Editing 1119: Undoing
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| title = Undoing | | title = Undoing | ||
| image = undoing.png | | image = undoing.png | ||
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| titletext = I've been sneaking out at night and installing lamps on the underside of every photovoltaic panel I can find. Sure, there are upwards of 80% losses, but I prefer to think of them as nearly 20% gains. | | titletext = I've been sneaking out at night and installing lamps on the underside of every photovoltaic panel I can find. Sure, there are upwards of 80% losses, but I prefer to think of them as nearly 20% gains. | ||
}} | }} | ||
==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
− | + | The comic is a play on regenerative energies and the way they transform the natural resources (wind, sun, water) into electricity. Instead of using the electricity from the windmill as a renewable resource for homes and cities, Cueball has rigged it so that it powers another fan in the other direction, therefore wasting energy. It may also be a continuation of Randall's mistrust of modern electric windmills (see [[556: Alternative Energy Revolution]]). | |
− | + | The alt text is a reference to the very bad efficiency of solar panels (roughly 20-25%) and light bulbs (20-30%). Thus instead of only 80% loss of energy, which is either not converted to electricity or converted into heat) it's actually far more. | |
− | + | Thus the undoing done by the character is quite less effective than the common "Undo" function known from computers. | |
− | + | A windmill is powered by blowing wind, and it "absorbs" some of the strength of the gusts. Someone standing on the "front" side of a windmill will feel a stronger gust of wind than someone who stands on the "back" side. Cueball has severed the connection from the windmill to the electrical grid (thus decreasing the amount of energy on the grid) and used it to power a giant fan blowing the other way, thus restoring the amount of wind that was blowing before it came across the windmill, effectively "undoing" what the windmill accomplishes. | |
− | + | A slightly different interpretation could be that the fan powered by the windmill is blowing air in the opposite direction of the rotation of the windmill blades (this would explain the short curled lines in between the windmill and fan, otherwise the lines would be long and well defined as the ones in front of the windmill or fan). Also, the windmill generated electricity is no longer going into the grid, and is now only powering a device which counteracts it (or is undoing it). The humour here is about how ridiculous this would be in real life. Also, the wind can only provide the windmill with so much energy and then the windmill can only absorb so much, then that energy is converted to electricity, so a lot of energy is being lost in the process from natural wind to artificial wind, therefore the air blowing from the fan must be much weaker than the natural wind and could only undo it to a certain extent and no more. | |
− | + | I'm not sure about this, but the fan given its "opposite set-up" might slow down the windmill and therefore negatively affect its own energy source. (Could a physicist please correct me if I'm wrong?) | |
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==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
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:My Hobby: | :My Hobby: | ||
− | + | :[A large wind turbine is spinning but the electric cord has been severed and rewired to a large fan] | |
− | :[A large wind turbine is spinning but the electric cord has been severed and rewired to a large fan | ||
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:Undoing | :Undoing | ||
− | + | {{comic discussion}} | |
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− | {{comic discussion}} | ||
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] | [[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] | ||
[[Category:My Hobby]] | [[Category:My Hobby]] | ||
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