bookworm1398
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Commented on What do you know about my inner demons?
I remain skeptical of the ability of Big Data to improve marketing targeting. The Amazon recommendations I get are mostly junk. And I don't think I'm an outlier, surveys show that most people find books to read through friends, not...
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Nojay commented on
What do you know about my inner demons?
The project you referenced intends to use recycled concrete processed into the 35-ton blocks they use for energy storage because it's cheaper. They plan to stack as many as twenty of them on top of each other i.e. the bottom block will have a load of 675 tonnes pressing down on it. The foundation will have to support several thousand tonnes static load as well as the dynamic load of the crane. Like I said it looks good on paper/PowerPoint and table-top models but in real life scaled up to useful dimensions it has its problems. As for Greg's fascination...
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Moz commented on
What do you know about my inner demons?
in real life scaled up to useful dimensions it has its problems I agree. But I was trying to point out the positives. I quite like the idea of a taller than 100m crane lifting and lowering big blocks of concrete, but the same problem as the accumulator tower applies. 35 tons seems like a lot, but we have that same mgh problem... 35000 * 10 * 100 = 3600 * 1000 * 10 = 10kWh. That makes the presentation pretty, but you're going to have an awful lot of blocks per megawatt-hour if your crane can only lift them...
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Damian commented on
What do you know about my inner demons?
They could move Ben Nevis to somewhere in Cambridgeshire, more accessible for tourism that way too. Funny this topic sort of came back to life - driving around today it occurred to me to remember gasometers ... there were still a lot of them around Brisbane when I was a kid. So what if they were 100m tall, and each vertical frame member had a track for a worm gear... then you don’t need to be keeping gas in, just mount a lot of mass on a platform. But maybe it’s jaunt me, thinking gasometers are sort of retro-steampunk-romantic-gothic-cool or...
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Damian commented on
What do you know about my inner demons?
Just me, that is. I think that was autocorrect, but it could be me subliminally thinking of Tomorrow’s Children and how the Laundryverse reminds me of it slightly, in terms of culture and feel and stuff. Maybe that’s just me, though :)...
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Moz commented on
What do you know about my inner demons?
Oh, sudden thought: with the crane idea, make each block an apartment. That way every single one can be sold as a penthouse apartment! Trump would wet himself at the idea. You could do the same thing by lifting suburbs independently... they would all have "great views over surrounding area" and a whole lot more would have "sea views" :)...
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Quick Stuff
Specials
- Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
- How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
- Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
- Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
- Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
- Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
- The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
- “Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
- Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)
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