5 ms·
I'm going to be wonderfully pedantic here, in full HN tradition: What you have here sir, is a Wind Turbine. A 'Windmill' mills grain as part of the rotation. :D
by Jaruzel 6y ago
I'm going to be wonderfully pedantic here, in full HN tradition: What you have here sir, is a Wind Turbine. A 'Windmill' mills grain as part of the rotation. :D
- saalweachter 6y agoMilling is not necessarily confined to grain. While gristmills are one of the oldest types of mills, many windmills in the Netherlands were poldermills to drain low-lying land, and the industrial revolution brought us a variety of carpet mills and powdermills and everything mills, although they were mostly based on water mills, and steel mills, which don't even involve turbines.
- jacquesm 6y agoIn nl we call all of them windmills. We even have 'watermills', windmills that pump water, the same term is also used to indicate a water driven mill. But from a tech perspective you are right, Wind Turbine is the correct name.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Doxin 6y agoTo be entirely correct you still have to call them "wind turbines" in dutch when talking about the energy generating kind.
- jacquesm 6y agoYou have to, but everybody calls them 'windmolens'. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmolen https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmolen
- Someone 6y agoI think that’s common in English, too. Checking various online sources, I couldn’t find one that’s strict on the narrower meaning. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill says “the term is also extended to windpumps, wind turbines and other applications.” On the other hand, I think windmills that pump water are called windmills, not watermills. Watermills always extract power from moving water (saw mills don’t extract power from saws, nor do gristmills extract it from grist, though) The Kinderdijk mills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderdijk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderdijk) aren’t called water mills, for example.
- jacquesm 6y agoTrue, you shouldn't. But I've heard farmers refer to their pumpers as 'watermills', which technically they aren't. In the end it doesn't really matter, people seem to find a way to understand each other even if their use of language is imprecise. A bit like the internet protocol guidelines. So it's important to at least try to use things properly and leave the fixup to the recipient in case the sender wasn't doing it perfect after all.
- tdeck 6y agoI think "mill" is an accepted term for a generic powered machine installation. Examples include sawmill, fulling mill, textile mill, steel mill, paper mill, etc... The first two at least date back to the medieval period. In this particular case "windmill" also implies a certain aesthetic that fits the project quite well.
- donw 6y agoTechnically, is he not milling electrons?
- KSteffensen 6y agoI don't think he is crushing electrons into their constituent parts.