Back in the days of the Open eBook(TM) Publication Structure 1.0, there used to be a paragraph that said that OEBPS wasn't meant to be read on ebook reading devices.
Instead, it was meant as common format for publishers and content-providers to create and store books for later conversion to myriad proprietary binary formats. This paragraph seems to have gone, and the binary format soup continues to this day.
I was a bit disappointed with what autotag.pl could do. I've been looking for a program that would, given a directory of MP3s ripped from a CD, calculate the freedb DiscID, and get the names from there.
Today I found mp3cddb, a Perl/shell program to do just that. It's a little old -- it only supports ID3v1 -- but it's GPL, so we can fix that.
> If you have a "right" to education, where does it come from?
Okay, then, if education is not a right, do you support those who deny education to others? So the Taleban are acting on strictly libertarian principles in forbidding education to women?
WindSave's Plug 'n' Save System is supposed to be a roof-mounted wind-turbine that plugs into your domestic power circuit and "gives back" some power. It also phones home every night, acting (if the consumer uptake's big enough) as a distributed wind farm.
Only problem is, in the specs that used to be on the website, they exceeded the Betz Limit, the theoretical limit of wind turbine efficiency. There's no way they could reach the figures claimed.
It's interesting to note that they've taken the claims off their website over the weekend.
> Chernobyl... Nothing at all a hundred miles away.
Um, Earth calling b-baggins, are you on the same planet where sheep more than 2000 miles away in Wales are still affected by Chernobyl's fallout, 17 years later?
I'm guessing that one of the reasons they chose the town of Galena is that the mineral galena is the common name for lead sulfide. It would be no suprise if the town were named after what you got out of its mines.
For the sort of money they're talking, you could build a lot of renewable generation, and it'd be working now, not in 2010.
It's not all that Mary Goldring was opposed to. She was opposed to the TSR2, an advanced military aircraft developed in the UK, and shelved amongst much conspiracy theory about US pressure to buy fighters from M-D.
My dad, a former aerospace electronics engineer, still spits fire at the mention of Goldring. It was something to do in the long, dark Scottish winter evenings.
Uhoh -- yellow on blue was the default colour scheme of the Amstrad CPC. I know of one hardcore former CPC developer who now works at Redmond. I wonder...;-)
Oh dear, we must be doing something terribly wrong in Toronto to be able to generate enough electricity for 250 homes from one turbine -- with a tower diameter of about four metres, and a rotor diameter of 52m. Please come and put us right.
While you are here, please sort out our broken nuclear plants. They've been down for years, and are just eating up subsidies.
One minor correction: they don't call them "condor cuisinarts" at all. It's the faux-libertarian Cato Institute that calls them that, and we know all about them...
I reckon that more birds die by colliding with nuclear plant walls and stacks than by wind turbines. The Wind Energy Handbook [pub Wiley, ISBN: 0-471-48997-2] cites 0.018-0.074 bird kills per turbine per year in North California. A free-roaming domestic cat may kill 2-5 birds in a year.
And no-one starts a capital project in order to lose money, so yes, wind turbines are about making money. What isn't?
ah, that would be it, then. I still claim it's bad subbing on the part of Spectrum's web editors, though.
I have to say -- and sadly too, 'cos I'm really keen on wind energy -- that that picture of the Kamaoa Wind Farm is one of the ugliest I've ever seen. What is that stuff on the turbine towers?
I think it only covers the US -- otherwise WindShare's very nice Lagerwey variable-speed wind turbine wouldn't have been allowed on the Toronto lakeshore.
So if it is a composited image, why does it have a "Photo: Getty" credit, instead of an "Image: Getty" credit? Labelling a modified image as an original photo is just plain wrong, as this article from the NUJ shows.
A very easy way of dealing with NIMBY is community involvement, as we have done in Toronto. Since "your own pigs don't smell" (which I'm told is a Danish expression), if a wind turbine or wind farm is owned by the community in which it is sited, more people feel involved, and fewer feel threatened by it.
Another great way of countering the problem is... go ahead and build it anyway. Most (non-Danish, Dutch or German) people haven't seen a wind turbine, and they're usually pleasantly surprised about how unobtrusive they are.
As someone who built wind farms for four years, and is now a director of Canada's first urban wind power co-op, WindShare, I'm not convinced that this article really accounts for much.
While it's true that most wind turbines use induction generators, they do so for several reasons, including:
safety: as the wind can blow at any time, an alternator could energize a powerline that's down for maintenance. Induction generators need line (excitation) current to get them going, and thus they won't frazzle an unsuspecting worker.
stability: an induction generator's torque/speed curve matches that of a stall-regulated wind turbine. Thus a wind turbine of this type will tend to run at a constant speed.
All the turbines I have worked with have either had modest capacitor banks to correct for reactive power, or used insanely cool AC/AC back-to-back inverters to produce line quality AC.
I'm also concerned about the article's allegations of power intermittence. Wind turbine rotors have a fair amount of rotational inertia, so they're not capable of passing every flutter of the wind to the generator. It seems that this part of the article is a sales pitch for a new product that the vast majority of installations won't need.
I was also amused at the requirement of wind turbines to "ride through" grid frequency variations. This is basically a nice way of spinning the fact that wind turbine controllers are often far more picky about the frequency they'll accept or put out, than the rather poor regulation that applies to our power grids.
An finally, that picture. Where on earth did they get it? Apart from the fact that it's a contravention of every safety code to climb the tower of a running turbine, the climber must be a human sloth. To get that kind of motion blur on wind turbine blades, you'd have to have several minutes' exposure. Thus our perfectly sharp climber (and their horse) must be moving incredibly slowly...
Hmm... bumbling, pompous, convinced of their own greatness; sounds exactly like the classic of English humour Augustus Carp, Esq: by Himself (which is out of copyright in the US, and available for free download on Eric Eldred's site).
> But what types of birds are killed in cities... ?
cars, buildings and cats claim all types, from songbirds to raptors. Wherever birds are, they are part of the local ecosystem.
> I'm... suggesting that the best solution for energy generation is one that maximizes return.
Return of what? Smog? If it's return on investment you are after, WindShare is offering its members very good returns.
>... at least some folks are saying that the ecological drawbacks to mass-scale wind-power right now are large
Let me tell you about one of the power stations running in my province, Ontario. Nanticoke, on Lake Erie, is the largest coal burning plant in North America, and one of the single biggest polluters. It's kept running for two reasons:
the promised nuclear reactors refits are running years late and billions over budget. Nanticoke is tiding them over, while New York State is lodging a formal pollution complaint about Ontario's coal plants.
the US's power infrastructure is in such chaos due to overconsumption and underinvestment that Nanticoke sells a lot of its power south. Most of its smog goes south, so I suppose that's only fair.
The last two points are from memory, from reading Power: Journeys across an energy nation, by Gordon Laird (ISBN: 0140290036). My numbers may be slightly off.
The negative environmental impact of wind energy is nothing compared to that of traditional non-renewable energy methods. Wind is "What You See Is All You Get" -- no smog, no radiation, no weird stuff.
Mind you, given the amount of land there is in this continent, I'm surprised people are going for offshore solutions. I guess they just want to fiddle with the cool underwater technology, 'cos the costs are way higher than building on land.
Since the sea is a smooth, flat surface, you do get some impressive wind yields offshore.
bird-shredders? Please, where'd you get that? In the years I've worked with wind turbines, I've never seen a single dead bird. I've seen large raptors using the updraft form lift, but never a bird strike.
If it's a bird shredder you want, get a cat. In an article in yesterday's Globe & Mail (not online, alas), biologist Robert Alison reckons that cats are responsible for the deaths of over 100 million song birds and game birds each year in North America.
I'd like to see your sources for your fourth point, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, it was meant as common format for publishers and content-providers to create and store books for later conversion to myriad proprietary binary formats. This paragraph seems to have gone, and the binary format soup continues to this day.
I think we're concentrating on renewables instead. They're cheap, they work, and they don't mess with your genes.
Today I found mp3cddb, a Perl/shell program to do just that. It's a little old -- it only supports ID3v1 -- but it's GPL, so we can fix that.
Hoping some other folks find this useful ...
Okay, then, if education is not a right, do you support those who deny education to others? So the Taleban are acting on strictly libertarian principles in forbidding education to women?
Only problem is, in the specs that used to be on the website, they exceeded the Betz Limit, the theoretical limit of wind turbine efficiency. There's no way they could reach the figures claimed.
It's interesting to note that they've taken the claims off their website over the weekend.
The Barenaked Ladies haven't fled Canada. Steven Page lives in Toronto. He's a member of Toronto's wind power co-op.
XSLT is considerably easier than the transformation language for SGML, DSSSL. Imagine Scheme blended with CSS; that's DSSSL. Groo!
Yes, I used to work in dictionaries ...
I can't keep up with demand for Scots Tablet, though ...
Um, Earth calling b-baggins, are you on the same planet where sheep more than 2000 miles away in Wales are still affected by Chernobyl's fallout, 17 years later?
For the sort of money they're talking, you could build a lot of renewable generation, and it'd be working now, not in 2010.
My dad, a former aerospace electronics engineer, still spits fire at the mention of Goldring. It was something to do in the long, dark Scottish winter evenings.
Uhoh -- yellow on blue was the default colour scheme of the Amstrad CPC. I know of one hardcore former CPC developer who now works at Redmond. I wonder ... ;-)
While you are here, please sort out our broken nuclear plants. They've been down for years, and are just eating up subsidies.
One minor correction: they don't call them "condor cuisinarts" at all. It's the faux-libertarian Cato Institute that calls them that, and we know all about them...
And no-one starts a capital project in order to lose money, so yes, wind turbines are about making money. What isn't?
I have to say -- and sadly too, 'cos I'm really keen on wind energy -- that that picture of the Kamaoa Wind Farm is one of the ugliest I've ever seen. What is that stuff on the turbine towers?
I think it only covers the US -- otherwise WindShare's very nice Lagerwey variable-speed wind turbine wouldn't have been allowed on the Toronto lakeshore.
Sounds like you want to read Home Power magazine. Lots of home-scale power projects, and more groovy tech than you can shake a stick at.
So if it is a composited image, why does it have a "Photo: Getty" credit, instead of an "Image: Getty" credit? Labelling a modified image as an original photo is just plain wrong, as this article from the NUJ shows.
Another great way of countering the problem is... go ahead and build it anyway. Most (non-Danish, Dutch or German) people haven't seen a wind turbine, and they're usually pleasantly surprised about how unobtrusive they are.
While it's true that most wind turbines use induction generators, they do so for several reasons, including:
All the turbines I have worked with have either had modest capacitor banks to correct for reactive power, or used insanely cool AC/AC back-to-back inverters to produce line quality AC.
I'm also concerned about the article's allegations of power intermittence. Wind turbine rotors have a fair amount of rotational inertia, so they're not capable of passing every flutter of the wind to the generator. It seems that this part of the article is a sales pitch for a new product that the vast majority of installations won't need.
I was also amused at the requirement of wind turbines to "ride through" grid frequency variations. This is basically a nice way of spinning the fact that wind turbine controllers are often far more picky about the frequency they'll accept or put out, than the rather poor regulation that applies to our power grids.
An finally, that picture. Where on earth did they get it? Apart from the fact that it's a contravention of every safety code to climb the tower of a running turbine, the climber must be a human sloth. To get that kind of motion blur on wind turbine blades, you'd have to have several minutes' exposure. Thus our perfectly sharp climber (and their horse) must be moving incredibly slowly ...
Hmm... bumbling, pompous, convinced of their own greatness; sounds exactly like the classic of English humour Augustus Carp, Esq: by Himself (which is out of copyright in the US, and available for free download on Eric Eldred's site).
Compared to Toronto, a.k.a. The Megacity?
> the Sierra Club referred to these things as "Cuisinarts of the air"
ah, that convenient misquote from the Cato Institute, who are not known for their accuracy and impartiality. The Sierra Club denies ever saying it.
> But what types of birds are killed in cities ... ?
cars, buildings and cats claim all types, from songbirds to raptors. Wherever birds are, they are part of the local ecosystem.
> I'm ... suggesting that the best solution for energy generation is one that maximizes return.
Return of what? Smog? If it's return on investment you are after, WindShare is offering its members very good returns.
> ... at least some folks are saying that the ecological drawbacks to mass-scale wind-power right now are large
Let me tell you about one of the power stations running in my province, Ontario. Nanticoke, on Lake Erie, is the largest coal burning plant in North America, and one of the single biggest polluters. It's kept running for two reasons:
The last two points are from memory, from reading Power: Journeys across an energy nation, by Gordon Laird (ISBN: 0140290036). My numbers may be slightly off.
The negative environmental impact of wind energy is nothing compared to that of traditional non-renewable energy methods. Wind is "What You See Is All You Get" -- no smog, no radiation, no weird stuff.
Since the sea is a smooth, flat surface, you do get some impressive wind yields offshore.
If it's a bird shredder you want, get a cat. In an article in yesterday's Globe & Mail (not online, alas), biologist Robert Alison reckons that cats are responsible for the deaths of over 100 million song birds and game birds each year in North America.
I'd like to see your sources for your fourth point, please.