All posts by George

Lectures

Welcome to the web site – if you are looking for material to download, its probably on the educational pages.  That is on the menu above.  Some links are in the sidebar on the right.

Feel free to have a look around.

Michael

 

Rudd

We sit here two days before a vote on the challenge from Kevin Rudd against Julia Gillard.

It’s strange, that by all rights it should be open and shut.

Julia, by most peoples reckoning, cannot win the next election. Kevin might, and if not will retain far more seats than Julia would. There would be a prospect of returning to government much quicker than under Julia, who on current prospects will lead the party to oblivion.

So what is wrong with the labor party that they are willing to see themselves slaughtered at an election.

The irony of this is that in the middle of an utterly unprincipled fight by the prime minister, where every principle of decency seems absent, that they are clearly fighting on principle, even thought they are fighting to lose.

A day not off

It’s funny how a day can work out.

 

I didn’t plan to have a day at work.  But it ended up happening.

 

One of the most productive days I’ve had in a while.  Echo’s reported. Rosters written. And all from going to work, while telling everyone I was having the day off.

New Server

Ok,

A complete rebuild of the server.  Running on Lion now, which isn’t trivial.  No support for MySql, so it has to been installed manually.

And poor virtual host support – have bought VirtualHostX, which does the job well.

Now I just need to rebuild the whole thing, although the blog entries are here, which is a start.

Michael

Solar Versus Wind

I really liked this article on energybulletin.net that looked at the fundamentals of solar versus wind.

Currently, wind power is cost neutral (at least) compared with fossil fuels for power generation, but intermittent.  Solar photovoltaic is 4x the cost of fossil fuels such as coal, and doesn’t work all the time – specifically at night.

So it seems obvious which one to develop….  Except for one thing.  All wind power comes from solar energy.  When you look at the total amounts of energy that actually goes into wind power, its a small percentage of solar.

Net result:  There isn’t going to be enough wind power out there to really solve all the world energy problems.  There is plenty of solar power however.

So – solar wins.

The article is here

 

Michael