Smart Energy

An Avondale woman who spent 11 days sleeping in her car said the city treated her unfairly when her home was condemned in December for lack of electricity.

But city officials said Christine Stevens violated building codes, a health and safety concern because Avondale homes are required to have heating systems and a running refrigerator.

Stevens, 47, was trying to make ends meet by powering her home with solar panels and batteries for several months before Avondale code enforcement officials visited her on Dec. 10.

via Avondale condemns home: Solar, batteries insufficient.

Leonard Bernstein's Omnibus

Leonard Bernstein, early mass media star, gave millions of people a long string of sophisticated lessons in music. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Bernstein appeared on all three major television networks many times as brilliant educator and glorious composer, all the while and just off screen he was also a glamorous bon vivant. Bernstein was a man who lived large and looms large still in the musical consciousness of the United States, and the world as well.

From 1958 to 1973, Bernstein delivered four TV music performance/lectures per year, illustrated lavishly with the likes of the New York Philharmonic: the Young People’s Concerts series is still one of the longest-running programs on classical music. Earlier in the 1950s, he delivered for Omnibus a handful of performances that are considered among the finest of the so-called “golden age of television.” Omnibus was a dignified, mid-century monumental series hosted by Alastair Cooke that explored art, science and the humanities. Read the rest of this entry »

Ginevra's Story

Using X-rays to literally delve beneath the surface of this mysterious portrait, Christopher Swann’s 1999 documentary is a fascinating examination of a beautiful painting.

One of only three portraits of women by Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of the painting was the 16-year-old Ginevra de Benci, a member of a wealthy family. The portrait may have been Leonardo’s first commission; he is thought to have been 22 when he painted it in 1474. The picture hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. – or, rather, the upper half of the painting hangs there.

For at some point in its past, the picture was mutilated: the bottom half was cut away, so that Ginevra is portrayed only from about mid-bust upwards. Ginevra’s Story shows how art historians, using computer-aided design technology, reconstructed the bottom third of the painting. The reconstruction is based on sketches of Ginevra’s hands in the Windsor Castle art collection, and on comparison with Ginevra’s “sisters,” the Mona Lisa and the “Lady with an Ermine.” Read the rest of this entry »

Booker T. and the MGs were the house band for Stax Records and provided the backbone for many a hit record. Here they in a performance in Oslo, Norway, in 1967.

Eco-bling describes unnecessary renewable energy visibly attached to the outside of poorly designed buildings – it’s a zero-sum approach. If you build something that is just as energy-hungry as every other building and then put a few wind turbines and solar cells on the outside that addresses a few percent of that building’s energy consumption, you’ve not achieved anything.

via Is renewable power “eco-bling”? Report raises question – Green House – USATODAY.com.

See further: Paul McFedries’ Word Spy, the “word lover’s guide to new words.”

WIth all the stimulus money going into the smart grid [including here in Pullman], you’d better hope that it would have an impact not only on energy efficiency but on reducing carbon emissions. And fast. Well, there’s a new report out from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory exploring just what those benefits might be: overall, a 12 percent reduction in carbon emissions in 2030.

The report with the scintillating title, “The Smart Grid: An Estimation of the Energy and CO2 Benefits, was prepared by the laboratory on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy.

via In case you were wondering: New report quantifies smart grid benefits – SmartPlanet.

Europe’s biggest space company is seeking partners to fly a demonstration solar power mission in orbit.

EADS Astrium says the satellite system would collect the Sun’s energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity.

Space solar power has been talked about for more than 30 years. However, there have always been question marks over its cost, efficiency and safety.

But Astrium believes the technology is close to proving its maturity.

“Today we are not at an operational stage; it’s just a test,” said chief executive officer Francois Auque. “In order to implement a solution, of course, we would need to find partnerships and to invest, to develop operational systems,” he told BBC News.

Those partnerships could comprise space agencies, the EU or national governments and even power companies, he said.

via BBC News – EADS Astrium develops space power concept.

With many companies investing heavily in algae-based biofuels, researchers from the University of Virginia's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have found there are significant environmental hurdles to overcome before fuel production ramps up. They propose using wastewater as a solution to some of these challenges.These findings come after ExxonMobil invested $600 million last summer and the U.S. Department of Energy announced last week that it is awarding $78 million in stimulus money for research and development of the biofuel.

via UVa engineers find significant environmental impacts with algae-based biofuel | ScienceBlog.com.

WSU is a significant recipient of recent DoE money for algae-fuel research.

Dam management is under review

Civil engineers at the University of Washington and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s Seattle office have taken a first look at how dams in the Columbia River basin, the nation’s largest hydropower system, could be managed for a different climate.

They developed a new technique to determine when to empty reservoirs in the winter for flood control and when to refill them in the spring to provide storage for the coming year. Computer simulations showed that switching to the new management system under a warmer future climate would lessen summer losses in hydropower due to climate change by about a quarter. It would also bolster flows for fish by filling reservoirs more reliably. At the same time the approach reduced the risk of flooding. The findings are published in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.

“There are anticipated dramatic changes in the snowpack which ultimately will affect when the water comes into the Columbia’s reservoirs,” said co-author Alan Hamlet, a UW research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who works in the UW’s Climate Impacts Group. “We were trying to develop new tools and procedures for changing flood control operating rules in response to these changes in hydrology, and to test how well they work in practice.” Read the rest of this entry »

Generosity by Richard Powers

Richard Powers is a master of sleight-of-hand. He writes novels full of science but escapes being called a science fiction writer. In Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by the MacArthur “genius” grant and National Book Award winner (for The Echo Maker), Powers feints and flourishes in order to — presto-magico — pull together two seemingly unrelated themes: genetic engineering and creative nonfiction.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces? Read the rest of this entry »