Thursday, May 25th, 2023 - TrickJarrett.com: Semper Ad Meliora

The History of the Power Grid

A fascinating read on the whole as it gives a good overview of the history of electricity and its growth from World's Fair attraction to home mainstay.

I found this tidbit fascinating:

To put this in perspective, the average yearly outage time in the US is around 475 minutes per year, which is considered especially unreliable despite representing ~99.9% uptime. By comparison, Germany averaged just 12.7 minutes of power outages per year in 2021—a remarkable 99.998% uptime.

Of course the US is much larger than Germany and serves a great deal more people. I would be curious to compare outage time averages for countries of both similar geographical size to the US (Canada, Brazil, China), and also comparing for countries of commensurate population (China, India.) Though China, India, and Brazil are not as "industrialized" yet.

5/25/2023 7:23 am |

| Tags: electricity, thomas edison, science, technology, progress

Hand Talk - A look at the sign languages of the First Nations

Found via kottke.org, thanks Jason!

I love learning about this, for example - the Plains Indian Sign Language condenses What, When, Where, Why, and How, into just the gesture for 'Question.' Absolutely fascinating to see!

5/25/2023 9:03 am |

| Tags: linguistics, sign language, first nations, linguistic genocide

A look at Sergey Brin's LTA and a brief history of airships

Built inside a giant hangar in Mountain View, California, the Pathfinder 1 is 122 meters long (400 feet) and 20 meters in diameter at its fattest part. From the outside, it looks much like any airship you’ve ever seen in photos. It’s white and tapered at the back and front, and it has a dozen propellers along with a gondola. Inside the airship, though, are intricate patterns of carbon-fiber tubing and titanium joints that give it structure and strength and 13 helium bladders that provide lift—and nonflammable lift at that. It’s a fraction of the size of the vehicles LTA plans to build in the future, and yet no rigid airship of its scale has been constructed since the 1930s.

The article goes on to give a bit more history and also educate readers about what an airship is versus a blimp.

Very few people reading this article have ever ridden in a proper airship. Even the Goodyear Blimp isn’t what Brin and Weston have in mind—those are just big, inflated bags with a minimal gondola stuck to the underside. A blimp lacks a sturdy inner structure, so its engines must be attached to the gondola, which, among many other limitations, makes conditions noisy and inelegant for the pilots and passengers.

I still remember the amazing idea of having airships able to dock with skyscrapers, as was done once for the Empire State building.