đź”— Articles: Wednesday 27.Mar.2024
Kickstarter: How Comics Were Made: a Visual History of Printing Cartoons
Backed
Undecided (YouTube): How a Sand Battery Could Revolutionize Home Energy Storage
Sand. It’s coarse, it’s rough, and it can make for a great sand battery. And as weird as that might sound, it’s just one example of the many earthy materials currently used for thermal energy storage (or TES). A while back, we covered the debut of the world’s first commercial sand battery, which is big enough to supply power for about 10,000 people. Now, sand-based energy storage has reached a new frontier: individual homes. Companies like Batsand are currently offering heat batteries that bring hot and fresh sand directly to your door. Seems you can get just about anything delivered these days.
But what’s stopped us from experimenting with residential TES before? How will heat storage impact our lives in our homes? And where exactly are homeowners supposed to put this stuff?
Politico: Joe Lieberman, 2000 vice presidential nominee, dies at 82
McCain considered picking Lieberman as his running mate on the 2008 GOP presidential ticket but was persuaded otherwise by Republicans worried that it would cause a rift in the party.
“I completely trusted, liked and worked well with Joe,” McCain wrote in “The Restless Wave.” “And I still believe, whatever the effect it would have had in some quarters of the party, that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would have been received by most Americans as a genuine effort to pull the country together for a change.”
Politico: Outmoded bridge design likely contributed to catastrophic loss in Baltimore
After a Florida bridge collapse tragedy, bridges were required to be built with protective “fenders” — but not until the 1990s.
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The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday after a collision with a massive container ship could have been mitigated with simple “fenders” that have been standard issue on new bridges since the 1990s.
Today these fenders are standard to be installed around supporting beams for new bridges to help blunt potential impact from cargo ships. They help combat the ever-increasing size of ships just like the thousand-foot-long Dali, which sent the bridge into the Patapsco River on Monday.
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In the 1970s, when the Key Bridge was designed, ships were dramatically smaller and engineers would not have foreseen the behemoth container ships of today. The largest ship in the world at that time was about a quarter of the size of the Dali, which is the length of a skyscraper.
Odd measure of comparison.
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Podcast Episode: About Face (Recognition)
Is your face truly your own, or is it a commodity to be sold, a weapon to be used against you? A company called Clearview AI has scraped the internet to gather (without consent) 30 billion images to support a tool that lets users identify people by picture alone. Though it’s primarily used by law enforcement, should we have to worry that the eavesdropper at the next restaurant table, or the creep who’s bothering you in the bar, or the protestor outside the abortion clinic can surreptitiously snap a pic of you, upload it, and use it to identify you, where you live and work, your social media accounts, and more?
Last Updated: 27.Mar.2024 23:55 EDT