“We accept our responsibilities as a corporate citizen in community, national, and world affairs; we serve our interests best when we serve the public interest…. We want to be at the forefront of those companies which are working to make the world a better place.” IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson, Jr, IBM’s Basic Beliefs & [...]
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Tweet While it ain’t over till it’s over, 2011 is over. A lot that could have happened, didn’t. Obama didn’t resign, Donald Trump didn’t throw his hat into the ring or divorce his current wife and marry one or more Kardashians. Newt Gingrich threw his hat into the ring, but also didn’t divorce his [...]
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Jessica Dailey, writing at Inhabitat, notes the United States’ largest net-zero school, Lady Bird Johnson Middle School, in Texas: Texas is known for the Alamo, spicy Tex-Mex food, big Stetson hats, and now it also has the nation’s largest net-zero public school. Welcoming its first students this past fall, the Lady Bird Johnson Middle School [...]
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Another example of the risk of petroleum supply interruption: the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz. While it’s hard to imagine that United States military forces wouldn’t prevail in a conflict with Iran, that confrontation might easily escalate. Excerpted from Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz by Clifford Krauss at [...]
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While Iran is threatening to block the Straits of Hormuz, and various agents are calling for military actions, the crew of an American destroyer patrolling the North Arabian Sea rescued 13 Iranian fishermen captured by Somali pirates in November, 2011. U.S. Navy Rescues Iranians Held by Pirates, 1/6/12, Robert Mackey and J. David Goodman. The [...]
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Let us remember the Blue Marble. There would be no food – and no life – without sunlight and clean water. The whales, and the dolphins, the deer and the polar bear, are our cousins. Let us return to the UN on March 20, May 9, June 20, September 3, and December 21 with delegations [...]
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I just bought some LED bulbs at Home Depot. The bulbs, from Cree and Lighting Sciences, are sold under the “ecosmart” ™ brand. The Lighting Sciences bulbs will go into my bathroom. The CREE bulbs will go into the bedrooms, family room, and the kitchen. Over their 35,000 lifespan, each LED bulb will outlast 14 [...]
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The Jewish celebration of Chanukah, the “Festival of Lights,” commemorates the successful struggle for freedom and independence of Israel from the Selucid Greeks, about 2200 years ago. At the conclusion of this war, the Macabees purified The Temple in Jerusalem and sought to relight their “Eternal Lamp.” They only had enough oil for one day. [...]
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Here are my top 10 predictions for 2012. These are less readings of the tea leaves or the entrails of goats and chickens and more simple extrapolations of patterns in progress. Altho that may be the way effective oracles. They just masked their observations with hocus pocus, mumbo-jumbo, and guts. This list runs a gamut [...]
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Does “Moore’s Law” hold for Solar Power? In New Jersey, between 2001 and 2010, we went from a total of six systems with a combined capacity of 9.0 KW to about 7000 systems with a combined capacity of 211,000 KW or 211 MW. This is illustrated below. This is the “hockey stick” curve of exponential [...]
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From MIT Study: US Can Meet Power Grid Challenges of Future, by Gino Troiani, According to a recent two-year study commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s Energy Initiative, if certain measures are taken, the answer is yes. The study was composed of 13 MIT faculty members, 1 Harvard faculty member, 10 graduate students and [...]
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Tweet Via NPR‘s All Things Considered, from correspondent Richard Harris, Feds Delay Decision On Pipeline Project The State Department is delaying a decision for at least a year on whether to approve the Keystone pipeline. The $7 billion pipeline would carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, through the U.S. to Gulf of [...]
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Tweet To paraphrase Bob Dylan,”The answer my friend, is storage of the wind.” We have long been saying that the question is not: “Can clean, renewable and sustainable energy power the grid?” It is: “How can we harness clean, renewable and sustainable energy systems to power the grid?” As Matt Wald observed in Taming [...]
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| Tweet As Paul Krugman points out, in the NY Times, “fracking” for hydrocarbons, , see pictures at left, would, in fact, be highly subsidized: Fracking — injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels — is an impressive technology. But it’s also a technology that imposes large costs on [...]
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Excerpted from The Class Warfare of Dynamic Pricing, by Bob Gohn, on the Pike Research Blog Dynamic pricing for electricity has long been the holy grail of the smart grid, particularly for smart metering. The rationale is that if the retail price of electricity actually reflected the true time-based costs instead of a blurred monthly [...]
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The same messages can be communicated by signalling the letter "K" in Morse code via signal lamp. (While a proper signal lamp may be ideal, a flashlight, probably best employing red LEDs, will certainly fit the bill).
In Morse, the letter "K" is represent as Dash - Dot -- Dash.
The ICS also has a subset, the Medical Signal Code, which uses three-character phrases to communicate brief medical messages.