Those pocket calculators came out after I was done with school, so I never really got into them. I didn't quite trust them at first, and I didn't see how they saved you any time because you had to do the math on paper anyway just to see if the calculator got it right. Actually, any errors were not really the fault of the calculator, the problem was that, with those small buttons, it was so easy to push the wrong one or push two of them at once. I did use them some at the paper mill, after somebody taught me two tricks. One trick was to use the eraser end of a pencil to push the buttons instead of your finger, and the other trick was to do the calculation twice and, if it came out the same both times, you could be reasonably certain that it was correct. I don't even own one now because I've got nothing to calculate anymore. I had one once, but it sat unused for so long that the battery leaked acid and ruined it.
I never cared about grades in school. I paid attention because I was interested in that stuff, and the grades just took care of themselves. My teachers usually liked me because I participated in the classroom discussions, but I didn't do it to impress the teachers, I did it because I am a natural born motor mouth who likes to talk a lot. I told you before how that all changed when I got to trigonometry. I don't know why, but I just couldn't get interested in it. I needed it for my planned forestry career but, in the end, I found it easier to give up forestry than to embrace trigonometry. I ended up becoming a hobby forester in later years but, the way I do it, you don't need any math. You do need to know something about physics, but not in an academic sense, more like intuitive common sense. If a tree falls in the forest, the most important thing to remember is that you don't want it to fall on top of you. Also, that thing about action and reaction comes in handy a lot. If you use a tractor like I do, it's also important to know about things like center of gravity. Tractors are kind of tippy because their center of gravity is so high, but you don't need a plumb bob to know when you're getting tippy, there is something in your stomach that tells you that. It's kind of like riding a bicycle, once you fall off, you never forget.
I'm not sure why solar and wind power equipment is so expensive to install, maybe because the units are smaller than regular power plants so you don't have the economy of scale. I still think that, once it's up and running, it should pay for itself because the wind and the sunshine are free. Then again, they only work when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, so that must extend the payout time considerably. I have read that, for something like that to be practical, you need to do a study first to find out if there is enough consistent sunshine or wind in the proposed location to make it feasible. You might think you get a lot of sunshine or wind in your area but, if you put a meter out there for awhile, you might be surprised at how little of it you really do get.
One of my Ipernity contacts lives on Walney Island, off the coast of England, where they get a lot of wind. Some time ago, they put about a hundred off shore windmills right in the way of the beautiful sunsets that he liked to photograph, and he was pissed about it. He says that most of the windmills are not turning most of the time, even when there is plenty of wind. He thinks that they can't run them when the wind is too strong because the equipment can't handle it. I'm not sure about that. It seems more likely to me that they just use them at times of peak demand because they are easier to turn on and off than a regular big power plant.
I'm don't know exactly how those hydrogen fuel cells work, but I'm pretty sure that the hydrogen is consumed and the tank has to be refilled periodically. The TV show that I saw about it said that it requires electricity to produce the hydrogen, and electricity is cheap in Iceland because they get it from geothermal. That's why Iceland uses it and we don't.
I'm sure that they're still making ethanol because it comes up in the news from time to time. Corn is probably not the best thing to make it out of but, in theory, it can be made out of wood chips and other organic stuff. There was a lot of talk about switch grass, whatever that is, but I haven't heard anything about that lately. I seem to remember that they are building a plant somewhere in Michigan to make it out of woodchips, which can come from sawmill waste and low grade timber that isn't good for anything else. Michigan is one of the few places in the world in which the trees are growing faster than they are cutting them down. I think that came from National Geographic, but I have read about it more than once.
On a related subject: According to the TV news, it was recently revealed that the U.S. has been doling out money to foreign countries for several years now for the purpose of "fighting global warming". The number they gave was 7.5 billion dollars, but I don't know if that's annually or the total since they started doing it. How it was revealed was in a speech that some U.S. official recently gave at a United Nations meeting. Apparently congress was not consulted about it beforehand, and some congressmen are really pissed about it. Well, they only interviewed one congressman on TV, probably a Republican, but they gave the impression that more people than him are upset about it. I suppose 7.5 billion dollars isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things, Obama probably just got it out petty cash, which is why he didn't bother to consult anybody. Nevertheless, as some famous person once said, "A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about some real money."
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