You Learn Something New Every Day

and I actually did last weekend...twice..... The first came from Gob.....

We were headed down to the beach, and sometime after the Chinese Fire Drill, we drove through a Texas wind farm. The huge, white wind turbines were on either side of us, some only feet from the road while others looked as though they were miles away. Now I'm no stranger to wind farms. I spent a year living out in West Texas working on Governor Perry's 2010 campaign, and drove through some of the biggest wind farms in America a few different times a week. My favorite memory of these drives were the ones at night. There is a little light on the top of each turbine that lights up at night--it flashes red. Well when driving through thousands of these, it's as though the entire sky lights up red for half a second or so then goes dark, then repeats constantly from nightfall to sunrise. It's really crazy to witness.

Anyway, Gob is familiar with turbines too since he went to Texas Tech up in Lubbock. As we drove, the engineer in him came out, and he explained that just by timing one turbine blade's rotation, you can actually calculate the speed at which the blade is spinning. This blew my mind, so obviously I whipped out the calculator on my Blackberry and told him to start rattling off the calculations.....

Estimating that the blades are 80ft long and it took 5 seconds to go a full loop......... the circumference = 2*pi*r = 2 *3.14*80ft = about 502.4ft and divide it by the time, 5 seconds, to get a rate of ft/s....502.4/5 = about 100ft/s. Now you just convert the rate of ft/s to miles per hour. There are programs that do this for you online but if you know there are 5280ft in a mile, you divide 100 by 5280 = .019 which means it goes .019 miles/second. Now you know there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour, so .019mi/sec * 60sec/1min *60min/1hr = .019*3600 = 68.4mph! That last part you just know when you go from ft/sec to mph, you divide by 5280 and multiply by 3600, or *3600/5280.

It's a lot of numbers for me, and I literally had to have Gob email this paragraph twice to even get it posted here, but the end result is cool. The turbines we saw were spinning at 65 miles an hour. Amazing.

The second thing I learned was equally as nerdy, but just too cool not to share. After being at the beach one day for an unknown period of time, Gob, Brick and I were discussing on the way home what time we each thought it might be based on how long we thought we'd been at the beach. Brick guessed a time somewhat close to Gob, and my guess was probably a little ridiculous. This is when both Gob and Brick started with the theories of telling time by the position of the sun. And while I realized this was possible in some sense, I guess I never knew how close you could actually get. Brick starting explaining that if you know what time, or approximately what time sunset is, hold your arm out in front of you... palm facing in... Fingers parallel to the horizon (thumb stays pointing up...it's useless in this trick). Put your hand just under the horizon. Either use your other hand or keep flipping your one hand up until you reach the bottom of the sun. Each width of your hand (btwn the horizon and the sun) equals one hour until sunset. If it's almost sunset, each finger equals 15 minutes. Magic. 

 After we did our calculations it was back to the trusty Blackberry to compare our predicted sundial time, and the real time. Like I said, only 10 minutes off! Pretty impressive.

So there you have it.... how to tell time via the sun's position and how to calculate wind turbine blade speed! If you only learn one thing a day, take tomorrow off, cause I just gave ya two things! You're Welcome.

xoxo Sara Marie