Precise Metallic Replicas of Ancient Fossils and Cells by Allan Drummond
Each creature is sculpted digitally by Drummond using scientific references, including specimens from private collections. Next, they are 3D printed in wax, and finally lost-wax cast in bronze and finished by hand. The sculptures are rendered down to the smallest detail, including gills, antennae, legs, and even mitochondria in cell division.
sparks wrote:One of the many fascinating things they didn't cover (or perhaps didn't know about yet?) in my high school biology classes: Mitochondrial DNA. How the fuck does that work?
I just remember that some starship crashed on a planet where the circle was sacred, so the crew couldn't use logs for moving their machinery. Until they thought of this geometric trick (using 1/3 of a circle was OK).
Mob of the Mean: Free beanie, cattle-prod and Charley Fan Club! "Doctor X is just treating you the way he treats everyone--as subhuman crap too dumb to breathe in after you breathe out."--Don DocX: FTW.--sparks
"Doctor X wins again."--Pyrrho
"Never sorry to make a racist Fucktard cry."--His Humble MagNIfIcence
"It was the criticisms of Doc X, actually, that let me see more clearly how far the hypocrisy had gone."--clarsct
"I'd leave it up to Doctor X who has been a benevolent tyrant so far."--Grammatron
"Indeed you are a river to your people.
Shit. That's going to end up in your sig."--Pyrrho
"Try a twelve step program and accept Doctor X as your High Power."--asthmatic camel
"just like Doc X said." --gnome WS CHAMPIONS X4!!!! NBA CHAMPIONS!!Stanley Cup!SB CHAMPIONS X5!!!!!
Exactly how big are these? It's a little hard to tell because there's no people up on top to give a point of reference, but each one of those blades is longer than a football field. 117 yards long to be precise (107 meters). Those fences are probably about as tall as a person.
There's some interesting talk about capacity factors:
This quote from the Department of Energy’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report shows how wind capacity factors have evolved over time: “The average 2016 capacity factor among projects built in 2014 and 2015 was 42.5%, compared to an average of 32.1% among projects built from 2004–2011 and just 25.4% among projects built from 1998 to 2001.”
By way of comparison, in 2016 the US nuclear fleet had an average capacity factor of around 92 percent. (Given current markets, nuclear is only economic when running continuously, as baseload.) Coal and natural gas were 55 and 56 percent respectively. (Natural gas is that low because it frequently ramps up and down to follow swings in demand. Coal used to be up close to 80, but it is less and less economic to run coal plants at all.)
So modern US wind is up to 42.5 percent and natural gas is at 56 percent. The Haliade-X, according to GE, will have a capacity factor of 63 percent. That is wackadoodle, though it wouldn’t be the highest in the world — the floating offshore turbines in the Hywind Scotland project hit 65 percent recently.
Add all that up and, at a “typical German North Sea site,” GE says, each Haliade-X will produce about 67GWh annually, “enough clean power for up to 16,000 households per turbine, and up to 1 million European households in a 750 MW windfarm configuration.” (Suffice to say, the number would be smaller for energy-profligate American households.) That’s “45 percent more energy than any other offshore wind turbine available today,” according to the company.
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare
By way of comparison, in 2016 the US nuclear fleet had an average capacity factor of around 92 percent. (Given current markets, nuclear is only economic when running continuously, as baseload.) Coal and natural gas were 55 and 56 percent respectively. (Natural gas is that low because it frequently ramps up and down to follow swings in demand. Coal used to be up close to 80, but it is less and less economic to run coal plants at all.)
Make it appear that wind is on par with coal and natural gas. But in fact the comparison is at best apples and oranges. Coal for example has a lower capacity factor because one decides to turn it down. Wind has a lower capacity factor because the wind stops blowing. A coal plant with any given nameplate capacity can be run at >100% as necessary and any downtime can be scheduled. Same with nuclear, natural gas, hydroelectric, and even geothermal. Decidedly not so with wind unless the wind decides to cooperate; it is unpredictable.
Therefore, for every unpredictable KW of wind that you build, you have to build a KW of something reliable to back it up. As such, you pay for your power twice even if you only need the energy once; every KW/h of energy produced will have two KW of potential behind it. What you save in fuel may pay for that but the energy bills certainly don't reflect any savings.
arXiv.org wrote:The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
Gavin A. Schmidt, Adam Frank
(Submitted on 10 Apr 2018)
If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.
WS CHAMPIONS X4!!!! NBA CHAMPIONS!! 
Stanley Cup!
SB CHAMPIONS X5!!!!! 
"If I turn in a sicko, will I get a reward?"
