Category: General

Coal fired power stations

Greenpeace at it again

 My lunchtime news reported yesterday that Greenpeace Africa dumped 5 tons of coal at the headquarters of our electricity supply generator ESKOM.

They were protesting against the construction of (reportedly) two of the worlds largest coal fired power plants, the Medupi power station (4800mw on line from 2012) and the Kusile power station (also 4800mw on line from 2014) and six new nuclear reactors.

That’s a lot of megawatts.

My first thought was who’s going to clean this mess up, perhaps the residents from one of the local unelectrified squatter camps could do with some free fuel on these cold Highveld winter nights.

Secondly, Continue reading “Coal fired power stations”

How to Acquire an Australian Accent

I was planning to post a blog about crabs and oysters today and had made some progress towards getting it straight when Donald’s post advising Mr. Mackie about acquiring some proficiency in Strine reminded me of a happening from many years ago, it has something to do with oysters albeit indirectly and may have a significant bearing on Mr. Mackie’s endeavour.

Many years ago when my old dad was still alive, he and my mother came to visit us in Maryland, he and I decided that we would take a couple of days on our own and sail down the Bay visiting a few fishing places en route. A few days after setting out we were a hundred miles or so down the eastern shore and stopped for a night at the town of Tilghman on Tilghman Island. This quiet little place is the home port for ten or twelve skipjacks, wooden boats of forty or fifty feet in length employed in the oyster dredging business and one of the last fishing fleets powered solely by sail. Continue reading “How to Acquire an Australian Accent”

The Mote in God’s Eye

Are the Moties coming out…?

NGC 3132: The Eight Burst Nebula 
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Explanation: It’s the dim star, not the bright one, near the center of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula. Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, the glowing gas originated in the outer layers of a star like our Sun. In this representative color picture, the hot blue pool of light seen surrounding this binary system is energized by the hot surface of the faint star. Although photographed to explore unusual symmetries, it’s the asymmetries that help make this planetary nebula so intriguing. Neither the unusual shape of the surrounding cooler shell nor the structure and placements of the cool filamentary dust lanes running across NGC 3132 are well understood.

Original.

The X bin-Laden Files

I’ve been trying to keep up with the conspiracy theories spawned by the death in early May of Osama bin Laden. The trouble is the furry little creatures have been multiplying faster than rabbits!

Barack Obama, himself the target of all sorts of peculiar notions, could not have done better to spur the speculation, which even spilled over into the main news media: the hasty burial at sea, changing versions of the exact circumstances behind the killing, the refusal to release pictures, all added to the process. And what a process it was, what a carnival.

There are people who abhor vacuums more than nature, filling the spaces with all sorts of oddities. There are those who question if the dead man is bin Laden at all, up to 66% of Pakistanis, according to a poll carried out on behalf of the University of Cambridge. Others have it that the US Navy Seals took him alive, to be spirited away to a mysterious AREA 51 (yes, that’s how it’s written, sinister caps and all), there to be tortured and killed at leisure. Continue reading “The X bin-Laden Files”

Can you scan a banknote?

No problems here

The Daily Telegraph says it can’t be done! (Why can’t I scan a banknote?)

The article tells us that the banknotes include secret patterns of dots which when identified by copying equipment somehow initiate a built in ‘anti forgery application’ and prevents us from doing so.

As you can see, I had no problem, perhaps because I have a (very) old HP 1210 ‘all in one’. Don’t know why it says all in one, it can print, copy and scan but can’t fax! I would have thought an ‘all in one’ would ‘do-it-all.’

So, my question is are the DT telling porkies? Can you copy / scan a bank note?

Does your printer / scanner give you an error message?

After my little experiment I find the whole thing hard to believe, what do you think?

What I Did Last Night

Last night, I was down to play for my Club in the Embra-wide knock-out tournament. Really did not want to because I would much rather have been somewhere else. I felt, however, that I owed it to my fellow members to be there for them. Then, the opposition scratched with an hour to go and I was free to be where I wanted in the first place. Made it to a vantage point at the last moment.

To explain, today is, as you should all know, Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. A very new introduction. Don’t care what anybody else thinks about the idea.It means a lot to me as an Army brat. Continue reading “What I Did Last Night”