In an article about the recent and already infamous outage at the 365 Main Colocation facility, I noticed a bit about them using UPS devices with a flywheel instead of a battery. There is an interesting wikipedia article on flywheel energy storage, which is really encouraging from an environmental standpoint. One of the obvious problems with solar and wind energy is how to capture and store it for use when it at night or the wind isn’t blowing. Having a flywheel to store energy seems like a greener alternative, although as the wikipedia article mentions one of the main dangers of the flywheel is that the wheel can shatter sending out shrapnel at high velocity as it releases the stored energy all at once. While this may rule out some applications, for homes and businesses it might not be too hard to bury or shield it.
Archive for July, 2007
Flywheel energy storage
Friday, July 27th, 2007Transformers movie
Friday, July 20th, 2007As previous readers may have noted, I have a penchant for bad movies. This past weekend I went to see the Transformers movie, expecting no more than what seemed to be promised: a mindless but fun summer popcorn movie that would appeal to the nostalgia I felt for the carton/tv show/toy series I loved as a kid. And it basically delivered on that promise, in a manner typical of director Michael Bay’s style which, as a friend of mine put it, is to make movies which are essentially a 2 hour preview for themselves.
One of the fun things about a movie like this is that it gives the critics good material to work with when pointing out its shortcomings. Here are two of my favorites:
How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible. (Roger Ebert)
No screen cut lasts more than two seconds, and the good robots and bad robots all look exactly alike. I could never tell who was winning, who was losing, who had The Cube, or why it mattered so much in the first place. They could have spliced in battle footage from Godzilla and it would have made just as much sense. (Rex Reed)