Category: learning curve

Invoked today…

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In this tweet about the Muizenberg Fire:

This 1988 song about drug addiction:

Amazingly, TIL that Fergie and Jennifer Love-Hewitt (amongst others) sang backing vocals on the chorus to this song. And because you’re now trying to remember the other songs that Martika did (solely for pub quiz purposes, of course), let me help you out with I Feel The Earth Move, Love (Thy Will Be Done), and the utterly dreadful Martika’s Kitchen.

I think I still have the album on cassette somewhere.

World’s Biggest Windmill

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Not really, but still – nice story: they’ve put a couple of VAWTs on the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Well, they couldn’t really put them on the Eiffel Tower anywhere else, could they?

If you’ve ever seen the Eiffel Tower in real life, you’ll know that it’s not small. Here it is with its head in the clouds in the height of summer, 2012 with the boy wonder in the foreground, and a handy indicator of where the turbines have been fitted just above the 2eme étage:

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Amazingly, despite their hugely elevated position, they’re not even at the height of the wind turbines in Caledon just up the road from Cape Town. Suddenly, Gustav’s big project doesn’t seem quite so huge. Or maybe wind turbines are just generally horribly invasive. Hey, you decide.

The 10,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity they’ll produce each year is about enough to self-sustain the commercial section on the tower’s first floor, but not much else.

Look, it’s something. And I do understand that this is really all just about visibility. To be honest, short of putting a set of huge blades on the top of the tower itself, it’s probably about as good as it’s going to get. Especially in a country which produces around 80% of its electricity from nuclear. But while wind is good because it’s renewable, it’s may not be quite as green as you think. Here’s an interesting “back-of-the-envelope calculation” by Popular Science magazine on which are the nastiest forms of electricity generation if you happen to be, say… a bird (as one of the endangered Blue Cranes near Caledon might self-identify, for example).

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You can read more here, but the gist of it is that Coal is downright evil (we knew this), solar plants fry birds:

Rewire reports that during the test, operators fired up a third of the 110-megawatt facility’s mirrors, concentrating sunlight on a spot 1,200 feet off the ground. Over a six-hour period, biologists counted 130 “streamers,” or trails of smoke and water left behind as birds ignited and plummeted to their deaths. Rewire’s anonymous source said that at least one of the birds “turned white hot and vaporized completely.”

and we already knew that wind turbines kill birds and bats.

Sadly, despite our current (no pun intended) electricity woes, it seems like nuclear isn’t the er… cleanest option for SA either (although not necessarily for environmental reasons).

So we have the choice of evil coal (which we’re going to use), the horribly inefficient and not-ever-so-nice-after-all solar and wind, or the allegedly dangerously corrupt nuclear.

Or we could do fracking… Now there’s a good idea.

More Parisian flickritude

TIL about cellphone jammers

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There were seventeen different kinds of uproar last week at the State of the Nation address when journalists sent to cover the debacle event noticed that they were unable to use mobile communication to file their reports on JZ’s evasiveness and parliament’s generally appalling misbehaviour.

They blamed a device found near the media gallery:

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…which obviously, no-one knows who put there. Although my money is on the man with the pointy shoes.

And yes, it turns out that this is what a (military strength) cellphone jammer looks like. But how does a cellphone jammer work? Well, given the high tech world we live in, it’s actually surprisingly crude.

Basically, it’s the airwave version of a Denial-of-Service Attack in that it doesn’t do anything other than flood the frequency which cellphones use to talk to the nearest tower with signal, thus preventing any mobile device from accessing the network. I’m guessing that it’s like the illegal version of what happens when you try to send a tweet from a concert. (Which you shouldn’t be doing anyway, you went there for the music, right?) Simply too many signals competing to try and latch onto one tower – except in this case, the vast majority of them are artificially generated.

Cellphones use two different frequencies to send and receive information, but if even one of them is jammed, then the device is fooled into thinking that it can’t get through at all. But fancy jammers like this one can block lots of different frequencies at the same time – just in case you think you have some alternative means of accessing the network.

If your cellphone is being jammed, the likelihood is that you won’t find it suspicious – it’ll just be like you’re in an area with no signal – we’ve all been there:

Yeah, I think we got cut off
Yeah, I got crap reception in my house
I have to stand in a certain spot in my kitchen or it cuts out

Such a Twat, The Streets

It was only because there were large numbers of people in a small area struggling to get any reception on Thursday that it became obvious that something a bit sinister was going on.

Depending on how strong the jammer jamming your phone is, you might only have to walk a few steps away to regain a signal. But with a big one like the one above, and with everyone in a defined space (the Parliament building), the only way to #bringbackthesignal was for somebody to switch the big box (which no-one knows who put there) off.

Once that brief hiccup was dealt with, we could get on with the rest of the circus, and deal with the hangover and recriminations of media freedom denied for weeks and months to come.

Low level training

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I spotted this image over the weekend and it was duly Pocketed for blogging. Because it’s incredible.

I believe that it shows a USAF F-15 aircraft doing low level flight training – I think – in Wales (although there’s some suggestion it may be the Lake District in Cumbria, England).

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Shots like this are obviously incredibly difficult to take as the aerial vehicle in question is going quite fast. For most, just getting the plane in shot would be achievement enough, so this shot with the people in the foreground gives it depth and perspective. It’s simply amazing.

But the skill of the photographer is matched, if not bettered by the skill of the pilot. To take a 20 metre long plane with a wingspan of 13m and a top speed (at low altitude) of Mach 1.2 or 1,450 kph (Mach 2.5 or 2,665kph at high altitude) through the valleys of the Welsh countryside takes some ability. And some beeg balls.

Here’s a pilot’s eye view of a Typhoon doing the same thing.

250 feet is 76 metres. About half the height of the Portside Tower in Cape Town. Wibble.

I remember family holidays to the Lake District being punctuated by the RAF Tornados doing this same sort of training, and was amazed to learn that most of the planes we saw (and heard) there had flown up from RAF Coningsby, some 300+km away.

Still, with the same sort of speed as the F-15, I guess that as a Tornado or Typhoon pilot, you can pretty much choose wherever you want to play and then be there fairly promptly.

Seafret – Oceans

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I don’t know much about Seafret, nor about the actress who plays the bullied superhero schoolgirl in this video of theirs (apparently, she’s been in Game of Thrones), but fortunately that doesn’t stop me from enjoying this track:

In more good fortune, there’s google, which tells me that the actress is Maisie Williams, and that yes, she played Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. It appears that Arya is still alive and well, which I believe is unusual for the series in question.

Seafret are a bit more difficult to find information on except to say that they’re from Bridlington on Yorkshire’s east coast (Yorkshire doesn’t have a west coast) and still “unfathomably young” and “are rooted in acoustic fare, songcraft which sounds both deeply traditional and immediately fresh”.

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And yes, it’s more of that slow folk-rock stuff that was mentioned yesterday, albeit with a touch more indie than most, but it’s pleasant melancholy and another band worthy of further investigation.