I was going to chime in to second this. In a former life I worked on power towers and we had designs for air receivers that would potentially work really well with this type of system:
- High temperatures
- Intermittent solar input not a problem
- tall central structure (?? maybe a plus given the paper's tall storage vessels)
But high temperature air receivers have their own problems, mostly around receiver material properties (thermal cycling / stress) and heat loss. It's really hard to focus a lot of light from the sun into a tiny aperture, because the sun isn't really a point source, and no mirror is perfectly shaped.
And highly concentrating mirrors only work with direct sunlight, while PV works with diffuse sunlight scattered off clouds, dust, or the air itself. Bifacial PV cells even capture light hitting the back of the panel.
Portland, OR (NW Oregon in general) also has a lot of planted Giant Sequoias! So it may not be strictly true that they are super picky. I imagine as climate warms, the PNW will become a better spot for Sequoias. Unfortunately at the cost of trees that like it cooler and wetter e.g. Western Red Cedars.
I would plant one, but their trunks get huge quickly, and I see a lot of busted sidewalks around here due to that.
Yeah, we have a lot of both in Corvallis, neither are great city trees but look great in parks etc. My neighbor across the street has a Sequoia and the electric company is constantly chopping out massive sections to keep the power lines safe.
Redwoods look nicer, in my opinion, but have a bad habit of sprouting like crazy at the base.
"Though water itself does not absorb much light, and neither does the hydrogel material itself, when the two combine they become strong absorbers, Chen says. That allows the material to harness the energy of the solar photons efficiently and exceed the thermal limit, without the need for any dark dyes for absorption."
So when water is combined with hydrogel, they absorb more light -> more light = more energy -> more energy = more evaporation.
yes, but that's the exact opposite of everything else that's being said which is that there is no absorption taking place. It's not a good article in terms of explanatory power
I wonder why Wired didn't provide any hyperlinks despite mentioning the site (italicized) several times. Seems like common internet courtesy. Perhaps just a direct-from-print copy.
If you want all these things and exponential growth, check out Neptune's pride: https://np.ironhelmet.com/ for basically "diplomacy in space with a few extra dimensions". I haven't played in a few years (it was great at the beginning of the pandemic), but it was a lot of "fun" in the same way that diplomacy is "fun". Except with a space theme and a lot of anxiety waking up at 2am hoping your fleet arrives at an empty star system and doesn't get immediately obliterated.
Fair warning: I played and won my first round of NP when I discovered it ~11 years ago. It required unreasonable amounts of being willing to let the game take over my life at arbitrary hours for a couple of weeks, and a couple of strategic betrayals. I don't regret it, but it was a major commitment as far as games go.
The last time we played this at the company, we lost maybe two weeks of productivity over the game period. I needed to run polyphasic sleep with 2 h naps throughout but my secret alliance got to the end game strongest and then it was a vicious little fight, and one of us took it.
IMO a better game is subterfuge, because it allows you to schedule commands into the future, which means you don't have to wake up at ungodly hours of the night to execute a command.
That's pretty hilarious considering this nagging popup i got
> It looks like you’re using an ad blocker. With almost half of web users now running ad blockers, it’s now getting very hard to sustain an educational website and keep it free.
I guess they had to resort to grabbing stuff off kotaku because those horrible adblockers killed their ad revenue... :^)
A recent (8 days ago) comment on the hexandcounter subreddit post announcing that game says they're still playing, though it's not confirmed by Jake himself.
(Personally, I don't find any of the - very few - claims to have played a full game solitaire to be plausible, and I'm not aware of anyone even claiming to have played a full multiplayer one.)
It is participating in an art piece that was created with painstaking attention to detail. One of the games I have is a WWII submarine simulator ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17484/silent-war ). While play testing it, the realized that the US fleet was sinking too much tonnage. After going back over the records they realized that at any time, some portion of the fleet wasn't out in the ocean but rather in dock getting refitted. Adding that to the rules brought the tonnage sunk back within historical lines.
They could have changed the victory conditions to match the values that aren't in agreement with history - but they didn't. This is part of the (for lack of a better genera description) American Simulationist genera where the goal is to model the thing as closely as possible with rules and cardboard.
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I've played some two day games. Games where you spend an entire weekend playing one game. With the right group of people, it's quite fun. And then the next weekend, we play another game.
I've also done PB(E)M games where the game can last as long as the person running it keeps it going. ( http://rickloomispbm.com ).
This, to me, isn't any different than someone who is still playing an MMO - just a different medium of play.
Eh, not really. It's an art piece for sure, but as much dada as simulationist. As Berg said, it was designed as "a wretched excess." I think Jake's CNA game is less the gearhead obsession in so many of the WW2 simulations and more like the attitude described at https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/940888/
“Well, Troy,” I went on, “I want to be the guy who suddenly, at age 42, does spend hours doing this kind of thing, if only to feel what it’s like to take back a little piece of the soul I’ve sold to the company I slave for, to the obligatory evenings with people I’m not sure I even like, to daily errands, the lines at the DMV, to tax forms, to tedious family visits. This game is a slap in the face to all thinking creatures who live in such dire fear of the sands sifting through the hourglass. Playing a monster war game on this scale is ridiculous, a waste of energy, a waste of time, and so I want to do it. Let spite rule the day, Troy. Let’s learn and play A World at War!”
I like the structure of the article and it's a good procedure for evaluation compensation, but my nitpick would be it could be more helpful if it included more realistic numbers.
Do 5% of startups actually reach 1B valuation in 4 years? No. Uber took 10 years to IPO. I don't know the average, but I would imagine based on a cursory search that it's closer to 7 or 8 years for highly valued companies in the past decade. And 5% seems extremely high for billion dollar IPOs.
Also, only 2 startups are compared in the NPV calculation. What about joining a BigCo / FAANG? That would really put it into context.
On the other hand, the math gets slightly better if you assume you leave after some amount of vesting. I thought danluu had a post about this, but can't find it. Staying in a startup until the bitter end is almost never the optimal choice, especially if you have inside knowledge of its progress.
https://tldroptions.io/ - This was posted a few years back, and while it doesn't give tell you the likelihood of a particular size of exit, it does help give an idea of the type of dilution and final equity value (with no discounting though).
> could be more helpful if it included more realistic numbers.
Any ideas on where to find these? While there's a lot of info out there on valuations most datasets have the problem of hindsight bias, especially missing data at the pre-A round.
> only 2 startups are compared in the NPV calculation. What about joining a BigCo / FAANG?
My original model was actually a FAANG vs two startup model (I left Apple) but it gets too complex to try to explain it in a post that's aimed at the stock options 101 crowd.
> the math gets slightly better if you assume you leave after some amount of vesting.
100%, although that's tough to model without just adding an arbitrary cutoff.
Thanks for the reply! Sorry I don't have any great sources off the top of my head. It makes sense that you'd want to restrict the scope of the article to make it more understandable.
I've only been part of one startup, and it went nowhere, but it's very common (ubiquitous?) for prospective employees to be sold the "if we IPO for $1xB" line when that likelihood is laughably small; hence my suggestion to lower the expectations with some lower numbers.
- High temperatures - Intermittent solar input not a problem - tall central structure (?? maybe a plus given the paper's tall storage vessels)
But high temperature air receivers have their own problems, mostly around receiver material properties (thermal cycling / stress) and heat loss. It's really hard to focus a lot of light from the sun into a tiny aperture, because the sun isn't really a point source, and no mirror is perfectly shaped.