Mad Salt Lake Idea

I think this idea must be mad, because no-one seems to have done it yet; however I don't understand what the problem would be, so I explain it here to be deconstructed.

There exist in the world a large number of salt flats that are to my knowledge to all intents and purposes barren wastelands with no useful purpose to the ecology or humans. I propose to change that.
There is no shortage on this planet of seawater so we pump the seawater back to these salt flats and create new salt lakes. This would give nice shallow water, unfortunately it'd almost certainly be too salty for anything but the most hardy algae to live in. So what would creating a new dead sea give us.

• Increase precipitation
• Cooling effects of bodies of water on surrounding area
  
• You could use it as cooling water runoff area for power plants.
• Salt production

Not major benefits it might seem except that people are suggesting building boats spraying sea water to create more clouds to combat global warming. Also there's always talk about the lack of fresh water, so here's a way to increase it.

The only problems I can see with this would be the energy cost of pumping the water (which might effectively be free if the power plant cooling is available) and the potential corruption of the water table. If that was a problem though then presumably every time it rained on one of these locations you'd get irreversible salt water corruption of the water table.

Precognescence In sportsmen

This is an old thought of mine that I thought I'd share; it's a thought experiment so:

Suppose precognescence is real.
Suppose this talent is particularly useful in sports such as motorracing where knowing ahead of time for example exactly how much grip you have available would be an advantage. Similarly knowing that someone is going to try and overtake you by dodging to the left before they do it would be a huge advantage.
Now suppose that because the offspring of sportsmen/women are likely to interbreed and produce offspring likely to go into that sport themselves then you have set up perfect evolutionary conditions for enhancing this effect.

To summarise - if the ability to see into the future is possible, and this is a genetically carried feature, expect to see it in sportsmen.

Now the existence of this sort of this goes against what you would term my belief system (i.e. all currently observed scientific data) however that's never a reason to fully discount something so: how could we test for it?

Easy - change the penalty for jumping the start of a race. At the moment (taking F1 as an example) there is a random delay from all lights going on, to the lights going off and the race starting. If you are judged to have moved before all lights go off you are judged to have jumped the start. Change this so that no penalty is given if you are sufficiently close to the lights going out. If you have no precognescence, then jumping the start will then most of the time give you a penalty, however if you can truly anticipate when it is going to happen then it'll soon become clear which these drivers are.

I know what results I'd expect to see (i.e. that nothing really changes) but the universe could yet surprise us.

New Speed Limit?

According to this there's plans for a 50 limit on single carrageways.

Despite the fact that quoting the governments own statistics:

• A 40% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured (KSI) in road accidents;
• A 50% reduction in the number of children killed or seriously injured (children are defined as being those aged under 16);
• A 10% reduction in the slight casualty rate, expressed as the number of people slightly injured per 100 million vehicle kilometres

Compared with the 1994-98 average baseline, in 2007

• The number of people killed or seriously injured was under 31 thousand, 36 per cent below the baseline.
• The number of children killed or seriously injured was 55 per cent below the baseline.
• The slight casualty rate was 32 per cent below the baseline.
• In this period the traffic has risen by an estimated 16 per cent.

So things are in fact getting better.
We have to fight this! Time to get onto writetothem