NASA’s unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977 and now is really getting out there. Via TPM, prepare to have your eggs scrambled.
“Just water, please.”
More here. Thanks AC.
L’air over there
The government of France is thinking post-nuclear energy and developing off-shore wind farms in the North Atlantic:
Long reliant on nuclear as its chief source of energy, France is having to think long and hard about its energy strategy in the face of increasing public questioning about the safety of nuclear after the Fukushima disaster and greater evidence about the potential future high financial costs of the technology. The decision by the French government late last week to award tenders to build offshore wind farms to produce 2 GW of energy suggests that wind power is high up the Elysée’s list of alternatives to nuclear.
French energy minister Eric Besson said the decision would create up to 10,000 new jobs and “position France among the leaders of the offshore industry,” when making the announcement that a consortium led by energy giant EDF and engineering firm Alstom had won a bid to build three wind farms off the coast of northern France. Spanish energy firm Iberdrola and French engineering giant Areva secured the rights to build a fourth farm, he said. The two consortia are expected to invest around €7 billion to install 2GW of offshore wind energy capacity, according to Besson.
I’m sure all kinds of batailles are raging there about whether climate change is real, too.
Via Juan Cole.
Meecro-Cosmos
That’s how it’s pronounced, anyway, this incredible documentary I watched a couple of nights ago.
Fantastic.
Not so fantastic: Venice is sinking, faster than previously thought.
What water are the water greatest water global challenges?
Did I say water? In England they call them ‘hosepipe bans’ but it seems our language brethren are experiencing a wee problem with drought:
The south-east of England and East Anglia are already in the grip of the UK’s worst drought in 30 years. Seven water companies have indicated that they will impose hosepipe bans. Most will begin next month, but some could start earlier.
This in a country known as having one of the wettest and dampest climates in the Northern Hemisphere. So it’s a bit weird to think of the UK in terms of drought. But there it is. Weird = new normal.
And maybe we can begin to understand what drought is like in parts of the world that are not historically wet, which have a lot of people and (already) very little water. It has been happening for years, with tragic consequences for man, land and beast.
Excited Particle Physicists
Abbreviations. Violations. Sometimes science has everything.
Physicists have long suspected that a difference in the properties of matter and antimatter is key to the early universe’s survival. Such a difference—technically known as charge-parity (CP) violation—would have allowed normal matter to prevail over antimatter so that normal matter could go on to form all of the stuff we see in the universe today.
To witness CP violation, physicists study particles to see if there is any difference in the rate of decay between normal particles and their antiparticles. The accepted theory of elementary particles, the standard model, allows for a low level of CP violation—including that revealed in the discoveries of the 1960s and 2000s—but not enough to explain the prevalence of normal matter. So researchers have been trying to find cases in which CP violation is higher.
The LHCb detector at CERN, and CDF at Fermilab, are two such experiments. They trace the paths of D0 meson particles and their antiparticles. These can decay into pairs of either pions or kaons, and by tallying these decay products, the LHCb and CDF teams can calculate the difference in decay rates between the D0 particles and antiparticles.
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The results cannot be claimed as a bona fide discovery, which requires a statistical significance of 5 sigma—or the chance of it being random at less than one in a million. Still, particle physicists are excited. “We cannot yet say for sure it is CP violation,” says Angelo Carbone, a member of the LHCb collaboration. “But it’s close.”
What have you done today to ensure the universe’s survival, huh?
Force Multiplier
Inside the clown car that is the field of 2012 Republican Presidential candidates, one the fake knobs that doesn’t do anything but that each one of the pushes when they can get their big shoes out of their mouths and the rubber noses out of each others… ear holes, is the EPA. By turns they want to abolish it, burn it, churn it, make it cry and turn it into a boo-boo blanket for everything the Democrats know, love and want. Their opinions on environmental issues and what the EPA does are, of course, unhinged and ill-informed, as this “debate” highlighted for all to see and ignore. But guess who else thinks the EPA is the route to their own sustainability, ne’ the future part of their future?
The ARMY:
The Army’s vision is to appropriately manage our natural resources with a goal of net zero installations. Today the Army faces significant threats to our energy and water supply requirements both home and abroad. Addressing energy security and sustainability is operationally necessary, financially prudent, and essential to mission accomplishment. The goal is to manage our installations not only on a net zero energy basis, but net zero water and waste as well. We are creating a culture that recognizes the value of sustainability measured not just in terms of financial benefits, but benefits to maintaining mission capability, quality of life, relationships with local communities, and the preservation of options for the Army’s future. The Army is leveraging available authorities for private sector investment, including using power purchase agreements (PPA), enhanced-use leases (EUL), energy savings performance contracts (ESPC), and utilities energy service contracts (UESCs) as tools to achieve these objectives. The Army must invest in its installations and improve efficiencies in energy, water and waste for the benefit of our current and future missions.
“Net Zero,” is a signed program between the Army and the E.P.A to collaborate on implementing technologies for resource conservation, renewable energy and energy self-sufficiency on Army bases, Perryromneygingrichbachmannpaulthatotheronemorans.
Idealism and Urban Transmogrification
What do you get when you cross a major corporation with the do-gooder trendiness of a Major Art Establishment? Pleasure.
You can tell a lot from the language people use– as well as from the language they don’t use. An online visit to the “mobile” BMW Guggenheim Lab, which recently touched down on Houston Street and Second Avenue in all its up-to-the-minute minimalist splendor, suggests that the “international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents” running it are engaged in the paradoxical task of trying to discover “innovative” solutions to intractable urban problems while thinking solely in clichés.
The Web site itself is of course cheery and bright, featuring lots of baby blues, the usual self-promotional videos, fussy graphics, things to click on, and, of course, an Internet letter box in which you – an ordinary citizen! – can post your radical visionary ideas about how to improve the city without even buying a stamp.
The economy is almost beyond repair, world banks are facing a meltdown, entire segments of the population have been served with their divorce papers by any and all employers, but the Guggenheim’s site is full of madly utopian visions such as that eye-catching poster in which all of New York’s major buildings are squeezed into the rectangle usually occupied by Central Park, while the rest of the island becomes a green, pristine forest – much as it was before those horrid Europeans arrived in their high-tech wooden boats. Yeah, that’ll work. Just watch out for the bows and arrows.
Read the whole thing – it’s just darling, like feeling the future through a never-ending schedule of plastic glove symposia.
Films on Fridges
You, too, can become a creative-type person:
It is Britain’s coolest new pop-up cinema and the only one inspired by a load of rubbish. Films on Fridges is the brainchild of 25-year-old American Lindsey Scannapieco and it is inspired by “Fridge Mountain”, the 20ft high pile of discarded fridges that towered over the London district of Hackney until its removal in 2005. Films on Fridges is an outdoor venue where the screen is surrounded by fridges, the bar is made of fridge parts, and fridge doors are incorporated into the seating arrangements.
Scannapieco was researching east London while studying City Design at the LSE when she first heard about the dumped refrigerators. “Fridge Mountain seemed to be part of urban folklore,” says Scannapieco. “Something which spoke to east London’s industrial past at a time when the area was changing. I thought it would be fun to resurrect it and create something that was both educational and playful.”
Fridge mountain. Kids today. Though our version of this might be some ohio teenagers doing some freelance fracking on the weekends. American creativity – that will be an awesome CNN chryon: BP sues teenagers over illegal fracturing.
Dog sues man.
Cool kids update: Films on Fridges has a site. uh huh. whadya say to that, ohio teens?
Designing Compensations
So the Obama Administration, in a bold display of having other work to do, is set to announce new fuel efficiency minimums today, though it might be an out for car makers.
At issue is a “technology re-opener” that allows auto manufacturers to fight the standards after 2021 in the hopes that they can re-negotiate rules with a future administration that may be more lenient on the industry. The re-opener potentially gives auto companies an incentive not to develop technologies immediately so they can argue down the road that the standard can’t be met.
And researchers at Caltech are engaged in extreme, Onionesque crazy talk about increasing the power output of some new, vertical-axis wind turbines.
simply by optimizing the placement of vertical wind turbines on a given plot of land.
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The experimental wind-farm houses two-dozen 1.2-meter-wide vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs). Vertical turbines that have rotors and look like eggbeaters sticking out of the ground. Each turbine is 10 meters tall.
Now is simply not the time to suggest these nugget-sized simplistic solutions to the overwhelmingly complex issues facing the world today. What we need are cautious yet controversial, half-baked propositions that allow leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, to pick an arbitrary side and battle to a standstill. Unrest at a loggerheads. No decision. A dead-end into which to channel our hostilities, to let our economic and ecological problems convulse into something much more magnificently horrific than we can now imagine. In a word, or two: more freedom. There’s just no reason to let these so called easy answers peek through and scare people. Bikes. Walking. Cooking your own food. Handholding. Making out…. these were of another time. Let’s calm down and argue about things that matter: like iPhone vs. Blackberry. Now there’s an argument that’s built to last, that means something. Where do you stand?