Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Bicycling

After nearly two years of having my bike in mothballs, I was back on the road today.  The weather was beautiful today and I greatly enjoyed the ride.  My plan is start my year-round riding again, even though fall is fading fast and winter is near at hand.  I'll need to figure out my commuting routine, how to handle shleping my stuff back and forth to school and work out some details with my afternoon-oriented school schedule. 

But I'm back on the road and it feels great.

Earthquake and the Internet

As some of you may heard, the normally seismically boring Plain States (that's what I'm calling the part of the country where I live) have had a number of tremors over these past few weeks.  The epicenters have been between Oklahoma City and Tulsa and all have scored under 6 on the Richter scale.  This past Saturday evening one of them was large enough that we felt it here in Wichita.

I was mostly asleep and was waken by the shaking of our bed. The shaking was minor enough that I thought one of our dogs had broken out of its kennel and was up on our bed busy trying to relieve an itch.  The fog cleared in  my mind to realize that probably wasn't likely; I then noticed our rafters were popping and cracking like the wind was blowing heavily.  This wind, though, was very rythmic in nature and just so happened to be blowing in a way to match the vibrations of our bed.

My mind was still futily trying to figure out what was going on and I asked my wife if she was casuing this rucus.  I have long suspected her of having superpowers but she flatly denied responsibilty. 

The shaking stopped; she and I stared at each other in the dark, not knowing how to respond. 

"That was an earthquake."  I knew I was right the moment I said it but how to confirm this?  I read a newspaper article yesterday that said over 300 residents of my fair city called 911 to report the news or ask for confirmation.  I was almost one of these but realized the operators probably wouldn't appreciate the call and weren't seismological experts.  Local TV news?  Maybe, but I'd have to get out of bed for that and who knows what they would say.  There was a computer right by the bed so I grabbed it and started trolling the internet looking for an authoritative source that would provide details.  After several minutes of general searching I tried the United States Geological Survey website and a few more mintues after that found this page.

In less that 10 minutes I knew that yes, there had been an earthquake just minutes before, the epicenter was down in Oklahoma and it was significantly larger than many of the recent quakes in the same area.

The USGS has a great website that put the data up quickly.  The internet made the data available quickly.  We had our confusion oblviated quickly and fell back asleep.

Friday, November 04, 2011

Published

Sometime in the past few weeks I officially began my career as recognized academic: my paper got published.  The paper in question was one I submitted for the conference in Detroit at the end of July and for reasons that I don't understand it took them roughly three months to get it posted online.

But here it is.

As circumstances would have it, just yesterday I started writing the paper I'll be submitting for the 2012 session of the same conference.  The deadline is the end of the month and I've got all the research done; all that's left is the process of assembling the words in a clear and helpful manner.  This paper will be on a completely different topic: rather than dealing with wind turbines I'm looking at the effect on the electrical distribution system of the addition of a significant amount of generation.  Said differently, when a bunch of people, businesses, and manufacturers install solar panels and wind turbines, how does that affect the operation of the neighborhood electrical system?  Traditionally power flows from the big generators to the customers but in this case, if enough people install solar panels, that flow may end up reversed.

(For the power nerds out there, here are the details. Due to the effective limitation in IEEE 1547-2003, inverters can only contribute real power to the distribution feeder.  At high penetration levels this could lead to a case where real power is flowing towards the substation but reactive power is still having to be supplied by the substation and/or capacitors on the feeder.  My paper seeks to discover if this counter-flow between real and reactive power is a significant issue or not.)

My greatest fear is going through the process of submitting it through the IEEE website.  Last year it was a torturous process due to an unspecified problem with how their software interpreted the files I sent over. Now that I'm aware of the problem I'm going to try to get it all squared away before I submit it but there is a lot out of my control and I expect there will be problems once again.