oelewapperke

No it doesn't include women and children to chuck at soldiers hoping they'd shoot em and get sued for war crimes.

Might have been a funny game.

You do kinda have to admit that presenting an "edited" birth certificate is very unlikely to end the debate. What was wrong with a normal, plan scan ?

Of course that doesn't mean there's an illegitimate president. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

And there's certainly no shortage of stupidity on both sides.

Which agricultural plant gets 5% efficient photosynthesis ? That's huge. 2% is quite a lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

Cellulose is a horribly difficult material to do anything at all with. After drying it can be burned to produce heat, and that's pretty much all that's ever been done to it.

Perhaps he means if you're using solar cells followed by Fisher-Tropsch to make actual fuel.

I'm pretty sure plants beat that.

But the base efficiency of plants is horrible : 2% is relatively high in plant species (solar energy input -> produced plant matter output). The most efficient plants in the world are close to 4.5% efficient.

Yeah, given what sort of stories one reads about science at most internet sites you'd think we'd actually have a way to turn electricity + H2O + CO2 into oil (and sugar, and bread, and proteins, and plastics, and so on and so forth). But we don't.

We do not have anything remotely resembling a reasonable option to do this. There's Fisher-Tropsch, but it's horrifically inefficient.

So we're dependent on plants to do the work for us.

In reality we don't know at all how to efficiently make molecules that have more than 4-5 atoms in them. Oil has hundreds to thousands, depending on the oil. Sugar only has a few dozen (depending on the sugar, starting at 20, going up to several hundred).

Kinda pathetic really.