blah blah

Hey dudz I found this video:

My Wife is the Coolest.

She painted a mural at the gymnastics place where she works.

It has the fruits of the Spirit on it. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, goodness, gentleness, self-control, faithfulness, patience, kindness, generosity. Just kidding about generosity. That's in a Ladysmith Black Mambazo song... I guess South Africa has different fruits of the Spirit.

Ok, a quick analysis of the differences:
love = love
joy = joy
peace = peace
patience = patience
kindness = kindness
goodness = generosity?
faithfulness = faithfulness
gentleness = gentleness
self-control = self-control

Okay, long-suffering is left. That goes with either faithfulness or patience. Also, is goodness the same as generosity? Either way, they have 10 fruits, and I am used to 9.

The way she did mural... she drew it with pastels on paper. When her boss liked it, she projected it onto the wall with a cool projector thing and traced the outline of her drawing on the wall. After the outline was complete, she put away the projector and turned on the lights, and then she painted it! That's my version of the events, anyway. My friend from high school, AJ, let me borrow this scaffold for her to work on. He's awefully nice.

Mural painting is very hard work. It hurts your back and it makes you a little crazy! But Emi did a very good job. I think it took her a total of 8 days to do it, maybe a couple more? She used normal acrylic wall paint. Her boss picked the colors. And her sister helped her quite a bit also. Probably 12 days of work between the two of them.
Emi has painted a few murals before. One of the best is a dolphin scene. You can see a picture of it in one of her facebook albums.

California Utility to Capture Solar Power in Space

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,515984,00.html

http://www.livescience.com/space/080912-solarpower-beam-test.html

A power company near Fresno, CA is trying to get a contract with another company which will provide them with 200 MW of solar power beamed down from a satellite orbiting the earth. They plan to beam it down in the form of radio waves to a "lake-sized" reciever.

I am mostly skeptical but still fascinated.

It's not a totally new idea... broadcast radio and TV already do this, except the broadcasting towers send out maybe 100 kW of power (0.1 MW) in all (mostly) horizontal directions and your radio or TV's antenna recieves milliwatts or microwatts of power (I don't know-- very small whatever). So scale that up to broadcasting 200 MW and pointing it all at one spot on the earth's surface... By the way, 200MW is about 10% of the nameplate capacity of the Hoover Dam.

From working as a "broadcast engineer" for a year (but not really enough to be anything close to an expert), I know that lower frequency RF (by RF I mean radio frequency radiation, the stuff that antennas shoot out or receive)-- anyway, lower frequency RF can be amplified with solid state electronics, which is cheap, scalable, and hardy. This is what AM stations can use. Higher frequencies like FM stations, as far as I know, need tube amplification, which is not cheap or scalable. So I would expect them to use very low, low, or medium frequency for transmitting the power to earth.

Shooting a beam of 200MW of RF power from space to a "lake-sized reciever station", especially if the satellite is in geostationary orbit (very very far from earth), would require some amazing focussing to keep the beam from beings wasted by shining down on an area outside of the reciever station (and frying people and making cars explode). But what about birds or airplanes that fly through that beam? I'm thinking those birds will either spontaneously combust or they will gain super powers. An airplane will have lightning shooting out from its wing tips and maybe a pretty red glow. I'm thinking... "Command and Conquer, Ion Canon". Anyway, if the beam was 1000 ft by 1000 ft, there would be about 200W per square foot inside the beam, and if it were a square mile, it would be about 7W per square foot. I can imagine an array of receiving antennas 1000x1000 ft. However, I have a hard time believing they'd have an array the size of a square mile.

The whole concept seems expensive, ineffecient, and hard to maintain. But its advantage is that it can be located near existing power infrastructure. That's more than other alternative energy sources can say... Here are the expenses of upgrading the infrastructure for alternative energy that I can think of: the permits required to build long distance transmission lines, the cost of tons steel and copper for the raw materials, the engineering of soil tests and the entire power system, the power quality systems including massive capacitor banks and inductors to keep the system reliable, metering and control systems for the entire system including sensors, microwave communication links, computer systems, labor to build all of this, redundancy for reliability and easy maintenance, and innovative new switching systems for handling the varying levels of supply that are usually inherent in alternative energy. A lot of this expense could be avoided if every city had its own personal space power beam.

I have to admit that I have not researched this whole concept outside of these two articles, so I may be ignoring a lot of good ideas...

On (as I see it) the humorous side of this (besides the flaming ducks) is the little experiment that the Discovery Channel did in Hawaii. According to the livescience article, they spent a million dollars to do an experiment in shooting 18 watts from one island to another. It says they only recieved 0.001% of the power... so if you scaled that to our 200MW station, that would mean the satellite would need to transmit 20,000,000,000,000 W (20TW) to recieve the rated power. Imagine everything else you're heating with all that power... and the giant shadow that a satellite that big would cast on the earth. I don't know what the little experiment in Hawaii taught them, except that obviously they would need to use better techniques.

jack and jill went up the hill to get a pail

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK, now what?"

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: “That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen. Ugh!” The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: “The driver just insulted me!” The man says: “You go right up there and tell him off – go ahead, I'll hold your monkey for you.”

Why do ducks have webbed feet?
To stamp out fires.
Why do elephants have flat feet?
To stamp out burning ducks.

A patient says: “Doctor, last night I made a Freudian slip, I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say: “Could you please pass the butter.” But instead I said: “You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life”.”

Emi took this picture:

We should get paid for Cliff Bar commercials

Hard Core Rock 'n Roll! Drums!

Scandalous.

Emi likes the guitar player.