So far so good. My home grid tie solar system from SolarCity just produced its for megawatt hour (1000KWH) of electrical energy. How much electricity is a million watt hours?

A microwave oven typically draws 1000 watts of power. So a kilowatt hour is the energy it takes to run your microwave for an hour. So a megawatt hour is running a microwave oven continuously for 1000 hours, which is 41 days, 16 hours.

This is enough electricity to drive a Tesla Model S or a Nissan Leaf from Los Angeles to New York. (range 3000 – 3500 miles per MWH)

1 megawatt hour is enough energy to lift something weighing 1 million pounds (500 tons) 2655 feet into the air (1/2 mile).

Interesting how many stories there are about Apple or the Bolt being a Tesla killer. Elon smiling all the way to the bank. What these writers don’t realize is that if another car company builds an electric car so compelling that it puts Tesla out of business then Elon has accomplished what he set out to do. This isn’t about Tesla winning. It’s about converting the world to electric cars. Elon will still be a billionaire selling them batteries and he can focus on his other projects including colonizing Mars.

I wonder if Apple is going to get into the rocket business too?

Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt snubbed President Obama’s invitation to his cybersecurity summit today because of Obama’s illegal NSA spying.

I think it’s amusing that a summit to stop hackers is being held by America’s Hacker in Chief. President Obama, who is the worlds most notorious cyber criminal, has ordered the NSA to track every person in America and uses secret courts and secret law to undermine the Constitution. So I want to thank Zuckerberg, Mayer, Page, and Schmidt for taking a principled stand but boycotting Obama’s sham summit.

What’s the anti-vaccine movement about? This Article says that TRAIL LAWYERS funded a fake study so they could sue big pharma over vaccines.

Last April, ILR President Lisa A. Rickard published an op-ed in Forbes, entitled, The Anti-Vaccine Movement And A Trial Lawyer-Funded Climate Of Fear. Given the current spotlight and national debate concerning vaccines, and the recent measles outbreak, we thought it timeline to re-post her April 2014 piece in its entirety:

The most savvy plaintiffs’ lawyers understand that in order to create new fields of litigation, up-front investments are often required. So for those looking for the next big payday, what does$665,000 get you? For starters, a British medical journal study that claims to establish a link between vaccinations and autism.

A 1998 article in the medical journal The Lancet caused a firestorm of controversy when it was published, and helped create the anti-vaccine movement that continues today. There’s only one problem — the article was later retracted by the publisher for being “utterly false,” and the author, Andrew Wakefield, was found to have been paid big bucks by plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Brian Deer, investigative journalist for London’s The Sunday Times wrote that Wakefield, “Was paid more than £400,000 ($665,000) by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.”

The article wasn’t simply retracted. Wakefield lost his medical license in Great Britain and the country’s General Medical Council chair, Dr. Surendra Kumar, said that Wakefield had “brought the medical profession into disrepute” through “multiple separate instances of professional misconduct.”

Before everyone starts screaming DENIER at me let me say up front that, yes – the Earth is getting hotter, and some of the reason is from humans. So here’s a few inconvenient facts that disturb me about some of the alarmist predictions about global warming.

1. In the above graph (NOAA) you’ll notice that 0 represents about where we are now and where we are now is on the high side of normal over the last 400,000 years. The real normal appears to be ice age. Look to me if you buy the CO2 correlation that it would be bad if CO2 levels dropped. Perhaps I’m missing something.
2. The man made increase in CO2 is 100 parts per million. That’s one part in 10,000 in the atmosphere. That’s not a lot of change. I have a hard time conceiving that one part in 10,000 is the difference between paradise and Venus.
3. 100% of the coal and oil came from plants. The plants got 100% of their carbon from the air. Therefore at some time in the past 100% of the carbon from coal and oil was in the air. And yet Earth didn’t turn into Venus when CO2 was 100 times greater than today.

So – yes – we should reduce all forms of pollution and manage our resources. For example – the use of one condom can prevent 44,000 tons of CO2 as a result of an unwanted pregnancy. And we should move to solar power and electric cars. But to those who are saying Earth is going to turn into Venus I say you’re full of stuff.

Today will be the second attempt of SpaceX to land the first stage of his latest rocket on a barge. If it succeeds it will be a milestone in human evolution and the next big step for colonizing space. If it fails then history will be made later this year. The launch is scheduled for 6:10pm Eastern – 3:10pm Pacific. 9 minutes after launch will be the first stage landing.

UPDATE: Launch scrubbed again due to high winds.

Next attempt will be 6:03PM (3:03 Pacific) on Wednesday 02-11-2015.

I think I’ve made an interesting observation about Atheists that are former Christians and like to see what you all think. Christians who turn Atheist seem to think that getting rid of God is the cure for what ails them. That becoming an Atheist means that you have arrived at the Truth, But you haven’t. Atheism is just one very tiny step in the right direction. Christian Atheists still think like Christians and it takes a lot of work to move your thought patterns to a science based mentality. You have to embrace Reality – not just reject God, Just being an Atheist doesn’t get you there. You have to go “all the way in”.

And we’re just going to sit here and let them do it.