Wind Power in the Antarctic, OR318, Sherlock Holmes Lives!, and The Photographer

Wow. This is not your garden variety wind turbine installation, eh? This is Princess Elisabeth station in Antarctica. It’s a Belgian research facility located “upon the Utsteinen nunatak in the Dronning Maud Land (East Antarctica),” according to the station website. Better yet, if you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can fly right to it. Princess Elisabeth is designed to study the effects of climate change. Fittingly, it’s also designed to be the first zero emission research station. Usually, diesel fuel is brought in to power generators for Antarctic stations. But not this one. As you can see, the Belgians have opted for wind turbines. The turbines are built by a Scottish company called Proven Energy, which has been in the renewables game for nearly 30 years. It’s a good match, as there is plenty of wind blowing across Antarctica. But setting up wind turbines in such conditions isn’t a cinch. To find out more about the installation, I called up Richard Caldow, Operations Manager at Proven Energy. It was one of those rare, sunny days in Scotland, so Richard took the phone outside to chat. The singing birds add a nice backdrop to the beginning of Tech Podcast #244.

Our second item follows up on a story we covered back in March . On March 18, Omid Reza Mirsayafi died in Evin prison in Iran. That’s the same prison in which journalist Roxana Saberi was being held. Mirsayafi was a blogger who mostly wrote about Iranian music. But some of his political posts got him into trouble. Now, his death has spurred the creation of The March 18 Movement, made up of various blogging rights groups from across the globe. Its motto is: “Let the first blogger to die in prison be the last.”

Now, folks, here’s the deal. Technically I’m on vacation. I say technically because, well, I’m typing this right now. We all need a break from technology, even though we do love it so. But to honor the vacation, to embrace it fully, the last two items are non-tech related (although you’ll note nice undertones of tech in both of them, I’m sure). The first is an interesting piece on the world’s most famous literary detective, Sherlock Holmes, who continues to get makeovers as the years roll on. His creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would have been 150 years old on May 22.

And the final piece of the podcast puzzle this week deals with an amazing graphic novel called The Photographer, which documents French photojournalist Didier Lefevre’s trip into Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders in the mid-1980s. You can view a high-res slideshow that goes with the podcast piece here. But I’ll give you the low-res version too: