My parents joined our family tonight for dinner at Tobacco Road Sports Cafe, as the Wolfpack were in the 7th inning against Rice. The company and food were outstanding and so was the Wolfpack win!
Check out these amazing highlights!
NextDoor and silos
Searching around this morning, I found this insightful comment on NextDoor which echoes my concerns. It was posted on a message board way back in October 2011:
How tragic that I could sign up to *heyneighbor.com* and *not* be connected to all my neighbours who happened to signed up to *nextdoor.com* And every new venture in this space could serve to silo people as much as it connects them. These business models contain paradox – they can only succeed in a neighbourhood if they have a monopoly.
There’s a lot of truth here.
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
In addition to collecting call detail records, there is some speculation that phone conversations themselves are being harvested. Recall this exchange from last month, as reported by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian:
On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers
Yesterday it was revealed that the National Security Agency is collecting millions of phone records from Verizon:
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
Today, the Wall Street Journal claims this extends to AT&T and Sprint customers, too. Yesterday, The Guardian revealed PRISM, a Top Secret NSA program to directly query social media servers owned Facebook, Google, Apple, and others.
I suppose the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” got left behind somewhere in the 20th century.
via NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The Guardian.
Renewable energy is clean, cheap and here – what’s stopping us?
Great article on the solar revolution.
Solar will be the cheapest form of power in many countries within just a few years. In places such as California and Italy it has already reached so-called “grid parity.” Onshore wind, on a piece of land not constrained by years of planning delays, is already the cheapest form of energy on earth. These are not wild claims – those are figures from General Electric, Citibank and others.
Newly built solar plants are already considerably cheaper than new nuclear plants per kilowatt hour of electricity produced and we are almost at the stage where we don’t need a guaranteed price known as a feed-in tariff because solar energy will compete head on with conventional energy.
Jupiter, the furry killer
Cute, but a killer!
So the porch cat we adopted, Jupiter, has a little problem … he’s a killer. An accomplished hunter, indeed. He lived by these skills for the three years before we began caring for him and he’s kept those skills sharp ever since. He’s as sweet as he can be to all of us but behind that fuzzy face is an expert hunter. We’ve found all manner of mice, moles, birds, squirrels, rabbits, and lizards who have met their master at the deadly claws of Jupiter. Our yard becomes littered with a dead body of some variety about once every three weeks, it seems.
Last night I was preparing to view the International Space Station, gathering my camera when I heard an eerie wail coming from the front yard. I knew it was a battle of some sort so I leapt up and raced out the door.
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Nextdoor: the online version of a gated community
Many of the neighborhoods in and around mine are signing up for the Nextdoor social media site to manage their neighborhood communication. Nextdoor is a social media site which provides a forum for neighbors to post. From Nextdoor’s About page:
Nextdoor is the private social network for you, your neighbors and your community. It’s the easiest way for you and your neighbors to talk online and make all of your lives better in the real world. And it’s free.
Thousands of neighborhoods are already using Nextdoor to build happier, safer places to call home.
People are using Nextdoor to:
- Quickly get the word out about a break-in
- Organize a Neighborhood Watch Group
- Track down a trustworthy babysitter
- Find out who does the best paint job in town
- Ask for help keeping an eye out for a lost dog
- Find a new home for an outgrown bike
- Finally call that nice man down the street by his first name
Nextdoor’s mission is to bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood, one of the most important communities in each of our lives.
Sounds groovy, doesn’t it? The problem is with the fourth word in the description:
“Nextdoor is the private social network …”
Unexpected sun
On my way out the door this morning I walked into our garage and was instantly startled. It was light in there! There’s normally light coming through the windows but this morning there was a bona fide sunbeam!
The front of our home faces almost due north. It turns out this is the time of year when the rising sun actually shines on the the front of our home. I hope to leave a little time tomorrow morning for snapping a few pictures during the rare moments the front of our home is illuminated in sunlight.
Fields of electrons
White Post Road solar farm in Bath, NC
I found a page about this solar farm in Bath, NC yesterday. It quietly generates 15.5 MW over 85 acres, selling the power to Duke Energy.
Earlier this year, Duke Energy shelved plans to build another reactor at the nearby Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant. The plant property encompasses over 20,000 acres. If Duke were to build a 20,000 acre solar farm on the Shearon Harris property it could generate over 3,000 MW of safe, clean electricity: more than that produced by 3 nuclear reactors. The cost would be about $3 billion, which is 1/3rd of what just one reactor would cost to build.
While nuclear plant construction costs continue to skyrocket solar PV costs continue to plummet. Which technology does it make sense to invest in?
Inverter clue?
Over the past few days we’ve had too much gorgeous sunshine for me to let our power station go idle. I had the inverter on all day Saturday and banked about 18 kWh for the day. Sunday morning had me wishing I had shut down the inverter the night before, though, as its antics woke me up.
I was snoozing in bed around 6:52 AM when I awoke to a loud popping sound from my clock radio. Since this was about the same time the other inverter issues took place, I suspected the inverter had gone offline again.
Before I went outside, I checked the eGauge power graph. It showed power was being generated but, more than that, it showed a very strange anomaly at the time I heard my clock radio pop. All power to the house had been interrupted at that moment: it seems the inverter had malfunctioned yet again.
I let it run the full day yesterday as it seems fine once the sun gets going. I did, however, shut it down overnight last night, and noted no power anomalies.
I’m thinking now that the problem is with the inverter, specifically when the panels produce enough energy for the first time of the day to cause the inverter to resync with the grid. I wondered if the inverter isn’t syncing properly, sending a power surge through the wiring instead. At the time of Sunday’s blip, the panels were up to a mere 100 watts, which is basically nothing.
I’ll leave the inverter shut off until the Southern Energy techs can give it a good going-over. My electronics are at stake here, you know.