These are both MUCH simpler molecules than any nucleic acid heterocycles, or all but the simplest amino acid (glycine). The first is just the dimer of hydrogen cyanide, found pretty much wherever HCN is found. This fad of reporting "MOLECULES OF LIFE FOUND IN SPACE!" has gotten really old. There is a very long and improbable path between such spaceborne molecules and all but the simplest amino acids or nuclear bases. In contrast, the formation of these molecules under planetary conditions is well documented. The main difference is simply concentration -- the probability of two molecules reacting with each other is proportional to the concentration of each of the molecules involved, which is much, much lower in instellar space than in planetary atmospheres/hydrospheres. I wish these scientists would try harder to formulate plausible hypotheses, rather than going for the most spectacular hypothesis in the hopes of greater fame -- which is evidently what is driving this fad.

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/veriditas/Overzealous_staffer_defense

And that was largely because the country didn't want to change leaders in the middle of a war, which was a good decision.

Voters don't need to be "protected" from their decisions. They have chosen well enough without the 22nd Amendment. The only President who could have been elected to a third term since was Clinton -- and wouldn't that have been BETTER than W? Even if Clinton had lost, he could have run again in 2004 -- how do you think THAT would have turned out? Think how different our recent history would have been without the 22nd Amendment -- maybe no 9/11, certainly no Iraq War, maybe warning signs on Wall Street would have registered in time. No, I don't think Presidential term limits have done us any good at all, and quite a bit of harm.

Given the population turnover in any given district, the people who vote for a candidate the third time are not all the same people who elected him/her the first time. Should the new voters be denied the right to choose the representative they want just because someone else -- who may no longer reside in the district -- voted for them before ?

Remember, the limit on Presidential terms was legislated by vengeful R's after FDR's fourth victory. GOP presidents get to be too old (or too incriminated) for a third term; without the 22nd Amendment, only Clinton could have won a third term since, and we weren't better off with his successor. Most Presidents who sought a third term failed; no further "protection" is really needed. FDR probably won a fourth term largely because it was a wartime election. Personally, I'd love to see the 22A repealed just to get Obama (at least) one more term. The 22A seems to say that you can't give the voters what they want. I'd rather trust the voters to make the right decision.

ironically, one of the signs I was having problems (though I didn't realize it at the time) came when I went to see an old 50's 3D movie. I had to watch the movie for a long time -- say half an hour? -- before the 3D effect worked for me. That was a sign my binocular vision was failing, but I didn't realize it.

The main therapy consisted of viewing red/green or polarized anaglyphs (trademarked as Tranaglyphs ™), while the therapist adjusted the separation between them. Since my left eye was turning outward, at first I could only fuse the two images when they were widely separated. With repeated exercises, over several weeks, I was finally able to fuse the images at normal separation. After each session, I could tell that my vision was taking on a little added depth -- and an hour or two later I would get a real hammer-between-the-eyes headache. After the whole therapy sequence was finished, it still took some time to re-adapt to full binocular vision, and my eyes tended to tire easily.

A big prerequisite to successful therapy, in my case, was having my lens prescription reduced by a doctor who was very careful not to over-prescribe the lens strength. Many ophthalmologists tend to over prescribe, and if you are young and nearsighted, your eyes will adapt to the overcorrection. Over a period of many years, I had accumulated quite a lot of overcorrection in one eye, causing that eye to suffer so much fatigue that it would stop focusing properly and my brain would simply suppress the image from that eye. It was a real shock to discover one day that I could cover my left eye and leave my vision almost unaffected -- the image from that eye was not being processed much at all. Some doctors routinely check for overcorrection, others -- not so much.

Sue Barry's book describes some of the other treatments used. She had been stereoblind her whole life, unlike me, so her doctor started her off with more basic therapy than I needed. I thought the bead-on-two-strings would have been a good home exercise for me, but I didn't learn about it until after I no longer needed therapy.

Surprisingly, it is not ophthalmologists, but optometrists who are the leaders in diagnosing and treating problems with stereovision, especially in children. See http://www.covd.org and http://optometrists.org/public_eye_care.html

A Greek king and a Persian king got into an argument over man's "natural" language. The Greek king insisted that it was Greek, of course, and the Persian king insisted that it was Persian. So they proposed an experiment -- the kind that only kings could get away with. They took a newborn baby boy from its mother and carried him off to be raised by a hermit high in the hills, far away from any other people. The hermit -- who was a deaf-mute -- provided the baby with goat's milk and raised him to the age of twelve. At that time, the two kings stopped by to see how their experiment had turned out. When they knocked at the door of the hermit's cabin, the boy answered the door. The two kings silently glanced at each other, and then nervously waited for the boy to speak. Finally, the boy opend his mouth and gave voice to: Baaaaaaaah!

(This is a fun joke to tell, if you can do a convincing goat bleat. )

There is no direct conversion of graphite to carbon fibre which is practical on a large scale, though graphite "whiskers" can be produced this way on a very small scale -- more of a laboratory technique than a process suitable for production.

Carbon "nanofibres" can be grown from hydrocarbon precursors such as methane, and methane can be made from CO2 and H2. So if the H2 is "green", you've got a way to convert CO2 to CH4 to carbon fibre, but the conversion will be many, many times slower than the production of CO2, and consume quite a bit of energy as well.

Currently, carbon fiber is made mostly by pyrolysis (high-temperature decomposition) of carbon-containing precursors such as polyacrylonitrile. Acrylonitrile is made from propene, ammonia, and oxygen, with propene coming mostly form petroleum, so either one needs to find a competing process, or find a way to convert CO2 to propene. Some propene has been made from methanol, but I don't have details of this (it's probably safe to assume it's the methanol-to-gasoline process invented by Mobil a few decades ago) -- presumably a mixture of products is formed.

It's quite conceivable one could obtain propene from agricultural byproducts (which are just captured CO2) such as acetone (obtained by starch fermentation); but currently it is cheaper to go the other direction, and make acetone from propene, because of the artificially low cost of heavily-subsidised petroleum.

IF we can recover the CO2 economically, and IF we can obtain enough H2 in a renewable and economically competitive fashion, then CO, methane and methanol derived from CO2 will become just another stream of simple precursors to feed into the process streams built around inputs of coal, natural gas, and petroleum. The problem at this point is that the deck is stacked in favor of petroleum-based inputs.

Bear in mind that only a few percent of petroleum goes to make materials -- the majority is burned as fuel. So even industrial-scale conversion of CO2 to materials would only offset a tiny part of CO2 production from burning fossil fuels. Probably it would be better to convert CO2 into fuels such as methanol or dimethyl ether, which would at least form a closed carbon cycle when burned, without the need to bring more fossil carbon to the surface.

Also, if you're thinking of building "big stuff", keep in mind that carbon fiber is combustible -- you might want to think twice before using it in buildings, bridges, etc. in place of non-flammable steel and concrete.

It's very unlikely that any particular fossil organism is our direct ancestor, even if it's from the right phylum, class, order etc. The best we can say is that it's from a genetic population that's very close, *possibly* identical, to the one that led to us.

("If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" is the question to which this is the answer. We evolved from particular populations of primates, none of which exists today, but some of which split from the ancestors of surviving primate populations. The more recent the split, the more similar our genomes to those surviving primates. But none will have a genome identical to our direct ancestors -- those genomes evolved into us, or into other well-adapted, hence relatively long-surviving, primate populations.)

A pox on the fools who got the "synthetic" label established. This is not a synthetic version of a natural product, or a modified natural product. It is (one or more) totally synthetic "analogues" which bind to the same receptors (more or less) as THC but in significantly different fashion. The perceived effects are somewhat similar to MJ but the differences are more significant than the similarities.

The active ingredients are *NOT* those found in natural MJ, and some of them are much more pharmacologically active. These compounds have found a market in an effort to circumvent anti-MJ laws, but they appear to be immensely more dangerous than MJ itself. It would be much safer to legalize MJ than to try to block the market in cannabis imitators. Cannabis imitators have sent a number of people to emergency rooms and one is clearly implicated in at least one death. Given the short period of time these drugs have been available, and the smaller number of users compared to MJ, they are clearly the sort of public danger that opponents of MJ always wanted MJ to be.