Category: Technology

Happy Earth Day.
There is a series of articles on electric grids in a recent Economist news magazine.
The cover says ‘Hug Pylons Not Trees’, recognizing that while it’s good to protect Earth’s resources, it’s not enough. There needs to be a wholesale change in the way we produce energy.

From the magazine:
At present, 62% of the energy delivered as electricity comes from fossil fuels. That has to come down to more or less zero. A lot of its replacement will be in the form of cheap wind and solar, and that presents a serious challenge to grid operators. It means a lot of new connections, which are troublesome. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that renewable installations typically generate less power than steam turbines do. That means more connections per unit of capacity.
As well as adding a great many new connections, grids will also have to change shape. The places best suited to the generation of renewable energy in very large amounts are often not the places where today’s generation is concentrated. So new transmission lines will be needed. And because grids are complicated things, some of these expansions will require compensating changes elsewhere as bits of the grid become congested.

 

“My top hope is please, may fate smile upon us, and we clear the launchpad before anything goes wrong. That’s all I’m asking.”
– Elon Musk

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Thirty-three Raptors are installed on Super Heavy on the SpaceX Starship that is set for launch tomorrow morning. (Raptors are the engines, and Super Heavy is the booster for the super-sized rocket).

A major concern is that a problem with one engine could cascade and destroy other engines, part of the vehicle— or even the launchpad. Rebuilding the pad, depending on what happened, could take several months.
[Information obtained from reporting in the Wall Street Journal].

Tesla has not yet announced any plans to bring the their electric vehicles to South Africa.  EV models from Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Mini Cooper, Porsche, Volvo are available in South Africa.

These car companies are leading the charge to build out the EV charging network in the country, and a total of some 280 public charging stations are currently available.

My friend is hoping to find someone to help her restore this Loewe Opta vacuum tube radio from the 1950s to a working condition.
It was made by the Loewe AG company based in Berlin, Germany.
In addition to the front speaker, ones are found on each side to create an early version of “3D sound”.

This model already has connections for turntables, loudspeakers, a VHF antenna, and a diode plug for recording radio transmissions on tape, on the back.

We changed over to Daylight Saving Time here in the USA last night.
The Sunday after changing the time forward— or back— always feel a little weird to me.
For the record, my opinion about changing the time on the clock twice a year: it’s STUPID.

Yesterday’s envelope with my stamps had this 1987 stamp on the outside.

When I go to Elysian’s Capitol Hill brewery, I check the out the vehicles at the Electrify America charging station across from it.
Tonight there was a Volvo XC40 Recharge compact SUV and a Rivian R1T pickup truck (Montana plates) getting a charge.

The widespread devastation and loss of life of Monday’s earthquake in Turkey is shocking to me. The map below shows where the North Anatolian Fault line and the East Anatolian fault line runs in Turkey.

It was the East Anatolian fault that ruptured— well-known to seismologists  and government officials. The problem was that it had not caused a catastrophic earthquake in at least the last century.  So building codes had not been enforced rigorously enough in many areas near the fault line.

From the New York Times:
The major earthquake and large aftershock in Turkey on Monday are two of more than 70 quakes of magnitude 6.5 or higher recorded in the region since 1900. Turkey’s two main fault zones — the East Anatolian and the North Anatolian — make it one of the most seismically active regions in the world.
The 7.8-magnitude earthquake at 4:17 a.m. local time, and the unusually large 7.5-magnitude aftershock nine hours later, both were in the East Anatolian Fault Zone. But there have been several extremely deadly quakes in the North Anatolian Fault Zones as well, including one in 1999 about 60 miles from Istanbul that killed about 17,000 people.

 

 

The Quantum Fiber technician hooked up my line and modem for my new fiber internet connection today. It is blazingly fast.

What is the difference between fiber internet and cable internet?

In a nutshell: Fiber is faster, more reliable, and generally more expensive .. but it turned out that my fiber connection cost per month will actually be lower than my cable connection’s cost.

The giant white spy balloon from China that had drifted right across the continental United States the last few days, was shot down today at about 2:40pm ET over the Atlantic Ocean.

As reported by David Ignatius for the Washington Post:
The Pentagon official said it weighed as much as two or three buses and could have caused considerable damage if it had hit land. If it had fallen over Montana, 2,000 people could have been in danger from scattered debris.

As a military operation, the shoot-down was relatively simple. An F-22 Raptor fired an AIM-9 missile at the balloon, and television cameras showed what happened. The Pentagon official said the key targeting priority was to avoid shooting clear through the balloon, which might have left it largely intact and able to travel another 500 to 600 miles east, perhaps out of range of U.S. retrieval.

The Pentagon weighed whether it might be possible to partially deflate the balloon and capture the intelligence pod at lower altitude. But the official said no technology exists that would allow such a “butterfly net” capture operation.

I walked down to the Capitol Hill library just before sunset today. (At 4.30 pm, the gray sky promptly turned pitch black).

On the way back, my Apple Watch buzzed on my wrist with the ‘It looks like you’re working out’ message (offering to record it).
A few minutes later at home, I found this cartoon in The New Yorker magazine that I had taken out at the library. 🤗

If you’re going to fly on long-haul international flights again after Covid (and I will, soon), you’re going to need noise-canceling headphones for your phone or tablet.

I ditched my last device that still had a headphone jack, last year —a very old iPad— which left my wired Bose headphones stranded, disconnected. Apple has fancy new wireless noise-canceling AirPods out, but why spend $275* if you still have perfectly fine headphones?

*That’s including sales tax. The over-the-ear noise-canceling wireless Apple AirPods Max come to $600. I will only buy a pair of those ‘when my ship has come in’, as they say.

Here is what I went with instead:

Apple’s iOS 16 and watchOS 9 were released today, and I updated my iPhone and my watch.