Windmill saves ski resort $450k/year

More land-using organizations should start putting up wind turbines, if the results from Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock MA is any indication. Putting up a single turbine is saving them $450,000 per year, around 1/3 of their energy bill. Fortunately for them, the windmill produces the most electricity during the winter when it's the most windy, and seeing as they're a sky resort it's also when they use the most electricity (primarily due to their snow-making machines). (I can't help but think that if more companies used turbines, that we'd slow global warming and ski resorts wouldn't need to make fake snow as much.)

Also interestingly during the summer months the turbine produces more electricity than the Jiminy Peak uses. It appears they have not actually worked out a buy-back program for the excess electricity (where their utility company would actually pay *them* if they produced more electricity than they used), so instead the excess power goes into the grid - where it is then used up by local residents, reducing their reliance on the power company, on fossil fuels (coal burning is the primary source of electricity even in the Northeast US), and even their electricity bills. So this project has helped not only the ski resort, but also the local community.

Just don't tell the bats - the action of the turbine results in extremely low pressure air behind the turbine, which then results in internal bleeding. Shame that every improvement in one field leads to a problem in another. Time will tell whether the net good outweighs the net bad.

Critical Thinking

I just ran across the following list of skills that comprise critical thinking.

* Evaluate and interpret the meaning of the textual material.
* Support a thesis with evidence appropriate to position and audience.
* Organize and connect ideas.
* View situations from different perspectives.
* Compare and contrast source material so that analysis can be made and theories can be proved or disproved.
* Draw inferences, suppositions, and conclusions from source materials.
* Perform a medley of solutions to a possible problem and present those solutions in a logical, coherent manner.
* Differentiate between fact and fiction, concrete and abstract, theory and practice.
* Make estimates and approximations and judge the reasonableness of the result.
* Apply quantitative and/or qualitative techniques, tools, formulas and theories in the solution of real-life problems and recognize when to apply those techniques, tools, formulas, and theories.
* Interpret data presented in tabular and graphical form and utilize that data to draw conclusions.
* Use quantitative relationships to describe results obtained by observation and experimentation.
* Interpret in non-quantitative language relationships presented in quantitative form.
* Apply the scientific method including methods of validating the results of scientific inquiry.

By these definitions, any course can be a critical thinking course! What do you think?

Physics Today: Applying Title IX to Science Departments

The link is a reposting of a Physics Today article about applying Title IX criteria to college and university science departments.

Naming the Sky

The second video in my series for my online course.

What is Science?

I'm working on creating an online course that is the equivalent of my face-to-face intro astronomy course. Think of it as an "astronomy for poets" course, as there's very little math, and it's an overview course. Below is the first online lecture for it, or if the embedding doesn't work well for you, here's the direct link.

Physics Limericks

Have I mentioned I love order of magnitude estimates?

How Fermi could estimate things!
Like the well-known Olympic ten rings,
And the one-hundred states,
And weeks with ten dates,
And birds that all fly with one... wings.

--David Morin, Harvard University

There's plenty more physics limericks on Dr. Morin's webpage or in his physics textbook.

Metric Conversions

When I teach the metric system, I try to help my students get a feel for metric units so they can do what I call a "sanity check" on every problem ("Does your answer make sense?"), but many still do better converting to Imperial units first. I think from now on I'll show them this graphic.