TedPage

When talking about alternative forms of energy, a lot of people are promoting wind power. While the details differ, almost all of the implementations take a fan and connect it to a turbine and then wait for the wind to turn the fan. While this seems like an inexhaustible resource, from a physics level you are taking energy out of the wind. The wind is slower, and more chaotic, after the turbine. While today there isn't enough wind power generation to seriously effect our environment, I'm concerned that this isn't going to be true in the long term.

The real issue comes down to what effects these low altitude winds have on our environment currently, and what will happen if they're gone. One of the most documented uses of low altitude winds deals with erosion. Basically moving dirt around. But, as far as most cities are concerned, one of the biggest uses is clearing out smog. I work south of Los Angeles and you can tell how windy it inside the climate controlled building by looking out the window. If you can see the city, it's windy, otherwise the particulates in the air obscure the view. While both of these effects seem somewhat trivial to warming up our planet by several degrees a year, I don't think they should be discounted. If we take away the wind, we are just shifting climate change to another set of factors.

As we've seen with global warming, long term effects are difficult for humans to grasp, especially those that last longer than a human lifetime. Even harder are those that naturally require a change to the status quo. In general we try to maintain everything the way that it is. In forest management this caused serious issues because humans kept putting out the forest fires, until we learned that they were an important part of the forest life cycle. I imagine that removing things like erosion, if they do start to effect our environment, will be even harder to explain and convince people of.

I don't believe that wind power shouldn't ever be considered, but we need to be careful with it's use. If we start to pull enough energy out of the wind, it will have an effect on our environment. This is why a balanced approach to energy production is important. If we continue to take a significant portion of our energy from a single source we'll always have problems.

posted on Thu, 24 May 2007 at 01:41 | permanent link

Back in college a friend sent me an e-mail with a picture of urinal that had a fly printed in the porcelain. The goal was to subliminally control men having them target the fly when using the urinal, thus reducing the splatter caused by missing the sweet spot of the urinal. At the time, I thought the photo was edited and I thought she was just picking on men, but now I've seen them in the wild:

   

These were located in a public parking garage in Santa Monica, California. You'll have to excuse the cell phone pictures, I wasn't about to go and grab my DSLR and bring it into the restroom. I haven't decided if I feel manipulated, or it is a really good idea.

posted on Wed, 16 May 2007 at 14:32 | permanent link

I'm pretty excited that I got a LGM review posted on Linux.com. I hope that this drives interest in LGM and free graphics in general.

The article talks about a lot of the higher level things that went on at LGM, and things that a general audience would find exciting. From an Inkscape perspective there was a lot going on. Everyone was excited by blur, and it was amazing to see "Inkscape experts" work, much more skilled than myself.

One of the things that I think we found really interesting was the work on InGIMP. We talked a lot about how to get that working in Inkscape, and Mental prototyped some of it out on Saturday evening. The idea that we can capture the usage in "real sessions" is a great way to find out what users are really doing. The folks at UWaterloo said that they would work with us to host the data. But, what I'd really like is for them to study it and come up with conclusions <smile>. Really, the strength of their method is tying the data to recorded user session, and we couldn't easily get those sessions together.

I think the most fun was just meeting everyone, and seeing the folks that I had met again. Cheers to all!

posted on Tue, 15 May 2007 at 18:24 | permanent link