One great era ends, another begins.
Category: General
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Radiant Heat Barrier
Just before we left for Taiwan, we finally had a radiant heat barrier installed in our attic. We’d been talking about it for years but were skeptical of the dramatic claims of energy savings.
The very day it was installed, we were positive we could notice a difference in the cooling pattern in the house. “Hot spots†were no longer hot, and the cooler seemed to be coming on less often and for shorter periods of time.
Because we left for Taiwan, our electric bill for June (about May 12-Jun 12) covered a period of time when no one was home and the cooler was set very high. Also, the Bill for July (Jun 12-Jul 12) was the same way.
Upon our return, it became obvious that the barrier had changed one thing very drastically: My office, which is very long and only has one, inadequate vent at the far side, was no longer being cooled. The temperature at the thermostat was coming down too fast and cutting off the air conditioning before my office could equalize.
We normally keep the temperature at 81º, and the far side of my office, where I have my desk, could not be brought below 90º. On July 4th, I broke down and bought a window AC unit for the office, knowing that this would diminish any potential savings I might get from the radiant heat barrier.
August’s bill is finally here. It covers a period of time when we were all home and the new AC was running every day during the month.
Results: Compared to last year, during the same time period, our energy usage is down 22%. Outdoor temperatures were slightly cooler this year than last, but only less than 3%.
At this point, I’m willing to make a tentative conclusion that the radiant heat barrier works as advertised and if things continue at this current rate, we might be on for a savings of $1,000 in the first year. At that rate, we’ll recoup the investment in under three years.
I’m not complaining about that.
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Plateosaurus Mass Grave
It’s been a while since I posted any paleontology news.
Reuters => Dinosaur mass grave discovered in Switzerland
ZURICH (Reuters) – An amateur paleontologist in Switzerland may have unearthed Europe’s largest dinosaur mass grave after he dug up the remains of two Plateosaurus.
The article goes on to say that the area might contain as many as 100 more plateosaurs.
All I ever find in my back yard are rocks and weeds.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, Paleontology, Science
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Taking AIMS
My wife is a professional educator. She’s also a graduate student working on her Master’s degree in education.
As English is not her native language, I’ve had nearly nine years now of proofreading her papers for non-native grammatical mistakes. That’s given me a fascinating opportunity to read the coursework for her degree programs. As a non-educator, what I’ve learned shocks even the cynic in me. I’ve got some thoughts on the whole thing that I’ll be posting later.
In the meantime, I want to recount a story told to me by a friend who runs a business near a local high school.
A high school student came into his store. As it happens, the kid had a $92 credit with the store. He made to purchase $115 worth of merchandise. My friend rang him up and told him how much the total was and how much he owed: $23.
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Accidental Pano, Tokyo, Japan
While I was going through those same old photos, I also ran across this one, too.I had actually discovered this one a couple years ago, but I decided to let CS3 try to make a better job of it. This is stitched together from eight photographs that I took from our hotel window.
Chu-Wan had gone out to the nearby store to get some bread and other groceries and I spotted her on the way back, so I kept taking pictures of her along the way. In this pano, you can see her, in red, 4 times as she approaches the hotel lobby below me. You’ll need to look at the full-sized photo at flickr to spot here, though.
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Accidental Pano – Edinburgh, Scotland
I was going through some old scans of negatives when I happened to notice that two shots I took of the Edinburgh skyline from the hill that Edinburgh castle sits on overlapped enough to let Photoshop CS3 have a go at stitching them together. The results were not too bad.I love surprises like this!
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Unimpressive Pink Taco
If ever there was a classic example of the rape of the taxpayers, this is it. The so-called “University of Phoenix Stadiumâ€.
It’s not the University of Phoenix’s stadium, they just bid to have the naming rights. This is the stadium for the Phoenix Cardinals, not that they could be bothered to pay for their own damned stadium, but instead conned the public into voting to pay for it with public funds.
It stands there like a giant canker sore on the state. I so wish that the Pink Taco restaurant had managed to get the naming rights for it.
Nonetheless, there was a home and garden show there today, and I took the family out to see it… at least it’s well air conditioned.
The home & garden show was “the usualâ€, but we got some ideas for the homestead, and that’s good.
I doubt that they run the ticketing and admission process the same as the ball games, because if they do, it must be a catastrophe. There was a huge line stretching 15-25% of the way around the stadium just waiting to get to the tent (which at least had misters) which then wound you up and down 5 or 6 times before you could go to a box office ticketing window.
The tickets were bar-coded and when we went to the gate, they used portable scanners to scan the tickets… which took a ridiculous amount of time, the people were beginning to back up just because people could purchase and receive tickets faster than they could scan them. What’s wrong with ripping the bottom off the ticket? No doubt this is an example of some numb nuts selling technology to somebody because they thought it was cool.
Inside this model of modern stadium architecture looked exactly like… a plain old stadium. The only cool part, and it really is cool is the grass field.
Artificial grass is, of course, completely horrid to play sports on, but a necessary evil in many indoor stadiums. An indoor stadium is essential in Phoenix, where daytime temperatures regularly tip towards 115º in the summer. This stadium has an innovative solution: the entire grass field is basically on a huge train car, and one side of the stadium opens up to allow the field to be moved outside into the sunshine between games.
It also allows things like this home & garden show to be placed on the cement floor during the off season. Well, public funds paid for it, I felt I at least deserved to see it once.
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Cambrian Plush Toys – How cool is that?
It was big, it was dangerous, a top predator of the Cambrian Explosion and, in Japan, a plush toy for the kids.
I want one.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Japan, Paleontology
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It’s Bulwer-Lytton Time!
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest has been run again and the winners are in!
What’s the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest?
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii†(1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,†and phrases like “the great unwashed†and “the almighty dollar,†Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts†beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.â€
My favorite was the winner in the adventure category…
As the hippo’s jaws clamped on Henry’s body he noted the four huge teeth badly in need of a clean, preferably with one of those electric sonic toothbrushes, and he reflected that his name would be immortalized by his unusual death, since hippo killings are not a daily occurrence, at least not in the high street of Chipping Sodbury.
Tim Lafferty
Horsell, Woking, UK
