And yet it did work, with positive results shown over a year, right? It seems that the reasons why this "could never work" like cracks, dust, and vibrations might have perfectly reasonable solutions. Solar panels have gotten so cheap that it might not be as important to install them in perfect conditions, and other factors like real estate, ease of maintenance, access to the grid come into play in interesting ways. I suppose long term results are yet to be seen, but it doesn't seem ridiculous to me.
You can put panels on anything and generate power for a couple years.
This system was only 18kW. That’s less than what we put on some residential houses. They didn’t address any of the hard parts like a transmission system capable of scaling up along a linear row of panels extending kilometers long.
> Solar panels have gotten so cheap that it might not be as important to install them in perfect conditions, and other factors like real estate, ease of maintenance, access to the grid come into play in interesting ways.
They had to use special panels for this, not the cheap ones you know. Any installation in an area like this requires reinforced and protected panels, which are more expensive than what you’re thinking.
You did identify some of the problems: Maintenance on this is terrible. They’re not going to shut down train routes to fix problems with the solar, so when something breaks it’s probably broken for years until a maintenance window can shut down transpiration.
Access to grid is terrible. You can’t re-use the train power lines, so I guess we’re running new transmission lines? A linear array is the worst possible configuration for a solar array because it maximizes the transmission distance and starts to require high voltage equipment to work.
Would you ever think it would be a good idea if someone suggested we go put solar panels out in the middle of nowhere between towns? Or would you agree it’s better to put them close to the towns on unused space like rooftops where they can feed directly into local loads? I think the visual of putting these on train tracks is misleading a lot of people into thinking we’re getting something for free when really this is an absurdly expensive way to place and connect solar panels.
A first version is always going to be low in scale and problems will of course be found. The question isn't 'are there problems', of course there are, the question is 'are the benefits here worth more than the problems'. If you already have the land, a maintenance operation, a user of energy, etc etc then integrating solar into that system has a lot of strong benefits that can make the problems manageable. Start looking for the upside here and you may actually find the cost benefit equation balances out, especially if this scales out.
> A first version is always going to be low in scale
They don’t have a first version of the hard part: The electrical transmission.
Maybe this isn’t obvious to people who haven’t worked on solar power systems, but you can put a couple panels anywhere and generate electricity for a couple years. It doesn’t prove that it’s viable to run thousands of kilometers of panels.
It’s like baking a tray of muffins in your kitchen and saying you proved that you can run an industrial scale muffin factory. They are different problem sets.
"Molecular biologists tend to focus on characteristics like metabolism, growth and development, response to stimuli, reproduction, and the ability to process information or evolve."
Even if you stretch the others real hard, I don't see how you'd argue that the Earth "reproduces." Especially not the more rigorous definition of reproduces fertile copies of itself which can evolve.
I see quite a lot of technical data. Check their whole site including the documents page and youtube videos. (Also, I know them, they're very legit.) https://www.c-motive.com/about/documents/
It just occurred to me that it was weird how 6^n always ends in 6. And that it never occured to me before that that was weird. 5s of course do that too. And I wondered what numbers do it in other bases and why. And I found this nice blog post talking about it. And was surprised to find that very large numbers also have this property.
Thinking about this more... and just thinking out loud here. So this pattern essentially happens when: In whatever base you're in a number x^n gives an end of "0" plus a remainder of the number x.
So a number would be automorphic if ((x^n - 1) * n) always ends in "0" (to whatever length that matches the number).
Terrament is working on a modular gravity storage solution that uses deep mine shafts to gain 20x more height than stacking blocks above ground. So you don’t need water or mountains. And since gravity storage uses ballast that is really just dumb weight, it could even be economical to make that ballast a secondary storage like thermal storage.
With climate weirding accelerating, I'm getting concerned that it's only a matter of time before this road continues to collapse in new sections and it will no longer be feasible to keep repairing it as we are now. I'm also worried that sections on both sides of big sur could collapse leaving thousands stranded.
Anyone have knowledge about any studies on these scenarios?
Or, the media is gaslighting people to think violent crime is up even if it’s not. Which is a rational possibility since reporting crime has political motivations.
From stories I’ve read, I think people generally, and including Feynman, concluded that the sprinkler would not rotate. Because conservation of angular momentum. Which is almost true. So what’s fun is that this experiment shows it’s not entirely true, if you have a sensitive enough experiment that takes into account more nuance of the fluid dynamics.
Yes that is the experiment. I think when you do that it doesn’t move at all because the effect is tiny so will normally be nullified by friction? And I think the research used very low friction so they could observe the small effect.
