Some Knowledge

All websites about making money online have a common theme.  They are all long-winded sales pitches to get your money for a useless information product.  This product might be a common pdf file ebook, a computer software package, or a whole website and hosting package that will supposedly make you money.  I have spent many hours looking through these offerings and they are all selling something.  Even the free offers are only bait to get your email address so these people can send you ever more sales pitches for stuff that will make them money.

I don’t know how so many of these people can stay in business.  It is a simple proposition to run one of these sites.  You offer people the promise of wealth, and sell them a book on how to run Adsense on a website.  Seriously, if you want to know how to run Adsense, go to the Adsense site.  Google is a lot easier to understand than some marketing drivel about how many people got rich with some ridiculous system.

What I can’t understand is how some of these information businesses can advertise on Google.  Cash gifting.  This is clearly a pyramid scheme.  Roulette systems.  Online gambling is illegal in the USA.  A corporate ponzi scheme, which I saw advertised this morning.  It seems anyone with money can advertise on the Internet.

So, what do you do if you really want to make money online?  Write a short book on how to set up a website that takes money from people to download a file.  Nothing fancy, it can all be done in html.  Turn this book into a pdf file and write a long advertisement letter complete with fake testimonies from satisfied customers.  Then buy a domain name and some hosting and set up your online business.  Buy some advertising on Google to direct the suckers to your offering and sit back and collect money.  It is a simple thing.

Barack Obama has started a new White House blog.  You can find the site here.  There are four entries so far, and many links to government sites detailing policies and information on how to get your voice heard by the new administration.

I have spent the last hour reading information from this site.  I suppose it is a basic change in government to have policies and plans posted online.  Perhaps this is a sign of better things to come from the government of America.  We can only wait and see.

One word for cloud in Latin is “nebula.” Nebula means little cloud or mist. In astronomy, a nebula is a cloud of interstellar gas or dust, or, in spiral nebulae, a galaxy of stars.

There are several words from the Latin used by meteorology to describe types of clouds. There are cumulous clouds, which are like cotton balls. There are Nimbus clouds, which bring rain. There are stratus clouds, which form in layers. There are also combinations of clouds, such as nimbostratus, cumulostratus, and nimbocumulous. These words all describe different types of clouds, but the Latin words do not mean cloud.

Several online Latin-English dictionaries seemed to have problems translating this word. I learned it from an astronomy book, so I’m fairly certain that the Latin word for cloud is nebula, even though this might be specific for a little cloud due to the diminutive suffix of “a” on the word.

Acrylamide is a chemical that is a known carcinogen. It was found in potatoes that are cooked at a high temperature in 2002. Frito Lay, Kettle, and Cape Cod potato chips were sued in California over unsafe levels of this chemical in their products. In an out of court settlement, the companies agreed to reduce levels of acrylamide in their products and paid two or three million dollars in fines.

Apparently, acrylamide forms in potatoes that are cooked to a nice golden brown color. This is not just a problem with processed foods. To avoid this cancer-causing byproduct of cooking, do not overcook potatoes. Levels commonly found in fried potato products are in the 200 parts per billion range.

NREL has many laboratories researching renewable energy.  It seems that the government of the United States has an interest in promoting renewable energy technology.  I think this is a good use for taxpayers money, if the research benefits the taxpayers.  If the labs are just going to license their research to corporations to exploit for a profit, then I don’t know.  It seems a lot of people are working on the renewable energy problem.  Knowledge about a subject is always valuable.  It’s how you use this knowledge that determines its worth.

There’s really not much basic research a person can do about renewable energy.  There is solar power.  Invent a new kind of solar cell that works better and is cheaper to produce so more people can afford them.  Then there is wind power.  Invent a new wind machine that extracts more energy from the wind and make them less expensive so people can afford them.  Of course, we have biomass.  Burn the biomass in a boiler and convert the steam pressure to electrical energy to distribute to people.  Or, you can turn the biomass into alcohol to fuel cars.  Grow oil crops to make biodiesel.  Very simple stuff.

I looked over the NREL website briefly and the problem I have with it is that it reads like an advertisement.  They talk about what they are supposed to be doing as if they are trying to get me to invest in their lab.  They advertise conferences and talk about their ideas for research, yet there are no links to what they are actually researching.  Perhaps, like other government operations, they intend to keep the results of their research secret.  Perhaps they are working for the government-industrial energy complex that is harvesting money from the public for their energy product.  It would be nice if research was more open so all people could benefit from it instead of just the giant corporations.

There is a word game called Free Rice that donates grains of rice to feed the hungry.  Apparently the link adder is not working on the new WordPress interface, so here is the URL:www.freerice.com/

All you have to do to donate rice is to choose the correct definition for a given word from a multiple choice list.  If you get the answer right you donate 20 grains of rice.  If you play all day you might actually feed somebody.

The rice is paid for by advertising that shows up on the bottom of the answer page.  This is not the easiest game, but the questions get easier when you get wrong answers.  If you get a lot of answers right in a row it throws you some pretty strange and unusual words and words in foreign languages like German and Greek to try and trick you.

There are about 30,000 people who starve to death every day on earth.  It would take a lot of annoying questions if this game was the only thing that could feed them.  I don’t like the idea of being flashed with thousands of advertisements as I answer impertinent questions about what words mean.  There are other sites that donate whole bowls of rice just for clicking on one link.  I guess they get more cash for their advertising.

It’s a nice idea to try and feed people by selling advertising on the Internet.  We could end all starvation on the planet if people would stop turning food into motor fuel and stop feeding perfectly good grain to farm animals to produce meat.  There is no shortage of food in the world, just a flaw in how that food is used and distributed to the poor.  Instead of clicking on annoying questions and being tortured with advertising, people ought to change the way the world is run and make it a better place where so many people don’t have to die of starvation while perfectly good food rots or is thrown away.