-
Content Count
5151 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Metabo Oyaji
-
-
Seems to really be enjoying shopping for men's underwear.
-
Actually, a combined trip with Tengendai... starts to sounds like a plan.
-
Was playing with the idea of zao instead of nozawa this winter... Miiiight just stick with nozawa... Just to be sure...
Agree with this idea! Better be safe than to enjoy while taking risk! There still lots of beautiful mountains in Japan to conquer and explore without the need risk life! Just saying!
Well, now that makes me feel I have to go back to Zao this year.
Reassure my monster that he hasn't been forsaken.
-
Maybe because there's no mountains?
Lol lol lol.
I guess you have never been to Yamanashi or have never read my posts.
Yamanashi is nothing but mountains.
No pears?
-
Basically, yes. You install solar panels, and can sell any excess electricity that you don't use back to the grid at a fairly high rate.
-
I've been known to partake of early-season slopes, including late-Nov. Marunuma.
Never regretted it, just set expectations accordingly, and it can be fun.
There won't be any park set up that early, though, if that is important to you.
-
Zombies only eat brains, right?
I figure I'm safe.
-
I don't see any zombies in this picture:
(Could there be just a hint of moderation at the end there...?)
-
Plenty of those said solar panels around Yamanashi and parts of Nagano.
Doubt they got to produce much electric though with so few sunny days that we had.
The panels we have on our house roof only produced about half the power or less on many days this summer.
It is good to have them, but and there is a big but, they forget to mention the fact that they have chopped down many forests to make space for them, which I think is not a good idea and they look ugly if they are put up where you can see them, which in quite a few case they can be.
They look a lot nicer than some of the evacuated areas in the towns around Daiichi, I'd say.
Or oil wells or coal mines.
Why can't the electricity be stored? Is it a size problem.....like the battery systems required would just be crazily gigantic? Or is it so ething else?
Regular batteries can only be recharged about 500-1000 times, for one thing.
Some people are working on sodium batteries (actually, I think there are some commercial ones used for neighborhood energy storage), but that's not easy stuff to work with, either.
Japan has some storage in the form of hydro plants that can be run backwards to pump water uphill, though the classic usage is to pump water using unneeded overnight power from nuke plants and to release it during the demand peak the following day. Storing solar power generated during peak demand for use during cloudy weather in a day or two's time is much more difficult.
Yes, I think there is about 25 GW peak hydro capacity in Japan, though don't know for how many hours it would last at that rate. And there really isn't much more that it could be expanded -- almost any place that can be dammed here has been.
It would be nice if one could build a home-based pumped hydro storage system, but the amount of water one would need to use for just one house would be completely impractical.
Maybe generate hydrogen through electrolysis, then burn it in a fuel cell to recover the energy?
Ideally with renewables, you mega diversify them so you wouldn't be massively dependent on the sun or the wind. You'd have both, plus geothermal, plus tidal. And some high voltage lines over to China and import their solar from the Ghobi or wherever its more reliable. The more diverse your sources, the less storage you'll need.That'll help some, sure. Still won't eliminate the need for energy storage if one is to get away completely from fossil fuels, though.
-
In the news a couple of days ago, the amount of solar panels installed or approved for installation since 3.11 has reached about 70 GW peak capacity, enough that a few districts have had to call a moratorium on subsidies for megasolar permits (homeowner-level tariffs unaffected so far).
70 GigaWatts! To put this number in perspective, Japan's entire pre-3.11 peak capacity output was 250 GW. Even knocking that solar number down by a factor of 5 to account for average insolation, the newly-installed solar panel capacity covers about 15 nuclear reactors.
Holy crap.
I don't know about you, but I'm completely impressed with this level of coverage.
All we need now is to solve the storage problem, so that we can make full use of such renewable power sources to meet unsynchronized demand. In my next life, that is what I plan to work on.
Any bright ideas out there?
-
Well currently around 4 times as many people die in car accidents each and every day just in South Africa alone than are dying from Ebola on the entire continent. Got quite a ways to go before it's a big problem I'd think.
Again, though, car accidents probably occur at a relatively steady rate, no?
So not a comparable issue.
-
I can understand the manual transmission. For that much money, I certainly wouldn't settle for automatic.
But 6.6 km/l... Not a good long-distance ski-trip vehicle, much as I hate to conclude.
-
Ahem......new.....ahem..........70 Series LandCruiser....
I saw that. I want!
If ONLY they came with a diesel..The originals did. Guess they figured not enough demand for the re-make.
(Don't suppose there's a hybrid version, either?)
-
Makes me glad that I live on the featureless Kanto plain sometimes.
Until the tornadoes appear.
-
This outbreak has killed more than all previous outbreaks combined but it's still only a few thousand people in around 6 months. More people die in Africa every day from AIDS. In the same amount of time that this Ebola outbreak has been going there will have been over quarter of a million people in Africa die from Malaria. I only mention these sorts of figures to keep some perspective on how few people are dying from Ebola compared o other diseases on that continent. Ebola really is one of their lesser concerns I'd think. I guess the real worry is that the more contact this virus has with humans the more chance it could mutate into something that is far more contagious. Luckily it doesn't spread very easily at the moment.
AIDS, Malaria and hippo attacks have all reached steady-state incidence rates though, haven't they? This new strain of Ebola is still in the early, exponential growth stage. The key, I imagine, will be at what point it begins to slow down. If that is soon, then it will not become a big problem.
-
The hard hat I carry in the back of my car should see me through all of the above.
not the toilet papaper panics.
It has a chin strap.
-
Let's see, I've been through (not necessarily personal involvement)...
Three Japanese Red Army ``Incidents''
One Nixon Shock
Two Oil Shocks
18 Yen-daka/Yen-yasu Cycles
Innumerable Earthquakes
25 Prime Ministers
One Marunouchi Bombing
One Death Cult Sarin Gas Attack
47,000 Suicide Train Delays (est)
3 Multiple Fatality Tunnel Disasters
Half a Dozen Toilet Paper Panics
17 (official) North Korean Abductions of Japanese
15,872 (est) Drownings of Senior Citizens (who went out in typhoons to check their crops)
5,931 (est) Deaths of Senior Citizens (who chocked to death eating mochi on New Year's Day)
500 (est) Deaths of Children Under 5 (left in closed cars while a parent went to play pachinko)
45 Senior Police Resignations (after being cited for traffic violations during National Traffic Safety Awareness campaigns)
135 Arrests of Police Officers for Molestation
225 Arrests of Teachers for Molestation
450 Arrests of Civil Servants for Molestation
48 Tora-san Films
30 Godzilla Films
2 Gaijin Tarento Named Kent
148,963 Off-Key Drunken Karaoke Renditions of ``My Way''
The hard hat I carry in the back of my car should see me through all of the above.
-
I admit to getting cynical about certain things, like official excuses for getting into yet another war, declared or undeclared.
Other things I get gooey and mushy and earnest about, like disaster recovery.
Ebola, though, not sure what to think. Objectively it seems pretty bad: 3 week incubation period, with initial symptoms that don't look that remarkable, so hard to contain, with high fatality rate (unlike Dengue, say, which always seemed like a non-issue to me). Also, we've been waiting for this particular virus to become a big problem for over 20 years now. Has its time finally come? No idea. Not worrying yet, but wouldn't really be surprised if it does become an issue, either.
-
Of course we're winning. We're always winning. We're the Charlie Sheen of collective entities.
-
I see booking.com have added new listings in the Inawashiro area that they didn't used to have.
Impressed that they have provided full English blurb translations for even tiny little places.
(French coverage seems a bit hit-or-miss.)
-
There goes that plan.
-
We'll definitely achieve world peace, just as soon as we manage to kill this certain group of people over there.
That'll do the trick for sure.
-
Libertarian is not equivalent to right-winger. When I was growing up, leftists were more likely to be libertarians (keep the government's hands off my body) than the rightists, who were always trying to control everyone's private lives.
Technically, though, the libertarian/statist axis is considered to be orthogonal to the left/right (liberal/conservative) one.
-
May it is because it is only med. doctor who can declare death (with one exception), others can say - no breathing or heartbeat.
I think that is indeed the issue. The news can't declare the victims officially dead until a doctor has signed the death certificates. Probably insurance, inheritance, and other legal issues involved.
Conference call
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
Only missing the part where, due to time-zone differences, some participants are working on their first coffee of the day, while others are are finishing off their nightcaps.