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Although the pun is excellent I'm a little unclear on why you view it important Isaac Send a noteboard - 23/10/2011 06:26:02 AM
Wikipedia's simple article on "Water Resources" should be required reading for every literate person on the globe. Want to claim something's bullshit? Please cite evidence.


Claim bullshit on what? I mean it is wiki, generally a bad source of info on anything vaguely controversial and the discussions page is hardly absent factual criticisms... it's also very NPOV. I don't really object that people should know this stuff, I've lived on Lake Erie the majority of my life and water consumption/resources has been an interest of mine since I was a kid, but I don't really see what you are drawing focus to here... what makes this article 'required reading' over say, Special Relativity or Oil Resources, or how to change your oil for that matter? Is there some section you think important?

As for bullshit in the article, I suppose I should point out that it oversimplifies and generalizes in some aspects of irrigation to paint a negative picture... for instance it says it take 3000 liters of water converted from liquid to vapor to satisfy one person's dietary need, which is vague and appears unsourced, I clicked the citation preceding it but it opened on nothing, now of course that's in the right zone to be sure, an acre inch being around 100,000 liters and 30-40 acre-inches being the rainfall common to most good farmland, nevertheless it's fairly unclear how they are using the figure... it's also doing the scale-dump, as your average house sitting on a quarter acre of land in a decent rainfall area is receiving a million liters of water in rain each year, or roughly 3000 liters a day. But I'd call it a touch of grandstanding considering a Megaliter per person per year would imply we need 7x10^9 people x 10^6 liters or 7x10^15 liters of water, the equivalent rainfall at a meter a year 7x10^6 sq.km. somewhat smaller than the US and incidentally about the amount of rain the US gets... the entire planets precipitation annually is 5.36x10^17 liters of fresh water, the majority falling into the ocean of course but that means people use is just over 1% and presumably around 4-5% of landfall rain... so I don't dispute the number but it seems to me to simply be grandstanding by obfuscation the fairly simplistic point that a person requires the approximate resources of an acre of land... hardly a secret. If it's going to go into water use in this way a discussion of water loss via irrigation should mention the differences between irrigation types. Of course I'm nitpicking for nitpicking's sake here but I believe the article is more than a touch NPOV.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein

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Chancellor of the Landsraad, Archduke of Is'Mod
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Water you talking about? - 23/10/2011 05:20:54 AM 933 Views
Although the pun is excellent I'm a little unclear on why you view it important - 23/10/2011 06:26:02 AM 670 Views
Re: Tone of post. - 23/10/2011 06:15:41 PM 790 Views
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