Summer of Power #3

Today SaskPower took a number of the summer students, little over 30, for a tour of the Boundary Dam Power Station and of the Shand Greenhouse.

Boundary Dam produces 822 Megawatts (according to the people giving the tour the website says differently) of power which is about one third of the total output possible by SaskPower. It is a coal power plant and it burns about 15,000 tons of coal a day. There six generators in the plant built between the late 50's and late 70's. The are trying an experiment to make the coal "clean" by trapping the CO2 emmisions. I beleive the eventually want to store it underground in now empty natural gas pockets. This first challenge is acctually removing the CO2 out of the emmisions from the plant. Below is a picture of the inside of the plant showing one of the 150 Megawatt generators. The plant was pretty hot and fairly dirty there is coal dust on just about every surface as the powder the coal into a fine powder before injecting it into the furnaces which allows it to burn faster, hotter and more efficently.
Next we went over to Shand Greenhouse which is near the Shand power plant which is also coal powered. The greenhouse is one of SaskPowers intitives to be more "green." They give away the plants they grow to none profit organizations and groups and for educational opportunities such as schools. They grow mostly native plants to Saskatchewan many of them trees but also brushes such as chockcherrys and saskatoon berries. It was a neat little place and they have grown a large amount of plants over the years. They give out about 400,000 to 500,000 plants per year. Overall it was not a bad trip and interesting to see some places a person does not normally see. Here is a couple of other pictures from the greenhouse; one inside and another of an area to where plants that have been moved outside.

Happy August long weekend.

Hope everyone has had a great August Civic holiday, or Saskatchewan Day as it is called in Saskatchewan.

Here Fishy Fishy!

This came up at work today, I am not sure how but it did.

Stop! It's Motion Time

In my travels around the interwebs, which they have on computers now! I came upon this neat video. It is a stop motion video and very well done plus the song is not to bad either.



It is based on the same principle as claymation, such as Wallace and Gromit, or seen in the classic skeleton scene from 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts. I also found a couple of other good live action videos of stop motion on youtube you might enjoy.

Summer of Power #2

In June I spent a “week” in the field up north. In actuality it took as eight hours one day to drive up to the project area and a second day to drive back home. This left us three days to survey just under a forty kilometres long route through the boreal forest. To complete this task water crossing and high and/or flat areas near water were the places focused on. The survey area was also was also nearby the road which made reaching it fairly easy and allowed us to travel between locations quickly. However it was not easy, something discovered right away.

This is a picture of my first test pit, I ran into the regular problems one would expect when digging in the boreal forest a nice humus layer, roots and a nice thick clay soil. I did not dig very deep as about 10-25 cm I hit ice. This was most unexpected. The location was not anywhere close to where permafrost exists and it was figured that it was late enough in the season for the ground to be thawed.

The first man produced object found was this cabin. It appears to be fairly old but it showed signs of continued use, we could see plastic containers and a tarp. The nails were definitely machine crafted but an archaeologist who knows more about historical material would be able to suggest a good time frame for the construction of the cabin.

Besides the cabin two archaeological sites were located, both on hilltops with flat areas. The first had a large number of quartz flakes and shatter within about ten centimetres of depositions. The other contained just a few buried quartzite flakes. The most interesting thing seen on the trip though was probably a stream that contained a water fall and still had ice surrounding the stream and even arches still going over. I also climbed a large almost total hidden cliff, about five metres off the road, that was covered in vegetation which made climbing fairly easy. One on top it provided an excellent view over Raven Lake, unfortunately while on top I found no indications of an archaeological site.

Well those were the highlights of the northern trip.

Summer of Power #1

My summer has been, and will be for the rest of it, dominated by my work. Therefore I have decided that I should make series out the stuff I have been doing down here. I know how much everyone wants to hear about it.

It’s what separates us from the animals; except the weasel.

For my first part of the series I just wanted to share the fact that weaselled my way into an author credit (fourth out of four) on a report. Here is a picture of my copy.

I was very excited when I was told that I would get my name on it as it is my first authoring credit. The report was originally rejected by the Heritage Branch, the survey map for each project was wrong. I redid them all, over fifty in all, and did some other editing/writing to finish up the report. It was recently accepted so it means I did something right.

I know some of you have many more publications and perhaps even thesis but I had to start somewhere. Well that is it for the first instalment, nothing particularly interesting or groundbreaking.

Get the hell out of here!

After many many years I finally went out to buy new shoes to replace my old beat up runners.

I am surprised how long they lasted but they finally got much to worn out. Plastic started to stick out of the sides of the shoe in the heel area causing discomfort and occasionally lacerations.
Here is my new pair, which look very similar to my old pair. However, showing off my new shoes is not really the point of this post.

While throwing out my old shoes I was reminded of a scene from my favourite Simpsons episode, You Only Move Twice; second episode from the eighth season. The scene in particular I was reminded of was when the Simpsons first meet Homers new boss Hank Scorpio. He starts talking about his loafers telling Homer that if Homer likes them so does he but if Homer does not then Hank doesn't either. Hank then proceeds to throw them away yelling "Get the hell out of here!" and then asking Homer if he has ever seen someone talk to a pair of shoes before. Homer indicates that yes once before he saw someone talk to a pair of shoes.

The title refers to the James Bond move You Only Live Twice and the episode contains many other references to different James Bond movies including Goldfinger, which occurs in the scene where Hank sets up a laser to kill Mr. Bont (who is obviously Bond). Other bond references can be read about in the wiki article linked above.

Overall I find almost every line in the whole episode hilarious and it is my favourite episode. So I decided to find somewhere that I could watch it, I should probably by the season. You too can watch it below.

I suppose I should of mentioned it is in Russian, could not find an English one to embeed, click here for one in English.