Time Change Looming :o)

Even though Spring is not scheduled to rear its sunny head for a few more weeks, at 2:00 AM it will be time to spring forward.  Please also take this opportunity to change out your fire detector batteries.  Have a great, even if shorter, weekend.

Send Your Good Thoughts & Vibes Please

Beth is on her way to Florida for a family emergency, so please send good thoughts and vibes her way.

Science Scene - SOcket :o)

The Soccket Ball is a pretty simple idea. It puts an inductive coil system, like the ones seen in those addicting, shaky flashlights, inside a soccer ball. The ball is going to be flying and tumbling about anyway, so why not capture all that energy and make a little electricity?


The ball offers up 3 hours of electricity for an LED light for every 15 minutes played.

It is designed to help people have quick, reliable access to electricity for simple things like lighting their homes.

The ball started as a Harvard University project undertaken by four female students.


The Soccket Ball is not yet available and is still in the prototype stages.

For the original site, click here

Science Scene - Electric Cars and Charging Challenges

SAN FRANCISCO — If electric cars have any future in the United States, this may be the city where they arrive first.

The San Francisco building code will soon be revised to require that new structures be wired for car chargers.

The first wave of electric car buying is expected to begin around December, when Nissan introduces the Leaf, a five-passenger electric car that will have a range of 100 miles on a fully charged battery and be priced for middle-class families. Around the same time, General Motors will introduce the Chevrolet Volt, a vehicle able to go 40 miles on electricity before its small gasoline engine kicks in.

The California Public Utilities Commission, whose headquarters are in San Francisco, has brought together utilities, automakers and charging station companies in an urgent effort to write the new rules of the road. Success or failure could turn on more mundane matters, like the time it takes car buyers to navigate a municipal bureaucracy to have charging stations installed in their homes. At the headquarters of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), utility executives are preparing “heat maps” of neighborhoods that they fear may overload the power grid in their exuberance for electric cars. “If you just allow willy-nilly random charging, are we going to have neighborhood blackouts?” asked a PG&E utility executive. He said a single car could consume three times as much electricity as a typical San Francisco home.

Later this year PG&E will lead a “smart charging” pilot project, connecting 200 cars to special charging stations that let utilities control the electrical demand at a given moment. To avoid problems in areas with high car concentrations, utility executives said they would encourage people to charge their vehicles at night or to use smarter electric meters that help control demand.

Before the first Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts reach the show room, an electric car infrastructure is getting a test drive in the Bay Area, in a limited way. Google, which is talking to automakers about using its PowerMeter energy management software, has already become something of an electric transportation hub. At Google’s Mountain View headquarters, a handful of employees drive to work in Tesla Roadsters, and more drive a fleet of modified Priuses that Google owns. The employees pull into carports that are covered with solar panels and plug their cars into the 100 available charging stations. Nearby, in downtown San Jose, the city has reserved street parking for electric vehicles and installed charging stations. Nearby, at Adobe Systems' headquarters, an executive showed off a dozen charging stations in the parking garage. Eighteen more will be installed this year.

Happy International Women's Day

Head over to Corve DaCosta's blog for a nice entry.

International Women's Day (IWD) is marked on the 8th of March every year. It is a major day of global celebration of women. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women to a celebration for women's economic, political and social achievements.

http://www.imow.org/home/index

Sunday Silliness - Perspective :o)

Less is more. Unless you're standing next to the one with more.  Then less just looks pathetic.

Newseum

Located on Pennsylvania Avenue, an new giant morphs the landscape, proclaiming the five freedoms of the First Amendment; speech, press, religion, assembly, petition.

The 250,000 square-foot facility covers five centuries of news history within its seven levels.  The building includes 15 theaters and 14 major galleries of permanent exhibits in addition to its temporary displays.

I came across this via my Illinois Alumni magazine as both the CEO and Executive Director are both UofI graduates.

Click on the picture to enlarge and read the inscription on the building.

I think this would be an awesome place to visit.  For details, click the Newseum link.

38 Days

As you read this entry, or at least at the time it posted, I am on my first day of our refueling outage at our nuclear power plant.  I will be doing 6-12 hour days, plus turnover and 45 minute commute each way. 

I find working this shift very tiring.  I normally got to bed between 11 and 11:30, but with needing to get up at 3:15 AM, I will need to plan on being in bed no later than 10 PM.  I force myself to get daily workouts, it helps relieve stress and offset the goodies that we have during the day to keep ourselves going. That leaves me with 7:15 to 10:15 PM daily to decompress, eat dinner, etc., so that does not leave much time for extras.  So besides my pre-staged entries, I will be kind of light for a while.

In addition, I will be lurking, but not commenting nearly as often.  See you in mid-April, just in time for the tax man.

Philosophical Phun - Punishment

The concept of punishment during the past half-century has shown a marked drift away from efforts to reform and rehabilitate offenders in favor of retribution and incarceration. Punishment in its very conception is now acknowledged to be an inherently retributive practice, whatever may be the further role of retribution as a (or the) justification or goal of punishment.

Justifying the practice or institution of punishment must be kept distinct from justifying any given act of punishment.

• Justification of the practice itself has reference to multiple considerations — social purposes, values, or goals of the community in which the practice is rooted.
• The infliction of punishment is normally intended to cause, and usually does cause, some form of deprivation for the person being punished, the infliction of punishment provides unparalleled opportunity for abuse of power.

To justify punishment we must specify, first, what our goals are in establishing (or perpetuating) the practice itself. Second, we must show that when we punish we actually achieve these goals. Third, we must show that we cannot achieve these goals unless we punish (and punish in certain ways and not in others) and that we cannot achieve them with comparable or superior efficiency and fairness by nonpunitive interventions. Fourth, we must show that striving to achieve these goals by way of the imposition of deprivations is itself justified.

The entire argument for the justification of punishment unfolds in the belief that alternative, non-punitive methods of social control have been examined and rejected (or severely limited in scope) on the ground that they will not suffice — or will not work as well as punitive methods in securing compliance with just laws.

As the prisons in our states and country continue to fill, and due to budget constraints, we start to release convicted persons early (regardless of whether they have earned their release), I think it is time for us to truly examine our philosophy regarding punishment and incarceration.  To me, we need to stop sending minor offenders off to prison, especially with few programs to help rehabilitate them, and go for more inclusive and developmental programs.  Give treatment to a first time drug offender instead of sending them away for a minimum sentence.  Put a young man convicted of non-felonous theft into a mandatory training program and on house release instead of locking them up.  These types of actions will help make them contributing members to society much sooner than sending them away for hard lessons.  

For non-violent offenders, I am in favor of rehabilitation instead of incarceration.  It is cheaper, smarter, and more humane.

However, for violent offenders, or habitual offenders, I am much more of the mind set to send them away for a long time (do the crime - serve the time), no appeals, no good behavior, no special priviledges.

What are your thoughts?

 

For full discussion, click through to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Science Scene - Wireless Light Switches

Most houses require hundreds of feet of electrical wire to connect light switches to a main power source. Popular Science's green house project has installed a wireless lighting system called Verve that uses radio waves instead of copper wiring to command all the lights and outlets in the house. The system not only saves copper (imagine the savings in a skyscraper) but also allows flexible light switch location(s).


A small module inside each light switch harvests energy from the motion of turning the switch on or off and uses it to transmit radio signals up to 300 feet away to a central 10-channel controller that’s hardwired to the fuse box. Since the switches generate their own power, they require no batteries, wires or messy electrical channels carved into my brand-new insulated wall panels.

Other whole-home lighting control systems offer more programming options, but they’re also more expensive and cost more to install because of all the wiring. At $3,500, Verve runs me only a bit more than the price of a home’s worth of fancy dimmers. The downside? The system is designed mostly for new construction—retrofits get messy and costly because they require ripping out wires.

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2010-01/green-dream-swappable-switches