Denmark has a problem with their wind turbines. Apparently its generating too much power from wind.
Right now, they are generating about 20% of their total electricity from wind power and on windy days that percentage can double which has placed some strain on the electricity grid due to extreme fluctuations. In western Denmark, the price of electricity can sometimes drop to 0 on a windy day which leaves utilities trying to find ways to offload the excess power.
Are you familiar with The Bleacher Report? It’s an open-source sports community where people can write articles about their favorite sports. I happened to notice an interesting editorial on Formula One’s recent traction control ban which was written by one Marco Soto, who is probably devilishly handsome and seems to be a mega expert on all things F1.
I must admit to being a big fan of Mr. Bragg, and I spent a solid month listening to his back catalog (most notably, the excellent Workers Playtime) in anticipation of this album’s US release. When the time came, I paid the extra cash to pick up the limited 2-disc edition, which includes a bonus CD of the album tracks performed by Bragg with guitar alone. I’m glad I did, because the bonus disc sounds even better than the album, but I’m getting ahead of myself here…
Mr. Love and Justice would be an excellent title for any Billy Bragg album, as it describes the two main themes of his catalog: heartfelt love songs and scathing political protest tunes. On this album, despite the fact that the world at the moment leaves plenty of room for political outrage, Bragg tends towards the softer side. I was hoping for something closer to a 50-50 split, but he’s fucking earned it. He still tours relentlessly and has written a book lately in the political area. If this album is a hint to what the twilight of his career will bring, I’m looking forward to it. He’s shown here that he can still write a fantastic melody, and the album showcases the excellent and steadying production hand of Grant Showbiz. Mr. Showbiz knows exactly what to do with Bragg, bringing in a variety of instruments to complement Bragg’s minimalist style. The inclusion of the bonus disc with just Bragg and guitar is an excellent addition; it is a testament to Bragg’s songwriting prowess that the tunes maintain their power even when stripped of all accompaniment. Billy uses his signature Fender Strat electric guitar on most of the songs and isn’t afraid to mix in a few powerful fills and licks between verses, giving the bonus disc a flavor reminiscent of Bragg’s earlier work on Brewing up With Billy Bragg and Talking to the Taxman About Poetry (the latter admittedly one of my all-time favorite albums)
Which brings me to my favorite part about Mr. Love and Justice: it’s not another Workers Playtime or Taxman. I’ll admit that I was hoping for another one of those masterpieces, but I’m not at all disappointed with this album. Bragg’s voice is a little rougher around the edge, a little lacking in power, and I love it. He manages to make the imperfections endearing instead of, well, just imperfections.
By releasing an album heavy of sentimentality and light on protest, with a title like the one he chose, it may seem like Billy Bragg is signaling the beginning of a downturn in activity. I hope that’s not the case, as this album shows he still has plenty to offer.
It’s stories like this which make me happy about using the “crime” tag.
BEIJING (Reuters) - Speeding drivers in south China are getting clear away thanks to machines which switch the numbers on their licence plates in seconds, state media said on Tuesday.
“More than 50 percent of cars caught on camera for speeding and other offences either cover up their plates or use a fake licence plate,” a traffic policeman in the Guangdong city of Yangjiang was quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily as saying.
“Our chances of capturing them is next to nil.”
The price of the remote-control device starts at around 800 yuan ($115), while a more advanced apparatus with the ability to flip over the numbers in less than three seconds costs more than double.
“The era of covering up the licence plate by hand has passed,” a driver surnamed Zheng told the newspaper.
“It’s really convenient and economical too,” a salesman who specializes in such devices in the provincial capital of Guangzhou was quoted as saying.
In motorsports, the innovations made by engineers for purposes of cheating are usually far more inventive and brilliant than those that fall within the rules. I think the rules are too restrictive, but that’s beside the point. I really believe that something about breaking the rules brings out the best in creative technical minds.
Regardless of how you feel about China and Tibet (can’t say I’m a huge fan of China’s activities), this is pretty funny:
Internet users downloading pro-Tibet content are being targeted by cybercriminals for the second time in a fortnight.
The latest attack consists of a key-logging application which uses a rootkit to hide itself on users’ Windows PCs. According to researchers at IT security vendor McAfee, the malware appears to be sending users’ keystrokes to a computer in China.
The malware is hidden in a Flash animation that pokes fun at a Chinese Olympic competitor. But as users play the clip, the Trojan downloads the rootkit and keylogging software to their PCs. The malware is being distributed as an email, RaceForTibet.exe, McAfee found.
It is the second such attack in just a few days. Last week, hackers placed the “Fribet” Trojan on a number of pro-Tibet websites. That exploited a vulnerability in Windows.
If there was only a way to do this with Toby Keith videos, the Republican party would be without computer power overnight.
First, the bad news: the inner solar system is unstable. Given enough time, Jupiter’s gravity could yank Mercury out of its present orbit.
Two new computer simulations of long-term planetary motion — one by Jacques Laskar (Paris Observatory), the other by Konstantin Batygin and Gregory Laughlin (University of California, Santa Cruz) — have both reached the same disturbing conclusion.
You know, back in my undergrad days, I took a course in the Math department on computer modeling. We spent a great deal of time on solar system models (they were probably so slow because it was 1997 and we only had the blazing speed of Sunsparc stations at our disposal) and we had the damndest time getting stable solutions out of them in the long term. I mean, one needed to put in just the right initial conditions to get anything besides, um, fiery oblivion. Maybe we did know what we were talking about? I hope you’re reading this, Dr. Chu.
Says Laughlin, “The solar system isn’t as stable as we’d thought.” Both teams have found that Jupiter’s gravity can increase Mercury’s orbital eccentricity over time. Mercury’s path around the Sun is already nearly as elliptical as Pluto’s. But Jupiter can make Mercury’s orbit so out of round that it overlaps the path of Venus. A close encounter between them could send the innermost planet careening off wildly.
“Once Mercury crosses Venus’s orbit,” Laughlin says, “Mercury is in serious trouble.”
So is Earth.
At that point, the simulations predict Mercury will suffer generally one of four fates: it crashes into the Sun, gets ejected from the solar system, it crashes into Venus, or — worst of all — crashes into Earth.
To call this catastrophic is a gross understatement. Such an impact would kill all life on our planet. Nothing would survive. By contrast, the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was likely just 6 miles in diameter; Mercury is 3,032 miles across. The last time an object about that size hit the Earth, the resulting debris formed our Moon.
Oh, well that’s cool. I mean, everybody loves the moon, right?
Check out this gallery of mostly SFW (but with several NSFW) posters of XXX movies from Ebay. My (NSFW) favorite, for reasons of sheer ridiculousness, is easily this one.
Oh and I’ve now added the ‘Vaginas’ tag, which should make things easier.
The aforementioned Mr. Barleycorn recently threw down the gauntlet and challenged the community to dethrone him as geek champion. While I doubt I can hang with his lofty credentials, I must at least do my part to rise to the challenge. I’ll do that by sharing my excitement over the news of the memristor, the missing link of electronics:
Details of an entirely new kind of electronic device, which could make chips smaller and far more efficient, have been outlined by scientists.
The new components, described by scientists at Hewlett-Packard, are known as “memristors”.
The devices were proposed 40 years ago but have only recently been fabricated, the team wrote in the journal Nature….
…
The memristors are so called because they have the ability to “remember” the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the power has been switched off.
This could allow researchers to build new kinds of computer memory that would would not require powering up.
Today, most PCs use dynamic random access memory (DRAM) which loses data when the power is turned off.
But a computer built with memristors could allow PCs that start up instantly, laptops that retain sessions after the battery dies, or mobile phones that can last for weeks without needing a charge.
“If you turn on your computer it will come up instantly where it was when you turned it off,” Professor Williams told Reuters.
“That is a very interesting potential application, and one that is very realistic.”
They are being considered the fourth basic building block of circuits (after resistors, capacitors, and inductors). Those preceding three are so fundamental to electronics, that adding memristors to the list is just huge. In mechanical terms, it would be analogous to the discovery of the pulley, but in 2008.
‘Industry anathema’
Professor Williams and his team have already shown that by putting two memristors together - a configuration called a crossbar latch - it could do the job of a transistor.
“A crossbar latch has the type of functionality you want from a transistor but it’s working with very different physics,” he explained.
Intriguingly, these devices can also be made much smaller than a conventional transistor.
“And as they get smaller they get better,” he said.
As a result, the new devices could play a key part in the future of the electronics industry, as it relentlessly pursues Moore’s Law.
I’m reminded of psychohistory in the Foundation series: just when we’re ready to scrap Moore’s Law, somebody finds a new way to continue on the path. It’s an amazing advance.
Oh, and I don’t know who came up with this, but someone has already determined a fitting schematic symbol:
Be good little Midpointers and check out our dear friend (and real writer) John Barleycorn’s article in The Weekly Dig. Here you will see that they got the correct name on it, and not the incorrect one like in the print version. Nice work!
Coworker 16, (on the subject of his upcoming 57th birthday): I was born premature. I was in an oxygen tank, they didn’t think I would make it. 57 years later and I’m still here.
Coworker 16: Oh, don’t feel sorry for me. It’s your generation you should worry about. I hate to say it, but I think my generation is the last one which will have been better off than our parents and better of than our kids.
Cangrejero: Is that so?
Coworker 16: Sorry pal, we’ve fucked up social security, medicare, the economy, and just about everything else for you guys.
Cangrejero: Well then, no nice nursing home for you.
Have I mentioned that I love Coworker 16? Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this article. Medicare and Social Security were the shining lights of the New Deal; they were proof that social programs could work if taken care of properly. Apparently, that’s a big if with this government.
Medicare “Drifting towards disaster”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Medicare is lurching toward disaster and it is too late for the Bush Administration and Congress to do anything about it, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said on Tuesday.
He said the next administration will have to act to stop rising costs and get control of the $400 billion federal health insurance plan for the elderly, which now covers 44 million people.
“Higher and higher costs are being borne by fewer and fewer people. Sooner or later, this formula implodes,” Leavitt said in a speech to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute think-tanks.
“There is serious danger here,” he added. “Medicare is drifting towards disaster.”
Leavitt’s speech echoes repeated warnings from other federal government officials who have noted that Medicare spending is projected to be 3.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2009.
Umm, holy fucking shit. 3.3 percent of GDP next year? I wonder how the disastrous Medicare bill in which the congressional Republicans voted to take away our government’s right to negotiate lower prices helped here?
WELLINGTON, New Zealand - Marine scientists in New Zealand on Tuesday were thawing the corpse of the largest squid ever caught to try to unlock the secrets of one of the ocean’s most mysterious beasts.
No one has ever seen a living, grown colossal squid in its natural deep ocean habitat, and scientists hope their examination of the 1,089-pound, 26-foot long colossal squid, set to begin Wednesday, will help determine how the creatures live. The thawing and examination are being broadcast live on the Internet.
The squid, which was caught accidentally by fishermen last year, was removed from its freezer Monday and put into a tank filled with saline solution. Ice was added to the tank Tuesday to slow the thawing process so the outer flesh wouldn’t rot, said Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa.
After it is thawed, scientists will examine the squid’s anatomical features, remove the stomach, beak and other mouth parts, take tissue samples for DNA analysis and determine its sex, Diebel said.
You Kiwi fools! Thawing it will only turn it into a squid-zombie, we’re doomed! Doomed!
I’ve never received a text message on my phone for which I wasn’t the intended recipient. Apparently, it’s quite a common occurrence. There’s even a blog which features exclusively text messages mistakenly sent to the author. (I can’t remember what it’s called or I’d link here).
Anyway, the other day I accompanied Coworker 15 to the Alltel store so he could replace his destroyed Blackberry (they don’t like to be dropped in water). I started playing around with the display models, and I found one which had close to 200 text messages stored on it! They were all also marked as ‘unread,’ so it would seem that even the store employees were unaware that this phone was the target of many incorrectly addressed messages, and they were awesome. The funny thing is, they were mostly (from what I saw) from 5 or 6 different people. You’d think that after sending someone a message 50 or so times and not getting a response, one would check to make sure they had the right number. Especially given that these weren’t messages like “on my way” or “c u l8r.” It was more like “I’m trying to get down to the club cuz I got FUCKIN BLUE BALLS YO!!!!” and “You know I love you, come open the door” (Seriously.)
