Extra links (One day I will get the hang of computers edition)

[andrewducker]

1. Could We Stop Yellowstone From Erupting with a Giant Geothermal Power Plant?

(tags:power Yellowstone volcano heat )

2. UK Gov 'blacklists' countries for allowing transitioning 'too easily'

(tags:UK LGBT transgender OhForFucksSake )

3. Confirmation that the UK government can block Scottish laws without any evidence to back anything up.

(tags:UK Scotland law )

Comments

[cmcmck]

2. Looking at the article I become boggled at the obsession with gender Recognition Certs.
I become certain that government are convinced that people carry them around all the time!

Yes, I possess one which lives in an envelope in our filing cabinet and is as immaculate as the day it was isued in 2005.

It went out once registered post in an A4 envelope to apply for a birth certificate and was returned registered post in another A4 envelope with said certificate and that is the only time it has ever been used.

I even begin to wonder if people who'd like to self ID think they'd need to carry the thing around all the time.

Even with the birth cert- I've used it once when we got wed and how many people carry their birth certs around with them?

[redbird]

I like that the article on geothermal from Yellowstone first discusses why the specific proposals are unlikely to work, then why they'd be a bad idea even if they were doable, and ends by noting that it would be illegal.

[hilarita]

Given passports and driving licences have photos on them these days, what even is the point of a gender marker on them?

[cmcmck]

It's a good question, but shush! You'll frighten the Tories! :o)

It'll frighten them even more to know that I was able to change the documents you mention even before a two week stay in hospital back in the seventies!

[ckd]

Maybe they could be built in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone where you supposedly can't actually be tried for a crime. :-D

(In reality, some of the work would happen outside of Yellowstone and that would allow a venue for a jury trial.)

[armiphlage]

My own meandering thoughts:

With respect to gold-plated copper pipes:

1. Pipes wear away due to fluid flow, especially at bends and joints. A thin layer of gold will rapidly disappear.

2. Gold plating dissolves into solid copper, especially when hot. If you want the gold to stay at the surface, you have to plate the copper with nickel, then plate gold on top of the nickel.

With respect to power transmission limitations, Wyoming has alumina-rich clays. You can use the electricity to electrolyze aluminum. 3.5 GWe is equivalent to electrolyzing a truckload of aluminum ingots every six minutes, which could be handled by the existing road network.

[armiphlage]

If your main goal is bringing heat to the surface, and you have a hostile environment that eats turbines, it might be less hassle to just drill a big hole kilometers deep, drop a smaller pipe down that hole, and pump in water. Let superheated steam blast out into the sky. If you feel like it, use a thermopile (inefficient but no moving parts) to extract some energy from the waste steam.

Yellowstone

[channelpenguin]

The 2nd "idea" in that article is so crackpot,vague, flawed and amateur that I'm very surprised it is known at all. I totally agree with the engineering-based takedown of it, don't get me wrong, but I'm saddened that such an obviously ill-thought out and impractical (verging on ridiculous) idea apparently has enough currency to require it!

[mountainkiss]

Every time someone understands the computer question, the computers secretly change the question.