Actually, wind isn't silent. The kinetic energy of moving air at about 8m/s give rise to a sound pressure level of around 45dBA -- the so-called "background noise level".
Wind turbines are rotating machinery. They make some sound. I haven't heard one make the supposed 'wop wop wop' noise in years. Being larger than they used to be, they rotate more slowly, so there are fewer blade passes per minute. Acoustic design is generally better, and a turbine should have no noticeable tonal component in its sound.
They're pretty quiet for their size. I'd quote you some sound pressure level figures, but they tend to freak people who don't understand acoustics. The Rogers and Manwell paper on wind turbine noise is instructive.
(and yes, I do design wind farms for a living...).
Spaceflight, whoever pays for it, does not have the right to pollute the public environment. Do you think that a species that messed up its home so much that it had to leave it would survive long in space?
Humans are small, squishy, almost infinitely fallible, and for the most part, dead.
Faired HPVs maybe road-unfriendly, but I used to commute on an SWB recumbent, and it was just great. Fast, comfortable, nippy, insanely sharp cornering and with enough road-cred to intimidate articulated trucks --- I loved it.
Does this mean we can get LZW compression back in libtiff too, then? It would be really nice to be able to supply compressed press-ready images to printing houses.
Yeah, I know there are deflated TIFFs, but they can be like "wha...?" in the prepress world.
CD player with digital signal output + iRiver H120 = 44.1kHz WAV file on a USB2.0 portable HD.
Since you're using a purely audio CD player, the CD will work on it. Even fairly basic compact stereo systems have digital output.
more secret weapons: Grimsby Butterfly Bomb
on
Japanese Balloon Battle
·
· Score: 3, Informative
News blackouts during wartime aren't just a US thing.
On June 24 1943, the English fishing port of Grimsby was bombed with experimental "butterfly" anti-personnel bombs. A total news blackout on this raid caused the Luftwaffe to abandon butterfly bombs after one raid, since they thought that the devices were ineffective. Quite the opposite was true -- many people were killed or injured by the butterfly bombs. Unexploded devices were still being found in and around Grimsby until quite recently.
In March 1941, the Scottish town of Clydebank was razed by German bombers. The first news that people in the nearby city of Glasgow heard of it was when survivors started walking in from Clydebank.
I guess your blog just hasn't been found yet. Is it known to Google?
Before I installed MT-Blacklist, I had over 130 comment spams on my site. Now I get at most a couple a day that get by MT-Blacklist, and these can easily be added to my blocked list.
For a while, I was getting over 100 blocked spam attempts from an IP address purportedly in Hungary.
Sometimes I'm really glad that I have an audio CD player with digital output, and an iRiver H120 with digital input. Any CD that will play in my stereo can be ripped to WAV on the iRiver. Result!
No, the error's yours. Re-read the bit where I said: "Since we'll get a capacity factor of about 1/3, we'll need 1.2 million turbines to make up that estimated total resource of 1.2 million MW". I was rating each 3MW turbine at 1MW.
Wind farm design is my day job. People pay me to know what I'm talking about. Here, I'm doing it for free...
> With that comes, I assume, the expectation that every possible free tract of land had a windmill farm stuck on it.
Not really. If we assume a 3MW wind turbine is 100m in diameter, and you site the turbines on an 8x-diameter (downwind) by 5x-diameter (crosswind) array -- which is pretty widely spaced, in wind farm design standards -- you get one turbine per 0.4km^2.
Since we'll get a capacity factor of about 1/3, we'll need 1.2 million turbines to make up that estimated total resource of 1.2 million MW.
These 1.2 million turbines would require an area of 480000km^2. This is less than 19% of the land area of the US, or the equivalent combined land area of California and South Carolina. I'm sure no-one would miss either, really.
Neither can any other power source, but there's nearly always somewhere windy in a country. Wind can contribute to baseload, and does in several countries.
I could be mean and point to Ontario's CANDU reactors, some of which provide a 30% capacity factor. That's about the same as wind, which of course can't provide power all the time.
> can't provide power when the wind is too slow or too hard.
The low windspeed bit is true. As regards high windspeeds, even in extreme sites the wind very seldom goes too high -- a matter of a couple of hours per year.
> all you have to do is look at Finland, I believe it was: they invested heavily in wind power
Finland has only ever modestly invested in wind energy. They did do some sterling work on wind energy in cold climates.
> the actual electricity can't be transfered worldwide).
So why did a powerline failure in the US affect Canada? Many countries are interconnected.
> And to boot, it's way more expensive than any other from of energy except solar.
Wrong. We're cheaper than any new generation except gas. Of course, when you get obvious fudging of nuclear costs like we did with the Manley Committee (who grossly overstated the cost of all other forms of generation to make a nuclear restart look viable), we're not dealing with fair opposition.
> With film, you can't send the image across the world within minutes
Actually, you can -- and have been able to since the 1920s. The RCA Photo Wire could send images transatlantically in six minutes.
There were various techniques that press photographers used to get pictures out quickly, including high activity developers and decidedly dodgy methods of handling images which were still wet. The old photo-finish labs at racetracks had to have their negatives ready in a couple of minutes after the race ended, otherwise the punters would riot.
So yeah, we might have a bit more bandwidth and colour, but I'l bet the average image spends a lot more time being futzed with in PhotoShop than it took to get a picture over the wire.
Actually, Scotland has ¼ of Europe's exploitable wind energy resource in an area approximately the size of the average midwestern Wal*Mart's parking lot.
It will be missed. I remember the (possibly pre-)HENSA days, frantically downloading Amiga Fish Disk images over a 9600 baud serial line from a vax to an Atari ST terminal emulator, and hoping that I wouldn't go over my 1000-block (500kB) disk quota.
Now I'm on the other side of the pond, mirror.ac.uk can still often soak any pipe I care to use for downloads. It's very well connected.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeh, but 100 watts is about 20% of a typical European home's total energy usage. That still adds up to a lot of power.
From anti-wind groups like Country Guardian, a very small organisation campaigning against wind energy . Country Guardian used to operate out of a building owned by British Nuclear Fuels.
Actually, wind isn't silent. The kinetic energy of moving air at about 8m/s give rise to a sound pressure level of around 45dBA -- the so-called "background noise level".
Wind turbines are rotating machinery. They make some sound. I haven't heard one make the supposed 'wop wop wop' noise in years. Being larger than they used to be, they rotate more slowly, so there are fewer blade passes per minute. Acoustic design is generally better, and a turbine should have no noticeable tonal component in its sound.
They're pretty quiet for their size. I'd quote you some sound pressure level figures, but they tend to freak people who don't understand acoustics. The Rogers and Manwell paper on wind turbine noise is instructive.
(and yes, I do design wind farms for a living ...).
I knew some of the Blue Sky team from my work with the sustainable energy folks in Toronto. I didn't know Andrew, though.
There are a few pictures taken inside the Blue Sky car in April in my photo gallery.
Parry Aftab seems to be completely misusing the title Esq. , which seems to be exclusively a guy thing.
Humans are small, squishy, almost infinitely fallible, and for the most part, dead.
Any built structure kills animals. Birds fly into buildings, pylons, powerlines all the time.
Faired HPVs maybe road-unfriendly, but I used to commute on an SWB recumbent, and it was just great. Fast, comfortable, nippy, insanely sharp cornering and with enough road-cred to intimidate articulated trucks --- I loved it.
Yeah, I know there are deflated TIFFs, but they can be like "wha...?" in the prepress world.
It is invariably fatal if you hit a pedestrian ... for them, that is.
I also didn't like the way that you were expected to find this out after you'd given them your credit card details.
Cato receives funding from the oil industry, and had Fox News head honcho Rupert Murdoch as a director. Now that's what I call fair and balanced reporting!
Since you're using a purely audio CD player, the CD will work on it. Even fairly basic compact stereo systems have digital output.
On June 24 1943, the English fishing port of Grimsby was bombed with experimental "butterfly" anti-personnel bombs. A total news blackout on this raid caused the Luftwaffe to abandon butterfly bombs after one raid, since they thought that the devices were ineffective. Quite the opposite was true -- many people were killed or injured by the butterfly bombs. Unexploded devices were still being found in and around Grimsby until quite recently.
In March 1941, the Scottish town of Clydebank was razed by German bombers. The first news that people in the nearby city of Glasgow heard of it was when survivors started walking in from Clydebank.
Before I installed MT-Blacklist, I had over 130 comment spams on my site. Now I get at most a couple a day that get by MT-Blacklist, and these can easily be added to my blocked list.
For a while, I was getting over 100 blocked spam attempts from an IP address purportedly in Hungary.
They run Slash too, so you'll know the user interface.
Sometimes I'm really glad that I have an audio CD player with digital output, and an iRiver H120 with digital input. Any CD that will play in my stereo can be ripped to WAV on the iRiver. Result!
Wind farm design is my day job. People pay me to know what I'm talking about. Here, I'm doing it for free ...
Not really. If we assume a 3MW wind turbine is 100m in diameter, and you site the turbines on an 8x-diameter (downwind) by 5x-diameter (crosswind) array -- which is pretty widely spaced, in wind farm design standards -- you get one turbine per 0.4km^2.
Since we'll get a capacity factor of about 1/3, we'll need 1.2 million turbines to make up that estimated total resource of 1.2 million MW.
These 1.2 million turbines would require an area of 480000km^2. This is less than 19% of the land area of the US, or the equivalent combined land area of California and South Carolina. I'm sure no-one would miss either, really.
Them's fightin' words. I design wind farms.
> it can't provide power all the time
Neither can any other power source, but there's nearly always somewhere windy in a country. Wind can contribute to baseload, and does in several countries.
I could be mean and point to Ontario's CANDU reactors, some of which provide a 30% capacity factor. That's about the same as wind, which of course can't provide power all the time.
> can't provide power when the wind is too slow or too hard.
The low windspeed bit is true. As regards high windspeeds, even in extreme sites the wind very seldom goes too high -- a matter of a couple of hours per year.
> all you have to do is look at Finland, I believe it was: they invested heavily in wind power
Finland has only ever modestly invested in wind energy. They did do some sterling work on wind energy in cold climates.
> the actual electricity can't be transfered worldwide).
So why did a powerline failure in the US affect Canada? Many countries are interconnected.
> And to boot, it's way more expensive than any other from of energy except solar.
Wrong. We're cheaper than any new generation except gas. Of course, when you get obvious fudging of nuclear costs like we did with the Manley Committee (who grossly overstated the cost of all other forms of generation to make a nuclear restart look viable), we're not dealing with fair opposition.
Actually, you can -- and have been able to since the 1920s. The RCA Photo Wire could send images transatlantically in six minutes.
There were various techniques that press photographers used to get pictures out quickly, including high activity developers and decidedly dodgy methods of handling images which were still wet. The old photo-finish labs at racetracks had to have their negatives ready in a couple of minutes after the race ended, otherwise the punters would riot.
So yeah, we might have a bit more bandwidth and colour, but I'l bet the average image spends a lot more time being futzed with in PhotoShop than it took to get a picture over the wire.
As regards wind power's effect on global weather, I can't be arsed typing it out again, so please see my spiel about 1/3 of 1% of a very small part of the wind>
Actually, Scotland has ¼ of Europe's exploitable wind energy resource in an area approximately the size of the average midwestern Wal*Mart's parking lot.
... but burns a heck of a lot more irreplaceable calories if you drive.
It will be missed. I remember the (possibly pre-)HENSA days, frantically downloading Amiga Fish Disk images over a 9600 baud serial line from a vax to an Atari ST terminal emulator, and hoping that I wouldn't go over my 1000-block (500kB) disk quota. Now I'm on the other side of the pond, mirror.ac.uk can still often soak any pipe I care to use for downloads. It's very well connected.