Can someone explain to me where the feeling_lucky variables comes from in the match example? I don't get it. The variable isn't defined anywhere in the relevant scope.
> For the same reason, the enthusiasm for the idea of installing solar plants in north africa and exporting power over interconnectors to Europe is gone. It's cheaper to install twice as many panels in a field in cloudy northern Europe (where capacity factors are half of what they would be in the Sahara) than deal with the costs and complexity of underwater interconnectors and transmission system upgrades.
I don't know about that, because long-range transmission significantly reduces the intermittency, even for the same longitude. It's not just about smoothing out the curve of solar production, demand patterns (due to weather, industry, behavior) will also have variations from place-to-place and these allow opportunities for power export.
Some places will have more dispatchable and expensive power plants than others, which also creates an export opportunity so that power is exported so that one country can burn less fuel. However, I admit this argument is slightly undercut by the question "can't we just build solar panels in the country with dispatchable dirty power?" True, but there's also a connection to wind power which is super local and random.
It's still not believed. It's just Twitter that I've seen the juicy stuff, like a (very sketchy) claimed replication from a Russian, and now another claim from a Chinese group.
I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.
Fusion was already starting to heat up in recent years. The entire SPARC reactor concept is based on (low-temp) superconductor materials breakthroughs.
If these room-temp superconductors pan out, it will be dumping gasoline on the funding fire for new fusion attempts. Given less than a year from scientific verification, fusion will go red hot.
The ideal conditions to stimulate daydreaming seems pretty obvious to me - sit me down in any class lecture.
Imagine that my mind like a glider. Glider is connected to a Cessna by a tether, but it's a magical tether that can disappear. In fact, it takes me active work to keep it connected, like I'm holding on to the end of the rope with my hands. The plane takes off and I'm following in lockstep about the main subject matter... looking down at the landscape below, to the left, to the right. After a quick climb, and at velocity, I've forgotten about keeping tethered, holy crud, I'm in the air! I want to bank, dive, maybe loop! What's over here? I can catch a thermal and go on forever depending on the landscape, but still often see more appealing currents and need to switch over. Oh wait, where did the plane go?
Yeah, good to bring it back to the original point. Reading the article felt exciting, but in hindsight I am now missing a key detail.
The equations all seem to be matrix operations with a fixed number of rows / columns (you can take me as a real layman here). Unless you change that, I don't understand _how_ you can reduce memory needs. Granted, I'm probably putting my foot in my mouth not understanding transformers.
In fact, I have increasingly seen the pattern of adults who work from home but have a commute to drive their children in the morning / afternoon. That's 2-ways both times, for the record. It's often multi-destination.
I hope/believe that we are near a tipping point. There is a very large and very substantial neighborhood premium based on what's around it, but the zoning is the same everywhere so the competition was legally restricted to greenways, sidewalks, parks, and HOA facilities. Even in the suburban US, it is a VERY desirable feature to be within walking distance of a park where young children can play. This has created a strange effect, where people (let's be honest, affluent people) accumulate a collection of aspirational wheeled items - strollers, bikes, weird electric skateboard-like things, and other wheeled things for the kids. These are coupled local government parks and spaces where people can ride a bike JUST FOR FUN. I mean it very seriously that greenways outright avoid any turns that might be useful for economic life. Riding bikes on the roads is mostly for the true anti-car zealots.
I've been ready to buy a house for few years, but I've realized I'm no longer happy with the whole package. I want to realistically be able to walk or bike to get a dinner, coffee, or groceries. Yet, city centers (in the south for sure) tend to offer the most dangerous roads for doing this, and unhealthy environment, and poor social atmosphere.
I'm sensing that there are more people on the sidelines (who have remove jobs, after all) who are ready to buy into better neighborhoods. These people may not be willing to give up their cars, but there is negotiating space, and it is relevant that these are people who have economic clout to force the issue.
I've been following Terraform Industries for a while, and it does strike me as obvious that H2 will be the preferred form of energy storage medium in the long run, not just an intermediate species.
Depending on the conditions, if you're doing day-night energy storage, then you would like to fill up the H2 tank and then burn it when demand ramps up.
The only role I see for methane is when your H2 tank is already filled up but your solar panels are still producing. This is not just possible, but deterministically required whenever solar gets deployed enough for seasonal storage to be necessary.
Right now California is something like 35% solar + wind energy, and the "duck curve" is nearly maxing out. This was predicted in extreme specificity 20 years ago, as >30% and you get stuff like zeroed-out energy prices during the day. We have not solved the day-night (daily) energy storage problem, which only requires storing energy for a matter of hours.
When you go to something like 60% renewables, then even crazier stuff happens. Overproduction during sunny times goes bananas and (assuming daily storage is solved, which it isn't) seasonal issues start to arise. I don't think H2 will ever work for seasonal storage, although I think it's fine for multi-day storage scenarios. It's not theoretically impossible, I just compare to the equivalent that we have for natural gas and realize you would need MANY TIMES that level of investment to save the same amount of energy in H2. Plus, fossil fuel gas producers are mostly at a constant level, whereas solar production outright needs summer-to-winter storage.
What I don't buy is that these units will be disconnected from the grid and be economical by their gas products. No way, no how. What you want is to run the chemicals plant with low-voltage solar power locally, and trade-off with the grid as is economical.
I tried this about a year ago and it was alright. I wanted to like Photonix, as it was a python library and I expected would be easier to hack, but I couldn't lie to myself. PhotoPrism is very clearly and very obviously the most mature of the available projects for this.
They see new builds hitting the market and look at the (aspirational) price put there by the builder. It's a borderline conspiracy that Zillow lists certain high-end new developments for a year (before they're built) which pollutes the "for sale" housing inventory. Whereas the "recently sold" is the best metric of how things actually are, the search options don't allow you to get an accurate market sense from these. After all, the app's purpose is not to give you an accurate sense of the market.
I have been, personally, figuring that I should wear mostly cotton clothing and glass / ceramic (as opposed to plastic) dishware. Limiting material choices for household items would be politically impossible, but I would like it to become a popularized "trend", which retailers will then cater to.
Companies should market based on using "traditional" non-toxic materials (still modern and industrial, just not absurd), and consumers can respond by giving their business.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf