You are currently browsing the British Engineering Systems weblog archives for the day 03/02/2007.
03/02/2007 by peter.
For those of you out there who have mastered PWM outputs on your μC and now have little RGB LEDs giving out 16777216 different colours and wondering what to do with this technology, you could build something like these people use in their shows. Seen them a couple of times on TV and they look rather good.
Just a thought….
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03/02/2007 by peter.
Here is an interesting list of power stations UK for all you wind farm fans. One wind turbine is about 2MW so go and tot up how many we need to replace one or two of our ageing coal or nukes. (Thankfully Chapplecross has since gone off-line after operating since 1959!!) And remember that a wind turbine doesn’t work in calm hot days (like the ones that killed 15000 people in France a few years ago and are now being prepared for with air con systems which guzzel power) or on stormy days where there are very high winds or gusting and blustery conditions with wind constantly changing direction like those we tend to get in winter here.
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03/02/2007 by peter.
The following sites may be of interest to those wondering if they are safe from the impending rise in sea level. Scotland is very mountainous and mainly made of igneous rock so river channels are deep and narrow thus being in a town next to a river usually means you are about 35 feet above water level, however England has lots of limestone and therefore has wide river valleys and large flood planes (which are cheap land and therefore used by councils to build council houses on) Something to think about…
Since the problem with burning fossil fuels is that you release carbon dioxide that was absorbed by plants in the carboniferous period and which was subsequently turned into coal and oil, we can expect to see temperatures and seal levels rise to the levels around that during and before this period, that is to say world average of 22 deg versus 12 today and sea level rise in the order of 300meters. However this is assuming we burn EVERY last scrap of coal and oil and since a fair quantity has been turned into plastic that is now in landfill, that ain’t going to happen. Also remember that since no little man has been recording sea levels over the last 500M years, all our information is based on scientific extrapolations so may be wrong like all science. Another thing you will have notice is that if the data we have is correct, then the time for the temperature or sea levels to change significantly may be in the order of millions of years, so no need to build houses on 1/2 kilometre stilts yet!
There is also the possibility of Global Dimming taking effect which will cause more problems.
One final note, remember weather is chaotic by nature, hence we have trouble telling what the weather will do tomorrow let alone in a year and there are natural cycles and cycles of cycles. For instance when the Romans invaded they grew grape vines as far north as Perth so it must have been as warm as the vineyards of France!!
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