Tabs for Thursday
- Via AL.com: Tommy Tuberville’s musician brother ‘compelled to distance’ himself over ‘racial stereotypes, white nationalism’.
- Also in Tuberland, via Politico: Tuberville’s top military adviser bows out.
- Via Slate: It Took Alito Barely a Month to Violate the Supreme Court’s New Ethics Rules. On the one hand, the issue was an easy one (disclosing the reason for recusal over a fairly straightforward issue, i.e., basic transparency) and not a huge deal. On the other, however, if he won’t do something that simple it raises the question of the efficacy of these rules.
- Via WaPo: California’s cliffs are crumbling as climate change reshapes the coast.
- Air Power? Via WaPo: Scientists find way to make energy from air using nearly any material.
Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution.
Well, it sounds too good to be true, but if we ever hit a point at which humidity is the key to energy, the Deep South will be sitting pretty.
It will be determined that generating electricity from humidity will change the environment of the south, therefore we should continue to burn fossil fuels.
It took some digging but the supplemental materials indicate that the power output is very small — call it five orders of magnitude smaller per square meter than a typical PV solar panel. If someone approached me about angel funding to attempt to commercialize this, I’d be a hard pass. There are lots of leading edge battery and solar panel techs that look much more practical.
@Michael Cain: Concur. This isn’t even at the “We see a path from the lab to commercial viability and so will begin the 15 year march to an initial niche market”, much less the expansion into a mass market product.
@Michael Cain:
If they’re cheap enough to make and operate, they could serve as local supplemental power for small uses. If there are enough such, it could sell as a niche product.
Speaking of Tommy Tuberville, here is more evidence that he is a POS. I remember because two of my children went to Texas Tech. He was also a crappy coach.
Tommy Tuberville left recruits at dinner to take Cincinnati job
Ken Paxton says he won Texas for Trump in 2020 by withholding mail-in ballots for Harris County – aka Houston.
From the Slate article on Alito:
Either Kagan is a saint, or she knew they weren’t good bagels and was using ethics as an excuse to bow out of a poor bagel experience.
Either way, but especially if the latter, my opinion of her rises.
@Gustopher:
My mind instantly played back the scene in The Shawshank Redemption, where the road contractor gives Norton a box with a pie his wife made.