Published

9 months ago

October 24, 2025

Alice Rush

A proponent of the wind turbine shown at left writes:

I commented this 6 year’s ago . It is so simple even if you put in small stream 1 000 000 small turbines like this one, you will have more power. It’s the same for the wind , we don’t need this big huge wind Parks we need small efficient and most important easy for fixing and easy for installation. Not forgetting we can make smaller things with eco friendly materials.

Me:

There are a few reasons that claims like this are bullshit. The main one is that the power extracted from the wind is proportional to the square of the radius of the blades. We recall from our childhoods the formula: Area (of a circle) = pi r-squared. This is why real (not fictional) wind turbines are so large (and getting larger all the time).

Also, as I mention frequently, today’s wind turbines capture about 90% of the theoretically available kinetic energy from moving wind; given the laws of physics, there is no room for any significant increase in efficiency/output.

Even if neither of these were true, which would you rather cover the cost of maintaining: one large turbine or a million little ones?

The Case for Tiny Wind (or Hydro) Turbines

Renewable Energy

Wrong State

Published

7 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Alice Rush

Minnesota is home to intelligent, well-educated people whose approval of Trump is lower than that of toenail fungus.

If Lindell wants to lead a state, he needs to choose one at least 800 miles away. Oklahoma?

He may also want to consider that Trump is easily the most detested person in this nation.

Wrong State

Renewable Energy

The Existence of God

Published

8 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Alice Rush

I wouldn’t say that the burden of proof lies on religion. No one knows how the universe got here.

The Big Bang was an event in which there was no chaos, no “entropy,” as we say in thermodynamics. How did all this orderliness get there 13.87 billion years ago? No one knows. This is an issue in cosmology which is quite likely to outlast human civilization on this planet.

I’m an atheist for a few reasons, one of which is that saying that God created the universe doesn’t get us any closer to an understanding of the cosmos, if only because it raises the question: Who made God?

More to the point, there are hundreds of moral reasons to disbelieve in God. Each year, 9 million children will die unbaptized on this planet before their fifth birthdays. In the bible, we learn that God punishes them all with an eternity of torture in hell. To what sort of weirdo does this make sense?