Over the last few months on my twice monthly visits to Idaho there has been a bunch of wind turbines being erected near the Rye Grass rest area on I-90. When Barb came west on Tuesday of this week to visit me in my bunker she told me she stopped and took pictures of the turbines. “They look like something out of a science fiction movie”, she said.
Wow! It just so happens that on my return trip last Sunday I also took some pictures:
Of course all this reminded me of something else:
I think that is my favorite xkcd ever. When you started mentioning how weird they looked I thought “xkcd!”
Calling a wind turbine or wind generator a “windmill” is like calling a magazine a clip.
Whoops!
Sorry about that. Fixed.
Thanks.
If the definition of a windmill is “something you hang out in the wind to turn a shaft for the purpose of converting wind energy into useable mechanical energy” then a windmill that has a generator connected to its shaft is still a windmill. It may an upgraded, modernized, highly efficient windmill, bit’s still a windmill. Otherwise an automobile is no longer an automobile, because it’s better than a model T Ford and has a turbocharger, EFI, etc. Or is it that these wind thingies aren’t being used to grind grain, so they aren’t, technically, “mills”?
Holy cow. I hadn’t thought about the tripod books in, like, forever.