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Messages - spiceant

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Hello everything,

A couple of moments ago (in January) I left this beautifull forum and darwinbots, I am not returning to darwinbots but am trying to tickle all of your minds again. You might remember me preaching about peak oil, but really lets get real. Peak Oil isnt such a big issue at all, there are bigger things at hand and I think I have a few general ideas.
I preach the good news of the end of the world.

Do you know marshmen? I can tell you that they didn't beam these thoughts into my head, these thoughts came from internet sites from many individuals spread across the globe and ofcourse my marvelous godgiven intelligence. I am also trying to harness the wisdom of the bible, believing that my saviour and eternal life has come through the acceptence of the safrifice of christ and the worship of the god of ancient Israel, the god of Christians and coincidentally also the god of Jehovah Witnesses. The latter proclaims that god has a name, Jehovah.

I will tell you about one litle thing I worry about:
The situation in the Middle-East. Today iran will finally conclude with denying to give up its nuclear ambitions, quite oddly it is not told that today Iran will also change its oil bourse away from the dollar, to the euro. But nobody wants to know that right?
Anyway, the USA maintains that it cannot allow the crazy Iranians that want to whipe the Zion people off the planet, to have nuclear power (not just electricity). Did you know that in the case of a second 911, the USA will attack Iran (even if it didnt do it)?
As it seems, the USA even wants to use nuclear weapons as 'self-defense'.
It happens though that iran and china and russia  are quite good buddys. I ought to wonder what would happen if the usa declared war on one part of what might be an ally of russia and china.

I am actually here to get you folks to read a litle text I wrote, about 25 pages about my life thoughts and worrys that I hope will wake you kind fellow human beings up to some realitys.
http://www.esnips.com/doc/c6ea395c-5af4-4e...-and-worrys.doc
it has a litle about my life, my worrys and my thoughts.
About armageddon, peak oil, moral decay, modern society, rich & poor, god, jehovah witnesses and other stuffs.

anyway, spiceant is back for a moment or two
loving regards from yours truly, Sander Buruma

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Off Topic / Happy Birthday to Greven
« on: February 04, 2006, 11:08:34 AM »
who's graven? :unsure:

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Off Topic / Please help this is taking to much of my DB time
« on: February 03, 2006, 05:19:29 AM »
I will have to some research to back up statements that I have made, like the actual cost of fuel cells, technology developments on those area (altough I have the impression new technologys may not come up in time), maximum capacity of some alternatives (hydroelectric/wind/solar), how many new efficient power plants can be financed, maintenance, the hydrogen economy (and all of its aspects, replacing vehicles/creating infrastructure). I agree that the life after the oil crash article is biased toward the negative.
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The sites you linked to seem a bit alarmist. Propoganda is what I'd call it. Hardly neutral in its POV as good scholarship would be. As such, people with scientists' minds (like most of us here) are going to approach it skeptically from the start.
I am afraid that we arent nearly as critical about alternatives and ouer ability to change to them then we are about the articles I linked.

now I dont have a lot of time to commit to research so please forgive me for not posting something extensive right now. perhaps at the end of the day. (some time around 18:00 in america).

regards

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Off Topic / Please help this is taking to much of my DB time
« on: February 02, 2006, 05:16:02 PM »
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Solar panels arent free and they dont come falling out of the sky when and where they are convenient. Solar panels are as of the moment quite cheap because they dont cost a lot to make. Solar panels use silicons
Sun is free though, once you have the panels in place.

Very optimistically speaking, solar panels have a maximum lifetime of about 30 years and dont produce energy at night. Windmills have worse lifetimes, dams require maintenance (altough dams will probably be very efficïent).

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The process of fission certainly does not generate a significant amount of pollution. Mining and enriching uranium does produce pollution and at the moment still uses fossiel fuels. In addition nuclear power is quite risky as the involved material is vulnrable to terrorism and public opinion (public opinion is sobering up on this, though).
Right but once the dependence on fossil fuels is reduced, the mining vehicles will be electrical. Actually most of the big open cast mining machines already are electrical and pretty much all underground vehicles have to be. The trucks that transport the stuff out of the mine site aren't though. But they could be.

A modern nuclear power plant isn't anything like as vulnerable as the popular press likes to make out. They mostly use very low enrichment uranium which couldn't cause a nuclear explosion no matter what happened to it. There could be potential radiation leaks if terrorist could get a bomb into such a plant but most likely nothing particualrly serious. Something like Chernoble would be damn near impossible in a modern power plant
Trucks dont run on electricity, I think you are underestimating transporation, it doesnt run on electricity and it probably wont be in the near future. Ouer food travels more then 500 miles before making it to ouer stomachs, for example. Conveniantly large suplys of uranium arent located everywhere.
Also the electricity of the mining machines is not the fuel itself but rather the fuel that the electricity in the first place.
Issues with nuclear plants include what is exemplemantary in Iran right now: As fossil fuels run out political pressures will grow and nuclear power plants become desired everywhere. A nuclear plant is a big leap closer to nukes.
Even then, nuclear power plants require about 3-5 billion dollars to construct and thats completely forgetting when we have to decommission then. The plant itself doesnt produce the the fuel for cars, boats, planes and trucks. Pressure on the uranium resource would explode if we managed to build the thousands of required nuclear plants.

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Actually most existing cars would run on hydrogen right now with only some very minor adjustments to their ignition systems. Hydrogen burns in a very similar way to vaporised gasoline.
even if car engines were modified to run on hydrogen, hydrogen at roomtemperature is a gas (with a very low energy volume) and must be compressed in safe fuel cells before it can be used as a fuel conveniently. The fuel cells are the smack in the face for hydrogen based engines as they cost to much to be a convenient replacement for every vehicle currently on the highway or even every vehicle in the future. The fuel cells require platinum, silver and copper in order to be a safe fuel cell. These 3 resources have already become scarce and will certainly become even more expensive if we were to build all the required fuel cells today. Fuel cells themselves dont last much longer then a few years, either.
Nuclear power plants take about 10 years to build and dont power the billion cars, millions of planes and boats by themselves.

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There are only four original sources of energy on this planet: the sun, gravitational forces, earth's interior, or nuclear power.
This is just plain wrong!

Only 3 of these are correct. There are no such thing as "Gravitational forces"
He goes on to say that hydro electric power is "Gravitational". But the movement of water around the atmosphere can also be traced back to solar power. The sun evaporates the water and gives it the energy to rise into the clouds. then it falls as rain and provides power to Hydro plants. All "Gravitational" forces in this case are actually Solar.
Hydro electric power plants produce energy out of nuclear power, the sun commits to fusion, emits energy and causes clouds (building up the amount of gravitational energy) to rain on mountains which in turn produces rivers that produce electric current with the help of hydroelectric plants, ultimately by nuclear power.
The author may not have had his facts perfectly straight, accurate and clear but I dont think your argument holds.

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There is also another energy source which he doesn't mention.
"Kinetic"
The Earth, Moon and planets have momentum and this can be converted to usable energy by tidal dams and various other devices. Tides are moved by the Kinetic energy of the Moon as it travels around the Earth so converting this to energy via applying resistance to tidal motion is actually going to slow the moon down very slightly.
Tidal power plants have very few feasible locations and will very probably not make a significant contribution to a hydrogen future. We might also cause the moon to break orbit but thats a lunatics thought at the moment ^_^
I googled 'tidal power' to type a remotely educated response to this.
All birds release energy every time they poo, if we catch the kinetic energy from the falling poo we can turn it into energy, but it wont make a significant amount of energy. Now tidal power isnt best compared to this but I hope it clears up my opinion on tidal power. It can be combined with other alternatives but that is the limit.
I'v still posted a message about tidal power as an alternative on peakoil.com because it wanst mentioned yet, hoping to get some better answers there.

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The rest of the article has a good bit of fact in it but is approached from an extremely over-critical way.

take this passage..
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Even using turkey offal, one must account for 1) the feed, 2) what fertilized the feed (natural gas), 3) how the feed was planted, 4) harvested, 5) irrigated (oil and gas), and 5) how the turkey got to market (oil). Thermal depolymerization should be more properly viewed as a form of recycling. But this process will never have the net energy of the original fossil fuels. As fossil fuels dwindle, so will the source material.
This is ONLY true if the turkeys are farmed for no reason other than to collect their poop. In actual fact turkeys are farmed and will continue to be farmed whether we collect it or not. The poop is a complete by-product of a food growing industry which will continue regardless. With that in mind the poop is actually completely free. It costs nothing extra to produce yet it could yield a very large payback.

The using of the poop would still require an extra investment that may well cost more then it produces. And will probably cost more energy then we can get it out of it. Even if it nets positive energy return it will not be within a remote proximity of oil.

I also believe it deserves a notice that transition to alternatives will probably not be remotely peacefull, considdering the big oil countrys basicly lead ouer countrys with ouer massive oil dependance of the moment.

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The article is very un-necessarily negative and takes no account of many highly important factors. If this were being submitted for peer reviewed publication it would never make it past my desk for one.
I agree the article is not very extensive, but I believe it was kept this way because it is relatively short so that people would put effort into reading it in detail.
The article isnt particularily optimistic but I fail to understand how the article is over-critical or how any other article can be over critical.

I believe that the articles I linked are clearly not something you want to read or know :lecture: . I believe that the named phenoma go against everything you, your friends and the media want and you for that reason choose to deny it wether you consciously know it or not.
But I would love to have my statements discharged because I hate the future I imagine right now.

I will try to reduce my use of double quotes.

Goodnight everything.

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Off Topic / Please help this is taking to much of my DB time
« on: February 02, 2006, 01:19:53 PM »
Hydrogen powered vehicles are certainly feasible on small scales (villages for example) but can it really produce fuel for the growing world industry? Hydrogen in itself does not appear in significant quantitys in nature, it takes about 120% of the energy to produce hydrogen out of water compared to the energy you can get from it.  This means it is not a means of producing energy but rather transporting or converting it, like uranium -> fission -> hydrogen -> car.

Solar panels arent free and they dont come falling out of the sky when and where they are convenient. Solar panels are as of the moment quite cheap because they dont cost a lot to make. Solar panels use silicons

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How about polution?

Nuclear power is the cleanest energy source (short of solar power) known to modern science.

The process of fission certainly does not generate a significant amount of pollution. Mining and enriching uranium does produce pollution and at the moment still uses fossiel fuels. In addition nuclear power is quite risky as the involved material is vulnrable to terrorism and public opinion (public opinion is sobering up on this, though).

Nuclear fission cannot be used to power all of the vehicles in the world (both literally and practically). practically none of the cars on the world can currently use hydrogen as fuel. in addition the world does not appear to be transiting from fossil fuels to alternatives neither does it appear to be going to in time.

I find this article quite usefull (9 critical questions to ask about alternative energy)
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/..._questions.html

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Off Topic / Please help this is taking to much of my DB time
« on: February 02, 2006, 09:43:20 AM »
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Brazil has been running on alcohol fuels for 30 years and they seem to be doing alright. My school uses biodiesel for many of their vehicles.
What do you define under brazil in this sentence? everything from power plants to cars to tractors? the way from soil to crop to biofuels is very long and dependant on a lot.
Soil needs to be worked and fertile, infertile land can be fertilized (by fertilizers derived from gas at the moment), crops need to be worked, harvested and transported to where they are processed, turned into fuel and distributed. The required crops dont grow everywhere. can the product fuel all of the above?

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Off Topic / Please help this is taking to much of my DB time
« on: February 02, 2006, 07:15:39 AM »
on page 2 it reads that biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel cost more energy to produce then it there's in it. Now I'm preassuming the 2 fuels are quite cheap because they can be produced using relatively cheap machinery, which currently still have cheap energy available to them.
Can biofuels fuel their own means of being produced and transported so that it nets a positive amount of commercially available biofuel?

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Off Topic / Please help this is taking to much of my DB time
« on: February 01, 2006, 04:11:36 PM »
eversince I have visited and red the 2 pages of http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ I cant stop visiting and haunting both the above sit and www.peakoil.com my mind keeps tricking me into thinking either 2 are more important then DB
then again it really is... aaahh...
HHEEEEELLLPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

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RANT / Bots Rants, take 2
« on: February 01, 2006, 04:07:16 PM »
sir, you are a moron

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Newbie / Daunted newbie on the killer bot making tour
« on: January 31, 2006, 06:57:52 PM »
if I replace a number of <500> everywhere in a DNA will it always be the same if I replace those with <200 300 add> (without the <>)?

when I use the tie functions that do not specificy that they affect other tied up bots (like  fixlen or fixang which adjust tie length and angle) will they limit their effects to the bot executing the functions? (so that adjusting angle doesnt make any or a 2nd bot swing somewhere as if it were hit by a bat)
if I want to change the angle of a bot's eye (in a multibot with hardened ties) do I have to use tie functions to make it happen?

do functions that involve angles always refer to the bots eye´s angle (in which direction its looking)?

how do I find values like venom, poison, slimy, shell, body or nrg points while a sim runs?

how do I get DB to always turn the 1rst bot I load turn yellow the 2nd blue 3rd purple and 4th red? or do I have to manually change the colors if they are similar to the color of other bots or DB's background, each time I load them? <-- suggestion :boing:

anyway iv been improving the tutorial bot to increase its body size according to a 5:1 ratio with nrg (5nrg=1body), it also wanders around if it doesnt see alien life and it also makes a bit of shell when it has a body and nrg surpluss. (it increases body/shell before repro-ing at 20K nrg)

league runs (50 each) showed each new gene improved performance compared to its ancestor, before I accepted it and moved on to another improvement.

edit: ill change the bot to considder variables more so it doesnt just depend on fixed values (like I did with the 5nrg/body ratio)
I also think of making it a battery bot that will in one or another way make the veggy a shell (and later slime to) so the bots ancestors cant hurt it bad enough.

regards and goodnight everything :sleep2:

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Newbie / Daunted newbie on the killer bot making tour
« on: January 31, 2006, 04:17:31 AM »
so far I'v made the simplest of bots ie one that makes shell, body and slime and if I take a look at the energy it appears to work as it looses energy when above 3000 untill it has full shell/body or whatever which works completely ok, however is it possible to see if a bot has made shell or slime directly?

also I dont quite get another thing, how to for example make an action that will use (a+b)*c= body -> energy or a/(b+(c*d)) or for that matter anything that goes beyond a+b. single variables are ok but I dont quite get it from staring at any other bots.
is it possible to combine booleans (assuming true =1 false=0) into it, ie. [booleanA]*200+2000?

how can I expect math to occur here? I dont suppose div and mult go before add or sub, considdering the code nature of bots in DB.

one of the ant bots I downloaded (basicly made up of queen's and workers) works perfectly (makes big queen cells and active worker cells) in 2.4.A but rather odd under 2.37.6

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Newbie / Daunted newbie on the killer bot making tour
« on: January 30, 2006, 05:44:03 PM »
  • How do I turn off random mutations all together, either in all bots or just veggies?
  • I am currently using v 2.4.A and am getting crashes sometimes (runtime errors) of different kinds depending on the settings I set. is this the most stable ver?
  • what is body good for, other then size?
q 2) I wanted to know when bots die, other then when they run out of body or energy
and question 4) was referring to the wikipedia of darwinbots.com

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Newbie / How did you find DarwinBots?
« on: January 30, 2006, 03:58:55 PM »
I also bumped across this place while browsing spore (pc game) forums, someone linked this place and its got me hooked (for now, atleast)

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Newbie / Daunted newbie on the killer bot making tour
« on: January 30, 2006, 03:39:33 PM »
  • When I go to take a look at "the one" gen of chen I see only one gen and still its at the top of the F1 and SB League?
  • When exactly do bots die? I tried making a veggy that keeps on turning energy -> body but it explodes so often even though it doesnt run out of energy
  • what exactly are *.'s for? as seen in for example this condition: *.fx 0 != but sometimes there are multiple on one line of a condition like with: *.refaimdx *.myaimdx =
  • some tutorial links are red and when I click I am shown a screen where I can write the tutorial?!
I was also wondering if there are more sites (or programs) with helpfull newbie tutorials.
anyway hello community, I hope the questions dont go below the level of newbyness.

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