Pictures in and around the Black Hills (Mt Rushmore):
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| Mt Rushmore and the Black Hills, SD |
The Badlands:
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| Badlands, SD |
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| Devils Tower, WY |
Archive for May, 2008
Pictures from South Dakota trip
Thursday, May 29th, 2008The Mississippi and the Mill City
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008I got to go check out the sights along the Mississippi riverfront in downtown Minneapolis last Sat. afternoon (I’m trying to catch up on posting some pictures). I didn’t realize there was so much to see there – I wasn’t really expecting much. But there was a lot of historical information about the old mills on the sight and the falls plus some great walking trails. I was planning to go see what was going on in St. Paul for the 150 year celebration that weekend, but stopped off to take a quick look at the bridge construction work in downtown Minneapolis first. In trying to get to the bridge I stumbled into mill area. So I ended up spending a couple hours looking around on my “quick detour” and I never made it to St. Paul! Here are a few pictures and you can see all of them here (I took a bunch just to try some different camera settings and didn’t delete most of them).
First off, the ruins of the old mills.
The city of Minneapolis grew up around the grain processing and flour producing businesses, powered by the energy of the Mississippi river and the St. Anthony falls. They were able to channel part of the river into the banks and use water turbines to drive their machinery. The hydro power plant located at the falls is the second oldest (by only a couple weeks) hydro power plant in the western hemisphere! It began operation in 1882. There is a hydro plant still in operation today at the same site.
An old turbine and the museum:
The partial remains of the old mills are still visible today and there is a Mill City Museum (will visit soon) to capture the history of the industry in the city.
And even some wildlife among the ruins along the riverbank:
Minneapolis was the flour milling capital of the nation from 1880 to 1930. Gold Medal Flour is now General Mills and now owns Pillsbury (since 2000).
A series of 29 locks and dams along the Mississippi River has been installed to make the river deeper and wider. They are designed to maintain a depth of at least 9 feet along the entire river. Here’s a tour boat rising through the lock near the falls:
Running from Lake Itasca, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi is the 4th longest river in the world, behind the Nile, Amazon and Yangtze and drains over 40% of the lower 48 states.
St. Anthony Falls:
Some sights along the river…A view of the under-construction I-35W bridge just downstream:
The photogenic Guthrie Theater with its Endless Bridge (the bridge has no end!) jutting out over the street:
(view from the river).
The architect recently won the prestigious Pritzker Prize in Architecture.
A flock of segways on a tour:
Can someone tell me why all these trees are leaning the same direction? (east bank of the river)
The Minneapolis skyline from the stone arch bridge:
Czech President compares “climate alarmism” to communism
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
Czech President Vaclav Klaus opposes the “climate alarmism” perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.
Klaus is promoting his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles – What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?
“Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,” he said.
“In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat – this time, in the name of the planet,” he added.
Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he oppposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.
“It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda,” he said.
Klaus alleged that the global warming was being championed by scientists and other environmentalists whose careers and funding requires selling the public on global warming.
“Duct Tape Bandit” Gets 10 Years
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008A Kentucky man dubbed the “Duct Tape Bandit” for his unconventional hold-up get-up he wore during an attempted liquor store robbery was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Memorial Day
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln chosen for their contributions to the first 150 years of the history of the United States of America. The flags of the 50 states are flying in the foreground.
I couldn’t resists this:
Thinking of Running for Political Office?
Saturday, May 24th, 2008More from IEEE Tech Talk… Becoming a public official isn’t just the pre-ordained career path of those with law degrees. Serving the people is a responsibility available to all in a democracy. And scientists and engineers very often make outstanding representatives for those they live among.
According to the article, The American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is held its first annual Campaign Education Workshop on 10 May in Washington, D.C. The May workshop will offer more detail and specifics on how to run a campaign, including how to hire a staff, how to create a budget, how to craft media messages, and how campaigns differ from the school board to the congressional level, Robinson noted. If you’re interested in learning more about this unique opportunity, please visit the SEA Campaign Education Workshop page on the Web. [a little late now though]
Congressman Vern Ehlers, former professor of Physics at Calvin College, says “What the country desperately needs is more scientists and engineers in public office at all levels.”
Photovoltaic Moore’s Law Will Make Solar Competitive by 2015
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Photovoltaic Moore’s Law Will Make Solar Competitive by 2015
Now there are some new twists and turns—essentially, three very positive developments that would not have been generally anticipated a decade ago. First, silicon-based solar technology has decoupled from the semiconductor industry and is achieving steady cost reductions, so that those following PV discern a kind of Moore’s law at work. In 2005, production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of silicon for semiconductors.
Second, the industry has become so confident in that evolutionary path, policymakers and planners have started to set dates when they expect PV-generated electricity to be competitive with the major sources of electricity sold on the grid now. And third, while the incremental path promises a commercial breakthrough within ten years, it’s suddenly looking like second generation technology may be arriving after all—in which case wide commercialization of PV could occur much sooner.
[Above, maps showing average daily solar energy]
In recent years, global PV production has been increasing at a rate of 50 percent per year, so that accumulated global capacity doubles about every 18 months. The PV Moore’s law states that with every doubling of capacity, PV costs come down by 20 percent. In 2004, installing PV cost about $7 per watt, compared to $1/W for wind, which at that time was beginning to stand on its own feet commercially, Last, year, as recently noted in this blog, average global solar costs had come down to between $4 and $5 per watt, right in line with the PV Moore’s law. Extrapolate those gains out six or seven years, and PV costs will be below $2/W, making photovolatics competitive with 2004 wind.
UK Security Camera, 30th Aniv. of Spam, Robotic Suits
Saturday, May 24th, 20084.2 million surviellence cameras hasn’t reduced crime in the UK.
“Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.”
30th Anniversary of Spam was May 3rd.
According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Gary Thuerk, who at the time worked for Digital Equipment Corp., sent what is believed to be the first spam message, an invitation to an open house for a new DEC computer (a VAX 11/780?) that he sent to 400 of the 2,600 or so people who had email accounts on the ARPANET at the time.
Thuerk claims that his email generated about $12 million in new sales. However, many people who received his email also got highly irritated, complained to US Defense Department (which operated the net) which in turn told him never to do it again. Thuerk says he never did, either.
Thuerk also said in the story that “people have one of three reactions when they meet him: Some are excited to meet someone with an unusual claim to fame; some want to beat him up on the spot; and others just avoid him like the plague.”
Robotic Suit for the Army Being Tested
There was an AP story last week on the Army’s “exoskeleton” robotic suit being developed by Sarcos Inc (now owned by Raytheon) that potentially will “multiply a person’s strength and endurance as many as 20 times.”
“Jack Obusek, a former colonel now with the Army’s Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in the Boston suburb of Natick, foresees robot-suited soldiers unloading heavy ammunition boxes from helicopters, lugging hundreds of pounds of gear over rough terrain or even relying on the suit to make repairs to tanks that break down in inconvenient locations,” according to the story.
The suit is still not practical: it is very expensive, and the suit’s battery life currently lasts only 30 minutes.
Japan is running out of engineers
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Japan is running out of engineers.
NYT: High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers
Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.
It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.
In the meantime, the country has slowly begun to accept more foreign engineers, but nowhere near the number that industry needs.
While ingrained xenophobia is partly to blame, companies say Japan’s language and closed corporate culture also create barriers so high that many foreign engineers simply refuse to come, even when they are recruited.
Nonetheless, labor experts warn Japan may be doing too little, too late. They say the country has already gained a negative reputation as discriminating against foreign employees, with weak job guarantees and glass ceilings. Experts say Indian and other engineers will often opt for more open markets like the United States.
Owning your wind farm: Trickier than it seems
Saturday, May 24th, 2008The title is a little odd as I wouldn’t expect it to be a trivial process to own a wind farm. I must not be optimistic enough?
Nevertheless, the Twin Cities Daily Planet investigates all the hurdles and red tape one must go through in order to own a wind farm these days. They find it’s not as easy for John Doe as it is for big utilities. Most Americans don’t qualify for the wind farm tax credits that large utilities do.
The ideas the author promotes sound a lot like the Distributism (or distributionism) economic philosophy formulated by G. K. Chesterton.
According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of a few state bureaucrats (some forms of socialism) or wealthy private individuals (capitalism). A summary of distributism is found in Chesterton’s statement: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”
