Plantagenet Penguinista

Stacking 60×20kg mud-bricks is that. ☺ Making 35×26kg bricks (meanwhile shovelling fill for those plus 139×20kg bricks) is also that ☺ oh, & on that day (Monday), was supposed to be 35°C, officially made 40°C, but we measured 44°C in the shade... Sweat? Just a tad... ☺ Global warming? Sunday was supposed to be 37°C, equal-hottest day this summer, managed to reach 38°C during a month which often peaks well clear of 40°C. Meanwhile, last week, 2xUS States had their coldest days ever , Burlington VT had 33" of snow on one day from one storm. Last year, the Copenhagen warming conference was snowed out. Next fairy tale, please...

I’ve been quietly reading a PDF archived on an odd energy website about CSIRO’s 2008 Energy Storage projects. These include an 8.54kf asymmetrical Ni(OH)2/C capacitor . Yes, that’s kilo Farads, or about a million times larger than the biggest electrolytic capacitor you’ll find in an everyday electronic appliance. They also invented a thing they call the UltraBattery , which is a blend between this asymmetric capacitor & a lead-acid battery. It gives the surge ability of the cap backed by the robustness of the battery. The cap “protects” the battery from damage through excessive demand. Performance is comparable with NiMH for around a fifth of the cost. Durability trials exceeded 100,000 simulated miles with no significant degradation. Like NiMH, the UltraBattery can be scaled to extremes. If the pollies (& the bankrupt philosophies pushing them) would just naff off & leave us alone, I think we’ll get on just fine with managing this...

Varying from tech stuff a bit, still, but this was fun ! ☺ Yesterday, I carefully took some time off to exercise my visual abilities, dragged a camera down to Cable Beach, grabbed some images of amazing waves (there’s a sort of cross-wave effect from the adjacent Cave Point rocks which leads to some quite bizarre wave-shapes), & of the rock added during a stormy night in recent years (6x8x30 feet, which makes it about 100 tonnes, yes we get real waves here) &… dolphins! They leaped occasionally, but a few were literally riding in the waves as they rolled in to break, would occasionally extend a fin out of the wave to produce a tearing surfboard-like effect. I was wishing for my zoom lens, as that would have allowed something visible to mere mortals to fit within the lens. Beyond the lighthouse (in which no light remains, but it has a radome & plenty of Yagi antennæ & a satt dish) there is another rock effect similar to The Gap (about 100m furthe...