When I grew up in Germany during the 1960s and early 70s there was hardly any programming on TV. Computers? Internet? Yeah, right!
But there were LEGOs. Practically every kid I knew had a box full. I had a big box. And every day after coming home from school and finishing my homework I just built stuff. At that time there wasn’t quite such a huge selection of different LEGO elements as there is today. But we still built airplanes, ships, castles, spaceships, rockets, trains, you name it.
The time came when other things became more important in life than building LEGOs. I guess my mom gave the LEGO box away when I moved out. But little did I know back then that several decades in the future I would take my very own kids to Legoland in Ulm, Germany.
Here some of the impressive mini-towns and cities built entirely from LEGOs.
The first three shots are in the Berlin set.
Berlin ReichstagBerlin CathedralI like this train bridge
Many of the settings include rivers and lakes featuring real water.
Netherlands scene, love the boatVenice with lots of canaliThe famous Rialto bridge in Venice
And upon closer looking you find out that all the plants are alive! Trees, shrubs, grass covers. Once you build the structures they stay there. They are glued together. But there are actual gardeners pruning and tending to all the green stuff. That makes everything look so real.
All trees, shrubs, grass, etc. in Legoland are real, 100% organicMore trees in the Netherlands setCheck out the grass, lovelyReal grapes? Probably not, but real plants nonetheless.You gotta go when you gotta go. The little things you see these Lego people do.
Airports, harbors, trains, hundreds of cars and trucks, I spent hours finding new stuff to look at.
Frankfurt airport with a cut-open Airbus A380Hamburg harbor. Check out the solar panels on the roof to the left.The solar cells make power for that ferris wheel.What is the riverboat doing here?Frankfurt with it's skyline in the backgroundThis stadium is in a smaller scale. There must be thousands of the small Lego people.Summit station up in the Swiss mountains...and right behind the station in the woods, a fracking UFO with green aliens.
Fractals in action? From the distance this looks like it’s made up of pretty big Lego technics elements. But if you get closer you notice that the big blocks are themselves built from real, smaller blocks.
Lego technics dino, big Lego blocks, right?....see the details? All the big parts.......are themselves built from real Lego blocks.
I hope you enjoyed this little trip to Ulm, Germany.
After listening to the 11/23/2008 episode of Tim Harold’s Paranormal Podcast featuring an interview with Stanton T. Friedman I had some more thoughts about the relationship of the UFO phenomenon with Science.
I want to say upfront that while I more often than not highly disagree with Tim Harold’s guests he is an excellent interviewer who somehow manages to keep a straight face (or tone of voice) while his guests tell the most outlandish stuff. I have heard Mr. Friedman interviewed on other shows before, I have checked out his website and viewed some of his video material on youtube. While I actually agree with him and many other ‘fringe’ or paranormal people that there might be more to a certain phenomenon than current scientific knowledge can explain I find the way they on one hand condemn scientists, universities and research in many fields when it contradicts their ideas while on the other hand eagerly striving to be scientific themselves to be a little inconsistent. Alright, I think I understand where they are coming from. People like Stanton Friedman used to work in a scientific field. They believe the stuff they research now is for real, too. What struck me with that particular interview was that Mr. Friedman spent a whole hour telling how close-minded scientists are when the subject of UFOs comes up. He specifically mentioned Brian Dunning, who produces the excellent Skeptoid podcast. I have listened to every episode of Skeptoid. I find them well reasoned, thoroughly researched and occasionally disturbing (I am a vegetarian and the episode about organically grown food didn’t go down easy.) Mr. Friedman also mentioned Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute who produces a podcast called ‘Are we alone’. The SETI Institute listens for intelligent signals from outer space (remember the movie ‘Contact’?) The podcast deals with scientific topics around that. I have learned much about robotics, astrobiology, physics, etc. listening to that show. Stanton Friedman called the search for extraterrestrial life a ‘religion’.
When I found out about podcasting I was surprised how many science shows there were. Scientific American offers two podcasts. Groks Science Radio Show is a great podcast with different guests each week. Not to forget The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, Skepticality, Geologic Podcast, Quirks and Quarks. There are many more but they don’t all fit on my iPod. The days are too short to catch them all. All of them have one thing in common: I actually learn something from them. And they actually talk about real things, or sometimes hypothetical things. It’s about stuff that has something to do with my reality. The people on these shows are not whining about not being accepted by the general science community (probably because their research has passed the peer review process?) Funny, too, when they talk about the fringe stuff (at least they do on the skeptics’ shows) the consensus is that if there was a real flying saucer or compelling evidence for ESP or life after death scientists wouldn’t hesitate to probe the subject in depth. Anyway, to make it short: podcasts or TV documentaries, books or magazine articles dealing with UFOs have often been about how serious scientists ignore the evidence for alien visitation accompanied by a few blurry or inconclusive photos, and the demand that more research needs to be done (and that the US government must release all the secret documents pertaining the Roswell incident.) I haven’t really learned anything new or conclusive from the UFO guys. And it’s not that anybody prevents people like Stanton Friedman from producing their own weekly podcast. I might actually tune in, in search for new information but for some reason I think it might be a bit repetitive after a few episodes when the reality I live in somehow turns out to have no relationship with what they talk about on the show. It just doesn’t hold much water to see a light in the sky and to extrapolate from that observation that grey aliens and reptilians are at war, etc. I know it’s oversimplified but my call goes out to the UFO folks: If you have real things to report about then produce your own podcast and convince me with compelling evidence.
Recently, as I was pedaling to town on my bike I had an interesting thought. Having just passed a ‘Speed Limit 40 mph’ sign I quietly chuckled thinking to myself that at that moment I would not have to pay attention to any speed limits because unless I strapped a rocket to my back I would not be able to go any faster. When I got home that thought expanded itself into the idea of self-enforcing speed limits.
Practically it works like this: You pass a speed limit sign in your car. There is a chip embedded in the speed limit sign and your car will pick the signal up, and magically refuse to go faster than the posted speed limit. At least superficially workable – except that everyone I mention this to thinks it sucks. And come to look at it closer I too have a strange feeling about it.
From a logical standpoint it makes total sense. If there is a speed limit you are not supposed to go faster – it’s against the law!
Just like Religion – you are not supposed to commit sin. Why then did God leave the sin-enable switch in us in the ON position? Or, in regards to the speed limit situation, why does everybody hate the idea that they could NOT go faster if the wanted to, even when it is against the law?
Could it have something to do with ‘free will’? Does such a self-enforcing speed limit evoke the notion of a driver who is ‘guilty’ by default? Rationally it makes total sense to me – as would disabling the sin-switch – and yet there is something weird. Could it be that committing a sin/breaking the law is *fun*?
Around 1976, back in Albstadt, Germany, I heard about UFOs for the first time. Being interested in all things space I immediately took to it. There wasn’t a lot of information available but I managed to write a short paper about the topic for a class in Gymnasium. I did get an 1+ for it which corresponds to an A+. The paper was pretty critical about the whole thing. There was just not enough information to make up one’s mind.
Then in 1978 I saw my one and only UFO on a night hike a few kilometers from my mother’s house in the woods. It was a light, hovering in the air like a helicopter some distance off over a valley. The thing that was strange was that there was no sound. There is a military practice grounds pretty close by and we were all familiar with the various sounds and sights from the different flying contraptions used in the practice. Seeing airplanes or helicopters at night was pretty common. My sighting happened during a clear and cold night in November. No crickets. Germans go to bed early. No cars on the road where I was walking. Dead silence. I think even at a distance of several kilometers I should have heard some sound. There was no wind. But for some reason, while I wished for it to be a spaceship that would pick me up, nothing much happened. I could see that mysterious light for 30 minutes or so as I was looking over my shoulder while walking back home. I lost sight of it for maybe 15 minutes until I went to the living room window of our apartment on the 6th floor. The light was still there. Moving about a little. When nothing further happened I went to bed. A good camera would have been nice.
A true Unidentified Flying Object. I don’t know what it was. At the same time jumping to the conclusion that it was an alien spaceship seems a bit far fetched. Other people have been taking this subject much more seriously. Since, in 1947, Kenneth Arnold reported his famous ‘saucer’ it developed its own mythology. There are UFO believers, UFO skeptics, UFO researchers and books, movies and documentaries dealing with the subject. There are claims, people who honestly think they saw something or were even abducted, fraud, faked photographs and videos, books full of unchecked, anecdotal stories. I don’t personally have an opinion about it other than people seeing something and jumping to conclusions. In the small cracks of our reality there are quite possibly countless things we don’t know about yet which together might turn the image we have about that reality upside down many times over. While I don’t know if there is other conscious life out there on some planet or if Earth is actually the only place in the known Universe bearing life my personal feeling is that we are not alone. However, what this other life looks like and how far away from Earth it developed is another question. The assumption that beings from another world have, or are visiting Earth has been been investigated for over a century by science fiction in written and later filmed form. In the written variety of science fiction one can find fantastic aliens, truly different. At the same time many alien cultures depicted appear almost ‘human’. Skipping to SciFi (the cinematic form of science fiction) popular TV series like Star Trek have a long history of depicting beings from other worlds. Most of these have more with us in common than Eskimos with Australian aborigines. Alright, they tend to have different foreheads. In many of the classic SciFi movies aliens – who often look just like us – visit Earth in their flying saucers. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some cross breeding of ideas going on. When the expression ‘flying saucers’ came up it was quickly adopted by movie makers as the obvious form for alien spaceships. And then people who saw something in the sky they couldn’t explain had an easy label to put on their observation. Herein of course lies the rub: UFOs in older photos or videos mostly look like hubcaps and lamps as do UFOs in movies made at that time. It’s hard to tell a real UFO photo or video from all the fakery, fraud and prank. And then don’t forget that UFO means Unidentified Flying Object but when people say they saw a UFO they usually do mean an alien space ship. The well is poisoned as in other ‘paranormal’ stuff such as ESP, near death experiences, ghosts, etc. It seems we try to impose archetypical explanations, thousands of years old, on a very thin layer of actual data. By the time a report of some paranormal activity actually goes on record the actual experience has been blurred, interpreted and totally mutated out of proportion and any sensible inspection is futile.
Perhaps there is stuff going on. Things our senses can’t really pick up because our eyes only see a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum and our ears have a pretty limited frequency band and range. Our mind (or brain, consciousness, whatever) uses all these inputs to fabricate the image of our reality from these inputs. That’s a pretty complicated task come to think of it. It doesn’t seem at all far fetched that small fluctuations in an input stream might trigger funny interpretations. There might be a lot more fluctuations on a small scale than our crude senses can perceive. Atoms are quite small and it takes a lot of them to form any visible structures. The overused but effective comparison with what you see on your computer screen comes to mind. You don’t think about all the electronic components involved in showing a youtube video in your web browser. One dead pixel on your LCD screen may not have too much of an impact but you do notice when a hard drive starts acting up or a virus or malfunctioning system extension spoils your experience.
Before any labels are put on anything we need to make sure that there actually is something to put a label on. So we are really dealing with two big problems:
1) sort the ‘actual’ physical phenomena taking place outside of the observer, from imaginations, deliberate fakes and other artifacts
If there are actual physical effects provoking observations which then get interpreted as UFOs its signal-noise-ration is very narrow. It may be even harder to come up with a good theoretical framework for these effects than it is in traditional physics because there is hardly anything to build a theory from. And it seems literally out of this world to base the gigantic theories surrounding alien interference in Earth matters on such thin data.
2) drop our preconceptions of what these phenomena might be, follow the data
Forming preconceptions is a human thing and it helps our minds to create the ‘inner’ picture of reality by drawing on previous experiences and acquired knowledge. At the same time, once we have a deep enough storage of preconceptions we tend to apply these first to make sense of what our senses pick up.
Ok. After building a greenscreen in my basement, enlisting my kids as actors, digging deeper into Final Cut Express, Toon Boom Studio and a few other applications I noticed that I still would need some “authentic” footage to put together a video about UFOs. Luckily there is youtube which is full of obscure (and not so obscure) footage from various sources. That it still took me over six weeks to fabricate this not quite four minute piece of *your pick here* is a testament to my stellar inability in all involved skills. To add insult to injury I don’t know which movies or documentaries most of the youtube footage came from. And since this video is actually a music video featuring the tune “Call the Police” from my new CD Peter’s Money I thought it might be appropriate to send a free CD to the first person to identify a certain clip used in the video.
So:
1) Can you identify the original movie or documentary a certain clip came from?
2) There are four distinct short musical quotes from well known movies or TV series in the song (actually they roughly correspond with the visuals….) – do you know the source of these?
If you know one, please, post the time when the clip/sound appears (minutes/seconds) and what movies, TV series, documentary it is from right here in this topic. Please, only one answer per post although post as many as you want. Whoever identifies the material first gets a free CD but should refrain from posting more answers. Just to give everybody a chance.
My wife actually got me a set of LEGO Mindstorms for my birthday. I am done buying guitars. For those who don’t know what Mindstorms are:
These are LEGO Technic (not the blocks but the parts that let you build all sorts of vehicles, airplanes, cranes, robots – probably guitars if you push it). The set comes with a few motors, sensors and a small computer which holds programs that control whatever robot – or thing – you build.
Here’s the musical analogy part:
As I am toying around with this I realize that having all the hundreds of parts in one big box really slows things down. Especially finding these very small pins takes time. On a trip to the hardware store I bought a few compartmentalized boxes people use to hold screws and other small stuff on their work benches and then I sorted all parts out and now I can find them quickly.
Somehow that whole process of learning what actually to do with this stuff reminded me of learning about jazz.
1) you start with a big, unsorted box of LEGOs
2) you put together small things from a few blocks to see how it works
3) you look at existing models and try to copy them
4) you start getting a little experience, what parts you can use for which job
5) you start organizing parts so you don’t always have to search in the big box
6) you become aware of what you actually CAN build with what you have
7) you organize your LEGOs in various compartmentalized boxes
8) you develop a ‘style’, things you like to built
9) you start re-using subsections you developed
10) your perception of what you CAN and WANT to build is intimately connected to how you organized the components
11) over time you might actually store pieces you NEVER use in a separate box
blah, blah
This could go on and on. From my perspective this is pretty much how we learn to improvise. Seems the main thing is to not sort our parts too much. You want to keep access to the big, unsorted box of ideas.
I guess I am getting old and a bit bored by ‘what scale goes over what chord’.
After all the good vibes coming out of our solar installation I really need to reinforce something I knew long before I decided to spend almost $15,000. You can’t really predict the weather so we can only estimate our yearly average power production. Right now, in mid-February, on a cloudless day my PV system produces about 5.5Kw from sunup to sundown. Let’s assume during the summer we might get up to 8Kw per day. That’s an average of 6.75Wh and for simplicity round this up to 7Kw. If we have 365 cloudless days we would produce 2,555Kw in a year. At a cost of $0.105 per Kwh that should save me about $268 in a year. I realize that I can only get realistic numbers after monitoring my power output for a year but this amount is pretty close.
Here are two facts to consider about PV panels and alternative energy:
1) If I can produce all the electricity I need at my home during the day with my panels I will still need power after the sun sets. There is just no way around it, I will need the power from the grid until something better comes along. My PV installation will only cover about 15-35% of my usage unless I increase the number of panels four or five times and buy a few tons of batteries for storage. A system of that magnitude would cost me close to what I paid for the house.
2) Driving through my rural neighborhood I notice that many homes have outside lights. And more than half of them are on whenever I drive by. Day or night.
Now assume that’s a 200W bulb in there. Leave it on for 24 hours and your meter will move by a whopping 4.8Kw. That’s almost as much as my PV system makes at the moment in a day. If you leave that turned on 24/7/365 it will use 1,752Kw in a year. Now throw in another 100W for phantom loads such as VCRs, DVD players, cell phone chargers – all stuff that’s not turned on but still sucks a few watts while it is connected. All of a sudden you are looking at 2,628Kw per year that you could save just by switching that outside light off and investing in a few switchable outlet strips. That’s $263 in a year. Pretty close to what I save with my panels! And you almost get it for free!
There are a few reasons why I got the panels anyway.
1) In the long run – 20 years or so – I’ll break even and then the system still has 15-20 more years which will be savings in my pocket.
2) I wanted to learn how this is done. The digging, the wiring, all of it. There is nothing like some hands-on experience.
3) I wanted to do something else than just donate a few bucks to various political causes.
4) Not a week goes by without somebody stopping and asking about that strange thing in front of my house.
But frankly, unless there are some seriously cheaper and more efficient panels, a modern power grid and practical storage of overproduced electricity I don’t see how solar panels can make a significant impact in the overall energy budget. It’s a drop in the bucket as are many other alternative technologies at the moment. Of course many drops also fill the bucket eventually. But I think whoever claims solar power alone, or wind power alone can replace all the nuclear and coal power plants is delusional. At the same time it’s equally delusional to think that things will just go on as they have been. Lots has to be done and everyone has to be more conscious about energy usage.
If nothing else, the PV installation in my front yard, and several others in and around my town show that things are changing. People are waking up. We should have paid attention after the oil crisis of the early 1970s. We could have altered our course a bit after 9/11/2001. Instead, we stick our heads in the sand and pretend everything is cool.
To conclude: For me the installation of a PV system in my yard is only a beginning and not the solution – but it can be a seed for a small part of a solution.
We’re still waiting for some insurance details to be cleared up. But at least finally the people from SCI-REMC, our electric utility, were here to do an inspection and a test run of the system. A nice, warm day (for January) enabled Alex and me to swing the mount to its proper angle of 45 degrees. Now, that really looks imposing. The people on my street finally know what’s happening.
It was very sunny that day and on the test run the inverter showed close to 1100 watts. That’s pretty close to maximum. I plan to keep track of electricity production once our system is officially running. The panels were pretty dusty since the ice, sleet and snow of the past two weeks weren’t able to slide off while the assembly was horizontal. Unfortunately the garden hose was still frozen so I couldn’t clean them.
We did get a new electricity meter. Pretty cool one. When we moved into the house in 1995 they still had to come to the meter, read the numbers and write them down. Then, a few years ago they installed a new meter which sends the reading wirelessly to the person driving by with a truck. This new meter sends its data through the power lines. It will measure how much electricity goes INTO the house as well as how much my PV system generates back into the grid. That probably isn’t a lot most of the time. It cycles through these five modes:
1. Kw – REMC delivered energy in 30 day billing cycle.
2. Kw – Peak or total consumer used kW over the last 15 minute period.
3. Kw – total energy consumer generated back onto REMC’s grid.
4. Kw – peak demand during peak period.
5. Kw – consumer generated energy back to the grid during peak period.
Plenty of numbers to be able to analyze how this will be working out.
I hope to be able to keep you updated on our status.
Alright, so I’ve been a bit busy. Two weeks ago Alex came over with his friend Ken to put up the mounting brackets for the PV panels. For that they set up the scaffolding.
Here the panels are neatly laid out in our front yard. $1200 a piece! I sure hope none of my neighbors comes around the curve too fast with his truck and flattens these.
Now the electric connectors are put in.
All six panels are mounted! Even though both the brackets and the panels are not that heavy individually together it’s about 200 pounds sitting on top of the post. We didn’t know it at that time but the surface would stay horizontal for two weeks until the final inspection by the power company. Since this is a grid-tied system any electricity coming from the PV array that is not used in the house goes out, through the electric meter, onto the grid. In case of a blackout on the grid they need to be absolutely sure that the inverter will disconnect the panels from the grid so they can repair the line without having their workers fried.
The inside of the inverter while the last connections are made.
This is a pretty cool piece of engineering. It shows you how much power is produced in Watts, displays voltage, daily production (or more correctly from power-up when there is enough current from the panels to shut-down when the sun goes down). It also shows you how much carbon emissions were saved (or offset).
So now everything is ready to go. But we have to wait with the official commissioning until our electric utility people come for an inspection and some insurance stuff is cleared up. It’s like Christmas: You know where the presents are hidden, and even know what it is…..
(I did turn it on a few times just to see)
As a we are waiting to go operational I have some time to ponder the pros and cons of my $15,000 investment, alternative energies in general and solar in particular. Despite my feeling of doing something good for the environment and (maybe) for our bottom line I know that this technology is young, even though it has been around for decades, and like my computer the equipment I am installing might be outdated in a few years. Our calculations still show that we’ll break even after about 22 years. The system has a life span of 35-40 years. It is a very long term investment.
There is lots of talk these days about green energy and solar and wind are usually the first technologies mentioned. The problem with both of these is that you only get electricity when the sun shines or when the wind blows. There are really only two ways to have access to electricity when there is no sun or no wind: oversize your system and store surplus energy in batteries or a grid interconnect. Unless you don’t have access to the grid battery storage is really a bad idea. Electricity storage will have to be much more efficient than what is currently available to a homeowner. If you read Scientific American or MIT Technology Review or do a search on the internet you find many people doing great and promising research. Last summer I had a little test setup in my yard with a small solar panel electrolyzing water into oxygen and hydrogen. Nothing much came of it – maybe the plastic bag I used to collect the gases was leaky. More likely the electrodes were the wrong metal. At the same time I am not sure how safe I would feel if there was half a Hindenburg’s worth of hydrogen in a pressurized tank under my house. No storage then. But then each time the sun goes down you will draw power from the grid instead of your panels. So the power utilities can’t really scale down their power plants. Sure, if you work at home and most of your power is used during normal work hours you might be able to offset that with a solar array. But even if my whole street does what I do and nobody draws a single watt from the grid during the 4-8 hours of usable sunlight the power company still will have to keep their coal or nuclear power plant running. As far as I understand you can’t just flip a switch and turn them on or off. To my knowledge just gas power plants allow for relatively fast on/off cycling. At the same time changes in the electric infrastructure will take people like us into consideration.
Of course there are really cool proposals such as once we all have electric cars their batteries will function as energy storage while hooked up to the grid. One literally ‘cool’ idea I read about was to replace the current wires of the electric grid with superconducting material which is kept at very low temperatures by liquid hydrogen. Superconductivity means that electricity can flow through a conductor without resistance. Usually this is done by cooling certain materials to temperatures close to absolute zero. These would be pretty substantial ‘wires’ but they would function to deliver electric energy and hydrogen and could serve as giant energy storage reservoir. Not cheap, though. (September 2006 issue of Scientific American).
Then we also have the really huge stuff like solar power satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Geosynchronous means the satellite is at such a distance from Earth that it appears to be hanging above the same point on the ground even as it is orbiting the planet at breakneck speed. Something like that could collect solar energy day and night. It would have to be huge (as in miles and miles of panels) and the energy would have to be transmitted to the ground using tightly focused microwaves or lasers. Since the US will lose manned orbital access for a few years after the Space Shuttle fleet is retired and NASA’s new rockets are not finished yet it doesn’t look too good for large cargo hauls to 36,000km orbits.
And, really why do I need to set solar panels up in my front yard if the payback is so long term that I can’t even be sure to still be alive to see it? Because it’s something that I can do now! This whole energy thing is made up of so many networked components that we can’t rely on one solution only. And we need to accept that it’s a moving target. Maybe more people would put solar panels or wind turbines up if you could buy them at Walmart. The fact that you can’t and that you have to actively make an effort to find skilled and knowledgeable people to help you with it forces you to learn about energy. I think that even if you end up not installing anything you will be much more conscious about your energy footprint and you will discover ways to waste less – or you stick your head in the sand (from what I understand ostriches don’t actually do this) and pretend that everything is fine and no change is necessary.
