6 May, 2012
Tricolore. The socialist challenger François Hollande was just pronounced the winner in this year's French presidential runoff elections against the encumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. It remains to be seen whether Hollande will make good on his promise to slacken assorted European fiscal belts that Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel struggled to tighten.
25 April, 2012
Salivation Is Nigh, or anyway no farther than exit 108. Coincidentally, the first case of mad-cow disease in the U.S. since 2006 was reported yesterday in California. Not to worry, though. The carcass in which the disease was found was en route to a rendering plant, not to your local taco counter. Source.
23 April, 2012
Department of Linguistics. Lose up to 10 lbs or more, the fat loss camp promises. Not 17, not 1, but 10, as if the number made any difference to the promise.
11 April, 2012
Early Bird Special. Solid, functional design for one migratory species, convenient access to the interstate for the other. This exurb, together with countless similar ones, will be interesting to watch when gasoline gets to be seriously expensive.
5 April, 2012
Don't waddle, run! The discount membership offer expires on Good Friday.
31 March, 2012
Through a Glass, Softly. The subject matter here is nothing extraordinary. The picture's organization around the tree and its color juxtapositions are only moderately engaging. But there is a softness and fluidity to it that I find very appealing, a painterly, impressionistic quality that suits the downpour. I normally loathe photographers' efforts to make their images look painterly. But here the effect is acceptable, I think, because it is no extraneous gimmick. It is, rather, an aspect of what the camera recorded through the window pane on which it was focused. The crack and bubbles in the dirty old pane should undercut any soft-focus romanticism (as should the truck parked in the wrong direction).
15 March, 2012
Cheese Grater XXL, Stainless, with a View. Fit and Finish C+. For the aficionado of digital photography, the New Museum in the Bowery is a fine spot to experiment with the moiré patterns produced by various elements of the imaging chain, from Bayer demosaicing to resampling.
2 March, 2012
Stop. To be stuck behind a school bus on a windy back road is more entertaining and instructive than it is in town. For one thing, there is less annoying dawdling. For another, one gets to glimpse sideways in places where it would otherwise be difficult to stop.
12 February, 2012
Cold Snap. After two balmy winter months, the mercury dropped just in time to assuage any creeping suspicion on the right that there might be something to global warming after all. It's sad for all the nipped buds.
8 February, 2012
Taking Aim, Incidentally. From its prominent location on a corner of Main Street, the cannon is liable to point at some structure in town. If you look carefully, you can make out some snow flakes in the air.
28 January, 2012
Ireworks. L & J Game Room in Campobello, SC is a private company categorized under Pool Parlor. Our records show it was established in 1980 and incorporated in South Carolina. Current estimates show this company has an annual revenue of $44,000 and employs a staff of approximately 1. (source). On a related note, we shall see soon whether recently reelected Democratic governor Steve Beshear of Kentucky will carry out his plan to legalize gambling, a plan that, according to many, amounts to imposing a regressive recreation tax, favoring the wealthy. Similar attempts to salvage state finances are afoot all over the nation.
20 January, 2012
Plus ça change... Season Greetings? Warning? Reassurance?
5 January, 2012
Kentucky Salt Flats. Lexington-Fayette is once again off to a good start in the Southern Salt Suppliers Sweepstakes. The winner is the county with the highest salt-to-snow ratio on the roads. This week's flurries got us to a respectable ratio (in weight) of 3:1 in many places. The picture above shows a smashing entry from 2007, with a ratio well above 10:1.
21 December, 2011
So Help US God. Nobody should say that the top 1% don't do their part to stimulate the ailing economy. One only wishes that the legion of bricklayers, carpenters, roofers, gardeners, decorators, and Chinese factory workers employed in the fabrication of this tableau were given something nicer to do.
12 December, 2011
Harley Santa. 'Tis the season for inflating and illuminating the outdoors. How frivolous is this? Each inflatable prop is equipped with an 80W fan; each bulb in the icicle lights draws 0.5 watts. There are 8 inflatables in this yard and on the order of 1200 bulbs on the barn. Together they draw 1.1 kilowatts. If the show is on for 6 hours a day for one month, it consumes 200 kilowatt-hours. This energy costs the retail customer about $20 (which is nothing compared to the purchase cost of the ornaments) and requires turning roughly 200 pounds of coal into 430 pounds of CO2 at the power plant down the road.
The thermal energy contained in 200 pounds of coal is also contained in 17 gallons of gasoline. The 17 gallons propel a leisurely cruising Santa on an average Harley for some 800 miles and transmute along the way into 340 pounds of CO2. If we used the 200 kWh of electricity to charge up a Tesla roadster, we could drive the same distance at a steady 60 mph for a third of the price of the gasoline.
In 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), 1,042,335,000 short tons of coal were burned to generate 1,985,801,000 megawatt-hours of electricity (source), at an implied rate of 1.05 pounds of coal per kWh. The CO2 emissions from coal burning power plants were 1,945,900,000 metric tons (source, table 11), or 2.06 pounds of CO2 per pound of coal, or 2.16 pounds of CO2 per kWh. The EPA gives a slightly higher figure of 2.249 pounds of CO2 per kWh (source).
The coal requirement for the yard display is 200 kWh x 1.05 lbs/kWh = 205 lbs; the CO2 emissions are 200 kWh x 2.16 lbs/kWh = 432 lbs. The figures would be slightly higher if we took into account losses in the transmission lines.
If you care to verify my arithmetic, bear in mind that coal is customarily measured in short tons and CO2 in metric tons. There are 2,000 pounds in a short ton and 2,204.6 pounds in a metric ton. No wonder NASA lost a Mars probe due to a mixup of measurement units.
If coal were pure carbon, then its total combustion would yield one CO2 molecule for each carbon atom. The molecular mass of CO2 is 12 + 16x2 = 44. So the mass ratio of CO2 to coal would be 44/12 = 3.7, much higher than the value of 2.06 above. We conclude that, unless the government numbers are wrong, coal is not pure carbon or combustion is not total. In fact, cumbustion is quite close to total, but the coal is far from pure. Coal burned in the U.S. is about half bituminous and half subbituminous (source), with a carbon content ranging from 35 to 86 percent (source).
Since Harley Santa lives in Kentucky, I let the energy originate from a coal burning plant, which is where most of the state's electricity comes from. In the national average, of course, power comes from a mix of sources. According to the EIA statistics above, total US electricity production in 2008 was 4,119,388,000 mWh; total CO2 emissions from electricity production were 2,359,100,000 metric tons. So the emissions from the mix work out to be 1.26 pounds of CO2 per kWh, or 252 pounds of CO2 for John Doe's yard display.
The energy content of gasoline is 36.6 kWh/US gal (source), that of coal is 6.67 kWh/kg (source). 205 lbs of coal are 93 kg and thus contain 620 kWh. (This number dovetails nicely with the earlier 200 electrical kWh because it implies, correctly, that only a third of coal's thermal energy is converted into electricity.) 620 kWh divided by 36.6 kWh/gal is 17 gallons for the Harley. Burning one gallon of gasoline generates 20 pounds of CO2 (source). 17 gal x 20 lbs/gal = 340 lbs.
The Tesla roadster at 60 mph gets 4 miles out of 1 kWh from its batteries (source, first graph). 4 mi/kWh x 200 kWh = 800 mi. More power goes into the batteries than comes out; so the actual picture is slighly worse. For the fuel price comparison, I put gasoline at $3.50/gal. If only one could buy a Tesla for the price of a Harley.
5 December, 2011
Department of Personal Responsibility. A gaggle of fourth-graders is turned loose in a retired steel mill in the German rust belt. There are plenty of opportunities for them to soil their clothes, bump their heads, or fall off lofty heights. Yet somehow they survive without adult supervision. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, such liberty is rare these days, thanks to a coalition of paranoid parents and insatiable litigators bent on infantilizing the young well into college age.
27 November, 2011
California Redwood: Ceci n'est pas un cigare. I wanted a scale figure in the frame, but the only candidate around, my wife, was not amenable. She might just have been able to reach up to the tip of that protrusion. The entire thing is 7-8 feet long; the ferns are waist-high. The image came to mind, naturally, after last week's post.
17 November, 2011
Club Paradise was recently forced by a city ordinance to change into a tame "bikini bar", much to the chagrin of dancers, staff, and owner. Patrons are encouraged to address their complaints to the authorities. The old Rules & Regulations still apply.
11 November, 2011
Urban Growth. I cannot seem to find the right context for this rubble idyll. The color does not fit into my Berlin b&w series, and the treatment of focus invokes the wrong company. A thin, slanted focal plane has become the hallmark of a cottage industry that churns out pictures of real things made to look like toys. (The effect exploits, I suspect, a learned association between shallow depth of field and close-up photography of small objects.) But I wasn't after any scale trickery. I simply wanted to connect the background trace of the demolished building to the building's overgrown brick remains in the foreground. The technical solution was to swing the lens on my view camera, which swivels the plane of sharp focus out of parallel with the picture plane. (Sissies use a Lensbaby for this. Lawyers use a tilt-shift lens. Real men use a view camera.)
7 November, 2011
No Loitering. How can one ponder the layered meanings of this sign while heeding its injunction? Magritte scholars to the fore!
4 November, 2011
Salmon Development. There has been worrisome news lately about infectious salmon anemia, a viral disease that may spell doom for salmon populations on the West Coast. I wonder what significance the virus will have for the tribal salmon hatchery in Ketchikan, Alaska, where I took this photo a few years ago.
1 November, 2011
Treading Tires: the Sun Belt response to DeHart's Bible & Tire store in Appalachia.
26 October, 2011
Steep Drop. Perhaps my associations are a little warped after having recently watched the entire run of the HBO crime series The Wire. Also to my excuse, there was a story playing on the car radio, just as I was passing this site, about the murderous business of the drug cartels in Mexico.
24 October, 2011
From the Archive. Where even to begin?
23 October, 2011
Totally Overdone. And yet, sometimes fall colors are irresistible, like cheap candy. Isn't it strange that cultivating a colorful garden is a respectable pastime, but taking, let alone circulating, photos of it is distinctly uncool?