Of course. This has nothing to do with dams or tidal power or anything like that. This is about estuaries and deltas. Think about installations in the Nile, or Amazon deltas. Wherever rivers run into the sea actually. That is where you find fresh and salt water together. It could be a limited but useful augment in some coastal areas. If the fresh water is running into the ocean anyhow we can use "concentration potential" to get some power at the end of the cycle. Ultimately this is solar power which came from evaporation which created the freshwater in the first place. It is an interesting idea. The devil will be in the construction details which will determine whether this is scalable.

People have looked at Wind right side up, upside down, back and forth and have raised issues that make anti-nuke people look sane. The problem with Wind is that it is a real threat to coal, so there is a lot of paid for flack. Especially if combined with NG and/or Nuclear with utility level Solar for peaking in the right areas. Given good distribution we know we can use wind turbines to over 30% electric power because it is being done right now in various European grids. The issue will really be capital cost and marginal cost. The scary thing for the coal folks is that there is no ongoing resource cost and as wind turbines get out of the 20 year capital payoff period they are going to be the cheapest marginal cost electricity.

Wind Power right now is close to 3% of U.S. electrical production and doubling again in 3 or 4 years. (And that is ignoring Picken's "plan" which was partially a front to own gas and water transport rights) Over half of all new power plant license requests in 2008 were for wind power. Nobody is calling for Plains to Coast power lines except for coal companies so they can criticize them. Intermediate level regional interconnects are what most propose now and they will be another up front capital cost item that will cause greatly reduced cost in 20 years or so. The better the regional interconnects the less variable the wind power is, and the cheaper the balancing cost.

Of course as Wind Power grows there are starting to be boondoggles and all the other BS things that go along with big time capital enterprises. Wind is the first "alternative" power that will have to deal with those issues and that is actually a sign of maturity to me. It becomes more like any other big business. We really are on the wave for wind as long as it isn't shut down by coal interests.

How much do you think it will cost to fully instrument an experimental Turbine in the field, then tear it down and build a different one? Now, how much for the equipment to stress the turbine at various loads, to manufacture wind speed conditions that mimic many different places around the country, and different loadings, look at various types of network interconnects... We might as well build a testbed location to do this. It might cost 40 or 50 million even eh?

No, The beams are microwave beams with a little more power density than the midday sun. If you walked into them you would not likely know they were there for a while.

They are not the water heating microwaves either, they are the tuned so as not to interact with water or atmosphere kind. You might induce a current in an aluminum shell airplane, but I would guess static forces with air flow might build up even more charge.

Yes you can simulate a neuron, but the point is that this chip is not doing that. What they are calling the equivalent of a neuron here is at least an order of magnitude (likely more than one) simpler than a real neuron. That is why these comparisons where they say 1/10th the brain are vastly off base. Plus the effects of the glial cells on processing is showing that they have more importance than previously thought. Since we don't really understand the brain in any great detail, all these comparisons tend to make me wince. They almost always equate very simple circuits (relatively) to neurons. It is a red flag for hype really.

I agree. Look at Bon Iver's "Woods". They take the autotune, well the vocoder really, and with Justin Vernon's voice make an instrument to give a different kind of sound space. You can like it or hate it, but it certainly isn't "inauthentic". As a group who has in the past regularly walked into the audience with acoustic instruments to finish their concerts and gave a capella versions of their songs in Paris alleys, I don't think they care what people call it. They want to experiment with sound and the vocoder/autotuner is another way to do that.

There will be two key things that determine how much work the transition will be, (in my experience).

1. How much VB is used mainly in Excel.
2. How are your workflows set up? Do they depend on other MS things that don't work with anything else?

All the other stuff is no harder than moving from an older version of MS Office to a newer. I have found it is worth looking at the little apps that people built in Excel, and spending the time on the transition seeing whether they can't be refactored to use Base, since everyone will have it, or moved over to the Starbasic stuff. (Or will it work with small changes in Novell's version?)

In transition you will need to give an overabundance of help right away to the heavy duty users, and engage them even before hand. In a small situation even have them help in looking at the little hand built apps. Plus you will find out usually about a month later when people actually really use the little odd things when they get to documents and and reports that they only look at quarterly, or monthly. Be prepared for that. Try really hard to separate the grumbling that will come simply because of change, and real issues that hurt someone's job.

No bigger at all. As long as you swing them the same speed. Weight != momentum. The momentum of the hammer head will be the same. The swing effort will be different though, your force more and you will have to figure out ways to brace yourself or jam your feet better. You will move around more and have worse footing due to the decreased friction. If you ever have actually broken rocks (concrete myself) with a hammer, you know it is in the timing of your swing anyway. You could use a more massive hammer on the moon with good bracing, but I am guessing the timing would be tougher. You would get off balance when swinging just the same as with that mass on earth.