Well he’s already got my vote, but if he didn’t, this would clinch it: McCain wants to build 45 new nuclear plants.
The NIMBYs and the irrational portion of the environmentalist movement (they aren’t all irrational of course) will go ballistic, but I’d be thrilled to see an administration that openly advocated more nuclear power.
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This does go a ways to overlooking (if not forgiving) the campaign finance debacle.
Most environmentalists support nuke plants now especially with the whole issue of global warming making their heads explode.Â
Anyway.. I’m still waiting for fission or some other alternative. The prior debates about individuals breaking physical laws of thermodynamics has made me excited at the possibility of housing these people and using them as infinite power sources. Forget fossil fuel! I want my fatass fuel!
John: I think you mean fusion. Fission is how current nuke plants operate last I looked.
Dave Price updates us periodically on what appears to be the most promising news on fusion on a semiregular basis, you might want to watch for it in between his Iraq updates.
No thanks Dean. Â I’m more interested in the thermodynamic defying obese people. Â Â We need to capture them, put them in large farms, and hook them up to the electric grid. Â Â They will solve all of our energy wowes.
Much as I’d like to (particularly since I am a nuclear engineer), I can’t see that happening anytime soon.
Â
Figure between 3 and 10 billion or more for each plant, and realize that we can’t build the required large forged castings for in the US and there are some serious obstacles, not to mention the dollar is weak.
Worked in a nuke plant myself, and the issue I’d have is:
Where are they going to get enough experienced engineers to go around to all the new plants?
I just hope that they’re smart enough to just license pebble bed technology from the Germans, and start making them commodity installs.
They’re relatively easy to install and manage and are the safest technology I’ve seen yet. Detractors point to the one incident where a pebble got stuck, but preventing something like that is a simple engineering challenge not an inherent design flaw.
chad’s last blog post..Firefox 3 is Out
John: "Thermodynamic-defying" obese people merely have fat cells that won’t release their fuel as readily as they’ll store it, like a gas tank with an open fuel intake nozzle but clogged fuel pumps to the engine. With no known way currently to completely repair the problem reliably. They aren’t defying any laws of physics. That’s what’s wrong with people who, contrary to the established medical research on the matter, insist that it’s all mere thermodynamics. I suggest reading published peer-reviewed research on the matter and not interesting but mostly-useless studies on statistical outliers, or Yet Another Diet And Exercise Guru who insists that he knows all the answers but won’t publish figures on what his actual real-world success rate is with his obese clients in a simple, easy-to-interpret format that doesn’t obfuscate failures and blame the patients for the shortcomings of the doctor’s advice.
P Mike: I’d say with a 20 year timeline, those issues can be dealt with.
Chad: The Navy’s currently got a number of nuke engineers who’d stand to make good livings in this scenario, and I somehow think our universities would find some way to turn out two or three more such people at least in the coming decades.
Dean:
We’ve went through this to the point of nausium. Your example of "peer reviewed research" is adiposity 101 and Science News. Neither of those sites are peer reviewed, and in fact neither of those sites actually do any authentic research. Trying to make those points to you is like trying to herd cats.
Not to mention your malfunctioning gas tank model has one thing to back it up. Your constant repetition of the example. That’s it.
No, of course neither site is. What Adiposity 101 will, however, get you is copious citations to peer reviewed research you can look up and read yourself. Your continued insistence that any of this has to do with defying the laws of thermodynamics just indicates that you don’t know much of anything about the actual research, dude. If you would, in fact, read Adiposity 101, and actually check some of the papers in it, you’d see that there’s more than enough data there.
You are having a hard time making any points on this matter with me because you’re repeating, ad nauseum, arguments that used to come out of my mouth for years and years and years back when I was a fervent believer in the “just eat less and exercise more” bullshit as “the cure.” I changed my mind, and there’s a reason. It had to do with personal experience, and talking to actual researchers, and actual medical professionals working full-time in this field, and reading what the actual research has said. The best you had in response is that I was supposed to thank Aziz for coming up with the PDF for an irrelevant paper I’d already read years ago and had already addressed in previous comments.
If you want proof of this, I’ll give you a real simple challenge: you write a three paragraph summary of what you think my arguments are, and I’ll write three paragraphs on what yours are. I can practically guarantee that I’ll make all your points just fine, because I understand them perfectly, but you probably won’t be able to do the same for me because you make no effort to understand what I’m saying (which boils down to, if the fuel can’t get out of the tank it doesn’t fucking burn, John). Your ridiculous references to thermodynamics ad nauseum only confirm it. No? Prove me wrong. I’ll start a thread just for it.
Yeesh.
It wont even take me the 3 paragraphs.
Your point can be summarized as follows;
I’m a hopeless failure. I have systematically failed at everything in life. Most obvious to everyone is my glutanously obese body. I can not lose weight, therefore I will find every shread of quazi evidence to support why I’ve failed so frequently. This frequently involves lame citations to Adiposity 101, or my famous ‘thought experiments’ that have no foundation in reality. This is all done in a pathetic attempt to explain away personal responsibility for my depressing life. Anyone who says it’s even remotely my responsibility that I’m morbidly obese is clearly an idiot because they haven’t read my armchair scientist, non-peer-reviewed citations. Yeeeeesh!!
As you can see I’m not going to waste my time trying to argue with the brick wall you are. Â I already wasted 3 days doing that last month.
Let’s see how that water runs off your back Dean.
btw…
"which boils down to, if the fuel can’t get out of the tank it doesn’t fucking burn"
Stop simply repeating your pathetic analogy as to why you’re such a fat ass. Constantly repeating it over and over like it’s some mantra to keep you from crying like a baby doesn’t make the analogy right.Â
In all my years in university studying human physiology, pharmacology, nutrition etc, or my reading of the literature I have never come across any work done that would substantiate this pathatic analogy.Â
It’s not a pathetic analogy. It’s just what illustrates that "Thermodynamics Uber Alles" is a childishly shallow way of viewing a very serious medical problem.
If in all your years of studying, you have not come across any work that would substantiate the idea that someone’s body’s fat cells may store at a more efficient rate than they release, then, you haven’t studied hard enough. The studies are there, and they’re exhaustive. This is why, just to pick one example, it is quite credible, even proven, that certain viruses can cause weight gain; various types of animals with certain types of infections gain weight at an accelerated rate even when their diet and exercise patterns are rigorously controlled and uninfected animals with the identical diet and exercise regimen (and control groups) don’t experience the same gain. This is one reason why studies which show that some fat people derive little measurable benefit from exercise are also credible. And, the viral vector is just one of the many possible paths to chronic obesity, there are others. Other research is there, involving insulin (look up research on hyperinsulinemia, just as another path). And in truth, we don’t *know* all the mechanisms involved here, which is why more research is needed.
That is not just my opinion, it is the opinion of *many* professional researchers and *many* physicians who treat this problem professionally. Making you understand this is worse than herding cats, it’s like talking to a brick wall, because you consistently mis-state my position.
But let me give you this: my doctor, my personal physician, *utterly agrees with me*, and treats many obese patients professionally. So, are you now advising me to go against medical advice? Are you planning on replacing my doctor for me? Or will you acknowledge that it’s at least *possible* that I’m right and that alleviating obesity is not merely a matter of discipline and willpower in many, many cases?
I again note, if you’d just *read* Adiposity 101, and check more than a fraction of the COPIOUS peer-reviewed scientific literature it references (as I have), you would see that, indeed, for many chronically obese people, character defects and laziness are not the primary issues. Continued babbling about how they could completely reverse their overweight it if they "really wanted to" is arguably very dangerous to their health and abusive toward them personally. You don’t believe it? Accept my challenge: I’ll give you 3-5 paragraphs on *your* position, which I understand perfectly because *I used to share it*, but you won’t be able to describe mine accurately at all, because you don’t want to or can’t. Am I wrong? Prove it. Or don’t. But stop, please, with the passive-aggressive "jokes" about thermodynamics-defying fat people, because nobody fucking said the laws of physics don’t apply.
wow.. a lot of claims but still no citations. funny.. seems to be the MO of Dean.Â
Why in gods name would I write 3-5 paragraphs on my position when there’s pages of it on this site? And I’ve accurately described your position in this thread already. The only difference between my summary and what you’ve written, and what you’ve actually written is that I didn’t reference your constant straw graspings. How could I summarize them all in 3 paragraphs? You just make up new stuff all the time without any proof to support it, other than ‘personal experience’ or ‘adiposity 101′ or ’science news’ or ‘my doctor.’ You argue like a 12 year old. A lot of fat, no lean meat (pardon the pun). Here, to satisfy your massive apetite for your lame straws I"ll name half a dozen of them.
1) Fruit fly fat cell (From Science News)… for god sakes Dean.. if you can’t identify that a fruit flies and humans have drastically different physiologies then you’ve got bigger issues. Fruit Flies don’t even have closed circulatory systems! So saying what happens in fruit flies happens in humans is quite the leap. We can’t even say what happens to a chimp happens in a human!
2) Virus/infection causes weight gain (From where ever the hell you thought it up). Are you, or do you think all the obese people you talk for, are perpetually infected with some unnamed virus/infection? You seem to talk for obese people, so I figure you’re trying to explain why they’re obese. Do you think this supposed infection (which you’ve completely refused to name) represents even a fraction of the obese population? I doubt it.  Perfect example of a straw grasping.
3) Thermodynamics has as much to do with obesity as it does with the workings of a vehicle…. it’s superficial at best (From Deans mind). See YOU said the laws of physics basically don’t apply.. I guess I can give it to you that you didn’t completely blow of thermodynamics. But your attempt to brush it aside can be interpreted just the same.  I suppose this is why it’s entirely impossible to argue with you on this topic. You can’t even identify that the physical principles that govern ENERGETICS by extension govern energy metabolism in living organisms. Again, just because you don’t understand something doesn’t make it unimportant.
4) It’s unhealthy for obese people to try to lose weight (From… Deans mind). I’m guessing you’re trying to say obese people will only burn lean tissue if they try to diet. Or that the oxidative stress put on their body is ‘unhealthy.’ The first point is totally ridiculous, but the stress on the body through dieting is true to a point. Putting your body through dieting stress is hard on it, but I’d err on the side that minimizing the complications to obesity over the long term would be better for the person compared to the acute complications to dieting. Hunger pains aren’t exactly deadly, but artheriosclerosis, congestive heart failure, diabetes etc… are.
5) Fat cells in obese people are like ‘clogged gas tanks’ (From Deans mind). I have no idea how to approach this because it demonstrates such a complete nonsensical understanding of metabolism that it’s astounding.  Fat cells exist to store energy for use at a later time. If they’re ‘clogged’ then the entire foundation of how we use energy is broken. If your ‘clogged gas tank’ example had any foundation in reality it would be headline news, and would be the focus of millions of dollars worth of research grants globally.  Or at the very least you could have pointed to an actual reference (which you have yet to do).    You’re asking me to disprove your ridiculous analogy before you’ve even proved it in the first place. Give me a break.
6) My doctor said so. Dean, you’re the perfect example of someone who would be classified as ‘totally unwilling.’ Your actively seek out reasons to why you’re obese and it’s not your fault. You’ve arrived at the conclusion, and are seeking the justification for it. That’s the anti-thesis of science, or any sort of rational thought process. I’m sure your doctor has identified this and simply gives you suggestions on how to live better but wont bother with ‘harassing’ you to seek serious diets to improve your health. He would only alienate you, and an alienated patient is a patient that the doctor can no longer help to any extent. That’s one of the first things future doctors learn at medschool.
Lastly:
"If in all your years of studying, you have not come across any work that would substantiate the idea that someone’s body’s fat cells may store at a more efficient rate than they release, then, you haven’t studied hard enough."
We’ve evolved to store energy better than we burn it. Obese people are no different than healthy individuals in this respect. With the exception of the last 50-60 years food was hard to come by, so it was to the benifit of the person to be able to store energy whenever they had excess food available to them.Â
So I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to say. Obese people’s adipose cells are the same as healthy people? GREAT! Then they can lose weight just like the rest of us, like I’ve been saying for the last month! Thanks Dean!
Hoy. No, but I guess you’re getting closer. There is substantial evidence that their adipose tissue is not the same. In fact, we know it’s not in certain ways. There is also substantial evidence that they have other physiological factors going on that most normalweight people don’t, and unlike what was thought in the past (that this is rare) it actually turns out to be much more common than once thought. There are also factors we don’t know about, although a growing body of evidence is pointing to some of them. More research is needed.
There’s much to be discussed here. But to even discuss them you have to be talking to someone who’s at least tried to familiarize themselves with the research on insulin resistance, on possible virus connections, on the abnormal number of fat cells that most fat people (particularly the chronically fat ones) accumulate, and at least a half-dozen other issues. When the response is, "Lalalala, I can’t hear you, thermodynamics and willpower thermodynamics and willpower, lalalalala!" it’s hard not to lose patience.
Show me that you understand the other side’s arguments before declaring that they are meaningless and irrational, John. I understand *your* arguments perfectly, or so I think:
There is no significant physiological difference between fat and thin people except thin people don’t eat as much and they exercise more. Thermodynamics is the most important issue in almost all but very rare cases, and practically no one besides a very tiny minority has any glandular or hormonal issues. Viral and other connections are tiny and mostly meaningless, and if fat people would just eat better and exercise regularly without ever going back to sedentary lifestyles and eating whatever they want whenever they want, they could almost all be thin and healthy. If they’ve failed, they just have been given bad advice by bad diet gurus and/or irresponsible marketing programs and/or just don’t want to do what it takes to fix their issues. They need to be encouraged to get off the couch, get some regular exercise, including weight training if possible, they need to watch fat and caloric and refined carbohydrate intake, and change over to a healthy lifestyle that they stick to for life. If they fall off the wagon they need to get back on and be encouraged that they can really really do it if they just stay committed!
Sound familiar? I could write this stuff in my sleep. The fact that I (and countless medical professionals) now find this deeply limited and sometimes troubling advice has nothing to do with a lack of ability to understand it. I understand it fine.
Now, would you care to explain what you think *my* beliefs are, or are ya gonna just *keep* insisting that I don’t understand thermodynamics and that I’m fat just because I don’t do what you think I should, the way you think I should?
Dean.. what you’ve asked me for is the very definition of chutzpa. I’m not going to argue your position beyond what I’ve already said for two reasons. 1)You have no defined position beyond obese people are hoplessly obese and 2) you’ve never cited anything to even support your position.
So what you’re asking me to do is argue your position in a twisted way to validate it. It’s not valid, but keep repeating it over and over and maybe someone will be convinced. It wont be me until you actually cite something that backs up your ‘clogged gas tank’ model, or any of your other lame analogies.
Lastly.. I remember you discussing how you worked out 2 hours a day 6 days a week and ran calorie deficits but didn’t lose weight. I’d be interested in seeing the data supporting this. If you measured yourself running calorie deficits you must have kept records. I don’t know of a single person who counts calories over any long term and doesn’t keep records.  So post them. THis will either demonstrate you actually didn’t keep to your self proclaimed ’strict’ routine, or that you’re a termodynamic-defying obese man. The saviour of all our energetic problems!~Â
Crickets…… pretty quiet now..
That’s what I thought Dean.
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