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In no particular order (no matter what the numbers may imply):
1. I saw a thing on TV recently about this desalination plant in Tampa, Florida. Salt water is taken from Tampa Bay and turned into drinking water. Enough to cover about 10% of the city's needs. It's the largest such plant in North America, but there are plans to maybe build more in California.
The show explained that a key feature of the plant is its location - right next door to a power generation plant. "That's brilliant!" I immediately thought.
See, just about any power plant, even today, uses steam-powered turbines. A giant tank of water is boiled. The resulting high-pressure steam is used to turn a turbine. The turbine spins an AC generator (basically a wire rotating between two magnets) which produces electricity. The steam coming out of the turbine condenses back to water (the heat energy basically having been used to move the turbine). The main difference between coal, nuclear, and solar power plants is the source of the heat used to boil the water.
On the other hand, you have the desalination process. There are a number of ways to remove salt from seawater, rendering it drinkable. My favorite is distillation. If you boil a pot of water with salt and whatever else dissolved into it (or if the water evaporates), anything solid is left behind. So is anything with a higher boiling point than the water. Anything with a lower boiling point boils off first. So if you throw out the first sample (since that may contain the stuff that boiled before the water), then collect the rest of the steam and cool it off, you're left with just about the purest water you can get. (And also, back in the first tank, you have sea salt, which you can sell.)
Only problem with this method is that it takes a lot of energy to boil water. Desalination in just about any form is one of the most expensive ways to get drinkable water. If there was only a cheap way to do it, we could solve a lot of problems having to do with droughts and water shortages in coastal areas.
So... you put the desalination plant next door to the power plant. The power plant pulls in sea water. You run pipes over to the desalination plant. You get clean water. Everyone's happy. Right?
Well, that much is right. But the details... not so much. It turns out that the desalination plant isn't located next to the power plant so that they can condense the steam into nice, clean distilled water. In fact, they don't distill water at all. Instead, they force the water, at high pressure, through miles of tubing and filters. Doing that isn't easy. In fact, it requires millions of dollars worth of electricity - the vast majority of the plant's operating budget. And that's why they're located next door to the power plant.
I'm sure there's some kind of reason for this. Distilled water has to be made in batches (instead of continuously) and you do have to clean out the salt that's left behind. There are some issues. But I can't help but look at that setup and think... D'oh!
2. Bees swarm over airplane.
Just an odd news story I came across. Thousands of bees landed on the wing of an airplane parked at a small airport in Massachusetts. They had to call in a bee removal expert, who got rid of them with a sort of giant specialized vacuum cleaner. I can't help but think of Wallace & Grommit's BunVac 6000 (Brief wiki entry, Video clip).
Best guess from the expert is that it was a queen moving her swarm to a new site. Happens this time of year. But the queens aren't used to long flights and have to stop to rest. So she probably set down on the wing of the plane for a breather, and the rest of the swarm, acting as the not-so-secret service, landed with her. (Though I prefer the proposed explanation that they were looking to hitch a ride and shorten their flight time.)
Not surprisingly, the bee removal expert owns an apiary (as well as an aviary, since he also raises exotic birds). As it happens, eight of his hives had been destroyed by a bear in April, so this works out rather neatly.
3. My grandfather was diabetic. In the later years of his life, he had a low appetite. It was a continual struggle to get him to eat enough. There were times when he and our large and somewhat overweight dog were separated by less than 10 lbs. One day, I came across a "motivational cereal bowl." It was oversized and painted with encouraging slogans like "CHOW THOSE WHEATIES!" and "EAT THE ENEMY FOR BREAKFAST!" I bought it for him, and he loved it. The size made his portion less intimidating, and the slogans amused him. He ate from it pretty much every morning, and it turned the daily struggle into almost a pleasure. We have it on the kitchen counter to this day. I think of him every time I see him.
Recently, it occurred to me that the artist might like to hear the story. Looking on the bottom of the bowl, I found her name and company. Our Name Is Mud. I sent an email through the site's webform with a slightly longer version of the story. She was so touched by the story that she offered to send me any item I wanted from her store. I was a little reluctant, since I'd been writing to thank her and it seemed kind of silly to accept a thank you gift in return. I told her so, but she kept the offer open. And so today I received a handwritten thank you note and a lovely oversized mug decorated with pawprints and bearing the slogan, "BARK LESS. WAG MORE." Words to live by.
4. Speaking of nifty presents... I'm getting a Kindle 2 for my birthday! (I was hesitant after the whole Amazonfail thing, but what I learned from my research into the aftermath was encouraging.) But I'm not getting mine from Amazon. It came from an online auction to support diabetes research. I learned about it from author C. E. Murphy, who writes the Take A Chance comic book series I've mentioned here before. Ended up costing about 10 bucks more than retail price, but just about all the money (a small percentage is taken out for operating costs) goes to the Diabetes Research Institute and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. So... w00t!
5. The battery on my spiffy video watch is dying. It won't hold a charge for even an hour now before shutting down. I was rather peeved about this. At first, when I complained, they told me that it's normal. Now they've got a whole page up about battery life. They told me they could get me a new battery for $3, but that I'd have to ship the watch back to them. I'm trying to get them just to send me the battery. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime, I've got a backup battery. It (currently) holds enough of a charge to power the watch for more than a whole day, and it's got a solar panel that can (supposedly) recharge it on the go. We'll see how well it holds up over time. (Yes, I know it's kind of stupid to get another battery from them after all that, but I was getting these binoculars for my niece's birthday - they run on AAA batteries - and it seemed worth a try. Cheaper than getting a new watch, anyway.)
6. I was never much of a fan of Oprah, but the cover article in this week's Newsweek showed me that it's worse than I thought. Clearly, Oprah needs a lesson from Spider-Man. "With great power there must come great responsibility."
(If you search the site, you'll turn up several supplemental pages. Mainly, a 9-minute podcast which covers much of the same material, this blog post.)
In short, the problem is that she's routinely spotlighted questionable (at best) medical practices without taking the time to point out the risks or downsides and without giving experts a fair say.
7. What the heck is it with the grocer's apostrophe? I run into it more and more these days, and it's starting to drive me nuts. It's long been a pet peeve of mine, but now I'm finding it in places that should darn well have people who know better. An apostrophe indicates a possessive, the plural of an acronym (but only if spelled with periods), a contraction, or part of a word left off due to an accent. That's it. If you're not looking at one of those situations, leave the apostrophe out. Okay?
8. My comp, which had been acting more or less okay, refused to boot up today. hal.dll. Again. Still no idea what's causing it. Or what I can do to fix it if reinstalling Windows won't do the trick. I do not want to have to format the hard drive and start over. But having to go through the whole process of booting to the recovery disk, rewriting the boot.ini file, and rebooting every time I want to boot up isn't exactly a desirable option, either. Might have to try a system restore, but I don't know if that'll work and I just finally got one of the more difficult programs to reinstall. *sigh*
9. I'm not really sure how or if to use cuts on this entry. For now, I've put item 1 under a cut, since that's long (and quite possibly not of interest). The others are short, but there ended up being a lot of them. What do you guys prefer? Cuts are for you, after all...
1. I saw a thing on TV recently about this desalination plant in Tampa, Florida. Salt water is taken from Tampa Bay and turned into drinking water. Enough to cover about 10% of the city's needs. It's the largest such plant in North America, but there are plans to maybe build more in California.
The show explained that a key feature of the plant is its location - right next door to a power generation plant. "That's brilliant!" I immediately thought.
See, just about any power plant, even today, uses steam-powered turbines. A giant tank of water is boiled. The resulting high-pressure steam is used to turn a turbine. The turbine spins an AC generator (basically a wire rotating between two magnets) which produces electricity. The steam coming out of the turbine condenses back to water (the heat energy basically having been used to move the turbine). The main difference between coal, nuclear, and solar power plants is the source of the heat used to boil the water.
On the other hand, you have the desalination process. There are a number of ways to remove salt from seawater, rendering it drinkable. My favorite is distillation. If you boil a pot of water with salt and whatever else dissolved into it (or if the water evaporates), anything solid is left behind. So is anything with a higher boiling point than the water. Anything with a lower boiling point boils off first. So if you throw out the first sample (since that may contain the stuff that boiled before the water), then collect the rest of the steam and cool it off, you're left with just about the purest water you can get. (And also, back in the first tank, you have sea salt, which you can sell.)
Only problem with this method is that it takes a lot of energy to boil water. Desalination in just about any form is one of the most expensive ways to get drinkable water. If there was only a cheap way to do it, we could solve a lot of problems having to do with droughts and water shortages in coastal areas.
So... you put the desalination plant next door to the power plant. The power plant pulls in sea water. You run pipes over to the desalination plant. You get clean water. Everyone's happy. Right?
Well, that much is right. But the details... not so much. It turns out that the desalination plant isn't located next to the power plant so that they can condense the steam into nice, clean distilled water. In fact, they don't distill water at all. Instead, they force the water, at high pressure, through miles of tubing and filters. Doing that isn't easy. In fact, it requires millions of dollars worth of electricity - the vast majority of the plant's operating budget. And that's why they're located next door to the power plant.
I'm sure there's some kind of reason for this. Distilled water has to be made in batches (instead of continuously) and you do have to clean out the salt that's left behind. There are some issues. But I can't help but look at that setup and think... D'oh!
2. Bees swarm over airplane.
Just an odd news story I came across. Thousands of bees landed on the wing of an airplane parked at a small airport in Massachusetts. They had to call in a bee removal expert, who got rid of them with a sort of giant specialized vacuum cleaner. I can't help but think of Wallace & Grommit's BunVac 6000 (Brief wiki entry, Video clip).
Best guess from the expert is that it was a queen moving her swarm to a new site. Happens this time of year. But the queens aren't used to long flights and have to stop to rest. So she probably set down on the wing of the plane for a breather, and the rest of the swarm, acting as the not-so-secret service, landed with her. (Though I prefer the proposed explanation that they were looking to hitch a ride and shorten their flight time.)
Not surprisingly, the bee removal expert owns an apiary (as well as an aviary, since he also raises exotic birds). As it happens, eight of his hives had been destroyed by a bear in April, so this works out rather neatly.
3. My grandfather was diabetic. In the later years of his life, he had a low appetite. It was a continual struggle to get him to eat enough. There were times when he and our large and somewhat overweight dog were separated by less than 10 lbs. One day, I came across a "motivational cereal bowl." It was oversized and painted with encouraging slogans like "CHOW THOSE WHEATIES!" and "EAT THE ENEMY FOR BREAKFAST!" I bought it for him, and he loved it. The size made his portion less intimidating, and the slogans amused him. He ate from it pretty much every morning, and it turned the daily struggle into almost a pleasure. We have it on the kitchen counter to this day. I think of him every time I see him.
Recently, it occurred to me that the artist might like to hear the story. Looking on the bottom of the bowl, I found her name and company. Our Name Is Mud. I sent an email through the site's webform with a slightly longer version of the story. She was so touched by the story that she offered to send me any item I wanted from her store. I was a little reluctant, since I'd been writing to thank her and it seemed kind of silly to accept a thank you gift in return. I told her so, but she kept the offer open. And so today I received a handwritten thank you note and a lovely oversized mug decorated with pawprints and bearing the slogan, "BARK LESS. WAG MORE." Words to live by.
4. Speaking of nifty presents... I'm getting a Kindle 2 for my birthday! (I was hesitant after the whole Amazonfail thing, but what I learned from my research into the aftermath was encouraging.) But I'm not getting mine from Amazon. It came from an online auction to support diabetes research. I learned about it from author C. E. Murphy, who writes the Take A Chance comic book series I've mentioned here before. Ended up costing about 10 bucks more than retail price, but just about all the money (a small percentage is taken out for operating costs) goes to the Diabetes Research Institute and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. So... w00t!
5. The battery on my spiffy video watch is dying. It won't hold a charge for even an hour now before shutting down. I was rather peeved about this. At first, when I complained, they told me that it's normal. Now they've got a whole page up about battery life. They told me they could get me a new battery for $3, but that I'd have to ship the watch back to them. I'm trying to get them just to send me the battery. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime, I've got a backup battery. It (currently) holds enough of a charge to power the watch for more than a whole day, and it's got a solar panel that can (supposedly) recharge it on the go. We'll see how well it holds up over time. (Yes, I know it's kind of stupid to get another battery from them after all that, but I was getting these binoculars for my niece's birthday - they run on AAA batteries - and it seemed worth a try. Cheaper than getting a new watch, anyway.)
6. I was never much of a fan of Oprah, but the cover article in this week's Newsweek showed me that it's worse than I thought. Clearly, Oprah needs a lesson from Spider-Man. "With great power there must come great responsibility."
(If you search the site, you'll turn up several supplemental pages. Mainly, a 9-minute podcast which covers much of the same material, this blog post.)
In short, the problem is that she's routinely spotlighted questionable (at best) medical practices without taking the time to point out the risks or downsides and without giving experts a fair say.
7. What the heck is it with the grocer's apostrophe? I run into it more and more these days, and it's starting to drive me nuts. It's long been a pet peeve of mine, but now I'm finding it in places that should darn well have people who know better. An apostrophe indicates a possessive, the plural of an acronym (but only if spelled with periods), a contraction, or part of a word left off due to an accent. That's it. If you're not looking at one of those situations, leave the apostrophe out. Okay?
8. My comp, which had been acting more or less okay, refused to boot up today. hal.dll. Again. Still no idea what's causing it. Or what I can do to fix it if reinstalling Windows won't do the trick. I do not want to have to format the hard drive and start over. But having to go through the whole process of booting to the recovery disk, rewriting the boot.ini file, and rebooting every time I want to boot up isn't exactly a desirable option, either. Might have to try a system restore, but I don't know if that'll work and I just finally got one of the more difficult programs to reinstall. *sigh*
9. I'm not really sure how or if to use cuts on this entry. For now, I've put item 1 under a cut, since that's long (and quite possibly not of interest). The others are short, but there ended up being a lot of them. What do you guys prefer? Cuts are for you, after all...
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From:
Cuts
Do tell me if you find out the reason for that desalinisation plant, because that does sound rather silly.
From:
Re: Cuts
As for the plant... I'm planning to write to them, when I get some time when I'm awake enough to do so. It'll have to be by snail mail, though. Probably for the best, if I want to get a serious reply from someone who (hopefully) understands what I'm saying.
From:
Re: Cuts
From:
no subject
"The problem is that our medical schools do not teach this," she said in a February interview with NEWSWEEK. She believes doctors, scientists and the media are all in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. "Billions are spent on marketing drugs, and these companies also support academic research." Free from these entanglements, Somers can see things clearly. "I have spent thousands of hours on this. I've written 18 books on health. I know my stuff."
So... In place of having a medical degree, the 18 books make her an honorary doctor? She knows more than those in the medical profession do? Really? If I write 18 books on ... pimples... do I get to become a doctor, too?
Computer woes suck so much. Is running Linux not an option for you?
From:
no subject
Linux? Hmm. It wasn't really for me last time I tried it, though I've heard it's evolved since then. (Funny, too, given how much I loved DOS and bemoaned losing the real command line interface when Win95 come around.) Still... as some more comp-savvy friends have pointed out to me, there isn't a perfect OS.
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no subject
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But I do like the fact that Windows runs just about any program you can name. Power of the huge market share. While I haven't checked, I'm sure there are some programs I use that won't run under Linux. Actually, my comic book ordering software is one of them. That could be a problem.
Of course, I could dual-boot...
Except that I don't have that much HDD space to spare on this thing.
Eh, I'll figure it out later, when I have brains instead of sleepy mush.
From:
no subject
From:
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As for drive space... it's not just the size of the OS. It's the fact that I'd need space for all the files and programs I'd use with that OS. Firefox and Thunderbird and everything would have to be on both partitions if I was going to dual boot. I could probably clean some older stuff out, and I do have a good-sized backup drive, but... I dunno.
Anyway, thanks for the help and advice. :)
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no subject
From:
bees and cuts
but if you do cuts, i'd prefer if you didn't just randomly do them for some arbitrary length, but for each different item with a short subject title (like the first two), so one can pick and choose what one's interested in.
i am so totally not looking at any clips of swarming bees. when i was a wee child (barely school age), my uncle kept bees, and one day a swarming queen landed on my shoulder. i ended up with bees all over my torso and head. OMG, it was a nightmare.
not a single one stung me though, which was pretty impressive. but it took me a long time to get over my swarming insect phobia.
From:
Re: bees and cuts
The video clip is of the BunVac, not the bees. Sorry that wasn't clear.
But yeah. Wow. That sounds rather scary and traumatic. And impressive. Congrats on coming away unstung.
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From:
no subject
And hey, good to hear from you!
Also... that was fast.