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Tuesday, November 17, 2015

November 2015 Quotations (58)

“If the Republican Party had anything of value to offer the American voter they would not have to lie and cheat and steal to win elections.”
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."
~~ Raold Dahl [1916-90]

"Never argue with an idiot, because bystanders don't know who the idiot is."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

”To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”
~~ George Washington [1732-99]

”When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”
~~ Franklin D. Roosevelt [1882-1945]

”Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

”Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.”
~~ Roy Goodman

”In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.”
~~ Sid Caesar [1922-2014]

“The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.”
~~ author-aviator Richard Bach

“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard’, I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’”
~~ columnist Sydney J. Harris [1917-86]

“Don’t go through life, grow through life.”
~~ Eric Butterworth

“Positive anything is better than negative thinking.”
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]

“I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.”
~~ Oprah Winfrey

“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
~~ U.C.L.A. coach John R. Wooden [1910-2010]

"I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do."
~~ Edward Everett Hale [1822-1909]

“Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it.”
~~ Joe Clark

“Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.”
~~ Ray Kroc [1902-84], who expanded McDonald's to a worldwide behemoth

“The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others.”
~~ Hasidic proverb

"Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves."
~~ suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815-1902]

"Evil is easy, and has infinite forms."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62]

"Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all: the apathy of human beings."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]

"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
~~ Robert Kennedy [1925-68]

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

“Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.”
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919]

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny little matters compared to what lies within us.”
~~ Henry S. Haskins [1875–1957], NOT Emerson or Thoreau

"Every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity."
~~ inventor Edwin H. Land [1909-91]

"Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there."
~~ essayist [Ms] Sloane Crosley

"A man doesn't know what happiness is until he's married. By then it's too late."
~~ Frank Sinatra [1915-98]

"The reason [that] people become funny is to overcome pain."
~~ actress-comedian Sarah Silverman

"Most people go thru life without ever discovering the existence of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as second wind."
~~ publisher Katherine Graham [1917-2001]

"Better to be busy than to be busy worrying."
~~ actress Angela Lansbury

"Sanity is overrated."
~~ G.E. Nordell {and others}

"We cannot ignore this corruption anymore. We need a governmernt that works ... We cannot afford a world with no sensible reform."
~~ Lawrence Lessig, TED Talk in 2013

"Americans owe Donald Trump a great debt for taking politics and raising it to the level of professional wrestling."
~~ comedian Argus Hamilton

"The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."
~~ British computer genius Alan Turing [1912-54]

"Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which to pride yourself – but poverty itself is romanticized by fools."
~~ J.K. Rowling

"I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner."
~~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1859-1930]

"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"We were young, we were foolish, we were arrogant, but we were right."
~~ Daniel Ellsberg

“A cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home ground, homemade, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.”
~~ Henry Ward Beecher [1813-87]

“We do not learn, and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.”
~~ Greek philosopher Plato [427-347 BCE]

"Democracy means that the people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship any God in any way [that] they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well."
~~ screenwriter Dalton Trumbo [1905-76]

“Never do for money what you wouldn’t do for free . . . Work is for slaves.”
~~ Luis Buñuel [1900-83]

"Drink alcohol when needed, but don't get drunk. If you can't prevent yourself from doing drugs, at least share them."
~~ filmmaker Gaspar Noé

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011], co-founder of Apple, Inc. [est. 1975]

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
~~ Robert Kennedy [1925-68]

"It's not about the money – It's about the game."
~~ character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps" [2010]

“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.”
~~ historian Arnold J. Toynbee [1889-1975]

Donald Trump is proof that you don't have to be poor to be white trash
~~ popular CafePress poster

"Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukulele."
~~ journalist Ben H. Bagdikian [b. 1920]

"The Martini: The only American invention as perfect as the sonnet."
~~ H.L. Mencken [1880-1956]

"If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing [that] we're talking about when we use the word 'identity' has reached an end."
~~ Don DeLillo

"As a country, as a state, and as communities, we need to work hard to make sure [that] our veterans get the care [that] they deserve, and a path open to them toward a brighter future ... and I pledge to continue to fight for them and their families – not just today, but every day."
~~ Russ Feingold, 2016 candidate for U.S. Senate from Wisconsin

"If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them."
~~ Caliph Umar bin al-Khat'tab [583?-644]

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new."
~~ Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

“Our taxes are too high. Our wages are too high. We have to compete with other countries.”
~~ Donald Trump, in November 2015

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Tuesday, November 03, 2015

U.S. Navy Makes Gasoline From Seawater

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (N.R.L.) announced in April 2014 that they have manufactured long-chain hydrocarbons – that is essentially gasoline – entirely from seawater, and used the fuel to power a flying model aircraft.

Using a patented electrochemical process, they have simultaneously extracted dissolved CO2 ions and created hydrogen gas from seawater. The resulting mixture of gases is then reformed into long-chain hydrocarbons in a chemical reaction.

The key to the process is the realization that a liter of seawater contains 140 times as much CO2 as a liter of air. In seawater, nearly all of the CO2 is actually in the form of bicarbonate ions, which should make extraction from water fairly straightforward because of the electrical charge [that] they carry.

Since it is entirely feasible to use non-fossil energy sources to power the process, the fuel created could be essentially fossil-free (carbon neutral) gasoline. The oceans and atmosphere exchange CO2 readily in massive quantities, so taking it from one place is functionally the same as taking it from the other.

The N.R.L. press release puts the cost of their new process at between $3 and $6 per gallon.