Dakota Today

***Tools for the Methanol Economy

Dr. George Ulah has a book out titled something like "The Methanol Economy". I have a copy, but right now I can't find it. It is kind of a general overview of energy and indicates the problems with using hydrogen as a "portable fuel" like gasoline. He notes the better options available with shifting to methanol since it can pull the same amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as combustion with it produces. Below is some text from a story on a development by the Max Planck Institute. It should make those who think South Dakota must build a huge electrical infrastructure of powelines to make use of wind energ to think more than twice.
There are alternatives and we should be pushing university research in South Dakota in that direction.

While available membranes meet some of these criteria, they still have disadvantages, such as low conductivity and poor chemical stability at temperatures above 80°C (175°F). Additional problems arise from the switching of PEM manufacturers from hydrogen-based to methanol-based fuel cells.

Methanol is more readily available and safer than hydrogen and also offers greater energy density. However, existing membranes exhibit the so-called methanol crossover, an effect caused by methanol transport from the anode to the cathode through the membrane. This effect drastically reduces a cell's efficiency and so far has prevented a breakthrough for direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs).

The membrane invented by scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart is based on sulfonated poly(arylene) ionomers that have low swelling properties and demonstrate a high methanol rejection. As a result, the new polymer bars methanol from travelling through the membrane while maintaining high proton conductivity as a result of the very high ion exchange capacity. In addition, it also exhibits superior thermal, thermo-oxidative and hydrolytic stability.

"Fuel cells are a technology with a huge potential," said Joern Erselius, Managing Director of Max Planck Innovation, "but they still need better efficiency. We are very happy that we were able to license this promising technology to a company that already has more than 12 years of experience in this field and that has demonstrated enormous and successful development efforts." He added, the know-how transfer will also be facilitated by a chemist switching from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research to FuMA-Tech GmbH.

http://bulletin.sciencebusiness.net/ebulletins/showissue.php3?page=/548/art/9224
New Window LINK to Methanol resistant fuel cell membrane story
http://tinyurl.com/2357sg

**Stay tuned, there will always be new science news even if evolution of religion slows to a crawl--- Doug Wiken

**Who would Jesus slaughter?

John McLaughlin today (broadcast in SDak on Sun Dec 16, 2007) interviewed Stephen Prothero who has written a book titled "American Jesus-How the Son of God Became an American Idol". He notes the types of "adaptable Jesus". They include the "Mr. Rogers Jesus", The "Sweet Jesus, ie the "effeminate Jesus", T Roosevelt's "Manly Jesus, ie the buffed up carpenter", and another, "The Laughing Jesus". He was taking shots at Mel Gibson's "Passion" movie, etc. It may be that the Jeffersonian perspective on Jesus was that of the "Philosopher Jesus" or "Moralist Jesus". I missed part of the program.

It seemed to me when listening to it, that SD Republicans like Bill Napoli (legislative rabid renegade), Bruce (big election loser) , Steve Sibson (notorious blogger) lexrex (notorious small-letter fiend), and more have invented a new adaptable Jesus. This one is "The Legislative Jesus" or the "Election Jesus".

As I have written before, a rather clear separation of church and state has very much helped religions in the US. But some of these churches and their members are a bit greedy and they want both the advantages of separation of church and state and the advantages (to them) of a theocracy.

Napoli and Bruce further indicate the problems of intricately mixing religion and politics with their own assumption that they are on God's side and speaking and acting directly for him or her. It gives them and people like Joe Lieberman an unfounded feeling that they are so very, very correct because they are after all on God's side and by extension all their political opponents are obviously on the side of the Devil and going to hell. But, as somebody else has noted, that if there is a heaven and a hell, hell would have a lot more interesting population.

Meanwhile, their hero in Washington or the Texas Twit and his co-conspirators are sending the USA to hell in a hand basket..every day more and more assuring that this Bush Administration will be ultimately regarded as the worst in US history leaping past Harding, Hoover, Grant, Johnson, etc in the "worst" department. The Bush "Adaptable Jesus" is apparently the "Warrior Prince Jesus" harking back to the "Crusades Jesus" and of course when it serves them, the "Business as Usual Jesus".

Obviously, I am not a scholar of religions or religiosity, but in terms of using Jesus for government, war, or other odd purposes, his tossing the money changers out of the temple seems to be too easily forgotten as is apparent statement something like "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's".

So, while Bush falls to sleep wondering who Jesus would slaughter, you can wonder how you will pay for all the Christmas presents now that Bush, Inc. has slaughtered the economy in the name of his adaptable Jesus and associated rebirth..or re-invention.

**Stay tuned and remember what a local lawyer said.."The shysters always sit at the front of the church" and a forum poster with a tagline "Don't tell me you are a Christian, Show me".--- Doug Wiken

**Thanks Bernie..Book is the Real Winner

Trying to match Bernie Hunhoff's very generous note in the book he sent, "This book is EVERYTHING you ever wanted to know about scenery and people in South Dakota". In case you are wondering what this is about, check the South Dakota Magazine website for a recent contest:
New Window LINK to The Whereizzit photo contest-Oct 23, 2007

I had a lucky guess on the location for a photo at the site and won a book of SD Photos as a result. See the photo below.. Click for a larger version.

This is an unfortunately small book for a photobook, but if you want a good compact collection of photos that give a broad view of a broad state full of interesting places and people, this is a book worth having. Enclosed with the book is a combination book offer that anybody interested in South Dakota might want to buy or buy as a gift. My guess is you can find a link at the site if you follow my link above to the Whereizzit contest. It is a page-turner. You will wonder from page one until the very end what delightful image is coming next.

A few months ago, I read a story on the saga of a small Iowa publisher of textbooks. His small town business was shut down by large textbook publishers "outsourcing" the publishing to Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, etc. I am sure Bernie Hunhoff could provide a college course worth of information on magazine and book publishing and that is something we need to know more about. This book is printed in Korea. The postage to mail it was $2.74.

I can remember when the bookrate for mailing was something like 24 or 29 cents.I think congress might want to revisit why it is in our national interest to make information in books available at reasonable costs...or at least help a bit more with the shipping.

I like a book or a newspaper I can hold in my hands and bookmark or clip or add notes; but I suspect that publishing will be driven more and more to CD and DVD formats because of the lower costs and shipping charges. I guess if I were publishing a book of photos, I would try to find a way that both protected copyrights and allowed inclusion of a digital form of the book.

Well, this might be drifting into the area of looking a gift horse in the mouth and we bloggers do enough of that with the blogging media "press" we use and exploit nearly every day. So, Thanks for the book Bernie, and I hope you can keep churning out more books and magazines.

***Stay tuned for politics..I may not know enough about that, but I'm sure I know more about that than about book and magazine publishing--- Doug Wiken

**Find a rathole and plug it with computers

Recently a number of SD Bloggers have been pounding life into seemingly dead horses. Computers in schools and the things done with them is a long-running tale. SD Politics Blog, Epp's blog, and a number of others have visited the issue recently. But, the post which seems to make a lot of sense as it reminds us of some obvious things we may have forgotten is by David Newquist at his Northern Beacon blog. Take a look.
New Window LINK to Newquist writing on computers and education

Don't let the title of his post lead you to the wrong conclusion about his post...it needs a subtitle.

Meanwhile back at the farm, I have most of the grease off my hands by now. Son was home for the weekend and we ripped apart the front hub and one front axle on the F-350 Ford. Perhaps if we have the 4x4 drive working, we won't have so much snow. That seems to be the way things work. Finding parts for our old junkers is a bit of job by now too. Computers sometimes help a bit on that, but that is not quite what schools are teaching kids about computers or with computers.

**Stay tuned even if on some days nothing seems to compute--- Doug Wiken

**Sony selling E-Ink book reader

The portable readable book that doesn't eat batteries or require a mile-long extension cord is more or less here.

Sony apparently has the reader ready to sell and claims 10,000 books in an e-library.

LINK--Sony ads for electronic book

And below is the link to the books which Sony pretty well hides on its "connect" site which is really set up to push music rather than text.

LINK--Sony E-Books library of sorts

I checked one e-book. Al Gore's "Assault on Reason". It was around $20 as a Sony e-book and about $16 in a regular hardcover version from Amazon.

The Sony Reader may be what seems to be what the e-book world has been waiting for, but if the e-books cost more than regular hardcovers and the format is a proprietary one, it is doomed technology already.

E-Books will be a hit when they cost a fraction of the cost of dead-tree versions. A pixel may be a terrible thing to waste, but it is also incredibly cheap to produce. Blogs are the current example of cheap production writ very large.

Guess I am going to have to again look at the TomeRaider system even if the writers of that system are loath to respond to questions and have failed to produce a simple free or cheap reader for Desktops, I am willing to pay the $30 or so for their PC program which allows reading and writing TomeRaider books, but I doubt a whole lot of people want to pay for a program to read my or anybody elses's books on their PCs even if the free Acrobat Reader works only with the bloated PDF format. And now there is an E-Pub format that will also require Adobe's expensive software.

But, take a look at The TomeRaider site anyway. Putting pages in their "books" is as simple as adding a " <New> " where you want a new page to start. Indexing pages is automatic.

LINK-- TomeRaider books and Free time-limited download

Here is an early comment on the Sony Reader and "E-Ink" system:

LINK--NYSun Blog Comment Dec 2006 First Impressions of Sony Reader, etc

And this is apparently the site of the company that invented the idea of polarized "E-Ink". Note there is a link to the Sony Reader as well as other technologies using E-Ink on this corporate site.

LINK--E-Ink Corporation

Now, if the people trying to build the $100 portable computer can get with the E-Ink system and make the $10 E-Book reader..............don't hold your breath...it took awhile before we went from Sony Beta video tape to other systems and finally DVDs.

**Stay tuned to the lowest priced reading you can find anyplace..well same price as all the other lowest price reading places--- Doug Wiken

**Did you see the Democratic Debate?

The TV debates some are seeing these days have a precursor. Yup, It was VP Nixon vs. Sen Kennedy back in 1960. A library in the area was moving from one building to another and was discarding a lot of romance novels, and other stuff like books from L. Ron Hubbard.

But, in the pile was one book that went back to the days when almost all TV was black and white and some of us were still in high school. It is a paperback government publication I did not even know or remember existed.

Click on the image for a larger view. The actual cover title is THE JOINT APPEARANCES OF Senator John F. Kennedy AND Vice President Richard M. Nixon.. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIDGN OF 1960 with over 700 pages in it including preface and index. I doubt we will be seeing anything like that from the Democratic and Republican debates this year.

***Stay tuned even if you saw Bob Ellis claiming the Bill Moyers show was just "propaganda". His Koolaid must have GOP and RNC on the label with the ingredients for the "sour grapes flavoring" right below --- Doug Wiken

**Miscellaneous on this and that..global warming, global trade

A few nights ago, I saw an interview with Vandana Shiva, a former Quantum physicist who is now primarily interested in the environment and the impact of trade on economic and social environment.

I thought her perspectives and accomplishements sounded very interesting. So, thought I might find a few Google links. Well, it was more like 600,000, so take your pick from the Google Search linked below:
LINK-- Google Search for "Vandana Shiva"

Checking Amazon will also show a number of books she has authored, co-authered or is noted in. Start digging into her perspectives on large corporations "stealing" DNA from other cultures and patenting products from them. Start thinking about the consequences of "free" trade that the supporters never mention.

And now for something completely different..maybe.. The recent Scientific American magazine notes that Lavender oils and oils from tea tree can cause the enlargement of breasts in young males. Some other similar scents may have similar effects. They mimic or are similar to female hormones. So, if you are male, it is better to smell like you have been working than to smell like a flower.

And, from one of the recent radio shows on NPR (Science Friday Mar 23, 2007, information that the reaction of those poo-pooing Al Gore's concern about global warming have made a few mistakes. Some have assumed that the sun is the culprit dumping out a lot more energy. Well, scientists have been monitoring the sun's energy output with satellites ABOVE the atmosphere and it has not increased in 20 years even if the earth's temperature has increased.

Well, the attackers of any ideas related to global warming say, it can't be human activity doing it. It must be some other change. Just one problem with that argument however. Measurement of the isotopes in the atmospheric carbon dioxide indicate it is from the combustion of fossil fuels.

So a couple of the arguments runing on the fuel of fear, uncertainty and doubt appear to be the result of propaganda from the fossil fuels industries. Look for http://www.sciencefriday.com perhaps..

And, from SD Public Broadcasting and their Health program comes more than a little news indicating we need to "Eat to live and not live to eat". Drs Hohn and Kevin Weiland with mention of Dr. Munch and flaxseed were pm the program. More on this as I round up the links I missed during the program. Even so, I ate too much pizza tonight.

Not much in the way of rain forecast for today, but drizzle has been falling most of the day and now we are in deep fog. Weather forecasts and coverage are somewhat less than wonderful on weekends and we sit in an area more or less on the edges or fringes of several radar systems.

And I know there should be more, but right now I am missing some notes..

**Stay tuned for more from the blog conveniently located in the middle of nowhere--- Doug Wiken

**GOP adds "Let's destroy the books." to "Import Garbage and export graduates"

Denise Ross at her HogHouse Blog writes about the tangled mess of "transitional policies" at the SD Library. LINK-- Hog House Blog on SD Library and HB1215 Check her reporting and then read my comment below.

This is peculiarly stupid. In a matter of years collections will be sent hither and yon by rotation policies and incompetent local librarians and staff or just plain disappear in transition. Then when the local librarian wants more room for romance novels, the historical stuff will be sold for 25 cents a copy to raise money to heat the library or cool it in the summer or buy cookies for the library board.

Rather than moving books all over the state like a huge book seeder, there should be a new state library in the area of the historical center that is fire proof and designed for long term storage with controlled temperature and humidity and with superb lighting for reading and research while ultraviolet light is reduced. Maybe Rounds can convince a certain benevolent banker that we need a "Sanford South Dakota State Library and Research Center."

Ross indicates the state will use the space formerly used by books and readers for state office space. For what does state government need more offices? The state population has not changed signficantly and with years of Republican government most of the problems of 20 years ago are the same problems of today and it does not appear that anything more will be done by Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures to ameliorate any problems in the near future. How many more Rounds family members need a state desk that has a computer connection and a foot rest?

A few years ago, the SD GOP policies could be summed up in "Import garbage and export graduates". Now we can add to that "and disperse and destroy the books and historical documents and references"

**Stay tuned even if you think all SD Republican policies are variations of Archie Bunker saying "Stifle yourself."---- Doug Wiken

**Mikey brings Christian Dogma To the Inaugural

I saw a few minutes of the SD Inaugural ceremonies in Pierre a day or two ago. Nearly stunning was the intrusion of religious dogma pushed into the procedure. Singers were pushing the dogma of Christian resurection, etc into the ceremony. It is just swell that Governor Marion Mikey is Catholic, but we really don't need the dogma machine running full blast during government processes.

We have been getting more and more intrusion of religion into politics. A book looking at this process and those pitiful souls misled by politicians exploiting faith for partisan purposes has been printed. The author has an interesting background. He is interviewed at Salon Online Magazine at link below.

See LINK -- Salon review/interview on Hedges Book on Christian Fascists Take a look at this before the link becomes less than golden.

Richard Dawkins and others are concerned that moderate's easy tolerance o fundamentalistf mixing of Christianity with partisan politics is a real danger because it allows exploitation of real faith for advocacy of incredibly stupid public policies including those in education and science.

It is time that any use of any religious artifact be removed from all forms of affirmation in government in South Dakota. The fundamentalist smudging of the boundary between religion and state is enhanced by such ceremonies and they become a threat to both freedom of religion and freedom from religious fascism and theocracy.

**Stay tuned even if your genuine autographed picture of Jesus Christ from a Christian radio station in Mexico was printed in China on paper recycled from baby chick mailing cartons---Doug Wiken

**Read Population: 485....by Michael Perry

I read several magazines and two or three newspapers, but I must confess, not many books..or at least not many whole books...parts and pieces mostly.

But, last week I heard Michael Perry on Michael Feldman's Whada ya know? Not Much. public radio show. He was turning some pretty good phrases at a little less than 60 mph and had a few good stories. I found a book by him and bought it from Amazon...nearest bookstore is about a 200 mi round trip. The book Population: 485, meeting your neighbors one siren at a time is his "memoir" of writing and working as an EMT and a volunteer firement in New Auborn, Wisc.

The book is a bit over 200 pages of good quick reading. It is an engaging mix of high drama and hijinks, family and fraility, joy and sorrow. I suspect the collection of stories many experienced EMT's nurses, highway patrolmen, and volunteer firement in small towns could write if they also happened to have Michael Perry's ability to write.

For my taste, Perry works a bit to hard trying to relate small town living to the rest of humanity as linked to ancient history and literature, but not to the point of being annoying. Always interesting anyway . He weaves in a few odd words that only George Will would appreciate, but the meaning of the story is obvious without resort to a dictionary even if some phrases reminded me of Ernie Kovacks "Percy Dovetonsils"

I don't have Dakota Today set up to get rich on book references and sales, so you will just have to dig around a bookstore or library in your town or if Amazon is nearly your only options, shell out $12 or $15 or so and get a few hours of better entertainment that you are likely to get from a similar evening of commercial TV watching. You might however find yourself wiping your eyes once or twice.

As Perry writes something like "The coming and going of many small towns has just got up and went", it is not hard to see many similar small towns and big and small people in South Dakota.

***Stay tuned even if you feel kinship only with a virtual "community" in area of the internet sparsely population with a few people with similar attitudes toward reality..few sirens and alarms, but perhaps a lot of quiet desperation most of the time---Doug Wiken