Power Line Theft Leaves 80,000 Powerless

So I'm wondering, how does one go about cutting a live, high-voltage, electrical cable?

As many as 80,000 people in northern China lost their power when the attempted theft of a power line went spectacularly wrong.

A high-tension cable that was cut on Monday fell onto a highway and became snagged on a passing tanker truck, said the state-run China Daily.

The trailing wire then dragged down seven steel towers along the highway in Huayin, northern Shaanxi province.

Traffic on the highway was stopped for nine hours and tens of thousands of people lost electricity.

Thieves sell the stolen wire for scrap.

Last year, China recorded the worst power shortages in decades as the electricity network strained to supply the booming economy.

Link

Waterloo Engineer Makes $30 A/C Unit

Using water is a heat sink is a brilliant idea. I've been thinking about how to install some sort of similar unit in my home but rather than using a cold garbage can of ice water was wondering how I could use the incoming cold water supply for my house as the heat sink. In so doing I'm getting free cooling ability out of the water that I am using anyway.

I'm no inspired and just maybe will get something all put together over the summer for a test demo. Until then, check out how this guy built his.

Here's the basic setup. The garbage can is filled with ice water, which is then fed by gravity (a siphon) through the copper tubing coiled along the back of the fan. The hot air passing through the tubing warms the cold water, cooling the air. Waste warm water is then pumped outside.

The system will cool an average room to a comfortable level in approximately 15-20 minutes. Depending on flow rate, a full bucket of water will last approximately 1-3 hours.

It doesn't rip quite as hard as central air, but for less than $30 CAD I'm not complaining.

Link

Dual Photography

We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location. The technique is completely image-based, requiring no knowledge of scene geometry or surface properties, and by its nature automatically includes all transport paths, including shadows, interreflections and caustics. In its simplest form, the technique can be used to take photographs without a camera; we demonstrate this by capturing a photograph using a projector and a photo-resistor. If the photo-resistor is replaced by a camera, we can produce a 4D dataset that allows for relighting with 2D incident illumination. Using an array of cameras we can produce a 6D slice of the 8D reflectance field that allows for relighting with arbitrary light fields. Since an array of cameras can operate in parallel without interference, whereas an array of light sources cannot, dual photography is fundamentally a more efficient way to capture such a 6D dataset than a system based on multiple projectors and one camera. As an example, we show how dual photography can be used to capture and relight scenes.

The craziest part is the video (63 MB) that they have showing how they use Helmholtz reciprocity to see what simply cannot be seen by the camera.

Simply put, any light source can become a camera.... privacy is over.

New Scientist News Article

Link

Be Inside a Tornado

It's a technological first. A well-placed probe fitted with 7 video cameras—6 with a 60-degree field-of-view designed to achieve a full 360-degree field-of-view (one failed during deployment, resulting in a 300-degree field-of-view) and one pointing upward—captures footage inside a tornado, providing visual data on ground wind speeds where the storm does the greatest damage. And Tim Samaras with his team of storm chasers are there to make it happen.

Link

We Bought Another House

Listing Sheet

My girlfriend and I just purchased another house in Kingston as an income property. Located just a few blocks west of Queen's main campus and about 2 blocks east of Queen's west campus the house is in a prime location and is in the presitigious Sir Winston Churchill school district.

On top of that, the house features a new furnace, new electrical and water services and a amazing "shed" in the backyard that is actually more like a small house complete with electricity, windows and insulation.

We are quite excited about this as we plan to buy a few more properties and to build up a nice real estate portfolio so that we can retire at a proper age, say about 35 years old.

James Bulloch is our real estate agent in Kingston and I would HIGHLY recommend him to anyone who is looking to buy property in the area. As well, I would be quick to recommend John Hunt from Mortgage Intelligence if you are looking for financing as he found us a superb, fixed rate mortgage.

Our plans are to rent the house out to grad or post-doctorate students or visiting professors, so if you fit the above description and need a place to live in Kingston be sure to drop me a line or post a comment.

I'll be sure to post a floor plan shortly for those of you who are interested.

Real Estate Deal Falls Through

Well, I'm sad to report that the real estate deal that we had been working on has fallen through. The building simply needs too much work and the lenders are, quite understandably, not willing to take the risk. Really, I think the lady selling the building needs a bit of a reality check as to just how much her property is worth. I guess only time will tell but I certainly hope that no one pays full price for the building as it simply is not worth more than 65% of the asking price (which has already been lowered by $70,000).

These things happen but I don't mind; as my real estate agent says, "Properties are like trains, another will be along in 20 minutes."

Although the market is currently "peaking" I believe that there are still a few good deals to be found.

Our New Website

A buddy of mine and I are working towards putting together a website that will feature tenant reviews of rental properties in the GTA. It will be another few weeks before we get everything up and running but in the meantime I'm happy to share that we now have our domain name, apartmentratings.ca, and have found super-cheap webhosting with Pow Web, where we get 5 gigs of storage and 10 gigs of bandwidth per day for only $7.77 per month!

I'll be sure to keep you all posted on our progress but like I said it will probably be another couple of weeks before we have something to beta test.