I lived in Los Angeles briefly in 1986. While I lived there, my dad sent me this book:
It talked about landscaping to minimize fire, flood, and mudslide risk, but my key takeaway was, “Only a moron would live in Southern California,” and I moved away before the end of the year.
It was a government publication, so the PDF is available: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr067/psw_gtr067.pdf
If you’re like me, and enjoy fantasizing about how nice it would be to have high-speed rail in the U.S., you might enjoy this video:
There’s a solar farm just north of Winfield Village, with ranks of solar arrays that turn from pointing east to pointing straight up to pointing west. (Oddly, they’re not arranged to point south. I assume the people who built it knew what they were doing, but I’ve been puzzling over it for a couple of years.)
The directions they point (and the timing of the changes) seem odd, and I’ve been trying to characterize the whole thing.
I initially assumed that they’d be programmed to point a particular direction based on ephemeris data about where the sun will be, but that seems not to be the case.
Here’s one piece of data: At dawn they do not turn to point east. Rather, they turn to point straight up:
It is only after the sun is well up that the panels turn to face east.
Last night, perhaps an hour before sunset, they were pointed about halfway between west and straight up. Which kind of makes sense, as there were clouds to the west, so they clear sky straight up was probably as bright as the sun behind the cloudy sky.
My current working theory is that the panels turn to face whatever direction produces the most power, regardless of where the sun is in the sky.
I’ll continue to watch, and try to characterize their behavior further.
Maybe I’ll even get in touch with the University and see if they can provide a link to a description!
“The best available science indicates that the effects of climate change will continue to adversely impact the basin,” — this from the latest issue of the water-policy journal “Duh!”
A long tedious pdf from those Davos guys. Only of interest because the topic is near to my heart. I may yet manage to plow through the whole thing, looking for the good bits. Via @bruces.
“The report also sets out how public and private urban leaders can utilise nature to both reduce the impact of their cities on biodiversity, increase their climate resilience, and secure significant economic benefits.”
Source: BiodiverCities by 2030: Transforming cities’ relationship with nature | World Economic Forum
“There are windmills in northern Canada. In Norway. At the Antarctic research stations. If Texas’s windmills shut down during the storm, it’s not because we don’t know how to make cold-weather windmills – it’s because allowing windmills to fail in cold weather was profitable.” — Cory Doctorow
Always true, just now laid bare by the pandemic:
In transit conversations we often talk about meeting the needs of people who depend on transit. This makes transit sound like something we’re doing for them. But in fact, those people are providing services that we all depend on, so by serving those lower income riders, we’re all serving ourselves.
“American culture of the early 21st century is still one that thinks it’s normal to want every American to have an SUV and deviant to want every American to have an apartment in a big city with a good subway system.” The Importance of Decarbonizing Transport | Pedestrian Observations
Climate emergency “skeptics” seem weirdly incapable of understanding that the various deadlines for taking action are the dates after which certain consequences become inevitable, and not the dates after which everyone is dead.
A wonderfully useful tool. How walkable/busable is your address? https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/
