Saturday, March 09, 2013

[jules' pics] Neighbours

For 12 years I've admired this big old house from the back of the mountain tandem. But now James is doing his silly running, I have control of my brakes, so it is possible to stop and take photos!
old house
But the thing that made me actually stop was the meeting of old and new Japan. These are the shocking next door neighbours to the old house, that appeared a few years ago. Bet each house has a Stepford wife inside.
New houses


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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 3/09/2013 06:57:00 PM

8 comments:

David B. Benson said...

What is a Stepford wife?

James Annan said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives

David B. Benson said...

In Japan would be actual robots.

James Annan said...

Well many "people" here seem to live in uncanny valley, it's hard to be sure either way... :-)

Steve Bloom said...

Now imagine all those roofs covered with solar panels.

James Annan said...

As we were saying a couple of years ago :-)

Steve Bloom said...

Yes. I was particularly interested to see in that article that a bunch of stored hydro capacity is already in place.

James Annan said...

Japan has been big in hydro for some time - it has a rather good combination of steep mountain valleys and plenty of rain (at least, it seems so from an inexpert point of view). I think I mentioned some time ago that the construction of the Kurobe Dam involved the death of 171 people, for a power output rather lower than Fukushima...

(I'm not sure if that system specifically allows for pumped storage or not - some of the dams we have seen just spill into rather shallow rivers, but even these are obviously useful for intermittency. Some are arranged as a sequence of consecutive lakes.)