Environment
drorzel | October 28, 2007On Thursday last week, the Schenectady weather forecast I have in my Bloglines feed called for "Tons of Rain," which I thought was amusingly unprofessional. I mentioned this to Kate yesterday (after it had, in fact, rained quite a bit), and she said "I wonder how much rain you would need to make a ton?"
Being a physics nerd, of course I had to try to come up with an answer.
We know that one cubic centimeter of water has a mass of one gram, so a (metric) ton of water would be 1,000,000 cubic centimeters, or one cubic meter. Our yard is about 20m x 50m, so if rain covered our yard to a depth of…
drorzel | October 18, 2007Over at The Island of Doubt, James Hrynyshyn has a post about solar skepticism on the part of some researchers, who think that claims of increased efficiency are often overhyped.
Of course, efficiency isn't the only issue. A couple of weks ago, we had a colloquium talk by Peter Persans of RPI, who is working on developing new types of solar cells using amorphous silicon and "quantum dots." He opened the talk with a fairly sobering description of the energy situation, though, which really puts the challenge of solar energy into perspective.
As best I can reconstruct it, the argument went like…
drorzel | October 14, 2007So, we'd like to get a new refirgerator (our current refrigerator is pretty old and beat. When the compressor kicks on, the lights in the living room flicker, and the shelf on the inside of the door is broken, which greatly reduces the useful storage space.), and being good liberal types, we'd like something energy-efficient. The problem is, our house is small, and the kitchen is very small, so the space available for the fridge (without ripping all the cabinets out and re-doing the whole kitchen) is only about 28" wide, and the selection in that small size is really limited. In particular,…
drorzel | October 12, 2007(WASHINGTON, DC) On the heels of reports from Oslo that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former US Vice President Al Gore, a White House spokesman issued a statement saying that "significant uncertainty" remained regarding the recipient of the prize.
"The President feels that at this time, it's too early to say for sure whether Al Gore has won the Peace prize," said White House spokesman Scott Stencil. "The science is just not conclusive yet. The President feels that more study is needed before we agree that this honor…
drorzel | October 9, 2007Here's another post to highlight a worthy proposal with a good science connection. "Little Scientists" is looking to bring marine habitats to pre-kindergarten students in Buffalo:
Animals and life sciences are of particular interest to young children, so we try to discover a lot about animals and habitats. We are also very lucky to have a partnership with the local science museum and students get a chance to visit at least once a year.
I am requesting science materials that will be housed in our classroom and not in the museum. For example, I would like my students to be able to handle books…
drorzel | October 9, 2007We're one week into the DonorsChoose challenge for this year, and readers of this blog have already contributed over $2,000 to help school teachers and students. Those of you who have contributed, thank you very much for your generosity.
We've still got $4,000 to go to reach the goal for the challenge, though, so there will be more than a few posts coming up to try to solicit new contributions. Today, I thought I would try to highlight a couple of the proposals in the challenge, to suggest some more concrete giving opportunities.
We'll start close to (my) home, with "Cruise the Forest", a…
drorzel | September 14, 2007One of our senior physics majors has made a video promoting sustainability to students, and posted it on YouTube. I need to figure out the best way to link it from the department web page, but it occurs to me that I have this big Internet platform I can use to plug it:
It's a good piece of work. Amazing what kids these days can do.
drorzel | July 4, 2007 On the way in from the parking lot yesterday, I caught up with a colleague from Mechanical Engineering, who was on a bike, but had stopped to look at one of the local raptors. There are at least two red-tailed hawks living on campus, and one of them was on the ground only ten or fifteen feet from the sidewalk. It had some sort of small object in its talons, and pecked at it as I was walking up.
The object in question turned out to be a pine cone, and while I was watching, it sort of hopped up into the air, and pounced on... another pine cone. This was at least the fourth pine cone to get…
drorzel | May 8, 2007It's spring here in suburbia, which means my neighbors were all out this weekend hastening the doom of the planet by running their gas-powered lawn mowers. Not me-- I was, um, paying our neighbors' teenage son to mow our lawn. With a gas-powered lawn mower.
OK, I'm not exactly staking out the Moral High Ground, here, and anyway, the amount of gas burned in lawn mowing is pretty trivial, all things considered. But it did occur to me to wonder about how we got to where we are with this, and what will happen in the future. Could it be that the widespread use of gasoline powered mowers and…
drorzel | August 14, 2006As Kate and I set out to run errands the other day, the "Service Engine Soon" idiot light came on in my car (a 1999 Ford Taurus LX). This may or may not mean anything-- Kate got one of those in her Prius a while back and it was nothing-- but if it's actually an indicator of anything serious, I'll be in the market for a new car. I was already planning to unload this car in December, because the warranty on the rebuilt transmission runs out not long after that, but if I'm facing more than $1,500 in repairs, we'll bump that up.
So, my question for the bloggeratti is this: What kind of car should…
drorzel | July 21, 2006Via a mailing list, Reason magazine has an article claiming that SUV's are better for the environment than hybrid cars:
Spinella spent two years on the most comprehensive study to date - dubbed "Dust to Dust" -- collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a car from the initial conception to scrappage. He even included in the study such minutia as plant-to-dealer fuel costs of each vehicle, employee driving distances, and electricity usage per pound of material. All this data was then boiled down to an "energy cost per mile" figure for each car (see here…