To me, the OP's use of "on land" seemed to imply that Plan Lievense was to involve digging a lake out of dry land. To which I provided a rebuttal. Quibbling over the definition of "lake" is entertaining, but tangential.
If you check the map, you'll see that the IJsselmeer is actually a sea bay that's been closed of with a dam (the Afsluitdijk). It used to be called the Zuiderzee (South Sea).
If you have the storage lake at a higher level than the surrounding sea, you have to build a dike to that higher level. When the storage lake sits at a lower level, you only have to account for sea level + wave height.
Also, precipitation only accounts for a few cm per day.
The point of this scheme is not the generation of electricity, but to enable better matching between demand and supply (peak shaving). A pumped storage station can store excess generated power and then supply a variable amount of power on short notice, something that's difficult to do with other power generation options.
Actually Plan Lievense was to convert part of the IJsselmeer (a large lake) to a reservoir, so not on land.
A later version of the plan mitigated the flood risk by keeping the reservoir at a lower water level instead of a higher level than the surroundings, which meant using the IJsselmeer wasn't feasible as it was too shallow. So they looked at putting it in the North Sea instead. The Belgian plan is exactly this.
I've been using yellow glasses for driving at night and in fog, heavy rain etc. They reduce the glare from headlights, and in rain/fog they seem to increase visibility.
I suspect that this is because (as with sunglasses) they filter out some of the light, reducing the dynamic range your eyes have to deal with, so you end up with less eyestrain.
In this article, the case is made that retaining production in house makes it easier to improve products, increase quality and reduce response times (due to lack of shipping cost).
ISS modules are protected by aluminium shields. The meteorite will hit this shield, punch through it but disintegrate in the process so it won't penetrate the module wall. They could flat-pack a set of shields alongside the inflatable module for launch.
When working in a large enough building, you can often plot a largish circuit to walk when you need to stretch your legs. Take the least efficient/longest route to meetings, print stuff on the printer furthest away from your office. Run up/down a couple of flights of stairs.
I can see where this guy is coming from. I'm an electronics engineer, I've had a few programming courses in school but I haven't done much programming since. Over the past few years, I've made a couple of attempts to get started with some simple programming again. Tasks I came across that needed automating.
So I did some digging, and found a language that seemed suitable: Python. Found some good tutorials, and soon I was on my way creating basic programs. Then I needed to run one of my programs on another machine, so I thought I'd create an executable. Turns out that's not possible with the standard IDE. There is a way, apparently (using a third-party package), but the documentation is so bad I haven't gotten it to work at all, even with a trivial sample program. Then I thought I'd add a GUI to my program. Again, not possible with the standard IDE, and to my horror I found that the GUI needed to be in another language. Hello! I don't have all day to figure this out, I've no inclination to learn two languages when one should do. Did I choose the wrong language? Maybe. But this is the sort of roadblock TFA talks about. I spent way too much time wrestling with the tooling; time I should have been able to spend on the actual program.
You may have noticed that this test will be run in the Netherlands. For those of you not familiar with the place: our winter temperatures mostly hover around the 0 deg C mark. At night, the air cools to below 0 and the roads freeze over, in the morning the temperature rises above 0 but it takes hours for the roads to thaw. Combine that with local variations, spots that are more susceptible to frost like bridges and overpasses, etc. and you have conditions where slippery roads are not necessarily signaled by a big, obvious blizzard.
As someone who's been caught out by this to the extent of rear-ending someone when the road went from normal to invisibly iced over in the space of 50 m, I appreciate my government putting effort into mitigating the problem.
two recent SF projects come to mind: 1. Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets 2. Defying Gravity
both based on the premise of a manned Grand Tour of the solar system. Defying Gravity, being a Hollywood project revolved around aliens. Space Odyssey was done as a mockumentary and looked quite plausible.
Directed beams work reasonably well on a perfectly straight and level road. Anything else and those directed beams end up directly illuminating other drivers' eyes. Even if they're correctly set up.
I'll agree that there are lots of idiots out there with incorrectly set-up headlights. But the number of new cars with factory-standard lighting that blind me is too high for it to be an 'incorrect set-up' issue only.
I've noticed a disturbing trend. Car manufacturers have been using the new lightning technologies to cram e.g. the headlights into ever smaller spaces. The resulting light beam still conforms to regulations, but because the peak intensity is much higher, those headlights are much more likely to dazzle oncoming traffic. The higher the light intensity of the lamp (lm/cm^2) the worse this will get.
I recently visited a poultry farm. The big surprise there was the density of the farm: a single building, maybe 50x30 m housed 60,000 chickens. Now this was a farm that complies with 'free range' criteria, but there's still ~40 chickens per m^2 (in ~6 levels in a column of 2.5 m high). So the 150k chickens would fit in less than a hectare. The numbers involved in chicken farming boggle the mind.
When installing a new disk in a Mac, I run Disk Utility with the Secure Erase option enabled. This will write 7 or 30 passes of 0000 to every block, that should find any early problems...
Lego have always included instructions with their sets. What has changed is the number of specialized pieces in a set. Some of these are single-purpose, replacing a bunch of bricks with a single large moulding, so some sets end up being less versatile. There still are plenty of sets that consist mostly of standard bricks. What you end up with after buying a bunch of sets, is a pile of bricks and a pile of specialized pieces that can still be combined to your heart's content.
The idea that creating the right language can make such a difference may be dismissed as obvious by the/. audience who are familiar with this effect in programming languages. But it shows the power of having someone look at a problem from a new or unusual perspective. In this case a mathematician managed to encompass most of the act of juggling in a simple expression. It must be incredibly satisfying to get an Eureka moment of this magnitude.
Is it going to be standardized? In a previous/. story I read that US nuclear power plants are usually designed by an architect, so every plant ends up having a different layout from the next even if the core components are the same. In France, on the other hand, they're all built to the same design, so operating procedures etc. all transfer from one plant to the next.
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Compressed air is much less efficient to store than electricity, mainly due to thermal losses.
To me, the OP's use of "on land" seemed to imply that Plan Lievense was to involve digging a lake out of dry land. To which I provided a rebuttal. Quibbling over the definition of "lake" is entertaining, but tangential.
If you check the map, you'll see that the IJsselmeer is actually a sea bay that's been closed of with a dam (the Afsluitdijk). It used to be called the Zuiderzee (South Sea).
If you have the storage lake at a higher level than the surrounding sea, you have to build a dike to that higher level. When the storage lake sits at a lower level, you only have to account for sea level + wave height.
Also, precipitation only accounts for a few cm per day.
The point of this scheme is not the generation of electricity, but to enable better matching between demand and supply (peak shaving). A pumped storage station can store excess generated power and then supply a variable amount of power on short notice, something that's difficult to do with other power generation options.
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full
Actually Plan Lievense was to convert part of the IJsselmeer (a large lake) to a reservoir, so not on land.
A later version of the plan mitigated the flood risk by keeping the reservoir at a lower water level instead of a higher level than the surroundings, which meant using the IJsselmeer wasn't feasible as it was too shallow. So they looked at putting it in the North Sea instead. The Belgian plan is exactly this.
I've been using yellow glasses for driving at night and in fog, heavy rain etc. They reduce the glare from headlights, and in rain/fog they seem to increase visibility.
I suspect that this is because (as with sunglasses) they filter out some of the light, reducing the dynamic range your eyes have to deal with, so you end up with less eyestrain.
Not everybody has a smartphone. Shocking, I know.
In this article, the case is made that retaining production in house makes it easier to improve products, increase quality and reduce response times (due to lack of shipping cost).
ISS modules are protected by aluminium shields. The meteorite will hit this shield, punch through it but disintegrate in the process so it won't penetrate the module wall. They could flat-pack a set of shields alongside the inflatable module for launch.
When working in a large enough building, you can often plot a largish circuit to walk when you need to stretch your legs. Take the least efficient/longest route to meetings, print stuff on the printer furthest away from your office. Run up/down a couple of flights of stairs.
That may just be what I'm looking for. How long does a pair of those tips last?
I can see where this guy is coming from. I'm an electronics engineer, I've had a few programming courses in school but I haven't done much programming since.
Over the past few years, I've made a couple of attempts to get started with some simple programming again. Tasks I came across that needed automating.
So I did some digging, and found a language that seemed suitable: Python. Found some good tutorials, and soon I was on my way creating basic programs.
Then I needed to run one of my programs on another machine, so I thought I'd create an executable. Turns out that's not possible with the standard IDE. There is a way, apparently (using a third-party package), but the documentation is so bad I haven't gotten it to work at all, even with a trivial sample program.
Then I thought I'd add a GUI to my program. Again, not possible with the standard IDE, and to my horror I found that the GUI needed to be in another language. Hello! I don't have all day to figure this out, I've no inclination to learn two languages when one should do.
Did I choose the wrong language? Maybe. But this is the sort of roadblock TFA talks about. I spent way too much time wrestling with the tooling; time I should have been able to spend on the actual program.
You may have noticed that this test will be run in the Netherlands. For those of you not familiar with the place: our winter temperatures mostly hover around the 0 deg C mark. At night, the air cools to below 0 and the roads freeze over, in the morning the temperature rises above 0 but it takes hours for the roads to thaw. Combine that with local variations, spots that are more susceptible to frost like bridges and overpasses, etc. and you have conditions where slippery roads are not necessarily signaled by a big, obvious blizzard.
As someone who's been caught out by this to the extent of rear-ending someone when the road went from normal to invisibly iced over in the space of 50 m, I appreciate my government putting effort into mitigating the problem.
two recent SF projects come to mind:
1. Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets
2. Defying Gravity
both based on the premise of a manned Grand Tour of the solar system.
Defying Gravity, being a Hollywood project revolved around aliens. Space Odyssey was done as a mockumentary and looked quite plausible.
Directed beams work reasonably well on a perfectly straight and level road. Anything else and those directed beams end up directly illuminating other drivers' eyes. Even if they're correctly set up.
I'll agree that there are lots of idiots out there with incorrectly set-up headlights. But the number of new cars with factory-standard lighting that blind me is too high for it to be an 'incorrect set-up' issue only.
I've noticed a disturbing trend. Car manufacturers have been using the new lightning technologies to cram e.g. the headlights into ever smaller spaces. The resulting light beam still conforms to regulations, but because the peak intensity is much higher, those headlights are much more likely to dazzle oncoming traffic. The higher the light intensity of the lamp (lm/cm^2) the worse this will get.
I recently visited a poultry farm. The big surprise there was the density of the farm: a single building, maybe 50x30 m housed 60,000 chickens. Now this was a farm that complies with 'free range' criteria, but there's still ~40 chickens per m^2 (in ~6 levels in a column of 2.5 m high). So the 150k chickens would fit in less than a hectare. The numbers involved in chicken farming boggle the mind.
When installing a new disk in a Mac, I run Disk Utility with the Secure Erase option enabled. This will write 7 or 30 passes of 0000 to every block, that should find any early problems...
Lego have always included instructions with their sets. What has changed is the number of specialized pieces in a set. Some of these are single-purpose, replacing a bunch of bricks with a single large moulding, so some sets end up being less versatile.
There still are plenty of sets that consist mostly of standard bricks. What you end up with after buying a bunch of sets, is a pile of bricks and a pile of specialized pieces that can still be combined to your heart's content.
The idea that creating the right language can make such a difference may be dismissed as obvious by the /. audience who are familiar with this effect in programming languages.
But it shows the power of having someone look at a problem from a new or unusual perspective. In this case a mathematician managed to encompass most of the act of juggling in a simple expression. It must be incredibly satisfying to get an Eureka moment of this magnitude.
Is it going to be standardized? In a previous /. story I read that US nuclear power plants are usually designed by an architect, so every plant ends up having a different layout from the next even if the core components are the same. In France, on the other hand, they're all built to the same design, so operating procedures etc. all transfer from one plant to the next.
Is there no way to profit from the existing investment?
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