Dead Cats Into Diesel

Neece — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:59:56 +0000

Ok, for some reason this struck me as a bit…. odd. Diesel from dead cats? I just had to share it with you, since we’re Heaving Dead Cats around here on a regular basis. Now we can save money, heave dead cats and make fuel! Woot!

Dr Christian Koch, 55, from Kleinhartmannsdorf, has a special method for turning household garbage into biodiesel. This leads me to believe you can make biodiesel out of just about anything.

So, his method involves heating stuff like old tires, paper, motor oil, plastic, dead cats, just about anything, to 300 degrees Celsius. Then the hydrocarbons go through a catalytic converter.

Now I’ll know what to do with all those dead cats in my freezer! (JUST KIDDING)

Found Here and Here.

Confessions Of A Recovering Woo Addict

Neece — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:42:40 +0000

Lately I’ve been talking to Jane. (not her real name) I am having trouble talking to her, and I think I figured out why. We knew each other about 10 years ago in a state far, far away. We were acquaintances, but we had a lot in common. (here’s where I tell you some dark secrets) We were into many different kinds of woo.

Woo: (n or adj) when you uncritically believe unsubstantiated or unfounded ideas. Short for woo woo, according to the Urban Dictionary, definition 4.

I was into reiki, divination, numerology, you name it. While I was an agnostic back then, I still clung to the idea of a kind of Universal Energy. Not really an intelligence, but kind of “magical” principles to energy that science just hadn’t quantified or qualified yet. I held to the beliefs that ancient societies knew secrets that had been lost. Like the Chinese were better at medicine than modern science, or the Mayans had some secret knowledge about the Universe that we were missing out on, as seen in their calendar stopping in 2012.

My main thing was reiki. If you don’t know anything about it, basically you channel energy from the universe through you into your subject. You get an “attunement” where “sacred symbols” open you as a channel. A reiki master has to administer this attunement which is basically a short ritual.

I’ve never been one for ritual. But I really wanted to cure myself of all that was wrong with me and help people, so even though I didn’t like that part of it, I accepted it. And reiki worked for me. My hands would get really hot when I “channeled” this “sacred healing energy” for people. People would feel better when I did my “healings” for them. They would get better. The anecdotal evidence was positive.

I became a reiki master, actually. I then “attuned” other people so that they could go on and be a practitioner, or better yet, go on and attune others. I really enjoyed it and thought it was doing good for people.

I did a lot of reiki for awhile. I held “reiki circles” where we’d all do reiki on each other to “clear our channels” and heal ourselves. I even had a reiki “healing” center with some friends of mine. We offered “healings” and “attunements” in a clinic. We did talks at different places. One talk was at the hospital for cancer patients who wanted alternative healing methods.

I totally believed in reiki. I developed a set of “reiki runes” which had Japanese writing on them. I then gave divination readings with them. I was pretty good at it too. People came back to me again and again for readings and advice.

I can’t believe I’m telling you this. Personally I’m very embarrassed by how much woo I believed back then. But I’m telling you for a reason. I was really wrapped up in this kind of belief in “magical energy”. It made sense to me. It worked for me. I was good at it. I was helping people.

After awhile, I started noticing several things. At first, since they went against what I was practicing, I tried to ignore them or write them off with different woo thinking. What happened was that one of the women I had the clinic with got really sick with pneumonia for quite some time. At first she still tried to do healings with us, before she knew it was pneumonia. But she would cough and hack and we finally all agreed that she needed to get herself better before she could heal others.

This disturbed me. If we’re healing people by channeling this amazing, loving energy from the universe, how could she get so sick? But this was explained that she wasn’t doing reiki correctly. She was supposedly taking on the illnesses of the clients, instead of simply channeling the energy into them. Basically she was doing it wrong and that is what made her sick. She did it to herself.

She ended up in the hospital. She almost died because she was trying to treat it herself with woo magic at home, instead of the medicine she really needed. Of course, we dutifully went to the hospital to give her more reiki healings.

The other thing that I noticed was that it really didn’t matter much what I did. If the person I was working on “believed” I was healing them, they got better and felt a difference. If they didn’t believe, or were resistant to change, they stayed the same.

It was all about psychology. I did some testing of this theory, more so in the readings I did for people and found it to be blatantly accurate once I was aware of it. If the person believed I was channeling awesome energy, the reading was successful. Even if I didn’t feel connected.

After noticing that it was all about psychology, I finally realized there’s no evidence that this stuff does anything at all beyond the power of the human mind and the placebo effect. And that’s when I started letting go of woo. It has taken some time and education, but now I think I’m actually getting somewhere with skeptical thinking.

Of course, now there’s a skeptical community that I can tap into and get new information from. Which is very nice.

Anyway, back to Jane. She’s still very much into all kinds of woo. Talking to her makes me ashamed of who I was. I think back on how I used to think 10 years ago and I feel embarrassed. I can’t believe I embraced all that nonsense.

Of course, the way that woo is packaged and delivered to people is very slick and shiny and palatable. It’s easy and simple and will cure all your ills if you believe the lies.

I’ve rambled enough for one day. But tomorrow I will have a list of some of The Main Features Of Pseudo-Science. This list is quite helpful for figuring out what is nonsense and what is based on real scientific fact and research.

A Solar Revolution In Our Future

Neece — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:45:47 +0000

In a giant leap for clean energy, MIT professor Daniel Nocera and his team, have developed a simple method to split water molecules and produce oxygen gas. This paves the way for large scale use of solar power.

Getting energy from the sun isn’t the hard part, it seems. It’s storing that energy that has been a problem.

These guys at MIT were inspired by how plants perform photosynthesis. Their revolutionary method uses abundant, non-toxic natural materials.

I won’t get into all the details, but I just wanted to share it with you because it seems pretty important and wonderful.

Here’s a link to MIT where they have a video of Daniel Nocera describing the new process and a lot more details.

This is just the beginning though. It’s still not really cost effective, but other scientists will be able to run with it and we’ll see where it all leads us in the near future.

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, we’ll be able to power our homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power our own household fuel cell.

Of course, the power companies will not like this. But hopefully it will all happen anyway.

Heaving Dead Cats » energy

Dead Cats Into Diesel

Related posts

Confessions Of A Recovering Woo Addict

Related posts

A Solar Revolution In Our Future

Related posts