I celebrated a merry Christmas with the family by hiking Point Dume (WARNING: contains photographic evidence of the individuals most genetically similar to me).
Holiday well-wishing goes out from me to friends, readers, and the universe.
I'm not sure how it started, but every time I go home now my brother and I (sometimes with the morland matriarch in tow) hike a trail in the Santa Monica mountains. This year to celebrate the sunny 76° day we chose Temescal Canyon.
The geography of solar power is obviously different from the nation's current supply scheme. Today coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants dot the landscape, built relatively close to where power is needed. Most of the country's solar generation would stand in the Southwest. The existing system of alternating-current (AC) power lines is not robust enough to carry power from these centers to consumers everywhere and would lose too much energy over long hauls. A new high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) power transmission backbone would have to be built.
The original rivalry between AC and DC for long-distance power transmission pitted Edison and his Direct Current against the tag-team of Tesla and Westinghouse, supporting Alternating Current. It was intense enough to be nicknamed the war of currents, and while the conclusion had been forgone for decades, the last DC power station in the US only closed this past November.
Now DC, specifically HVDC, may be coming back in vogue due to the extreme distances demanded by certain methods of power production. Not being an electrical engineer I can't really offer comment except to say that Tesla has a freakish record of almost always being right, and scientists are still testing out new technologies based on his experiments (specifically wireless power transmission) 60+ years after his death. Let the second war of currents (Electric Boogaloo?) begin.
In a study published this year, experimenters varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about the country of Mali. Those who were allowed to read silently were more likely to agree with the statement "The presentation was interesting," and those who read along with an audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the statement "I did not learn anything from this presentation." The silent readers remembered more, too, a finding in line with a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves.
Despite having a mad hot love affair with technology I do worry sometimes about how our chosen media of communication and entertainment affect our ability to think. My biggest fear relates to multi-tasking and the erosion of the global attention span, but the atrophy of our faculties for retention and critical analysis as we rely more upon orality isn't far behind. I will refer for the third time on this blog (now with Wikipedia citation!) to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, whose omission from this article surprised me, as it's as relevant today as when it was published in 1985.
I took some really boring pictures of Hong Kong. Unlike last time I wasn't there for sightseeing, and the number and quality of the pictures testifies to that. The trip did, however, reinforce my infatuation with the city and desire to live there, even if it serves as a repudiation of my sweat glands and lungs.
My first term of school is almost finished and I'll be taking advantage of the break to enjoy various foreign climes. If you are going to occupy any of the below time-space coordinates, please say hi.
Dec 8-14, Hong Kong
Dec 16-28, Los Angeles
Dec 30-Jan 5, Berlin
