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Comment Re:OK (Score 5, Informative) 169

Power usage has a daily pattern something like this:

https://db-excel.com/wp-conten...

The battery lets you take some usage from a period of low usage ( like approximately 5am on that image ) to charge up your battery array and then discharge it back into the grid at the highest usage point ( like 6pm on that image ).

A whole lot of engineering is worrying about the worst case of your metrics, so taking some usage from your best case and using it to make your worst case better is a great improvement.

Comment Re:Hypothetical question (Score 1) 26

My thought experiment is, what if two black holes were approaching each other very rapidly on a not-quite-collision course, so that the sides of their event horizons briefly overlapped as they passed. Would they stick together?

ISTM that if anything was inside the overlapping area they'd have to stick, since otherwise that thing would be escaping from one of them. But is there anything there? Maybe something that just now fell in and hasn't had time to fall to the center? Or, is there quantum foam inside a black hole, and if so, would that count as "something" that would force the black holes to stick?

Comment Re:This insult will not go unpunished (Score 1) 53

Well I was another one, and google only pointed to a handful of posts as satire posting as them.

But...
K'Breel is a fictional character from the science fiction universe created by Isaac Asimov, specifically from his "Foundation" series. K'Breel is a member of the species known as the "Seliwonks," an alien species within the Foundation universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:Whaaa? (Score 1) 14

The article actually does a good job of talking about this. It even mentions recent problems that they had in Alaska with a cable that got cut because the ice got thicker than they thought possible. I actually think that this is a pretty cool idea (pun totally intended), and I am glad to see these guys making 23 million euros to look into it. Good on them for getting paid to study a very interesting problem.

However, I would be surprised if the cable actual got laid, assuming that the current forecasts are remotely accurate. This fiber optic cable is already forecast to cost 4 times as much as a cable that took the conventional route. It is also going to be considerably more expensive to maintain. The main selling point appears to be that it is less likely to sabotaged (unless your adversary has access to nuclear submarines, I guess), and it is also less likely to be cut by an errant anchor.

There's a reason that so many of the undersea cables follow essentially the same routes. That reason is cost. No one wants to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into a cable that is going to have a serious price disadvantage.

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