electric mountain
November 30th, 2010 at 7:14 pm. 0 comments.
photo via ben cooper’s flickr
Deep inside the mountain is an 800m shaft, about 30m wide. During times of excess energy on the National Grid, water from the lake below is pumped up into the reservoir above the shaft. And when a surge of energy is needed on the grid, (say during a football match half-time), it’s released back into the lake, hurtling through the turbines and generating up to 1,320 MW from standstill in 12 seconds.
This isn’t all that surprising, after all it is how all watertowers work, but the name, Electric Mountain, the description of the semi-audible humming present at the site which is somewhere between hearing and feeling, gives the whole place a Tarkovskian type feeling of the Zone.
The wikipedia article about the Dinorwig Power Station has more details.
After we climbed out, I asked about the lake below. “You could say that it’s tidal, but with the television schedules, rather than the moon.”
Mind is blown.
via tom taylor
paths of flight
November 29th, 2010 at 3:48 pm. 0 comments.more from GE
maps of luis dourado
November 29th, 2010 at 3:38 pm. 0 comments.
Untitled Map #3 by Luis Douradro
google street view coverage
November 15th, 2010 at 10:27 pm. 0 comments.
Google map showing all areas covered by Street View
fictions
November 8th, 2010 at 7:02 pm. 0 comments.
Filip Dujardin, a Belgian photographer, makes both subtle and jarring architectural photo constructions. These digital assemblages made from photographs of real buildings taken near his home in Ghent, take the ordinary and make it implausible, and interesting.
I actually want to play at being an architect, instead of only recording the buildings of others.
via Kitsune Noir and File Magazine
what New Yorkers call 311 about
November 2nd, 2010 at 3:25 pm. 0 comments.
Wired Magazine’s graph of one week of 311 Calls
311 provides a pool of data that can get turned into usable intelligence, “a crowdsourced metropolis”
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