Released today in this little book-box-on-a-post thing near High Park in Toronto.
Not a Little Free Library afaik but the same idea.
And just to prove that if it exists, someone will be against it (Rule 35?):
So as not to clutter up this thread too much, I won’t post any further updates.
I think that criticism is honest and and addresses real issues. But it doesn’t offer any solutions whatsoever, so it’s kind of pointless. This is a case where having something that has a few flaws is better than not having it at all. And if the person criticizing actually cared, it’s totally within her power to make improvements, and really wouldn’t take much effort. Probably less than complaining.
Watching some interviews with Laurie Anderson:
Found this supercool one with her, bell hooks, and Theaster Gates, which is well worth the hour and some change it took to watch/listen to:
When I built one in front of my old house, they were still pretty few and far between in the L.A. area. But they have sprouted up all over. Even though there are a few within a mile radius of me, I still want to build a new one.
As for the quality of the books therein, a steward’s gotta steward. Good stuff shows up, but yeah, one does have to broom out the occasional religious tracts, old magazines, Paris Hilton autobiographies, and software manuals. I actively kept seeding mine with books I enjoyed, and it was fun. The neighbors stopped by to thank me a whole lot more than I expected.
Slovakia’s Academy Awards (the Sun in a Net Awards) have an award for best masks.
NSFW but interesting…
More in thread.
My go-to book for such things:
That blog looks fabulous.
It really is.
I’m fascinated both by etymology and profanity, so I find this blog addictive.
Reading that, I feel like a dog who’s being “Blah, blah, blah”-ed to.
Really fascinating. They could use that stuff to transport electricity from a cold fusion plant.
ETA: One innocent explanation could be an instrument that stores data temporarily in memory, with lousy software that manages to mix up data. But somehow I doubt it.
Besides, if the material is a silver-gold alloy, would the expense of the materials outweigh the savings in electrical transport?
Just as a layperson… that depends on a whole bunch of factors.
For instance: a fuse works because if you pour too much current through a thin piece of copper, it will overheat and melt. Superconductors have current density limits, too, but presumably they’d be much higher than imperfect conductors, so I’d imagine a superconducting gold/silver alloy wire would weigh much less per foot of similarly-rated wire than copper would (even after taking into account that conductivity is a function of cross-section, not mass, so silver, which is 17% denser than copper, would be that much more massive per unit of thickness).
And you would also have to take into account the increase in theft if the cable becomes more valuable. Someone check my figures for me, but, even if the cord is 99.99% silver (which is about the composition it would take for the price of the silver to meaningfully outweigh that of the gold), silver’s worth about 80 times what copper is by weight (silver = 15.05/oz troy = $0.4839/g; copper = $6153.50/MT = $0.0062/g). So unless the superconducting alloy is almost entirely silver, and has more than a hundred times the current density limit of copper (which it very well may), you’d also have to take into account the fact that a cable made of more valuable metals will get stolen more often.
That said, the amount of power that could be saved if we could put this alloy onto a computer chip and thus didn’t have to cool computers? Or server rooms? Or data centres? That’s worth thinking about.
Your last point is a good one; miniaturization has come so far that maybe the small amount of silver and gold in a superconducting computer would be worth it.
Be interesting to see how it all turns out.
Obligatory Ars Technica article from yesterday (they don’t miss much): https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/room-temperature-superconductivity-claim-has-side-dish-of-dodgy-data/
I’m reminded of when the Sydney Harbour Authority first decided to go all futuristic and install solar panels on their illuminated marker buoys. It was supposed to save them lots of hassle and expense, as they would no longer have to replace the batteries all the time.
But they rapidly reversed their decision and returned to batteries, due to the expense of replacing unexpectedly frequent missing panels. In the meantime, every yacht in the harbour coincidentally acquired a new onboard solar array.
