...m...

…i apologise for the long letter; i didn’t have time to write a shorter one…

…that’s how i find nouns in my head…

…first time i heard ozzy playing in a grocery store twenty-five years ago, i knew my age had passed into history…

…i give everyone i work with stickers when they do a good job, and they all go crazy for them: interns, bosses, the lot!..

…our CEO rolled his eyes at first and said they were patronising, then the entire staff catcalled him over it, so he changed his mind and loves getting stickers now, too…

^{(i think that’s half the reason why armed forces do ribbons)}

…where’s eris?..

…i’m not sure tesla’s ambitions will be around much longer…

…the most you’d ever need would be five; six offers a spare in case one’s lost…

…we just called him evil pope…

…in the afterlife, you could be headed for the serious strife: now you make the scene all day, but tomorrow there’ll be hell to pay!…

…pope francis was a good guy, and he didn’t need to flaunt his christianity to be so: his actions spoke for themselves, as they should…

…fair point, although we saw first saw roy scheider fraternising with dolphins in 1984…

…seaquest did it first…

…problem is there are enough imperial f*ckheads ready to dogpile on any virtue signal du jour…

…recursive eisenhower method works well for me: it’s effective + simple-enough not to be bogged-down by overplanning…

…fake window shutters are f*cking stupid…

…i’ve only done urban installations, but recently i’ve been giving a lot of thought to the localised effect of high-albedo reflective roofs (and other materials) and transpirative tree canopies (and other vegetation) being replaced by low-albedo solar photovoltaic arrays: it measurably increases heat load on the local environment, reduces radiative cooling at night, and drives up overall cooling demand, which presents a deep rabbit-hole of cost-benefit analyses in the tradeoff between reduced grid use during the day versus increased grid use at night, the potential net reduction in carbon emissions therefrom, the added carbon emissions from manufacturing and maintaining solar photovoltaic infrastructure, and the loss of ecosystem carbon capture and biodiversity services from decreased solar exposure and increased heat island effect…

…it’s a poorly-understood subject of ongoing academic study in both urban and natural environments, with the largest arrays i’ve read subjected to that sort of rigorous analysis measuring on the order of 1/300,000 the scale of this proposed project…still, apples-to-apples, that larger study was performed in desert scrubland and measured about 4°C increased local temperatures, which is significant but not a good proxy for the weather effects one would see generated by a 750 square-mile convection cell over truly barren desert…

…back to your original question, most solar photovoltaic panels loose somewhere on the order of ¼ to ½ percent efficiency per °C incease in panel temperature, but like most things in the real world it’s actually much more complicated than a simple multiplier…the short version is that investors wouldn’t be building desert arrays if they didn’t present a short-term economic gain, and they certainly do provide plenty of power despite the increased heat, but the long-term environmental impact of radically altering surface albedo at such a large scale isn’t well-understood relative to the implied let alone actual changes in carbon-intensive energy generation…

…ye gads, just imagine the heat island generated by 750 square miles of black glass: that’s a weather-creating convective air mass…

…NCSA mosaic won the web, absolutely; in truth i think it gave a lot of us an excuse to upgrade from terminals and shell accounts…

…i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..

…yeah, i’d rock thousand leaves…