McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, Pearson Education and the Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan Inc. are named in a Wall Street Journal article as having plans to make electronic study guides. This is a first step toward electronic textbooks at school. I for one feel that this could be good for students and the environment if handled correctly.

We will see.

The only problem I see with the current deal is that it is for a single device. Hopefully this is just a first step. A very practical alternative might be a netbook because it can perform other functions as well as having a real keyboard. Another benefit is that a netbook costs a lot less than a fruit logo tablet. Making electronic textbooks more cost effective and attainable by more of the population would make it a very real possibility.

I feel that if the device were a netbook and students could potentially do real work on the device as well as read information, the schools could supply them to students instead of textbooks. However, they would be issued for the entire school career and parents would be responsible for replacement if lost, broken or stolen. As many textbooks run $40 or more, the cost is already close to a break even when calculated 1st through 12th grades.

See the related link for the article about the fruit logo device.

Dubbed "Revolutionair," the sleek turbines were officially debuted after a lengthy 2 years of research and work. This is supposedly a brand new, never before seen helix-shaped version of the Revolutionair unveiled by Starck today. I don't know if maybe the photo just doesn't reveal the helix because it is 2 dimensional or if the slant of the blade is what they are trying to describe. Best I can tell, the blades are standard airfoils and held at a progressive angle.

I would like to see this in person. The idea of a useful and still home size turbine is something very important to me as I have a project in this category that is very close to full production. If you are curious, spinpower.org is my site and I use a little bit of the server space to host this blog.

I am a firm believer that wind power will be wide spread in the future and people in windy areas will have them the way people living by water often have boats. There may be big beautiful turbines all the way down to turbines not much bigger than a desk fan. If we are talking boats, luxury yachts down to inflateables, my turbine would be a ski boat and hopefully affordable by the masses.

Someday we will know if my prediction is correct. :)

More photos are available on the related link below.

Do the following statements conflict?

-- NASA's conclusion: "2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows."

-- NOAA's conclusion: "For 2009, global temperatures tied with 2006 as the fifth-warmest on record."

Not really. As each of these groups operate independently and the data sets were gathered independently from sources all around the world, the fact that the result is so close actually re-affirms the basic conclusion. Look at the following chart of their comparative analysis from the last 30 years:


Click the image to enlarge.


What is most important is that they used their own process and over 30 years have consistently come to the same basic conclusion with very little difference.

All this rain and flooding has not filled the reservoirs. The rain and flooding is highly visible, but not necessarily going into the locations that store the water for future use. Most of the runoff is finding its way back to the bay or other water outlets.

Another trick is the snow pack. A huge portion of our water comes from wet snow in the sierra's. The snow up there has been exceptionally dry. Hopefully some more storms like these recent storms will carry water up the hill for later use.

"It took three years to get this dry," said David Rizzardo, chief of the department's snow surveys section. "Barring an extraordinary year, it's going to take more than one year to get out of it."

The next two months will tell the tale, according to Rizzardo. The state could emerge from drought if the storms caused by that tempestuous weather maker known as El Niño keep coming, he said. But they would have to be particularly ferocious.

Forecasters are predicting regular storms until spring, but it is difficult for meteorologists to predict what will happen a week ahead, let alone several months in the future.

Although rainfall is now above normal in the Bay Area, Lake Oroville, the State Water Project's primary source of drinking water, is only 31 percent of capacity. That's about 48 percent of average for this date.

Reservoirs statewide, including Hetch Hetchy, appear to be doing relatively well, hovering around 72 percent of average. But most of them are tiny compared with Lake Oroville, which has a capacity of 3.5 million acre-feet of water. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, enough to cover an acre in a foot of water. Hetch Hetchy holds 360,400 acre-feet of water.

Rain and snow runoff in the northern Sierra feeds both Lake Oroville and the state's largest reservoir, Shasta Lake, which can hold 4.5 million acre-feet and is part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley Project. Shasta is only half full. The two dams provide water to millions of people in cities up and down the state and on farms in the Central Valley.

The bottom line - Continue to conserve water. If you have the means, collect some of this rain water for your own garden in the spring.

Click the image to enlarge. Visit here to see more of my photos.


While we all, even nationally, were watching the news and locally hearing emergency broadcasts, I went out and took a few photos. Then I retreated into the house until the storm eased up.

I'm sure we all learned a little about what to do in a tornado situation yesterday. I had personal experience with them while visiting Denver in the 1980's and again on a trip to EPCOT in Florida about 10 years ago. These things can be very scary. Until yesterday, the idea of them showing up where I live didn't seem possible.

As I think about this, Climate Change, Global Warming and our impact on the planet, something simple occurs to me: Nature seeks balance. We upset the balance and nature will seek to get it back. If we create a vacuum, nature tries to fill it. This weather may be natures knee jerk reaction to help restore balance.

As we try to be better stewards of our environment, we also need to be careful we do not over-react and create new problems as we try to make up for mistakes already made. This is one reason conservation is our best immediate weapon against climate change and it is something we all need to do.

The good news from these storms is an improving water supply for the coming months. Keep in mind, we are still making up for being way overdrawn on our water budget. Please continue to be very frugal with your water use.