Notifiblog: How Stuff Works Thursday!

Today's topic was a tossup between hydraulics and solar panels.  Solar panels won in a small (very small) (so small, I asked one person's opinion) vote.

We have some good friends who have installed some solar panels on their house.  One neighbor in particular balked and said it wasn't feasible.  Well, three years and dramatically small electricity bills later, those solar panels are still doing their job.  I think they're even selling power back to the company.

The closest How Stuff Works.com article I've found to explain how solar panels work is How Solar Panel Highways Work.​

Solar cell technology has been in use at least since 1958, when photovoltaics powered satellites' electrical systems.

The basic process works thusly:  (Straight from the HSW article) "Photovoltaic cells are made of special materials called semiconductors such as silicon, which is currently used most commonly. Basically, when light strikes the cell, a certain portion of it is absorbed within the semiconductor material. This means that the energy of the absorbed light is transferred to the semiconductor. The energy knocks electrons loose, allowing them to flow freely.

"PV cells also all have one or more electric field that acts to force electrons freed by light absorption to flow in a certain direction. This flow of electrons is a current, and by placing metal contacts on the top and bottom of the PV cell, we can draw that current off for external use, say, to power a calculator. This current, together with the cell's voltage (which is a result of its built-in electric field or fields), defines the power (or wattage) that the solar cell can produce."

The naysayers, which I am unashamedly NOT amongst, are often put off by the cost of panel installation. Also, our market is flooded with poor quality panels--often coated with plastic, which of course does not stand up well to exposure.  My friends got their solar panels from a company in Hillsboro, Oregon.  The tempered-glass panels have lasted for three years, so far.

Oh, and their Chevrolet Volt car hasn't added but maybe $20/month to the electricity bill.  They are SO cool.  Maybe we'll talk about their car next week.

Notifiblog: Bridges

Bridges are a big part of life when you have a river running through your hometown.  In Portland, Oregon, we have the following bridges:

Willamette River

Bridges over the Willamette River, listed north to south:

• St. Johns Bridge (1931) - U.S. Route 30/N Philadelphia Avenue
• Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge 5.1 (1908)
• Fremont Bridge (1973) - Interstate 405
• Broadway Bridge (1913) - Broadway
• Steel Bridge (1912) - Pacific Highway West/former Oregon Route 99W
• Burnside Bridge (1926) - Burnside Street
• Morrison Bridge (1958) - Morrison Street
• Hawthorne Bridge (1910) - Hawthorne Boulevard
• Marquam Bridge (1966) - Interstate 5
• Ross Island Bridge (1922) - U.S. Route 26/Powell Boulevard
• Sellwood Bridge (1925) - SE Tacoma Street

Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Bridge is the working name for a planned new bridge across the Willamette.^[39]

Columbia River

Bridges over the Columbia River, listed west to east:

• Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge 9.6 (1908)
• Interstate Bridge (1917/1958) - Interstate 5
• Glenn L. Jackson Memorial Bridge (1982) - Interstate 205

The fear of bridges is called Gephyrophobia.

 

The oldest surviving bridge in the US is the Frankford Avenue Bridge (1697), in the Holmesburg section of Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

 

Oregon also shares some of the US's collection of covered bridges.  My Mum and one of her sisters went on a road trip around various parts of Oregon just so my "Adventure" Auntie could photograph them.

Notifiblog: How To Do Stuff

During a day of total sloth yesterday, I wondered how to do something.  Something I don't remember at the moment.  But I'll think of it or something equally entertaining later, I'm sure.​

So, for when I do think of whatever it is I wanted to learn how to do, let's find a few places where we can look for instruction!

Ehow used to be pretty good.  It seems to have become a lot prettier than I remember.

wikiHow is another site.  As with Wikipedia, anyone can edit the content, so I'd be careful following instructions that involve chemicals.  We should probably compare that cake recipe against another site's instruction.

I've always liked Lifehacker, ever since I read instructions for removing the beeper from a toy microwave oven.  (Used to sit near a kitchen in another job; saw no reason we couldn't apply the same principles.  Never did get to try it, though:  microwave finally broke.)

Next assignment:  Think of something we want to learn how to do!

Notifiblog: How Stuff Works Thursday!

I'm on a mission today.  I want to know How Internet Search Engines Work!​

Skipping the bit about "web crawlers" and "spiders" (shudder), let's get on to some really good stuff.

(Straight from the HSW article) "Meta tags allow the owner of a page to specify key words and concepts under which the page will be indexed."  Good news:  meta tags can help find indexed words that can have multiple meanings, focusing on the meaning you want.  Bad news:  meta tags can have nothing to do with page content.  Ever gone looking for something nice and found something NSFW instead?  However, "(t)o protect against this, spiders will correlate meta tags with page content, rejecting the meta tags that don't match the words on the page."

(Straight from...) "To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders."  RANKING ROCKS!

(Straight...) "The searches defined by Boolean operators are literal searches -- the engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as they are entered. This can be a problem when the entered words have multiple meanings. "Bed," for example, can be a place to sleep, a place where flowers are planted, the storage space of a truck or a place where fish lay their eggs. If you're interested in only one of these meanings, you might not want to see pages featuring all of the others. You can build a literal search that tries to eliminate unwanted meanings, but it's nice if the search engine itself can help out."  Welcome, concept-based searching and natural-language queries!

 

The actual article, linked above, is chock-a-block with more information.  This HUMBLE posting is intended to inspire you to read more.  Later, as I will, when I'm on another break from work.  Cheers!

Notifiblog: Traffic!

I like riding the bus to work.  I get to read, play that addictive word game on my Kindle, knit, crochet, or even doze.  But I don't like to keep my coworkers waiting whilst my bus is stuck in traffic.  But traffic is a reality of my urban existence.  Instead of cursing the darkness, I choose to light a small candle to learn about...you guessed it: TRAFFIC!  There are many applications for this word, but I'll try to focus on the urban type my bus was stuck in this morning.

We use the word "traffic" pejoratively when speaking of urban road congestion, but it's really quite an innocent word we adopted from the Arabic word, taraffaqa, which means to walk along slowly together.

Traffic is controlled in my area largely by automated traffic lights.  There is a flashing red control at the intersection where I catch my morning bus to work.  Amazing how many people roll on through.  Even more amazing there aren't daily collisions there.

Traffic laws are designed to help the flow of traffic and to establish a code of driving etiquette.  We're still travelling in and around vehicles whose weight is mesasured in tons.  The rules are designed to protect us from injury as much as possible.  When we comply with them.

Notifiblog: Round Robins

There's a big "round-robin" tournament going on, which you may have read in some of my more obsessive blog posts.  I speak, of course, of the MasterCard Memorial Cup competition for the Memorial Cup.  This is the Canadian Hockey League's version of the Stanley Cup.

The first piece of the tournament is always a "round-robin" ​competition.  I finally bothered to look up what that means.  And it has nothing to do with a bird in this case!

(Straight from Wikipedia) "The term round-robin is derived from the term ruban, meaning "ribbon". Over a long period of time, the term was corrupted and idiomized to robin."

(Straight from Wikipedia) "In a single round-robin schedule, each participant plays every other participant once. If each participant plays all others twice, this is frequently called a double round-robin."

For the second time ever in Memorial Cup tournament history--and for the second year in a row--all four teams in the competition are, as of TODAY, 1-1.

Go Winterhawks!

Notifiblog: Do You Know Your National Anthem?

By now, a lot of people have seen the video of the poor Canadian girl who didn't know the words to The Star-Spangled Banner.  I saw the spectacle as live as possible, on several large-screen tellies at a Winterhawks hockey viewing party in a restaurant.  I felt her pain.  I felt a little ashamed that we Americans run around assuming everyone should know the words to our national anthem.  The girl did a great job:  SHE DIDN'T EMBELLISH THE TUNE!  She showed as much grace and respect as she could, while the spectators raised their voices to give her an assist.​  In tweeted replies to her apology, several of us reassured her most Americans don't know it, either.

There are, officially, four verses, and a fifth was added during the Civil War. 

A hand-written version by Francis Scott Key, himself, reads, "Whose bright stars and broad stripes, through the clouds of the fight".

(Straight from Wikipedia):  "The song is notoriously difficult for nonprofessionals to sing because of its wide range – a 12th."

Performers have tried over the years to place their own personal signatures on the song (José Feliciano, Jimi Hendrix, Whitney Houston, and more), but I truly believe the song should be free of embellishment.  And that's how a brave young lady named Alexis Normand intended to do it.

BTW:  The tune has often been accused of being a drinking song, but it's really too difficult to manage when in one's cups, apparently.  At least to do it right.