Ruuvi Air[1] seems to be close to the middle in both price and CO2 measurement accuracy between aranet4 and the IKEA device. I don't have personal experience with Ruuvi Air specifically, but have been using their cheaper Ruuvi Tags (that don't measure CO2) for temperature, humidity and air pressure measurement at home and office.
You're right. Perhaps clean would better capture the distinction in favor of solar in this context? Both corn and solar convert insolation to usable power with a short time between capture and use. Solar, on the other hand, is net negative when it comes to emissions, while the corn harvest is just burnt with the CO2 escaping back to the atmosphere. (And potentially, the solar panels can just be recycled back to new solar panels when they reach the end of their lifetimes. They're mostly aluminum and glass after all.)
Yes, and the corn-based ethanol here is used for "feeding cars" that have combustion engines, i.e. it's already used exactly for energy production. The most recent Technology Connections video[1] quoted some numbers on this. All this land dedicated to disposable energy production could be dedicated to renewable energy production instead.
Just today, a citizens' initiative started collecting signatures in Finland to stop recent projects that aim to transfer hosting of election, taxation, and social security data on services provided by US-run companies.[1]
Is it, though? It's genuinely hard for me to tell.
There's both serialization and deserialization of data sets with, e.g., JSON including floating point numbers, implying formatting and parsing, respectively.
Source code (including unit tests etc.) with hard-coded floating point values is compiled, linted, automatically formatted again and again, implying lots of parsing.
Code I usually work with ingests a lot of floating point numbers, but whatever is calculated is seldom displayed as formatted strings and more often gets plotted on graphs.
I'm a long-time Xmonad user. Currently, I'm using Ubuntu 25.04, having upgraded to new non-LTS releases every six months, on two computers running Xmonad. I haven't run into any problems.
Just finished reading your linked article. I found it interesting and I experienced similar excitement from the results as mentioned up-thread. There were some new things I learned, too.
I wouldn't say your article is too technical; it does go a bit deeper into details, but new concepts are explained well and at a level I found suitable for myself. Having said that, several times I felt that the text was a bit verbose. Using more succinct phrasing needs, of course, a lot of additional effort, but… I guess it's a kind of an optimization as well. :)
There's something about real optimization stories that I find fascinating – particularly the detailed ones including step-by-step improvements and profiling to show how numbers got better. In some way, they are satisfying to read.
Nicholas Nethercote's "How to speed up the Rust compiler" writings[1] fall into this same category for me.
Generally, I agree the situation with errors is much better in Rust in the ways you describe. But, there are also panics which you can catch_unwind[1], set_hook[2] for, define a #[panic_handler][3] for, etc.
A prime example: JIRA's backlog view. In the self-hosted version, you could easily find the issue you were looking for in the backlog view by just using the browser's search, press Ctrl+F, write some words, you have the issue you were looking for. The cloud version Atlassian forced their users into, OTOH, features their own implementation hijacking Ctrl+F combined with dynamically removing the issues not currently visible from the DOM, to ensure that no-one can have the convenience of the browser's built-in search.
I remember, as a child, attempting to reproduce the BASIC program in one of the MAD magazine issues. Somewhere, I had made a typo, which completely screwed the output. I guessed that the tediousness of the whole exercise was part of the joke, shrugged, and moved on.
There's also a middle ground: Painstakingly describe the solution first, along with its downside of not being general in the same way as some of the existing features (I guess for example seeking back 10 seconds) are not, and ask whether a patch implementing this solution would be welcome before implementing it.
Optimally, next to a source of water that can be split into hydrogen, ready to be used for the chemical process producing the pure iron. (Not the process in TFA.)
An array of SMRs (small modular reactors) located at the steel factory could be used – and would be sufficient – both for heating and producing the electricity without interruptions caused by fluctuating prices or blackouts.
Currently, birding. Got really into it in 2021 since it pretty much runs in the family. I feel that observing the lives of our fellow creatures helps me really destress and put my mind off work. Interestingly, I find that birding while walking in the nature works better in this regard than just walking in the nature.
Get a good pair of binoculars, a bird sound recognition app for your mobile[1], and a bird field guide (as a European, I prefer [2]), and you're good to go.
No mentions in this thread of biodiversity loss[1], which I've always considered one of the main reasons for vertical farming. We are (and have been) destroying immense swathes of land to make more room for human activities, killing numerous species to their extinction[2] in the process. This increased human land use includes farming.
Now, there are of course other solutions such as reducing meat consumption. I think those should be applied as well. However, the theory of vertical farming is simple: with land area A, you actually get the output of A multiplied by the number of floors, saving the number of floor minus one times A land elsewhere.
Maybe we should tax the externalities, i.e. land use, more, in the same way we tax carbon emissions (at least here in EU). With the externalities properly taken into account, vertical farming could prove to be more economically viable when compared against the highly-tuned competition. Of course, food prices would become higher, but maybe that's required in order to avoid doom.
> I agree that these are important issues to consider, however I disagree that this is important in the context of energy production. Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads (in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar).
Thanks for bringing up the point about comparing energy production's land use against the area taken by other human activity. Agriculture, particularly meat consumption and the required farm fields to feed livestock, is certainly one of the worst offenders in this context. As far as I can tell, the generally car-based city planning with the parking lots, roads and urban sprawl are also a problem in this regard especially in the US. So, I agree that certainly fixing these should have a higher priority from the viewpoint of improving land use.
However, I don't think the land use by electricity production can be completely disregarded. I was unsure about it being minuscule, so just as a quick calculation:
- Electricity from coal requires a median of 15 m² for 1 MWh of energy.
- In 2021, electricity use in Finland was about 86 775 000 MWh. As heavy industry (including steel production) and traffic are going electric, that number is bound to go upwards.
- The total area of Finland is 338 472 km² with about 34 524 km² of that being inland water, resulting in 303 948 km² of land area.
By year 2050 counting from today, using the numbers above I get that 11,67 % of Finland's total land area would be ruined by coal production if all the electricity was produced with coal (luckily it's not), mined locally. Also note that the chart in TFA is about electricity production. Countries with cold winters, such as Finland, also require heating. With a cleaner source, such as 100 % nuclear or roof installed silicon PV that figure would be around 1–2 %.
> It is telling that almost all pro-nuclear articles that we have seen recently argue which should put more money into nuclear vs renewables, not arguing about what is the quickest way to turn of coal plants.
On the forums where I find most of the environmentalist discussion I read, the generally held view is that both nuclear and renewables are required. It's not about either-or. The goal is decarbonizing ASAP while respecting nature in other ways as well and supporting the notion of humankind's prosperity.
> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.
I wonder, what's your opinion on these two matters:
- the sixth mass extinction
- carbon sinks
In my opinion as a concerned environmentalist, they are both extremely important and need immediate actions to have even a small chance of being somewhat remedied. Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.
And to be clear, there are lots of species that don't just accept any "close enough" environment as their living place. For example, willow tits in Finland are endangered because here they mainly live in old forests that include dead trees – unacceptable for timber and pulp industry.
Edit: I want to emphasize that I don't see land use concerns as an attempt to reframe the question, limiting the dimensions the energy sector is thought of. Rather, IMO it's a welcome important additional feature to think of.
[1] https://ruuvi.com/air/