Besides, I didn't have whole lot to blog about. I'd done a couple of really heavy posts earlier in the week--posts which had taken until way past midnight to finish--and I needed to get something resembling a life back.
So, in honor of the fact that I had a whole lotta nothin', I thought I'd refer back to last December's post about nothin'. In that post I just tossed up an interesting link from Popular Mechanics about a container ship that was being outfitted with a parasail to reduce the reliance on its engines (and thus its fuel usage).
I think it's therefore fitting that this post about nothin' should report an update: The ship has set sail.
Again, like I said in my earlier post, I rather doubt this sort of thing will get adopted wide-scale. There are always financial considerations to this thing that we armchair pundits don't take into account (like maintenance costs of the new system, added weight and complexity, structural issues for the ship, and so forth) that frequently prevent this kind of idea from being widely adopted. But it's still rather a neat idea, and I'm glad someone had the gumption to go ahead and try it to see if it works.
1 comment:
ummm.
ummm.
wasn't that like.... that whole thing called sailing ships--specifically the clipper ships of the late 1800s. They were cheaper and faster to transport a lot of freight and stuff, so well after the development of widespread steam power in commercial shipping, a lot of industries went back to wind.
dude... history is so cool.
-andy, the little brother, in his semi-annual blog response.
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