Mr Dolby — eww!

I’m a big fan of Thomas Dolby, and I don’t even mind admitting that it was one of his songs that initially got me thinking about what to do with my life (“… etch out a future of your own design”, and all that) . I got Thomas’s Live in Chicago DVD, and was a bit shocked by the visuals he used for wind power:

still from Thomas Dolby “Live in Chicago” DVD

Those are some old wind turbines. This would be a bit like going for some modern computer imagery, and plunking for a picture of a VIC-20.

still from Thomas Dolby “Live in Chicago” DVD

I mean, eww – those blades are filthy!

barefoot hydrodynamics

Ever since I discovered them, I have been fascinated by the Foxfire books. Not that I’m planning to go back to the land or anything, just they they often display flashes of ingenuity and craftsmanship.

Take this, for example:

tub wheel - from foxfire 2

It’s clearly a turbine runner, but it’s made from a slab of solid pine, pinned together then held in compression by steel bands around the rim.

sam burton chisels out a tub wheel bucket

It was made by Georgia craftsman Sam Burton, and is documented in Foxfire 2 (Wigginton et al, 1973, pub. Anchor Books, ISBN 0-385-02267-0, pp. 142-163).

beware of those you pay to beat you up

Alternative therapy for backache ‘can kill or disable’ | UK News | The Observer

Spinal manipulation, used by chiropractors to treat hundreds of thousands of patients a year, poses serious risks …

It’s probably heresy to say this in Ontario (‘cos DD was from Pickering) but I’ve always thought that having someone smack your spine about was not the smartest thing to do. But then, my one of my secondary mottoes for life is Allopathy Now!

largo

I just installed IBM® Lotus® Symphony™. I don’t have the pokiest PC on the block, but in order to make it run at any speed at all, you’d need to have a bit of grunt in your PC. My VIA SP13000 box takes a couple of minutes just to bring up the main window.

To be fair, OpenOffice isn’t the fastest starter either; none of them have large bits of themselves running in the Windows system code, unlike MS OfficeThey both work, and are free – and Symphony looks a deal prettier than OpenOffice. As there’s no Mac version of Symphony yet, I’m unlikely to switch just yet.