The Times ran an interesting piece on another form of solar energy for the coming fossil fuel crisis — solar thermal power. Mirror farms focus desert sunlight onto pipes or towers that contain a liquid. The heated liquid powers a generator to produce electricity. Not new and not without its own dangers; but fascinating.
Check out their story about “Turning Glare Into Watts”.
We’ve been there to visit these gaseous giants. We, the race of humans, that is who sent out a robot spacecraft and sat back to await the pictures. NASA
provides such great images from Astronomy Pictue of the Day as well as the NASA site.
The Jupiter image is wonderful because of its 3D quality.
The Saturn pictue with its rings because the robot camera and its earth-based controllers didn’t just go the distance and send back a snapshot. The image reminds me of Steichen or Weston in its 
planes, muted color palette and “modern” composition. Wait! It is a NASA picture from space.
Google Earth came along — even for Macs — along with the Map It version and I played with it. Fun. But only recently have I realized that it could be used, as it improves, to go aerial shooting without the plane and altitude.
I love planes and altitude and had been doing some aerial photography in a pal’s plane when jobs came along to pay our way. But my heart attack put an end to any altitude and would probably balk at aerobatics for fun. And fun they were.
So I finally began to explore Google Earth as a means to recover some of the beauty and fun of aerial photography. No camera. No plane. No wind in my face. No rolls to catch a straight-down shot. No gravity with which to fight. Less fun but pictures nonetheless.
Back in June I began what was to be a series of gallery pages showing off recently done photographs not yet put in other galleries. The first one worked and then I moved on to other projects. There was also the problem of using out-dated technology, film-based photography. This has been one of those technological advances much like the move from Daguerre’s invention to the other thread of photography: paper, glass and, finally, film. Daguerre had a great process that made beautifully sharp, life-like one-off originals. It was elegant and doomed.
Had I known how quickly and how totally a digital camera would become that which I wanted to choose first; I would have spent even more for a more advanced model Nikon. Film, especially here in Mexico where the labs are few, non-existent or just incompetent, is useless for me. Even the D40X I bought is pleasing me immensely. It is light and quick and seems to be providing usable results with its inexpensive lens and with the few Nikon lenses I have that work on it — though those (the 60mm/2.8, 85mm/1.8 and 135/2.8) were the last and mostly the best. Except for my beloved 105mm/2.5 that I had AI’d from its original state, heavy with brass and with perfect glass. It was a hold-over from the first days of freelancing photography in 1981, one of the first lenses I bought at a loft-store in the Photo District of New York, one of the first days snugged up to the counter of lens-deals and camera-deals and negotiating as a “professional”. And it was one of those great buys whether I paid too much or too little because it earned me thousands of dollars and more over the next 20 years or so.
THERE IS NOW A NEW PAGE OF RECENT IMAGES: GALLERY: RECENTSCANS.
There are 10 pictures on subjects of which I have written here, some previously shown and some not. There are a few from the recent sea trips to and from Miami on Carnival’s Fascination and Imagination. The shot of the Leger at MAM and — turn behind you Howard to see what it was you didn’t see — is a collection of planes and a wall of glass with a cloud happening by that pleased me. The scarecrows were appropriate for this Day of the Dead in Mexico and there is one of my first work on a series of hieroglyphs on the streets and walks of Miami left by an ancient civilization much as the Mayans and Egyptians left behind their signs. An infinity symbol for the ages.
The town hall of North Salem, New York makes a sunset appearance/disappearance and there is a one of an encyclopedic series begun of water vessels. I particularly like shooting work vessels.
WordPress has been updated to 2.3 “Dexter”. It was time-consuming but not terrible. Everything was backed up 3 ways until Sunday — since it is Sunday. It was relatively painless with the use of the plug-in WordPress Automatic Plug-in which is a great help.
Note that Lifehacker today had a great link to a BBC questionnaire about sleep habits that returns a personalized response. I tried it and was fascinated and reassured by its response. My “insane” sleep patterns, they said, were really not so bad, unhealthy or crazy. It is definitely worth a 10 minute visit.
Seen on my first excursion with a camera for a week of intense post-surgical pain — the radicals are not all hiding from the current paranoia of a tense nation. The management does not necessarily endorse the contents of other people’s bumper stickers.
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When I started my Monday — after email perusal and some time with investments — I did not plan to take any of the possible commercial references that could be put on my blog. I was far more distracted by the painters starting on the house, decisions as to where to move if I sell it, and the difficult decisions of how to manage a stock portfolio. I am, after all, a photographer-writer with cardiac problems and not a financier.
Then I ran across Mr. Beer which is the portal to TV Products 4 Less. It was my downfall as this expatriate re-acquainted himself with the wonderful attractions of a lifetime that used to only be found on TV when the late movie was over. This company is on-line and offers those great pieces of all-American (no matter where they are made — probably in the East) kitsch. What childhood in America would have been complete without a Chia Pet growing clover. They have Chia Homer and Chia Shrek and now there is a great Chia herb garden I would like here in Mexico for some tastes more American than my chaya, a green leafy jungle plant in my garden that is sort of a cross between spinach and chard — sort of. And I have hoja santa, the “sainted leaf” which is also called hierba acuyo in Veracruz and has some Mayan names I have forgotten. It has a pungent perfume-like taste I find hard to describe and is great wrapped around a chicken breast or fish to impart its taste. But these are jungle things not the foods nor sights of my American life.
Better, they have what I have been madly searching for here in hardware stores and the new Office Depot that recently appeared in the new mall in Chetumal, the nearest city. They have the Cable Organizer:
“This cable management kit organizes cords at home or in the office. The patented “zip clip“ easily locks around the loose cords and cables and then zips them into the cord organizer in one simple motion. Each kit includes: 8 feet of zipper cable, 1 zip clip, 2 wall mounts and 12 pairs of labels. (Note:: Cable Zipper can easily be cut with scissors to any length needed) Available in medium and large sizes. Medium size is meant for a few cables (or phone cables); large is meant for more cables (or computer cables).” I am so tired of being swamped by USB cable from printer, flat-bed scanner, film scanner, Mercury Hard Drive, power adapters for both my Macs, and (before I followed a Lifehacker design to organize a charging center for all the cell phones, cordless phone, etc) those cables hanging out in knotted clumps as well.
It was the kind of discovery that could talk me into moving back to the good ole US of A just to have the plethora of Things that we have available. From iPhones to Cable Organizers. Even their Mr. Beer kits as well as Mr. Ale for you Anglophiles. For those of us who suffer gout there was a wonderful temptation in the Mr. Root Beer Kit. If real ice cream was available here rather than just helados which are frozen confections that are popular and seem a lot like ice cream but hold up to traveling in the tropical heat; I could make my own root beer, pour it over chocolate ice cream and have the Black Cow I used to crave from a certain drive-in ice cream place in Tampa 50 years ago. Up with Black Cows you lucky Americans. Enjoy the wonders of democracy and freedom. Tend your Chia Pet, don’t fall over the cables and pull the laptop onto the floor and then settle back with a Black Cow, a fine book and, oh yes!, clap your hands and The Clapper will turn on your reading light.
Back to mulling over plans for my future, researching stocks to consider or avoid and writing a piece I had planned for Blogcritics Magazine.
This has been a word from one of our sponsors and a voice from the heart of the American Experience.
This green idea has been headlined a few times recently. The articles have declared that painting roofs white would save more than the equivalent space put into expensive solar panels. It is a good idea for a green and energy-efficient world – at least in the hotter and sunnier climates. In the US the demographics have changed, slipped toward the Sun Belt which makes the idea far more appropriate than it would have been before the Rust Belt rusted.
It is not such a radical idea – the painting of roofs white and reflective rather than the usual New England-like fake-slate or tar-black. The difference now is that photo-voltaic panels and hoped-for solar technologies are becoming available and therefore tempting as an active, visible, high-tech solution to a world crisis. Green is now the color of goodness and virtue; businesses and institutions are itching as if they had poison ivy to climb up the green stalks toward global responsibility.
One such report in Business Week sagely noted that the 21st century world is often dominated by the notions that “complex problems require complex solutions.” But they point out that the environmentally correct solution is probably that white paint is often cheaper and better than the expensive and glittering solution. K.I.S.S. — Keep It Simple Stupid – is the hard lesson of a high tech world. An iPhone might be, should be, probably will be fun, useful and the summit of cool. But when its battery is down and the power is out after the storm to recharge it; that $10 analog phone will come out of the closet because it is simple enough to work.
General Roof Management’s web site
touts its “Cool Roofs” program for an example. It is being written into code requirements in California — a place where “green” is a charged word– Georgia and Chicago. Their Cool Roofs are white or light-colored roof surfaces which, they write, have surface temperatures 30-90 degrees (F) cooler than more conventional roofing. This lowers the costs of cooling the building by 20-50%.
Plant Services.com writes that a typical flat, tar-black roof can get to 170 F in summer. Further they point out that these hot roofs contribute to the “heat island effect” which is said to be connected to increased carbon dioxide levels in urban areas. The heat build-up also requires extra fossil-fuel use to generate power for the additional cooling loads.
The relative reflectivity of the Earth itself is of interest in the nature of cooling. A black earth somehow denuded of clouds, ice caps, glaciers, deserts would be a hot place indeed. The Business Week article compared a dark Earth to a black leather car interior on a hot day and the Earth with those light-colored features as a car with a beige leather interior. In the jargon of planetary scientists the “albedo” of the planet – its relative level of reflectivity – is 30%.
The new element affecting the albedo of Terra is the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which contain additional heat. The sun gives Earth 1350 constant watts of energy, of illumination. Some is absorbed, some reflected by the light-colored features. In the modern, industrial world an additional 2 watts per square meter is retained over the retained levels in the world before it became industrialized.
The new generation of solar, energy-producing panels are not reflective. They are black and designed to collect and use those watts of illumination beamed down to us. The panels receive an average of 300 watts per day in a square meter panel. Most of that is still lost due to inefficiency but the 20% that is utilized is enough to offset the 2% loss to greenhouse gases.
Therein lies the hot rub. The meter (3.1 foot) square photo-voltaic panel costs about $1000. That thousand bucks would buy a lot of white paint. Enough, Business Week estimated, to cover 2000 square meters with high-quality white paint.
Should alternative electricity-producing products be replaced by white roofs, lighter roads and parking lots? No. You cannot use the white roof to produce electricity to power your refrigerator, water pump or even charge your new iPhone. But, some experts have put the estimate of savings by painting roofs light colors at $750 million.
The balance will be between greenish solutions of simplicity and the greenish solutions – for a number of reasons – that are the stuff of technology and public relations.
NPR has a podcast of “Morning Edition” that reports on a new solar energy business where solar energy producing companies sell large stores and chains on allowing them to install photo-voltaic panels on their large roof areas. The energy produced by the panels is then sold to the store at rates that are lower than the big utilities charge. The store can then advertise itself to the community as “green”.
(Photos ©Howard Dratch, 2007. Bacalar, Mexico)
Would I paint a house in the Hudson Valley of New York white roofed? No. Much of the year is spent trying to capture every fleeting draft of heat, the wood stove stoked and the furnace roaring while that Nor’easter roars outside and the world becomes deeply white.
There are an amazing number of new technologies waiting, offering themselves, or in the gleam of the inventors’ eyes. They could, with support, change the nature of the world into the new color of virtue – green.
Grab your cell phone, push “send” on your email, access the Net and check on the latest and greatest of new science and new ways to make the world a better place. But remember that there are times the analog phone works best, paper and pencil write a shopping list quicker and some kids would be better off making a phone with tin cans and string than having an iPhone in their pocket.
(Full disclosure: I have absolutely no interest in the roofing or paint industries to which I linked. They happened to come up in searches about white roofing and global warming, offered good navigation and information. I do hold shares in Apple so you are welcome to buy all the iPhones you can possibly desire. The white house on the lagoon may be up for sale after the painting is finished.)
I have learned — so far without a major loss of data — how important backups are. I have surmised from minor losses and scares how annoying the major loss of data would be. I did my first erase and install on my iBook G3 about a year ago.
After backing everything I could possibly find onto CDs I took the plunge and made the installation of a fresh operating system (OSX 10.3.9). Then some of those CDs had less on them than I thought and some files had been forgotten. I have re-installed the system twice, once it really seemed to need it. Each time some information is lost in the cracks, forgotten or corrupted. Yes, I have learned to double-check each backed up file to make sure the information is there. Still, something always leaks away into the digital void called “erase”.
With two machines some things are now backed up on the G. And I have a Mercury 80GB traveling hard drive that boots my Macbook Pro and has a clone of my system. But that should be kept somewhere else and somewhere safe and locked. I use it too much to do that. Therefore I still have a security hole in my digital life.
Now that I am running all these blogs and considering adding to my sites, the idea of Online Storage begins to make sense. IBackup.com offers a reasonably-priced package with 5 GB of secure storage and software for the Mac (and the other platforms) that looks like the image for Mac’s iDisk and allows drag & drop with methods to manage files suitable for personal storage to large web businesses.
They are promising that their service outperforms competing servers by 30-50% and is secure and running on a 24/7 basis.
The IBackup application is hosted at multiple world-class datacenter locations including El Segundo CA, Fremont CA, Newark NJ, London UK among others. The Data Centers provides the physical environment necessary to keep the servers up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These world-class facilities are custom designed with raised floors, HVAC temperature control systems with separate cooling zones, and seismically braced racks. They offer the widest range of physical security features, including state-of-the-art smoke detection and fire suppression systems, motion sensors, and 24×7 secured access, as well as video camera surveillance and security breach alarms.
There is, of course, the paper back-ups in those cases where I still get a paper statement and haven’t bothered any longer with the paper. It is green but it is also because mail takes from 2-6 weeks to get to us in Mexico. And there is the problem of procrastination and disorganization. Both are undoubtedly emotional. Neither will soon change. They seem to be inherent. Therefore, the more backup the better. The safer the better.
Note that my policy of full disclosure for subsidized posts is on the Disclosure Page in the Pages menu above and there is a link in the Sidebar.
The German news organization Spiegel reported on a new phenomenon — A deadly TV channel. In Germany this fall a new 24/7 TV channel will join the line-up of food TV, home improvement TV, Sports TV, News TV and, now, Death TV.
The channel will dedicate itself to “aging, dying and mourning.” They believe that there is no end to the fascinating stories of death and tragedy. People will have access to documentaries about cemeteries, nursing care, the culture of funerals — “Death and dying… right in your living room.”
Advertising should not present a problem. Looking for a nursing home or health related facility, need one of those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” panic buttons linked to 911? Soon there will be ads for the paraphernalia of aging and dying. Like those who need to show off expensive running shoes and stylishly aerodynamic suits — hundreds of dollars — to go for a run, the ranks of the ostentatious dyers may emerge as the stylishness of the funeral becomes one with the living room.
In terms of a business model there are distinct advantages to bringing death out of the closet and outing it to the living. There is a constant audience. People just keep on dying no matter what. There are the dead ones and the survivors who will soon be able to buy a 30 second obituary for 2400 Euros that will be broadcast 10 times and archived on the channel’s web site.
Check out The Internet Cemetery which will put the name of the dead one on their web site with up to 3 photographs for $15 and allows visitors to “plant flowers” and send flower e-cards to the family. There is still a lot of room in that server in the sky.
She did it.
Atlantis lifted-off at 7:38:04PM on 8 June as scheduled and docked with the International Space Station.
Visit NASA for more information, NASA-TV and other stories of interest to space and technology enthusiasts.
