Fallout From The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-05-03/fallout-gulf-mexico-oil-spill
A satellite image view of the oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico, April 29
NASA Goddard Photo and Video via flickr
A spreading oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatens shipping, wildlife, fisheries and tourism along the coast. Diane and her guests discuss how the government and the oil industry are responding.
Guests
Rayola Dougher
senior economic adviser, American Petroleum Institute
Michael Tidwell
author of "Bayou Farewell" and director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Jackie Savitz
Pollution Campaign Director, Senior Scientist,
Oceana
Stephen Power
reporter, Wall Street Journal
Comments
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It is my hope that myself and others can maintain our concern about this spill and not begin to tune it out. I just finished looking at pictures on The Huffington Post site of dead fish, sea turtles and birds that are washing up onshore and my heart just breaks thinking about all of this needless death and destruction of so much beauty.
Consider the concept, design and engineering of an oil absorbing sheet; the kind that can be applied to the skin so as to remove excess oil from the skin’s surface.
I ask that you apply such a design to another design: the design of a highly efficient fluid and materials exchange system. An example of such a system may be found in the layers of villi and microvilli that line the interior surfaces of the gastro-intestinal tract. Like the fractal, and nature’s correlate to the fractal, the tree, villi and microvilli derive much of their efficiency in moving materials across and between the intestinal lining from their repeating and self-similar structural compositions.
My proposal is to employ an oil absorbing technology, such as the oil absorbing sheet, towards removing oil from our oceans, rivers and lakes. I also propose to apply the design, manufacturing and engineering principles of such sheets to the design, manufacturing and engineering principles of systems that successfully transport chemical, molecular and physical substrates across and between barriers from which containers may ultimately be built.
Why not wrap oil absorbing sheets into cones and/or tubes, so as to increase their surface areas, thereby increasing the efficiency with which they absorb oil? And why not, for that matter, embed those oil absorbing cones and/or tubes into larger (and smaller) networks of self-similar oil absorbing sheets, cones and/or tubes? Would not such an oil absorbing ‘fractal’ remove oil from our waterways?
I know that art would gladly receive and employ such an idea towards useful ends; is it so difficult to imagine scientists, engineers and corporations as doing the same?
Sparta, NC