I posted this in my Resources blog, but this is a major find for future reference. These units are compressor-based and much cheaper than other 12v/24v refrigeration units available. They also run on 120vac. The 86 quart unit I have linked takes 80 watts either AC or DC, which is very reasonable. I suspect with a bit of additional exterior insulation (for a non-portable setup), they could be turned off overnight and only run during hours when solar electricity is directly available, reducing battery load requirements.

EdgeStar FP860 Portable Fridge Freezer 86 Quart

Labels: resources

From the comments here, commenter Spike Gomes lays out the following beauty:

“Bullshit” is a nice shorthand for “Your rhetorical position so sublimely wrong, that I as an observer am left completely agawk and astounded by the perversions of fact and logic which you have inflicted upon us today. I can only give a resounding ‘harumph’ and bid you a good day!”

That's good!

Labels: art appreciation

...no pics (yet).

I got the glazing panels on all but the lower twelve feet of the south face, and got the first panel installed on the west face. It was a tad nerve-wracking and I had to will myself up the ladder to work on the very top of the west face. The ladder goes only so far up, and then I am standing on the top safe rung with *no* room for error in movement. I tied myself off to the ladder to prevent catastrophe should I make a wrong move, but making every move deliberately and carefully I never needed to rely on it as I got first the closure strips attached, then the first panel, then back up again to trim the first panel at the very tippy top where it didn't quite fit...(*exhale*!)

The next couple of panels will still be a tad unnerving, but then the rest will be easier. I still have trim to put on the corners all the way to the top, but when I am done with that (assuming I survive) I won't have to go up there again. Everything else to be done (hot water heat, vent piping and fan) is in the bottom twelve feet of the tower.

I had taken Monday off a couple weeks ago, planning to work an extra day in the nice weather, but then I found out my sister and her family were coming to visit. So I've closed up shop for the weekend and will be taking them to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum tomorrow. I have never before seen these kids except in pictures. I went back to Minnesota for my sister's wedding, and she came out here when Dad was dying, but not with the kids. Three girls, 12, 10 and 8 (IIRC) and every one of them heartbreakingly cute! Two are redheads and one is a blondie who is the spittin' image of her Mom at her age. (Gosh we have good genes in this family!) And well-behaved and polite! Amazing. Good job sis!

Labels: ponderings, San Pedro homestead

...say some. "George Soros is merely a figment of some people's fevered imaginations":
Why Are the Media Ignoring Plans By George Soros to Remake the Entire Global Economy? - FoxNews.com

The thing is, George Soros is only the most visible member of the oligarchy, which is far more extensive, pervasive and powerful than he alone. You ignore the reality of this threat at your peril.

After the tsunami washed away their town, survivors band together, immediately organize for their survival.
Severed From the World, Villagers Survive on Tight Bonds and To-Do Lists - NYTimes.com

Don't expect this in this country if it were to happen.

Labels: preparedness

...on fears of inflation. Heavy buying means higher prices for precious metals:
$2,500 Gold Prices: Double Market Returns as China's Gold Fever Breaks Records - Seeking Alpha

For the Last Time, Is Gold in a Bubble?

Answer: probably not.

...to the shores of Tripoli. Marines To Libya

That didn't take long, eh?

How's that Hopey Changey skittle-shooting Unicorn of Peace working out for ya?

Oh and quit trying to blame the women in the Obama Administration. Obama's tha man, is he not? He is the one making the final decisions, not Hillary. It is Obama himself, Your Hope For A Brighter Future (TM) who is doing this.

Suck it, lefties.

Labels: liberal stupidity, ponderings, The Failed Obama Presidency

I made decent progress on the tower this weekend. All of the v-shaped light baffles are up, as is most of the hot air tube. I only got one glazing panel on the top of the south face however. Getting that face glazed was supposed to be today's task, but ri-DIC-ulously strong winds made working thirty feet up in the air on an open ladder a bit more exhilarating than I needed. I gave up and moved that to another weekend.


Instead today I got my house cleaned up, since my sister and her family will be visiting my Mom starting next Sunday. Not that they will be spending any significant time in my house, but in case they want a tour of the latest projects, there will no longer be ankle-high drifts of cat-hair dust bunnies and other assorted detrius piled up in every corner, and I've removed the green monster living in the toilet bowl. The tiled floors have been mopped and the kitchen is clean. The place is still a construction zone so...it's the best it's going to get for now, but it hasn't been this clean since Christmas.

Sam is coming into town with me this week. Jasmine will miss him. He is her body pillow when he's here.

Labels: San Pedro homestead

As I have been following this story, it is quite clear to me that this disaster was fundamentally a failure of engineering.
Japan Disaster Caps Decades of Faked Reports, Accidents - Businessweek

“The key thing here is that this is not another Chernobyl,” said Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation safety at the IAEA in Vienna. “Containment engineering has been vindicated. What has not been vindicated is the site engineering that put us on a path to accident.”

The 40-year-old Fukushima plant, built in the 1970s when Japan’s first wave of nuclear construction began, stood up to the country’s worst earthquake on record March 11 only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter tsunami that followed.

Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.
...
Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves.

Back-assward design! The diesel generators were in the basement, and the cooling pools for the spent fuel rods were *above* the reactor vessels!

However by "engineering failure" what I also include in this is management decision-making that pushed the engineering design in directions that led to cost savings at the expense of safety and redundant fail-safe measures. Surely you don't position diesel generators in the basement when you are located next to the ocean--an ocean that is prone to producing tsunamis every time a serious earthquake occurs--because it was the best choice from a safety/reliability/redundancy standpoint! And you don't position cooling pools up a couple stories where they are vulnerable to structural or mechanical failures that may make it difficult to get water into them in an emergency.

Hell if it was me designing that plant I would have considered putting the pools *below* sea level with valving in place to allow passive flooding of the chamber if necessary. For that matter, the reactor core itself could have been similarly positioned and the plant set up such that an explosive charge at certain key locations could have opened up the necessary channels to flood the entire plant to prevent a meltdown. But heaven forbid that we should consider "ruining" the plant to save the country!

It's not like it wasn't foreseeable:

The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the U.S. two decades ago. The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.

Read the rest of the story. It is rife with examples of when economics overrode safety in the operation of this plant and others operated by Tokyo Electric and built by Hitachi and Toshiba. Engineering failure includes the failure to uphold safety standards in the face of pressure from the bean-counters. That was the biggest failure in this case.

Labels: nuclear engineering, society and culture

Liberal Democrats in uproar over Libya action - POLITICO.com

Sucks to realize your votes don't matter, doesn't it?

More here on the illegitimacy of this action.

Labels: politics, The Failed Obama Presidency

...really, one does, how so many catastrophes can be clumped together such as this, except by design. And how such could be accomplished, except as by the hand of God...

Possible New Oil Spill 100 By 10 Miles Reported in Gulf Of Mexico (Update: Spill Photos) | zero hedge

And I haven't even mentioned Tha Won's opening a third war front in a Muslim nation today...

Labels: The Failed Obama Presidency, watching the skies

For those of you whose Irony Meter is broken (and that would appear to be, ah...most of you), I have no particular love for this dreg of Hollywood Excess. Yeah yeah, he is all of those things that you all are pontificating, tutting and carrying on about.

And?

My post here was in reference to one thing only: If you're going to live like Charlie Sheen lives, you don't f%king go on the Official Apology Tour when someone calls you out on it. Charlie Sheen didn't. Good for him.

It exasperates me that I have to spell this stuff out for you people...

Update: (ok sorry, I *did* say 'final word') There is a zeitgeist here that I appear to have caught the edge of. This article explains more.

Labels: blogospheric navel-gazing, misanthropy

Just...wow.



Update: another video at Miyako City. And another.

Labels: preparedness

Light baffles are going up in the solar tower.

To reiterate, these are designed to capture the solar input so that it does not pass from one glazed face through to the next and out, when the sun is hitting at an oblique angle (morning or afternoon). They are arranged in a v-shape internally. In the summer, the resulting heating and convection with draw air out of the house, which will be replaced with evaporatively cooled air drawn in at the other side of the house. The wind turbine on the top will help with this.

Also the first section of duct is installed near the top. This will be used together with a fan to push hot air into the house for heating in the winter months.


The winter cover crop is beginning to take off nicely in many of the beds, now that temperatures are warming. This is a mixture of vetch and wheat.


Elsewhere, the olive trees dropped all their leaves due to the cold we had a few weeks ago. The stems seem to be alive though, so this is just a small setback. Momcat planted a plum tree in the area that I had leveled, and this weekend set out several tomato plants inside "wall-o-water" protection.

Labels: San Pedro homestead

...and of the difference between men and women.

READ:
energy of activation � hempstead village renaissance

I predicted this:
Activist Post: Economy Hit with the Ultimate Smokescreen: Biflation

New one for the sidebar: The Field Lab

He calls his place the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory. I like that. It inspires me to do an adaptation on that name for my own laboratory, perhaps: San Pedro Valley Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory. Or perhaps something a tad more unique, but no less superficious. I'll have to think about it.

Update: Ok here is an interation. I want feedback:

Yeoman Renaissance Institute--
San Pedro Valley Experimental Station

Labels: San Pedro homestead

"She's breakin' up!"

Scotty's been on the com with me all morning, shouting from the engine room.

Direct hit from a pair of photon torpedoes, shields are destroyed, and more coming in...

Is this it for the Enterprise?

Labels: heart, women

"The 9 types of boyfriends/girlfriends". Click "read the rest" and find out--

Labels: felicity and jocularity, women

No real time limit, minimal restrictions on research, but glancing through the test, I hit a brick wall on just about every problem.
Ronald Hoeflin's Titan Test

Think you're smart? Take a look.

Realize this test is designed to filter for entrance into everything from the Top One Percent Society to the Omega Society (99.9999th percentile).

Another weekend that seems less than productive.
The extent of the work on the tower was to get the baffle panels painted up and ready to go. I am leaving early today for a concert in town, and so that's all this weekend.


The time seemed to burn up with small crap. I ran into town Friday to get some more parts to complete the irrigation system for the olive grove. After I came back, the rest of the afternoon I was farting with a front brake caliper on the Mitsubishi that seemed to be sticking a little bit.


I'm just using hose-end bubblers for now, although I bought emitters to install on the loops of irrigation hose that surround each tree. This will do for now. Adding a timer at the supply end will do for the summer.


Saturday's big accomplishment was the painting, which seems to take more time than it should. And today it's been a series of little things including some housekeeping and getting ready to go back to town--stuff that normally waits until late Sunday night to be done.

Who can resist such a belly?!

Right after I took this pic, I got my face in his belly fur and went "PHBBBBBBBBT!!"

No, my face was not removed by twenty-two Razors Of Death. He was actually quite calm about it and pleased for the attention. This is, of course, a dramatic change from when he first came to us years ago. Over the long haul I inspire trust in my cats. Several months ago his health was in jeopardy over a mouthful of bad teeth. I spent the money and time and care to make him whole, and now he's my big happy galoot again.

Poochie is doing quite a bit better and is almost back to her usual cranky fussbudget self. I think I have the insulin shot routine down pretty well. No more mishaps with Desert Cat getting stuck instead of the Poochie cat. I ordered a dog-sized carrier to serve as a kennel in the Tucson apartment during the week, and I also ordered a pet clipper to help her with her fur. She has never been particularly good about grooming, and while she was sick she really let it go. Now she's already looking better so she must be doing some grooming on her own, but I will be clipping about half that volume off to make it easier for her.

Labels: San Pedro homestead

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Phil Collins Apologizes for Success as He Quits Music - TIME NewsFeed

God what an insufferable prick this man has been. You are right Phil. No one will miss you, at least I won't. Now if we could scrub your songs from the playlists...

Charlie Sheen: Two Thumbs Up

Tiger Blood Game:

I’m me. I’m different. I just have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart… you know, I’ve got tiger blood, man.

I’ve got magic and I’ve got poetry in my fingertips, and you know… this includes NAPS.

I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available, because if you try it once, you will die.

Labels: game, society and culture

This morning on my way out the door I saw that I had a flat tire on my Mitsubishi. The nail in the sidewall finally overcame the Slime in the tire.

Falling asleep and staying asleep for eight or twelve weeks, while the world passes me by, doesn't sound like such a bad thing.

Labels: minutiae, misanthropy

How very cool, and appropriate!

Labels: art appreciation