and GDP must grow at a pace that meets the population growth rate just to keep living standards steady. (That's a bit under 1% these days.)

If we can keep up the current GDP growth rate, we should see improvement even sooner than 2011, but I don't expect that we will keep it going at 3.2%+ for the next year.

bend over bankwards