January 28, 2007

Moon Power!-

http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-2/p12.pdf

December 17th, 2006

Frantically working to finish my project before the end of the evening. I suppose one of the advantages to being an English major is the relative lack of finals at the end of a semester. But this advantage is surely nixed by the number of papers that seem to demand finishing upon the conclusion of regular class meetings.

More to come as the evening wears on...

December 14th, 2006

Jonathan Swift has kept me fairly occupied these last few days. Apparently it's harder to write a research paper on him than I originally thought. But I couldn't resist posting this quotation I found on a Mississippi power company's website:

'What is electricity good for? Video games.'

That's right. For years, scientists working around the clock have struggled to find an answer to this thorn in the side of human existence. But fear not, o humans, for Mississippi Power hath found the answer.

December 12th, 2006

I think a sustainability video game would be a fantastic idea. I've been getting the feeling that books are sort of petering out as a way to reach elementary and middle school children these days, so what better way to reach them than with video games? I agree with XMilitary, that a Sim City format would be a good place to start. The last version of Sim City that I played was in 1995, and I'm willing to bet that the format of the game has changed quite a bit since then. What I think would work best for this game would be if it had some sort of online/multiplayer type feature, wherein players could pit their created cities against other players' cities to see whose was the most sustainable. Rather than racking up kill points, players would be competing for the lowest kilowatt per hours score. Think of it! Either that, or we need to get a game out for that Nintendo Wii. Everybody loves that Wii.

October 17th, 2006

This is my first official post under this blog title. My other's are still scattered about the site and I'll be importing them here whenever I get around to it.

FYI, Arpeggi is a song by the band Radiohead.

BREAKING NEWS: My final project is going to be on Energy Star. The logo for Energy Star looks like this:

You've probably seen it somewhere before, most likely on some of your household appliances.

Energy Star's website is very cheerful. The heading 'THE QUALITY OF OUR ENVIRONMENT IS EVERYONE'S RESPONSIBILITY' greets you in big blue letters when you open the site, accompanied by this image:

(I just learned the HTML command for importing images. Can you tell?)

I first started noticing the Energy Star logo when I was in the fifth grade. A boy in my class brought in a device that he claimed was capable of measuring the radiation emmited by household electronic devices. It was more or less a black, rectangular device with a series of green LED lights and a small speaker that let out a shirll series of beeps when confronted with an electro-magnetic field. It reminded me of the gizmo that Egon used to measure ecto-plasmic levels in Ghostbusters.

After my classmate scanned each item in the room, he declared the class computers to be the most sinister devices. This confused one of our classmates, as he walked over to the computers and pointed out the Energy Star stickers that adorned each of them. The assumption was that with those little stickers, each computer was as innocent and harmless as a houseplant.

I noticed these stickers again and again as I grew older, eventually arriving at the conclusion that the stickers were merely a gimmick designed to lull the customers of electronics manufacturers into believing that their energy usage was acutally an act of conservation. I never thought about what Energy Star acutally was, or whether or not they were a private organization that operated outside the influnce of companies like Dell Computers and General Electric.