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Archive for June, 2007
There will be a new album out later this year from LA’s Biirdie and you can hear one of the tracks from it at the band’s Myspace page. It’s a newly recorded version of a song they’ve been playing live for quite a few years now (quite of few of these are present in the tracklisting for the new album) called “Estelle.” In anticipation of the new album, I’ve collected the 3 different versions of this song that have been floating around the net over the past few years, for your perusal and enjoyment:
Biirdie – Estelle (live at Schubas, 2005)
Biirdie – Estelle (online “single” release, 2006)
Biirdie – Estelle (forthcoming album, 2007)
Here are a couple of things you can use to visualize the passage of time:
- Polar Clock – This is a nifty flash app that will remind you about the cyclical nature of hours, minutes, seconds, weeks and so on. If they had used different colors, it might look like something out of Yellow Submarine
- Xplanet – I use this to set my desktop at work to a satellite image of the Earth, centered above my exact latitude and longitude. Every minute, it updates the image with a representation of which half of the globe is currently experiencing “daytime” and which is covered by darkness. Over the last few weeks of crunching to get the latest project out the door, it’s been both highly motivating and slightly depressing to watch the gradual approach of night as I struggle to finish up and get my ass out the door before it overtakes me.
…like he invented the question mark.
From The Economist:
The process begins when a truck arrives and dumps its load of recyclables at one end of the building. The materials are then piled on to large conveyer belts that transport them to a manual sorting station. There, workers sift through everything, taking out plastic bags, large pieces of cardboard and other items that could damage or obstruct the sorting machines. Plastic bags are especially troublesome as they tend to get caught in the spinning-disk screens that send weightier materials, such as bottles and cans, down in one direction and the paper up in another.
Corrugated cardboard is separated from mixed paper, both of which are then baled and sold. Plastic bottles and cartons are plucked out by hand. The most common types, PET (type 1) and HDPE (type 2), are collected separately; the rest go into a mixed-plastics bin.
Next, a magnet pulls out any ferrous metals, typically tin-plated or steel cans, while the non-ferrous metals, mostly aluminium cans, are ejected by eddy current. Eddy-current separators, in use since the early 1990s, consist of a rapidly revolving magnetic rotor inside a long, cylindrical drum that rotates at a slower speed. As the aluminium cans are carried over this drum by a conveyer belt, the magnetic field from the rotor induces circulating electric currents, called eddy currents, within them. This creates a secondary magnetic field around the cans that is repelled by the magnetic field of the rotor, literally ejecting the aluminium cans from the other waste materials.
Finally, the glass is separated by hand into clear, brown, amber and green glass. For each load, the entire sorting process from start to finish takes about an hour, says Bob Besso, Norcal’s recycling-programme manager for San Francisco.
