Fordi

First, a little context. I discovered that my policy views are largely compatible with those of Jill Stein. Unfortunately, this survey largely omits energy policy. Since energy policy is, in my opinion, the most important thing in the current spectrum of US policy, I consider this a massive oversight.

How we approach problems with energy scarcity is the single most important political question of our age.

Energy, simply put, is the capacity to do work. Because of this, it helps drive economy. It is what we use to convert natural resources into goods. It is what we use to convert sunlight into food. It is what we use to convert labor into leisure. Our ability to extract and use energy to perform work is one of the biggest reasons that slavery is relegated to illegal operations around the world. We've made energy our slave, so we no longer need to make slaves of each other.

Energy, additionally, is "free" - in that the human race does not synthesize th

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/**
	Usage (the label is required)
	<input id="uid" type="checkbox" ... /><label for="uid">Label</label>
	
	Produces styled checkboxes in IE9+, current Firefox and Chrome

	Demo here: http://jsfiddle.net/7Fggq/

	@author	Bryan Elliott <[email protected]>
*/

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(function () {
	var sayHi = function (token) {
			if (!token.progress) token.progress = {};
			token.progress.saidHi = (token.progress.saidHi||0) + 1;
			//true == simply proceed; false == reject workflow
			return true;
		},
		shakeIt = function (token, next) {
			token.progress.shook = (token.progress.shook||0) + 1;
			next('right');

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/**
 * Simple javascript rules engine
 * 
 * @author Bryan Elliott
 * @link http://codemonkeybryan.com
 * 
 * A RuleSet is essentially a simple list of voters.  By executing the RuleSet, 
 * you iterate over the voters and obtain a done/fail event via jQuery's Deferred 
 * interface.
 *

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var Dependency = (function () {
	"use strict";
	var Node = function () {
		var i, pub = {}, inst = this;
		for (i in inst) 
			if (inst[i] instanceof Function)
				pub[i] = (function (i) {
					return function () {
						return inst[i].apply(inst, arguments);
					};

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Respiration v. Generation

AGW deniers ask "Hey, we breathe CO₂; does that mean we're contributing?" supposing that this makes AGW absurd. The question it begs, though, is more one of, how does CO₂ emission via respiration compare to that of power generation, and what are the differential concerns?

Humans

World population: ~ 7 billion humans
[Avearge human CO2 production][humanEmission]: 2T / year
CO₂ produced by human respiration: 14GT / year

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Calculating Carbon Intensity

So terms like "oil" and "coal" are somewhat confusing, when you go to look for properties. These are names for sets of compounds that share similar, but not equivalent characteristics.

So when I went looking for the carbon intensity of oil (that is, mass ratio of CO₂ produced to fuel burned for a fuel), I found myself stymied; Wikiepedia did not have a simple number, and the papers on the subject elicited by a google search tended to avoid giving actual numbers on the subject.

Not to be discouraged, I figured you could calculate it yourself, and get something in the right ballpark.

Petroleum is made up of largely "alkanes" - molecules with this ladder-like formula:

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(function () {
	"use strict";
	/**
	 * Add event couplings to a function, enabling aspect-oriented design patterns
	 *
	 * @return	Function 	Coupled function
	 **/
	Function.prototype.couple = function () {
		var fn = this,
			events = {before: {}, after: {}};

Fordi

Informed atheism is a rebellion. Not against God, for you don't rebel against things you treat as nonexistant. It's the expression of a rebellion against a popular view that it's ok to hold a belief that you can't demonstrate as true.

There's simple atheism: just failing to believe in a god for whatever reason: you've never been introduced to the concept; you're "angry" at your concept of god; you simply don't have a reason to believe. These are fine; I welcome the day when nearly everyone is a "simple atheist". These are the atheists that hardly need it as a label.

Informed atheism is a different animal: it's the statement that the existence of a god has been almost entirely excluded from belief by our knowledge. We understand there may be flaws in our knowledge, but the number of flaws necessary to allow a god to be real is staggering.

In short, a simple atheist may be easily turned into a believer - indeed, it's happened at least once to every single religious believer - but an informed atheist is

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/**
 * This code block is designed to enable the consumer of a script to name your library whatever they want, by simply
 *	adding the attribute 'data-library-name' to the script tag.  When the time comes in your script
 *	you simply set Module.Space[Module.Name] = Your Cool Library
 * 
 * Other benefits to the Module object*:
 *	Module.Tag is the script tag that pulled your script in.  You can use this to pull in further data-* attributes for script configuration
 *	Module.URI contains the URI used to get your script.  This can be useful if you want to use script-relative resources, such as SWF files
 *	You can require jQuery just by setting the jQueryVersion argument.
 *