spenrose

31 ms·

331.
Solar and wind are coming. And the power sector isn’t ready(vox.com)
174 points by spenrose 8y ago|102 comments
332.
by spenrose 8y ago
1. I addressed this point by saying "I have no idea." I think the world has no idea. IEEE and other professional standards bodies are the only model I can think of, but it doesn't feel like a great fit. I tried to move the co
333.
by spenrose 8y ago
Thanks, that's a much improved way of expressing my point.
334.
by spenrose 8y ago
AFAICT, this article repeats the disaster of PEP572: it makes almost no effort to discuss how Python is used. Specifically, it implicitly holds that the BDFL + core contributors model that served Python so beautifully from, say, 1992 to 200
335.
by spenrose 8y ago
"[1] we should keep rolling out renewables as fast as we can. But [2] we should also fix the unnecessarily difficult regulatory environment for advanced nuclear" [1]: sit on hands and watch existing markets follow their current tr
336.
by spenrose 8y ago
That new nuclear will be deployed at scale in the next two decades that wind and solar are being deployed at now.
337.
by spenrose 8y ago
I linked to a write-up of peer-reviewed research which focused on the "if" and demonstrated that the odds are daunting. That ... is an answer. I linked to a second article showing that renewables are reducing emissions from natura
338.
by spenrose 8y ago
Like most climate hawks, I am a passionate proponent of maintaining existing nuclear and one who hopes that new nuclear will reach the market. But the operative words in your post are "thinks" and "mid-2020s". Every ton
339.
by spenrose 8y ago
OP is hyperbolic framing of a genuine issue. Pacific Northwest is one of the more extreme cases, due to the confluence of hydropower seasonality with renewables. In general, we will address the variability of wind and solar by building more
340.
by spenrose 8y ago
"Is nuclear power going to help the United States decarbonize its energy supply and fight climate change? Probably not. That is the conclusion of a remarkable new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences i
341.
by spenrose 8y ago
Those investments are happening anyway because they make sense on their own terms. "batteries have a slate of use cases and multiple value propositions; with costs declining, analysts say there is much more capacity on the way."
342.
by spenrose 8y ago
Abstract of the referenced (and paywalled) PNAS article: "Nuclear power holds the potential to make a significant contribution to decarbonizing the US energy system. Whether it could do so in its current form is a critical question: Ex
343.
Scientists assessed the options for growing nuclear power. They are grim(vox.com)
16 points by spenrose 8y ago|4 comments
344.
by spenrose 8y ago
I worked on petabyte-scale data at Mozilla. Here is a talk I gave on the history of debugging and the ways in which doing distributed large data analysis requires moving beyond printf() and STEP: https://www.youtube.com/watc
345.
by spenrose 8y ago
Per my earlier comment, one déformation professionnelle with being a libertarian "researcher" is that your funders expect you to tie the grand principles that make your soul sing to their parochial interests. "Keep your Pigov
346.
by spenrose 8y ago
"Those funding Mr. Jackson's work have known the answers to California's problems in 2018 since at least 1979" is not ad hominem, it's meta. Ad hominem would be "he's a jerk." PRI is a stopped clock.
347.
by spenrose 8y ago
The article is bylined "Kerry Jackson is the Pacific Research Institute’s fellow in California studies." Their Mission Statement [1] opens: "The mission of the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) is to champion freedom, opportun
348.
by spenrose 8y ago
Very popular simple time series library built on top of d3.js: https://metricsgraphicsjs.org .
349.
by spenrose 8y ago
Civilization absorbs technology. "Learning dominates when technologies are new and not very useful for broad human purposes. If you want to explore a coral reef in 2017, buy a plane ticket to the tropics. If instead you buy “FishWorld,
350.
The Case Against Facebook(vox.com)
5 points by spenrose 9y ago|0 comments
351.
by spenrose 9y ago
I don't think of < 10% / year as "dramatic", but YMMV: https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/electricity-domest...
352.
by spenrose 9y ago
1) The key word there is "capacity." The energy still needs to be generated . 2) Coordinating EV charging with grid dynamics is a hot topic, but getting 100M vehicles to charge largely at night is not on anyone's roadmap for
353.
by spenrose 9y ago
There isn't a"global" perspective on this, just a country-by-country perspective, because utilities are governed by national law. See Quitting Carbon for what a really aggressive attempt to transform Denmark's electric g
354.
by spenrose 9y ago
We can be a bit more precise than that. In the US, each 1% shift in Vehicle Miles Travelled will increase electricity demand by 0.25%. This is a BFD, but even a 100% conversion to EVs would only increase demand by 25%, not 100% ("doubl
355.
by spenrose 9y ago
That all makes sense. One of the themes of my piece is how things look when you stand outside of your own perspective and ask how people like you came to behave in the ways characteristic of their culture .
356.
by spenrose 9y ago
My personal account: http://www.sampenrose.net/sprouts/ which I deliberately paralleled with Free Software: http://www.sampenrose.net/tools/
357.
Inside the Fight for the Soul of Kaspersky Lab(buzzfeed.com)
13 points by spenrose 9y ago|1 comments
358.
by spenrose 9y ago
Two works lauded by many that lived up to the hype for me by changing my understanding of science and the modern world are David Wootton's biography of Galileo: http://www.watcheroftheskies.org/ Janet Browne's bio
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Shannon Mattern details how the City is not a Computer(creativeapplications.net)
1 points by spenrose 9y ago|0 comments
360.
by spenrose 9y ago
Openly accessible "What Developers Want ..." https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... obtained by pasting the title into scholar.google.com

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