One of the many benefits of living in Minnesota is the snowfalls in late March. You can get a glimpse of it in these pictures:
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| 2008-03-31 MN Mon Snow |
Short video of a truck clearing the snow from our parking deck:
http://northbynwa.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/P1020446.MOV
The video may take a while to load.
The total accumulation is not too much since it has been pretty warm lately and a lot of the snow has melted into a messy slush.
This should make my first day of work/training up here even more memorable. Fortunately I’m not in my apartment yet so I can walk from to work from the hotel that just down the street from the office.
At least we won’t have to deal with the tornadoes that are expected tomorrow across parts of the central US. Sounds like they could be pretty bad.
A HEAVY SNOW WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 7 AM MONDAY TO 6 AM CDT TUESDAY.
HEAVY WET SNOW WILL OVERSPREAD MUCH OF EAST CENTRAL AND SOUTH CENTRAL MINNESOTA AND PORTIONS OF WEST CENTRAL WISCONSIN FROM LATE MONDAY MORNING THROUGH EARLY MONDAY AFTERNOON. THE SNOW WILL PERSIST THROUGH MUCH OF MONDAY NIGHT BEFORE DIMINISHING SIGNIFICANTLY BY DAYBREAK TUESDAY. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 TO 8 INCHES ARE LIKELY ACROSS EAST CENTRAL AND SOUTH CENTRAL MINNESOTA WITH SOME 9 INCH AMOUNTS IN THE BALSAM LAKE…RICE LAKE AND LADYSMITH AREAS OF WEST CENTRAL WISCONSIN.
A HEAVY SNOW WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS. ONLY TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL…KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT…FOOD…AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.
I need to work “overspread” into more of my conversations. I didn’t even think it was a real word when I read the alert.
The high tomorrow is 33°F. It was supposed to be clear and really cold tomorrow night (6°F), but now they’re predicting cold and snow.
So the snow has mostly melted in Minnesota… mostly.
They got 8″ last weekend, so the Wild Mountain ski & snowboard hill was still open this weekend. What is left most places is the melting mounds of snow that was piled up during the winter in parking lots and some snow in fields that are partly shaded.
I was also surprised to see car car pulled over on the interstate last night. Who know what that Camry driver was up to… However, while I was driving around today I saw ZERO cops the entire day. Maybe they are in un-marked cars? Or maybe they are still in hibernation?
On to some pictures from the area today.
Nice farm, with a racetrack carved in the lake in the foreground
Still driving around on the lakes… gathering their ice fishing houses?
Welcome to Lindström
Wild Mountain – not as wild as I imagined
How did that get there? Must have jumped out of a moving truck.
St. Croix Falls Dam & Hyrdopower Plant
This hydro plant located in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin on the St. Croix River, is owned and operated by Xcel Energy Inc. The plant was constructed between 1905 and 1906. According to Xcel, the St. Croix Falls Hydro Plant is its 2nd highest producer of electricity among the Xcel’s-Wisconsin’s 19 hydro plants. The plant utilizes eight hydro turbines, and has the capability of producing up to 117,363 kilowatts of power annually.
Here are a couple before and after shots to illustrate the difference in snow from two months ago to today:
Target parking lot
Movie theater parking lot
More pictures in this album:
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| 2008-03-29 MN-Wis. Sat |
I was surprised to find out that The Philippines is the largest importer of rice in the world. However, there is a problem because global supplies of rice are currently shrinking as the governments of some rice exporting countries, such as Egypt, India, Vietnam and Cambodia, have decided it is in the interest of their citizens to ban or restrict the export of the grain to keep the prices lower at home.
Conversely, many US farm aid programs are in place to keep the prices of crops and related food products, like sugar, high at home to help farmers at the expense of the consumer.
Unfortunately, neither of these types trade incentives is good for the average person. In the US, we overpay for sugar or substitute corn-syrup as an alternative to support corn production over sugar production. Meanwhile Egyptian and Indian rice growers will be hurt by the lower prices of their crops because the demand is domestic-only which in turn causes consumers in rice importing countries, such as the Philippines, to pay much more for rice than they would otherwise.
Fortunately, there are some rice reserves in Vietnam and Thailand.
To a lot of people, the price of rice is a big deal:
Rice prices jumped 30 per cent to an all-time high on Thursday, raising fears of fresh outbreaks of social unrest across Asia where the grain is a staple food for more than 2.5bn people.
These foreign sales restrictions have removed about a third of the rice traded in the international market.
“I have no idea how importing countries will get rice,” said Chookiat Ophaswongse, president of the Thai Rice Exporters Association. He forecast that prices would rise further.
Rice is also a staple in Africa, particularly for small countries such as Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Senegal that have already suffered social unrest because of high food prices.
Thai rice, a global benchmark, was quoted on Thursday at $760 a tonne, up about 30 per cent from the previous daily quote of about $580 a tonne, according to Reuters data. Some traders, however, said the daily jump was not as steep, adding that Thai rice had already traded at about $700 a tonne this week.
Rice prices have doubled since January, when the grain traded at about $380 a tonne, boosted by strong Asian, Middle Eastern and African demand.
Something to think about the next time you have a plate of combination stir-fried rice.
I’m back in MN for the beginning of my six month training activities.
Spring is here and most of the snow is GONE! I even spotted a blonde driving a Miata convertible with the top down on the interstate – she did have a heavy jacket on. This was in 38° F weather.
Still no sign of ANY law enforcement here (outside the airport). I’m sure they’re here somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find them.
In the Safe Driver class I took last week for work training they stated that one cause of dangerous roads in Alabama is a lack of enforcement. The fact that there is practically NO enforcement around here, yet traffic flows smoothly, drivers are courteous to each other and most people don’t drive recklessly (changing lanes, speeding, etc.) makes me think that enforcement isn’t the cause of dangerous roads in Alabama. The more likely explanation is that the need for more officers on the roads to enforce the laws is a symptom of another problem – bad drivers who aren’t courteous and drive dangerously. Come on Alabamians – you can drive better (myself included)!
Lonnie Johnson, the inventor of the Super Soaker, has invented a device that can generate electricity from heat differentials (a thermoelectric generator).
Johnson says it has the potential to be the best-ever method of converting solar energy into a form that we can use. Among the potential applications are at utility-scale solar thermal farms and for plug-in hybrid vehicles, in which the device would use waste heat from the car’s internal combustion engine to help power the car’s electric motor.
Johnson says a prototype of the heat engine, called the Johnson Thermoelectromechanical Energy Conversion System, or JTEC, will be ready in a few months. It could, ideally, be 78 percent Carnot efficient. But what sets JTEC apart is its all-solid-state design. The lack of moving parts such as turbines and pistons eliminates nearly all of the parasitic losses that, in machines like an automobile engine, greatly lower efficiency.
In contrast, photovoltaic devices have net conversion efficiencies in the teens and thermionic (or thermoelectric) chips reach only a little higher than 20 percent of Carnot when converting heat to electricity.
“Johnson has opened up a fundamentally new pathway to generate electricity from heat,” says Paul Werbos, program director for power, control, and adaptive networks at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Werbos, an IEEE Fellow, says the NSF is funding Johnson’s heat-engine research because of the strong chance that it could cut the cost of solar power in half. Werbos acknowledges that the product’s development is still at an early stage where unforeseen problems might creep in. “But I don’t see any showstoppers,” he says.
Find out all the gory details in this IEEE Spectrum article.
Johnson’s page for JTEC, Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System.
In his hometown of Marietta, Georgia, February 25, 1994 was declared “Lonnie G. Johnson Day” in his honor
Interesting look at the video game market in China and their business models – free games (upfront cost) and then charges for various items and such later on.
From the IEEE blog, The Sandbox (China Gets In The Game).
The original article is here: Chinese Online Games to Top $3 bln in 2010.
John Beddington, the [UK] government’s current chief scientific adviser, has already expressed scepticism about biofuels. At a speech in Westminster this month he said demand for biofuels from the US had delivered a “major shock” to world agriculture, which was raising food prices globally. “There are real problems with the unsustainability of biofuels,” he said, adding that cutting down rainforest to grow the crops was “profoundly stupid”.
This piece in the Guardian discusses why the UK is about to fight the EU’s pending biofuels quota of 10% by 2020. Not surprisingly, the EU’s quota could result in higher food prices. Does anyone actually expect a government quota to produce positive results? Or even, results without unintended negative consequences?
The PintPundit sent me this blog post documenting electrical utility substations in the Toronto area that look like residential homes. Pretty cool. Like the cell phone towers I see around Birmingham that are disguised as pine trees (FYI… there’s one on the east side of I-65 just north of Lakeshore Drive).
A Green Wombat post today states that FPL Energy, a big player in the renewable energy market, is about to build a $1 billion, 250-megawatt solar power plant in the Mojave Desert, called the Beacon Solar Energy Project.
To recap, solar thermal plants, which are very different from solar photovoltaics, use long rows of parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on tubes of synthetic oil suspended above the arrays. The hot oil is used to create steam which drives electricity-generating turbines. This new power plant will be built on 2,012 acres of former farmland beside a Honda test track near California City.
According to the Green Wombat article, California law requires the state’s investor-owned utilities — PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) — to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020. But public utilities like LADWP only have to set green energy targets, 13 percent by 2010 and 20 percent by 2017 in Los Angeles’ case. Under California’s global warming law, the state’s greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020.
Not surprisingly, those renewable energy mandates have been driving the market for large-scale solar power plants, but so far California’s Big Three utilities have placed their bets on startups like Ausra, BrightSource Energy and Stirling Energy Systems.
See my recent post on solar thermal plants.
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