It was noted in The New York Times (in two different places), USA Today and at locations across the Internet, but it was news almost every sports fan in the United States already knew -- because they made it happen.
A regular-season football game pulled a higher rating than Game 4 of the World Series on Sunday. The Steelers-Saints matchup attracted 18.1 million viewers, compared to 15.5 million viewers for Game 4 of Giants-Rangers.
Yawn. Yep, that's no surprise. The football game held the attention in our house, too.
It's been that way since the start of the NFL season. Just last week the NFL announced that the 12 most-watched programs of the TV season to this point have been a dozen of its games.
While top-notch sporting events remain strong draws on TV, nothing compares to the NFL.
Still, the World Series was successful by many measures. It finished as one of the lowest-rated Series ever, but it helped Fox draw enough viewers to have the best week among all broadcast networks.
What remains, though, could be one final NFL victory. The concluding Game 5 of the World Series drew 14.9 million viewers Monday. It was up against "Monday Night Football" on ESPN. That matchup, Texans-Colts, might not carry the cachet of Steelers-Saints the night before, but if the football game (when final ratings come in tomorrow) drew more viewers than the concluding game of the Series that's just another football victory.
And the NFL will work to expand its dominance as the season continues with national broadcasts moving to Thursday nights and Saturday nights once college football season winds down.
Subterranean Aeolian Farm
A disused gold mine might soon provide geothermal energy for the city of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories, reports CBC.ca.
Yellowknifers have long thought about drawing geothermal heat from the abandoned mine, as former miners have reported temperatures exceeding 30 C when they were underground.
If the project goes ahead, a network of distribution pipes would have to be built to deliver heat from the mine to various downtown buildings.
Oil would still be used under the proposed geothermal plan, but would make up five per cent of the energy used. Still, Yellowknife could save 7.6 million litres of oil and lower greenhouse gas emissions by 17,000 tonnes a year under the proposed plan.
To quickly change to a related or unrelated subject, we've often wondered if you can excavate a system of underground tunnels wherein differentials in atmospheric pressure (or some other laws of physics unknown to us) create air movements at speeds fast and consistent enough to produce appreciable wind energy.
If you perforate a mountain (or an entire mountain range) that's buffeted by strong winds all the time from all sides and then populate it with burrowing giant helium balloons to keep the air moving when the Chinook or Katabic winds are at a standstill, how many homes can be powered? The entire downtown area or just the reclusive hamlet of a rogue Swiss tunnel digger?
Wind power and the cost-benefit headaches of such a multi-billion-dollar project aside, can you perforate a mountain simply to hum a tune, to turn it into a gigantic wind organ playing a melancholic song from deep geologic time? You won't be singing it to the mountain; the mountain will instead, to you.
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