Interesting Links for 12-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• Solar power trends (hint: they look very good)
  (tags: solarpower)
• Listening to music with your eyes shut makes it more emotional
  (tags: music emotion psychology)
• A fascinating piece on what can be easily discovered about your online habits using Google Analytics
  (tags: google online privacy location)
• A short biography of Grant Morrison's father
  (tags: grantmorrison war biography libertarianism communism)
• Sacha Baron Cohen is making a movie based on a book written by Saddam Hussein. Epic seems too small a word.
  (tags: comedy SachaBaronCohen)
• The chinese reached East Africa before Europeans did. (In 1418-or-so)
  (tags: africa china history archaeology culture)

Comments

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

"The film tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed." brilliant

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

The solar power increasing exponentially thing assumes there isn't a hard cap on the amount of energy that can be harvested per square meter from the amount of energy arriving from the sun though?

[andrewducker]

Neither of those graphs is about efficiency. They're about cost and usage. If we can make exactly the same solar panels, only for a hundredth of the price, then that's a huge improvement.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

They do seem a lot more hopeful than wind farms, that's for sure.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - without a way of storing the energy they produce I'm not seeing a huge benefit to wind farms right now.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Well, except for the owner/operators who are reaping vast profits from government subsidies anyway.

[fearmeforiampink]

Whilst it runs into issues with efficiency and on the large scale, with space, you can store the energy using two reservoirs with both a pump and a hydroelectric generator between 'em.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yus. I think this sort of thing requires a co-ordinated network such that electricity generated in one part of the country could be used or stored elsewhere. A national grid, if you will...

[andrewducker]

It's not just space though, it's time.

And we cannot store, with the current grid, enough electrity for a decent amount of time.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[FX: Reading up about Dinorwig]

[andrewducker]

Dinorwig is fantastic - but I'm not convinced that it's something that's scaleable. I remember reading somewhere recently that Scotland, for instance, would have real problems building more hydroelectric without knocking down (or hollowing out) a mountain or two.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Did you know that Carol 'Countdown' Vorderman worked as an engineer at on the Dinorwig project?

[andrewducker]

I didn't! That definitely get the "fact of the day" award!

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Yep. A Smarter grid is widely agreed as necessary for a lot of reasons. It's got to come.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Even if the details have gotten hazy, I was under the impression that Chinese exploration of East Africa was well established fact.
One of my favorite alternate history hooks is an armada of 200 junks, carrying 20,000 men, sails into Lisbon Harbor around, say 1450 (slightly after Joan of Arc, contemporaneous with Gutenberg) . . .