bdar's journal. I'll quote the positive part and leave the snarkiness and anger sitting over there.Out of the whole 51 minutes he spent about one sentence saying something that I liked. He talked about making ethanol from grass and other non-starchy biomass. My hope is that that means he's going to pour more funding into cellulase research, research which would help us mass-produce the currently expensive enzyme which would let us ferment cellulose into ethanol. The department of energy currently estimates that cellulase adds $.50/gallon to the cost of ethanol made from non-starchy materials but predicts that further research can get that cost down to $.05 in the forseeable future.Time to get back to work.
Imagine instead of harvesting corn and only being able to turn it's sugars into fuel and ending up with a stalky mashy waste biomass, instead turning the whole plant into fuel, turning discarded paper and cardboard into fuel, turning any kind of pulpy biomass into fuel. That'd be huge. I think cheap cellulase has got to be a major component to any sane short term energy strategy.
Oh, in wildly unrelated news, here's a followup to the whole Firefly Season 2 thing. Basically nothing has changed except that now a well known website has actually talked to the involved parties to confirm things. Some random dude who heads up a microscopic studio thinks he can make it happen but hasn't actually even talked to Joss yet.
