We just went through the giant December wind storm outside of Seattle that took down a substantial amount of the electrical infrastructure in the area. We were pretty much at the epicenter of the storm damage and were without power for 9 days. Almost every power pole along the nearest major road was knocked down. After three days, a repair crew broke our phone line which was out for another 4 days. Some neighborhoods lost their cell-phone towers as well. Our cell phones don't work at our house even in the best of times so we were without power or communication and most of the roads were totally blocked for extended periods of time by repair crews.
Our small group of houses is on a community well backed up by a 16kw propane powered generator (which I own). I take any surplus power to run things in my house. This works well for an outage that lasts a day or so but once you go past a week this sort of system just isn't feasible. The propane generator consumes something like 1.2 gallons an hour and we only have a 100 gallon tank over there. We spent over $600 dollars running the generator over 9 days and had to call the propane company out 3 times (with some urgency) to keep the tank filled.
(BTW: our house is on a 250 gal. propane tank and our neighbor has a 500 gal. tank thus so much for the speculation about small propane tanks stated somewhere above.)
The first thing you discover in the case of a severe outage is how vulnerable the entire system is. Stores mostly closed with some grocery stores staying open and running generators. The frozen and dairy sections had to be taped off since all the food was spoiled. Gas stations were down except for a very limited number running generators - it took hours in line to get gas. Any store that was open had huge lines snaking down the aisles. It took a long time to get back to normal even after power was restored because stores had to clear their ruined inventory before they could restock.
You also start to find out other things about what happens when you go off the grid for a sustained period of time. Our septic system has to pump uphill to the drain field and the pump doesn't have an electrical breakout so it can be generator powered (this will soon be corrected). We had to have the tank pumped as a stop-gap to avoid overflowing the tank. Another $600 dollars.
I also burned through 2 backup UPS systems that really didn't like the power fluctuations running on the generator. Another few hundred dollars.
When things get this bad you realize that gas or propane generators are extremely short-term solutions. Some people around here have 30kw whole-house generators that run on natural gas. I wonder what their gas bill looked like last month.
Two of the other neighbors in our cluster of houses went out and got gasoline generators (you should have seen those lines). One got a Honda 6500kw generator which eventually was getting about 12+ hours on 5 gallons of gas which is fairly reasonable (but only after the break-in period).
After the outage I started assessing how to improve things. I quickly came to the conclusion that internal combustion-based backup systems are really not very robust even in the short term. In a really bad outage/crisis you can't rely on gasoline being available or on propane delivery.
Thus even ignoring what is right for the planet, in practical terms what you want for power backup is the absolute most efficient system. We can burn wood for heat but you still need a few amenities like lights to read by (and the septic sump pump, grrrr!). We could probably survive fairly comfortably for a sustained period of time on about 1000 watts (and running the well generator just enough to get by). Thus a smaller version of the system described in the article would be really interesting. In fact, even without the solar component, having the hydrogen storage and fuel cell would be very useful as a backup power system. The efficiency vs any internal combustion-based backup system would provide a huge benefit.
Well, the first post went with regex which I think is much harder than XSLT so the difficulty bar was set pretty high right out of the gate.
XSLT isn't really that hard: find the tags you care about and transform them. The rest just get left behind - perfect for stripping things down and very easy to do incrementally.
I read in a prior comment that the OP's web site had totally clean HTML. If you are going to be all OCD about your HTML this solution is probably where you would end up (after much messing about).
The various tools and gizmo utilities will get you part of the way but never all the way there in an automated fashion.
1) get a copy of Word 2003
2) "save as" an exemplar as XML
3) write an XSLT to render it in a HTML with stylesheets etc as appropriate to your website
4) for every document you get, "save as" XML with the XSLT from 3) as the transformation.
5) publish
I've been wondering how long until using XSLT and XML was suggested. XML is supposed to be a common data transport format but most of the other comments talk about starting with tranformations to Word HTML. This is wrong because it assumes that the Word to HTML conversion will produce usable HTML in the first place which is a bad assumption.
The solution suggested by the AC could be combined into a program that drives the entire process using the Word COM API to save to XML and then then, for example, the MS Jet XSLT COM object model to automate the XML conversion. This could easily be maintained (eg: new Word formatting not previously encountered) with small changes to the XSLT.
If the desire is to completely control the output without having control of the input then this is the best way to go. Yes, it's a bit of work but once you have a maintainable turn-key system you will save a lot of futzing with manual formatting. Use the power of XSLT.
One question I have is why everything has to be modeled on continous curves? It seems the exception rather than the rule when nature proceeds by continous curves rather than discontinous (probably non-linear) steps forward and back.
Because it's easier for us to project using continuous curves doesn't make it better. It's usually useful mainly for trivial or degenerate cases.
I think deep innovation occurs when current models collapse and are decreasingly useful. It also probably occurs in unusual windows of synchronized opportunity between discovery and cultural requirements.
What is being characterized here as "innovation" is really more accurately described as successful social uptake of new ideas. Nobody has any idea about the true volume or rate of creation of new ideas - we can only measure those that have a observable impact.
I think it's more interesting to consider that what we may have now is a fuel/air mixture dilemma where we're trying to force innovation (in some profitable areas) faster than there is really new information to utilize: we're running lean on the basic science and rich on attempts to squeeze money out of incomplete knowledge. This leads us to believe that progress isn't firing on all cylinders but really the ignition is about to occur in some other area that is just beginning to smolder now.
That and the pathetic requirement that the world fit our simplistic continous curve models leads to these silly prognostications.
The point under discussion in this article is summed in this quote:
"More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
The goal is to forcefully point out (using an experiment) that the one way we think about mental processing, the digital computational model, is not very useful even at the trivial level of mental signal processing.
It's interesting how all the sarcastic comments about the "biological organism" reference completely miss the point. The point is that the signal is being processed in a way that could be modeled by the way a biological organism moves through space. It sniffs here, then there, then jumps to the solution. The signal processing itself exhibits emergent properties.
The reference to the dynamical system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system) is key. (I think people frequently fail to gloss the additional "al" and think this refers to some sort of generic "dynamic system"). Dynamical systems, although deterministic, are a foundational tool for developing chaos theory.
For me the interesting idea is that the default state of thought is in-betweeness. We stay jittering back and forth in an unresolved state until, suddenly, we aren't.
It looks like the real point of this exercise is to keep people alive that have totally bled out at the scene. Currently you can't revive these cases which makes sense since you don't have any fluid volume at all so the heart, arteries, and veins are essentially deflated. You probably end up having clotting factors being triggered and the entire system gums up with no chance for revival.
The combination of the mechanics of adding fluid volume together with the application of cold to slow down metabolism buys you the extra time required to get blood products back into the system and circulating.
I had always thought that salt water was better because of osmotic pressure issues: fresh water enters the lung tissue causing tissue and red blood cell rupture.
But apparently different bad things happen for either salt or fresh water inhalation with salt water resulting in more severe hypoxia during recovery because the alveoli are more completely filled with plasma drawn out of the tissue. Ideally, you should try to drown in water of exactly the same salinity as human blood.
Slashdot Mirror
We just went through the giant December wind storm outside of Seattle that took down a substantial amount of the electrical infrastructure in the area. We were pretty much at the epicenter of the storm damage and were without power for 9 days. Almost every power pole along the nearest major road was knocked down. After three days, a repair crew broke our phone line which was out for another 4 days. Some neighborhoods lost their cell-phone towers as well. Our cell phones don't work at our house even in the best of times so we were without power or communication and most of the roads were totally blocked for extended periods of time by repair crews.
Our small group of houses is on a community well backed up by a 16kw propane powered generator (which I own). I take any surplus power to run things in my house. This works well for an outage that lasts a day or so but once you go past a week this sort of system just isn't feasible. The propane generator consumes something like 1.2 gallons an hour and we only have a 100 gallon tank over there. We spent over $600 dollars running the generator over 9 days and had to call the propane company out 3 times (with some urgency) to keep the tank filled.
(BTW: our house is on a 250 gal. propane tank and our neighbor has a 500 gal. tank thus so much for the speculation about small propane tanks stated somewhere above.)
The first thing you discover in the case of a severe outage is how vulnerable the entire system is. Stores mostly closed with some grocery stores staying open and running generators. The frozen and dairy sections had to be taped off since all the food was spoiled. Gas stations were down except for a very limited number running generators - it took hours in line to get gas. Any store that was open had huge lines snaking down the aisles. It took a long time to get back to normal even after power was restored because stores had to clear their ruined inventory before they could restock.
You also start to find out other things about what happens when you go off the grid for a sustained period of time. Our septic system has to pump uphill to the drain field and the pump doesn't have an electrical breakout so it can be generator powered (this will soon be corrected). We had to have the tank pumped as a stop-gap to avoid overflowing the tank. Another $600 dollars.
I also burned through 2 backup UPS systems that really didn't like the power fluctuations running on the generator. Another few hundred dollars.
When things get this bad you realize that gas or propane generators are extremely short-term solutions. Some people around here have 30kw whole-house generators that run on natural gas. I wonder what their gas bill looked like last month.
Two of the other neighbors in our cluster of houses went out and got gasoline generators (you should have seen those lines). One got a Honda 6500kw generator which eventually was getting about 12+ hours on 5 gallons of gas which is fairly reasonable (but only after the break-in period).
After the outage I started assessing how to improve things. I quickly came to the conclusion that internal combustion-based backup systems are really not very robust even in the short term. In a really bad outage/crisis you can't rely on gasoline being available or on propane delivery.
Thus even ignoring what is right for the planet, in practical terms what you want for power backup is the absolute most efficient system. We can burn wood for heat but you still need a few amenities like lights to read by (and the septic sump pump, grrrr!). We could probably survive fairly comfortably for a sustained period of time on about 1000 watts (and running the well generator just enough to get by). Thus a smaller version of the system described in the article would be really interesting. In fact, even without the solar component, having the hydrogen storage and fuel cell would be very useful as a backup power system. The efficiency vs any internal combustion-based backup system would provide a huge benefit.
Well, the first post went with regex which I think is much harder than XSLT so the difficulty bar was set pretty high right out of the gate.
XSLT isn't really that hard: find the tags you care about and transform them. The rest just get left behind - perfect for stripping things down and very easy to do incrementally.
I read in a prior comment that the OP's web site had totally clean HTML. If you are going to be all OCD about your HTML this solution is probably where you would end up (after much messing about).
The various tools and gizmo utilities will get you part of the way but never all the way there in an automated fashion.
From the AC above:
1) get a copy of Word 2003
2) "save as" an exemplar as XML
3) write an XSLT to render it in a HTML with stylesheets etc as appropriate to your website
4) for every document you get, "save as" XML with the XSLT from 3) as the transformation.
5) publish
I've been wondering how long until using XSLT and XML was suggested. XML is supposed to be a common data transport format but most of the other comments talk about starting with tranformations to Word HTML. This is wrong because it assumes that the Word to HTML conversion will produce usable HTML in the first place which is a bad assumption.
The solution suggested by the AC could be combined into a program that drives the entire process using the Word COM API to save to XML and then then, for example, the MS Jet XSLT COM object model to automate the XML conversion. This could easily be maintained (eg: new Word formatting not previously encountered) with small changes to the XSLT.
If the desire is to completely control the output without having control of the input then this is the best way to go. Yes, it's a bit of work but once you have a maintainable turn-key system you will save a lot of futzing with manual formatting. Use the power of XSLT.
One question I have is why everything has to be modeled on continous curves? It seems the exception rather than the rule when nature proceeds by continous curves rather than discontinous (probably non-linear) steps forward and back.
Because it's easier for us to project using continuous curves doesn't make it better. It's usually useful mainly for trivial or degenerate cases.
I think deep innovation occurs when current models collapse and are decreasingly useful. It also probably occurs in unusual windows of synchronized opportunity between discovery and cultural requirements.
What is being characterized here as "innovation" is really more accurately described as successful social uptake of new ideas. Nobody has any idea about the true volume or rate of creation of new ideas - we can only measure those that have a observable impact.
I think it's more interesting to consider that what we may have now is a fuel/air mixture dilemma where we're trying to force innovation (in some profitable areas) faster than there is really new information to utilize: we're running lean on the basic science and rich on attempts to squeeze money out of incomplete knowledge. This leads us to believe that progress isn't firing on all cylinders but really the ignition is about to occur in some other area that is just beginning to smolder now.
That and the pathetic requirement that the world fit our simplistic continous curve models leads to these silly prognostications.
Finally, a few good comments.
The point under discussion in this article is summed in this quote:
"More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
The goal is to forcefully point out (using an experiment) that the one way we think about mental processing, the digital computational model, is not very useful even at the trivial level of mental signal processing.
It's interesting how all the sarcastic comments about the "biological organism" reference completely miss the point. The point is that the signal is being processed in a way that could be modeled by the way a biological organism moves through space. It sniffs here, then there, then jumps to the solution. The signal processing itself exhibits emergent properties.
The reference to the dynamical system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system) is key. (I think people frequently fail to gloss the additional "al" and think this refers to some sort of generic "dynamic system"). Dynamical systems, although deterministic, are a foundational tool for developing chaos theory.
For me the interesting idea is that the default state of thought is in-betweeness. We stay jittering back and forth in an unresolved state until, suddenly, we aren't.
Finally a link to something with content.
It looks like the real point of this exercise is to keep people alive that have totally bled out at the scene. Currently you can't revive these cases which makes sense since you don't have any fluid volume at all so the heart, arteries, and veins are essentially deflated. You probably end up having clotting factors being triggered and the entire system gums up with no chance for revival.
The combination of the mechanics of adding fluid volume together with the application of cold to slow down metabolism buys you the extra time required to get blood products back into the system and circulating.
I had always thought that salt water was better because of osmotic pressure issues: fresh water enters the lung tissue causing tissue and red blood cell rupture. But apparently different bad things happen for either salt or fresh water inhalation with salt water resulting in more severe hypoxia during recovery because the alveoli are more completely filled with plasma drawn out of the tissue. Ideally, you should try to drown in water of exactly the same salinity as human blood.
a ct1
http://www.rescuediver.org/med/drown.htm
You would have to be in the Antarctic for the temp difference to be relevant and probably not even there.
Interesting OT article relating to Antarctic swimming:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030203fa_f