I believe in the scientific method, the way they taught us in school, but that's not always what scientists do in the real world. Scientists are people after all, they have their preferences and prejudices. I remember what you once said about trends in teaching, how they come and go from time to time. It seems that something similar happens with the scientific community. If a new idea goes against accepted practice, it's resisted at first, and then it eventually may or may not wiggle it's way in among the old stuff, eventually displacing some of it. That's why I say that I don't believe something just because a scientist says it. I don't exactly not believe it either, I like to wait and see if it establishes itself. Meanwhile, I try to keep an open mind, but that's often easier said than done.
I used to believe that they were all in it together, but now I'm not so sure. They do seem to squabble among themselves a lot, but that might just be a front that they put up to lull us into a false sense of security. I'm still pretty sure that they are indeed all in it, just not necessarily together.
You brought up an interesting point about electricity transmission costs. You don't hear people talk about that a lot, but it must be a significant chunk of the total price of power. Plus, every time there's a tornado or hurricane, the power goes out, sometimes for days on end. It has occurred to me that we would be better off if each of us had our own power plant. City dwellers like you could have one big one for the whole building, or maybe a square block in neighborhoods with single family dwellings, but swamp dwellers like me would need a smaller one of our very own for just our houses.
Windmills only work when the wind blows, and solar panels only work when the sun shines, so we would need something more consistent. Of course they already have gas and diesel generators but, while those are fine for emergency backup, they are too expensive and too noisy to use all the time. What we need is something like the warp core on the starship Enterprise. It gives off a steady soft hum that I'm sure we would get used to and not even notice. The one on the Enterprise was powered by di-lithium crystals, but I don't think that exists in the real world, so either somebody would have to invent it or think up something else that works. How about plasma gas, don't they already use that for welding or something? You could have a big tank in your yard, similar to a propane tank, and a guy could come around in his truck once a month to fill it up. I suppose you could pipe it in too, but then we're back to being dependent on some distant source that could be cut off at any time. What do you think of that, my friend?
The reason I told you the story about Sheldon and String Theory was that it reminded me of that cold fusion thing. They have been working on it for a long time, and are no closer than when they started. It would seem that, at some point, somebody would throw up his hands and say, "To hell with this, lets go find something that really works!" I suspect the reason they don't is that there are people with a vested interest in fusion, and they don't want to give it up, just like there are people with a vested interest in fossil fuels, except that fossil fuels actually work. Of course, we're going to run out of that stuff eventually, so somebody needs to be working on whatever is going to replace it, whether climate change is real or not.
I don't roll my own cigarettes like the cowboys or the Hippies. I buy these tubes that are basically cigarettes without the tobacco in them. Then I have this machine that stuffs tobacco in the tubes, one at a time. It takes less than a minute, on average, to make one cigarette, even allowing that some of them don't come out right and have to be re-worked. I went through several cheap manually operated machines before I settled on the electric one that I now use. I paid about a hundred dollars for it, and I made that back from the savings on the first four cartons that I produced. One of the first things that Obama did after he took office was raise the tax on bulk tobacco, doubling the retail price. He forgot to raise the tax on pipe tobacco, though, and before long, most of the cigarette tobacco brands had magically changed into pipe tobacco. Ah, the wonders of modern science!
Don't worry about being too argumentative, it doesn't bother me anymore, I'm used to it. If potential newbies don't like it, let them go out and start their own blogs.
Have a nice trip.
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