I'm heading off for Dorsai Thing shortly. In the meantime, I thought I'd leave you folks with a picture to caption:



Enjoy!

Ever wonder what happens when a windmill gets caught up in a wind storm? This video from Denmark shows us:



Just to give a sense of scale, that turbine is approximately 60m high. That's some serious kinetic energy!

I also saw a comment elsewhere on YouTube that pointed out that even the destruction of the turbine was rather eco friendly, as opposed to the worst case failure mode of say, a dam (flood) or a poorly designed nuclear plant[1] (radiation).

[1] Yeah, I'm fine with the light water reactors here in the US that have containment buildings. I'm talking about certain graphite core reactors with positive void coefficient tendencies that can build up power very quickly and um, explode.

 

And mine is one of these:



Thanks, alexismckee!

I saw this on Fark today and felt it was an exceptionally screwed up story:

The rest of this story is available at http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/010408/met_231313469.shtml

It goes on to make it clear that her firing had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that her firing, after 17 years of service, wasn't for performance-related reasons, but because there was an upcoming hiring freeze, and the judge was afraid he wouldn't have an assistant. Except... a rotating assistant was assigned to him on a full-time basis while Birch was out on leave. Oops.

Unfortunately, she exhausted the amount of medical leave she has under federal law, and disability cases under the Florida Civil Rights Act are very hard to win in court, according to the article. I can only hope at this point that she and the judge come to some out of court settlement or something.

I'm amazed people like this still exist, let alone run our courts.