Dmitry Orlov

Checkmate

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In all of the descriptions of perilous situations that I have studied, arising during adventures on the high seas or in the high mountains, or during armed conflict, a single mistake rarely proves fatal. More often than not, death comes as a result of a sequence of bad choices which reinforce each other. These choices may not appear bad at the time–but they certainly do in retrospect! The end result is a situation in which no further steps can be taken that would not be either harmful or futile. This is the essence of checkmate: no moves left. At that point, none of the previous moves can be undone. Nor do they even exist, really: they have gone off to an imaginary universe populated by the regretful ghosts of those who didn’t make it.

The other half of the geyser

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Crude oil in the gulf yields good TV images, but BP and its contractors have untapped a geyser not only of oil, but of methane–more than 20 time as effective as CO2 at holding heat. The percentage of the gush that’s methane is roughly estimated at 40-50%, subject to verification.

The facts of life

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It’s been nearly 5 months since I started DOTE. The traffic stats are very encouraging. The number of visitors has increased almost every week during that whole period, although there has been a great deal of volatility. But DOTE is still a minor league blog, and will remain so for some time to come. I am about halfway to my initial goal of 1000 real visitors a day (as measured by Google Analytics).

The lost civilization: a dream

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There’s a dream I keep having. Maybe you’ve been having it too — in some form, at least. Or maybe it’s real; maybe we’re living it. It’s getting harder to tell these days, huh? In any case, it’s not a good dream. And it’s not over. It goes like this…

More accidents await with President Obama’s errant energy policies

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President Obama triumphantly entered office with the popular promise of moving the United States to a cleaner energy basis, but his actions to date, along with those of the Congress, have promoted two types of dangerous energy developments: off-shore oil drilling and nuclear reactors. Nuclear expert Harvey Wasserman highlighted the dual dangers by noting, “As BP’s ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico, a tornado has forced a shutdown of the Fermi 2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes Region.”

Really local diets: where the UN gets it wrong

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In a world where energy supplies are much more constrained than most international agencies assume, it is almost certain that refrigerated shipping will be too costly and energy intensive for many people – thus, the industrialized and centralized meat industry that we’ve created is not likely to be a long term success.