Don't radio and tv broadcast towers have blinking red light? It doesn't seem to have caused much of a problem.
The big problem with rural living is that dense concentrations of pigs or chickens smell really bad.
And the no-broadband thing you mentioned.
And obviously the wind. The wind farm attracts wind, so you'll have to deal with living in an area with high winds. It's really cold in the winter.
1: Yeah, I assume that's why they blink. But even when you have a dozen cell towers blinking in unison on the horizon, it's not as all-consuming as being in an ocean of blinking red lights. Albeit a somewhat sparse ocean, but distances are all distorted anyway.
I think 4 is wrong. The fans produce the wind. They should shut them off on the coldest days for the sake of the neighbors.
They don't produce the wind; then they wouldn't make sense as a way to produce energy. They capture the wind coming up from the ground--earth farts--and the excess is blown away by the turbines.
No, no, that doesn't make sense. They act like a convection fan in an oven - you get efficiency gains by circulating the air in the vicinity.
An "air fryer" is just a fancy name for a small convection oven.
You're all wrong: they are the propellers that make the earth rotate.
People against wind farms are all about "they kill birds," but they never mention if it's like nice or rare birds or just a bunch of assholes like geese and pigeons.
It's like one of those river mills they install to keep the river from turning stagnant.
They only kill birds so stupid that, with the entire sky available to them, they fly right into the rotating blades.
Not that stupidity should lead to extinction, but... it seems like our own species is likewise risking extinguishing itself through stupidity on a grander scale, and wind farms are one piece of the solution to this vast problem, so I'm finding it a bit hard to care about the fate of stupid birds.
If the blinky lights are synchronized, presumably they're all controlled by a single computer somewhere. If the computer can make them all blink at the same time, whoever is in charge should make them spell out words or pictures visible from the air. Imagine looking out the window of a jet plane and seeing a wind farm wishing you "happy thanksgiving" or "fuck Duke" or whatever.
I initially read "consigned" as "cornsigned".
12. Assholes like (passenger) pigeons can go from pest to rare extraordinarily fast.
Passenger pigeons were really nice. The asshole brands of pigeons are what survived.
14.2 reminds me that I need to give up reading the Herman Cain awards, but for real.
Supposedly people who live next to train tracks get used to the horn at night if it's regular, but will be woken up when it's irregular.
I used to live in an apartment facing a very loud and busy street, one night I woke up in one of those "something is wrong" panics. It had snowed heavily and there was no traffic.
In college, I used to live next to the tracks that carried all the coal from Wyoming to the east. I didn't even hear anything to the point that I'd be surprised when I had to wait for a train to walk to class.
We live two houses away from train tracks. For the first ten years or so, the trains would honk their horns at our street. I got immune to it very quickly and wouldn't remember until overnight guests mentioned it, or when we'd cover our children's ears when they were toddlers. One night a bunch of friends camped out in our backyard. The train came by in the middle of the night and tooted and they all jumped right out of their skins.
In the early 2010s we got converted to a quiet zone, which has been nice, too, I suppose.
The wheel noise of a train still kind of lulls me to sleep.
My house is in a rural area of the high desert that other than a fence here and there probably doesn't look much different than it did 150 years ago with dark quiet nights and a billion stars. At least it used to be that way. Now the whole night sky is nothing but blinking red lights. First it was just a few. Then I would notice a few more. Now the whole damn world is blinking red lights.
I do have high speed internet but it did take a little effort.
There is also a train track about 15 miles away and on a cold still winter night that train wakes me up.
Have you tried to get a quiet zone?
Lived in dilapidated rental housing mere feet from train tracks. A train rolled through with America's supply of corn syrup twice a day. The whole house would shake.
Within a week I slept through it.
Years ago, I had a colleague who had done research on the lights on top of radio towers-- among other things, she learned that birds avoided them if the lights blinked:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1890/07-1708.1
I wonder if synchronizing the lights would make them read as a single unit-- to be completely avoided, while randomly blinking lights across a broad area could be more confusing to birds. I did a quick google and found this:
https://awwi.org/news-events/success-stories/success-story-faa/
Interesting, I just assumed a thousand red lights blinking randomly would be disorienting for aircraft. Maybe it is, just another big bird.
Presumably the retired Air Force officer inside is used to blinking lights.
Maybe 15 years ago when the windmills were just starting to come on line, I had a friend that worked for the Bonneville Power Administration. She said there was one day with high winds when there was excess power production. BPA called the wind farms to tell them to shut down some windmills and all they got was an answering machine. She said it was a mad scramble to shut down power production at the dams and anywhere they could to keep from blowing out the grid. After that there was a serious meeting with the windmill operators.
35 . . . at which bitcoin mining was invented?
Related: Our local cemetery is a block from home, and big enough that you can get away from all the street lights. It used to be satisfyingly dark to walk through at night. A year or two ago someone lit up a family grave with a solar powered spotlight, and a trend started. Now the place is full of them, and people are adding light-up Christmas decorations, some of which blink or rotate, and it isn't dark at all. This sucks.
Maybe there was an issue with low-flying planes?
37 It has been a while but as I remember, the owners of the wind projects responded like any good capitalist private enterprise and argued that their contract said they didn't have to reduce their output and they were not going to spend the money for someone to answer the phone 24 hours a day. Then they sued the BPA.
I feel like it should be possible to rig up some baffle or something that makes the blinking light visible from the air but not so much the ground.
We are driving past a blinking wind farm right now! Most timely post!
Also, isn't red light considered the least sleep-interfering?
You are probably right. The red lights don't bother me when I am sleeping.
It's really a shame that they didn't put the red lights on the tips of the fan blades.
That's too hard for the people who have to change the bulbs.
That's why ceiling fans have lights only in the hub.
Well, you don't have to change it when the light is at the very top. It's like how you're supposed to wait until you get to the bottom of the ferris wheel to open your little seat-gate.
They make really small Ferris wheels.
Well, my (new) work computer is on the fritz. As soon as I get a loaner, I'll throw a (guest) post up!
OT question: I always thought that if I was in Miami I would go to the Everglades, but M thinks it's just going to be mosquitoes and Republicans. Should we go? Relevant: We don't have a car.
My BiL, who is a major wildlife freak, visited the Everglades and thought it was brilliant. But:
1. He had a car, and
2. It was some years ago.
Probably worth doing while it's still there, though.
On foot, the escaped pythons will get you.
I guess it's more "released" than "escaped".
Unless it's your snake. I can't prove anything and don't want sued for slander.
Those propeller boats are really loud.
I've only been to the Everglades City area (and did ride an airboat) and driven the Tamiami Trail. I can imagine that the drive from the Homestead entrance to the end of the road would present some interesting opportunities for birding, but you'd want to rent a car for the day to do a thing like that.