Thirty North

Many years ago I worked in Minneapolis. One day I was at lunch with my friend Kamal from New Delhi and Adel from Cairo. We started talking about the weather, and then which city was further south, New Orleans, Cairo or Delhi. We argued a bit, and I don’t remember exactly what side each of us took. It was intense enough that when we got back from the office we found a world map and checked. All were darn near the same latitude. Just had a look at the on line Latitude and Longitude Finder and sure enough, New Orleans: 29.951065, Cairo: 30.044420 and Delhi, India: 28.613939.

Innovation, Trial and Error

Good read for anyone interested in why some projects do better than others. I think I can give this a slightly different spin. Innovation is all about trial and error, emphasis on error. Your ongoing development needs to tolerate errors to make substantial moves forward. Nukes don’t let you fiddle around with techniques they way other technologies do. So innovation (i.e cost savings) seldom happen. On the flip side, small scale tech like solar allows for all sorts of tweeks at all levels. This leads to large, compounded improvements. Back to the energy grid portion: a nice quote below.

Well, the data on that is in. Wind and solar have plummeted in costs and grids with higher penetration of renewables are actually more reliable than coal, gas or nuclear heavy grids using industry standard metrics for outages per customer per year.

The Nuclear Fallacy: Why Small Modular Reactors Can’t Compete With Renewable Energy

That’s My Home

Was thinking about Louis Armstrong’s private tape collection. I read about it a bunch of years back and thought I would see if they had made it on line someplace. It a combination of music and conversations made in his home in Queens, NY. Ran across this pretty amazing site, from the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Will have to spend some time out here looking around.

That’s My Home – Louis Armstrong House Museum Virtual Exhibits