attension

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Clear visibility – road sign in front of trees

There is currently a not so easy discussion about the ambiguity of perception in the comment section of the post about dripping pains. Thinking about the ambiguity of perception I was asking myself why I had heard a lot about protests against windfarms (see e.g. this website) but for example not so much about protests against the visual (and sometimes auditive) pollution of advertisements.

Wind farms are rather loud and ugly and it would certainly be nicer to have a landscape without them, however the alternative is apart maybe from solar energy usually much, much uglier or dangerous (like to have a nuclear power plant instead). I am asking myself wether beople don’t see that these are the (more or less only) alternatives to wind farms or wether they really prefer to choose e.g. a nuclear power plant (see e.g. this and/or this randform post) over a wind farm.

Moreover one has some flexibility in installing a windfarm, like one should be able to find a compromise in order not to install it right next to a concert hall, just as one usually builts wind farms a little away from streets in order to ensure the safety of traffic.

And as I said already for some strange reason not so much protest is heard about the pollution of advertisement and their danger in traffic. The images (top and bottom) illustrate how advertisements may or may not draw the attention of a traffic participant away from street signals and signs.

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How dangerous are advertisements like of this kind where the stop lights are almost invisible? (high resolution)

4 Responses to “attension”

  1. Latte Mackiauto Says:

    Ach Meechen watt willste denne mitte schtopfschilda ?

  2. Gary L. Smith Says:

    Do you know John Baez? He is an acclaimed physicist and tries to gather information about the energy efficiency of wind farms and their environmental pollution. In a comment he asks for more literature:

    The second claim seems almost surely false. There are many off-shore wind plants in the world, and if they’re all net energy losers you’d think someone would have noticed by now. But let’s see some references that study this issue.

    I also want to see references for the first issue: the noise pollution created by building offshore wind plants, and how bad it is, e.g. compared to other sources of noise pollution.

  3. nad Says:

    @Gary L. Smith

    Yes I know John Baez. He even dared to comment here on this blog amidst all the sockpuppets. I met him on several occasions, like conferences, but haven’t seen him in person since 2010, because I left academia back then. Like me, he is a mathematical physicist.
    I have been though in loose contact with him via his Azimuth project. I don’t read all of his comments, but -yes- I have seen this particular comment.

    I don’t know what he has concretely in mind with “references”. I think there are a lot of different wind turbine designs out there.

    Actually a lot of newer designs were and are coming from world regions, which are rather windy, like the (what looks like abandoned ?) futuristic dutch wind wheel, the (Google-) X Makani project, this kite project, this turbine from Tunisia, this design of students from Kenya and Chile, this design from Australia, or this spanish design based on vortex induced vibration.

    Where it has to be said that it is rather difficult to come up with new and in particular better solutions than the existing ones and I could imagine that some of the modern designers, may have felt like Don Quijote against the wind mills, which -by the way- seems to be eventually an allegory on the wheel of fortune. Consequently especially bigger wind farms, like here from Africa seem to be still using (well-tested?) conventional technology.

    But of course ideally all those different designs should be evaluated with respect to their ressource efficiency and other aspects like noise pollution, effects on micro climate, space need etc.

    And something had been done even for the newer designs like for example in this article (in german) or in this CleanTechnica blog post (in english) the spanish vortex induced vibration turbine was met with quite some skeptisism regarding energy efficiency and noise.

    It is however clear that evaluation itself might be an unthankful job, like it seems this blog, which for example investigated the windtamer in conjunction with the Betz limit gave up. Another thing is that in principle the quality of some reviewers/evaluators may not be clear either.

    So in short – I could imagine that there is quite some research on the energy efficiency of the conventional and commercial designs, but who knows. It seems that even some commercial products may not hold up to the promise, at least I got the impression that there are quite some enraged customers of a certain type of smaller vertical wind mill on youtube – so lets see what John and collaborators find.

  4. nad Says:

    Latte Mackiauto asked:

    Ach Meechen watt willste denne mitte schtopfschilda ?

    translation: Oh Girl what do you want with those stopping signs?

    Answer
    There is the text “Clear visibility – road sign in front of trees” below the stopping sign image.

    With the image I wanted to show, that the visibility of street signs does play a role. The red traffic lights on Märkische Allee (image at the end of the blog post) are not so clearly visible as there is a red advertisement behind them.

    translation into german:
    Antwort:
    Da ist der Text “Klare Sicht – Straßenschild vor Bäumen” unter dem Stoppschild.

    Mit dem Bild wollte ich zeigen, dass die Sichtbarkeit von Straßenschildern eine Rolle spielt. Die roten Ampeln auf der Märkischen Allee (Bild am Ende des Blogposts) sind nicht so deutlich sichtbar, weil hinter ihnen eine rote Reklame ist.

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