Is this thing on?

Ergosphere, n.:  the zone around a rotating black hole in which the dragging of space-time makes it impossible for an object to remain stationary relative to the outside universe.  This phenomenon can be used to extract energy from the black hole's rotation.

Hello, and welcome to The Ergosphere.  This is my place to bring up my thoughts and analyses related to whatever, but mostly about energy and its politics.  I invite your comments and rebuttals.

About the blogger:  I am affiliated with no political party.  On the other hand I take the political impact of energy very seriously, especially the consequences of delivering billions of dollars a week to religious radicals whose avowed agenda is to make every surviving person be just like them.  Giving them money when they're using it to make nuclear weapons to further their agenda is insane.

I take ecology seriously, "deep ecology" and other mysticism not at all.  I believe that global warming is an important issue (if carbon dioxide was not really good at keeping things warm, Venus would not be hot enough to have metal frost on its surface).  I think that using 5 BTU of fossil fuel to create 6 BTU of "biofuel" from corn is just nuts, an opinion I appear to share with the Cato Institute.

Being somewhat of a poet (with emphasis on the "somewhat", as will be displayed in these pages over time), I appreciate elegance when I see it.  Being an engineer, I appreciate how things have to work together in order for the whole to function.  I solve problems for a living, as it is what I would do anyway.  This leads me, not merely to point my finger at perceived problems, but to craft solutions for them.  A certain optimism led me to find this forum where they can be posted, and humility leads to the hope that they will be criticised (constructively or otherwise), perhaps even improved.  Should that happen they cease being my own and become part of a collaborative work; where they go from there is out of my hands.  ¶ 2/17/2004 10:36:00 PM