Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Switching of the Nuclear Powerplants in Germany now?

Today chancellor Merkel announced to switch of  7 nuclear power plants as a consequence of the fukushima catastrophe.
The decision means cutting 10% to 15% of Germanys power consumption, using the net power production median of the weakest nuclear powerplants (890 MW) and the median of the overall powerplants (1288 MW)

Update: they named the plants in question


de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deutschland
UnterweserKKUNI NIE.ON1.4101.345


Biblis BKWB BHE HERWE1.3001.240








Biblis AKWB AHE HERWE1.2251.167








Philippsburg 1KKP 1BW BWEnBW926890
Isar/Ohu 1KKI 1BY BYE.ON912878
Neckarwestheim 1GKN 1BW BWEnBW840785








BrunsbüttelKKBSH SHVattenfall806771








These have a net power of 771+785+878+890+1167+1240+1345= 7076 MW or 11.3% of annual consumption.

Update: the last data on power trade balance shows a surplus of 22 TWh

Monday, March 14, 2011

Hot Bozen



Since I study time series analysis, here a little exercise with data from Hydrographisches Amt South Tyrol:
Its getting hotter:
decomposing mean temperature in Bozen 1981-2010, 
the observed data is splitted into a seasonal component and a level

The code for R:
bz<-read.csv("data/bozen.csv.txt", header=FALSE)
bz<-ts(bz[,1], start=c(1981,1), frequency = 12)
plot(decompose(bz))





+2°C is the mean temperature increase since 1971



Wednesday, March 9, 2011

R-Quote of the Day

"It is not meant to be the big data distributed crunching engine; it is more like the intellectual's answer to Excel."  - such a post, and the day begins with a smile.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Rationality Hurts

This piece of critical thinking sums up perfectly my experience leaving the spiritual forcefield of dogma.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt11/haidt11_index.html

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Whats Gonna Kill You?

Two remarks
  • the artist unfortunately chose smallest is most likely.
  • if you are an European, the odds are much minor for  firearm assault, but cancer rates might be the same.