Haha, brilliant! ;) It's a carbon offset program! ;)

No problem :) I first did my own research, then met up with the president of the Icelandic Concrete Association, who's pretty excited about the project, to discuss it further. The project is going to be unusual in quite a few ways, for example, it's going to be what's called an "umbrella earth home", and we're going for a natural cave/steampunk look to it (based on an idea that the concrete guy had, we're going to use high pressure water on the interior after the concrete sets to remove the outer layers of cement from the gravel, leaving it looking like rough rock on the inside). It may not be a first in the world, but it'll be a first for Iceland. :)

I've been thinking about the long term on everything with the project. For example, instead of drilling a well to pump from, I'm having the cold water come from a persistent natural spring up on the mountainside about half a kilometer away, naturally filtered through gravel and sand (my excavator operator is working on it as we speak, actually), so it takes no power to run and should last very well. Wells are standard where I am but I found I could get water from the spring for about the same price, maybe even less.

Yeah good luck with that.

I'm not an expert, but the steel is protected from corrosion in most forms of concrete due to the mildly alkaline chemistry of the concrete.

Gee, I wish I'd written something like:

The cement carbonates at a relatively constant rate (give or take somewhat depending on various factors like moisture), a given depth per year, which brings it down to a more neutral pH, which then when it gets to the steel allows the steel to rust

;)

And if you throw on sacrificial metal [wikipedia.org], you can keep that steel corrosion-free indefinitely.

Galvanic protection of concrete is rather tricky versus something like a ship's hull, the electric potential depends a lot on its environment, even where it is in the structure, and if there's too little it doesn't protect and if there's too much you cause electrolysis of the water in the cement (it's a hydrate), which leads to hydrogen embrittlement of the steel. And it's usually not some single electrode, it's generally a lot of separate cast electrodes or are applied to the concrete as a coating, so it's a big issue to replace/redo. And if you don't, it rusts and falls apart.

I strongly prefer passively stable structures. :) Something that could be completely forgotten and still be there after a thousand years.

The question is not whether you "can", it's what it costs and what constraints it imposes. It's possible to make an EV that goes a good chunk of a thousand miles, it'd just be a totally impractical absurdly-expensive monstrosity.

No question that batteries are advancing - usually a gravimetric energy density doubling every 8 years or so. But the trend for volumetric isn't as impressive, and the price changes per watt hour are far less predictable. Sometimes the next generation which improves your battery stats is more expensive than the previous one. Sometimes it's cheaper. Overall the trend is negative, but it's very bumpy and not as fast.

I saw a Tesla store in Reykjavík the other day. Haven't seen a Tesla on the roads, but still, neat to know that they're here. :)

Shortening a car is usually bad for aerodynamics, which is bad for range. Lowering the roofline reduces the frontal area, which increases the range, but are you sure there'd be enough headroom if you did that?

It's weaker, so the weight savings on major structural components isn't as great there. But I agree with you, I find this an odd move on their part. Unless they've got something out of left field in mind, like a composite frame.

I really despise steel. I just got back from walking over to a muffler repair shop to have them fix a flange that's rusted away for my pickup. : One of many, many parts that's had to be swapped out over the past year due to rust damage. Oh, I better go back out and spray bolts on my Insight with some rust remover after I submit this post... got to do that daily now for a week or so or those rusted-to-hell bolts are going to strip when I remove the cover to change out the gasket. And the Insight is an "aluminum" car - but the engine is still mostly steel.

I'm building a house now and am even looking to avoid steel in the concrete. For the foundation, we're just going to use fiber for reinforcement. For the walls (assuming the engineer signs off on it) we're going to use basalt fiber rebar. Most people don't realize that when you design a concrete wall, you decide how long it's going to live. The cement carbonates at a relatively constant rate (give or take somewhat depending on various factors like moisture), a given depth per year, which brings it down to a more neutral pH, which then when it gets to the steel allows the steel to rust (the highly basic environment normally protects it). When steel rusts it expands nearly tenfold, and thus the wall spalls out and is ruined. The lack of use of pozzolan in concrete because everyone wants it to harden super-fast so they can finish and move on to the next project only makes the problem worse. Roman concrete (with a volcanic ash pozzolan and no steel) has lasted for thousands of years, but little that we build today with concrete will last even 100, and in hostile environments (for example, bridges near the ocean) you may only get a couple decades. Basalt rebar should hopefully allow for the durability of ancient concrete while allowing for the tensile strength of modern concrete (my home is also going to have a vaulted structure to keep as much force as possible as compressive force, which concrete naturally tolerates well), and I'm going to use a pozzolan (basalt dust), which minimizes the CO2 footprint as well as increasing ultimate strength, durability, and watertightness. Oh, and my gravel/sand will also be basalt, and it's being built on basalt bedrock. ;) Mmm, lava....

I disagree. Most people don't have a car that can move furniture or large appliances. They just pay to rent a vehicle for those occasions. I find it odd that they don't apply the same logic to EVs. No car solves every imaginable situation. A good furniture mover's not likely to be an affordable commuter. Both will likely suck on the track. All three of those will likely suck off road. Etc. Vehicles come in radically different varieties for precisely that reason.

Actually, my preferred solution for EV range is like the AC Propulsion Long-Hauler trailer - a small self-steering (aka, easy to drive) genset trailer. You could own one, rent one, borrow one, have a group of friends/neighbors that share one, whatever. You've got range when you need it, and are otherwise you're pure electric and not having to haul around an engine that you don't use and which takes up space and weight in your vehicle (aka, PHEV).

If they go with steel instead of aluminum that'll probably cost them about 10% range (matters less for big structural elements, but overall it has a significant weight difference), which means more batteries. Seems weird that this would work out to be overall more economical.

more than anything else. Same goes for Arcades. $0.25 cents had a lot more buying power 30 years ago, but then again so did everything else. Arcade operators needed to raise prices to $1 or more a play to be profitable, but very few people can throw that kind of money away for 5 minutes of entertainment. If you're going to hang out at a mall for hours on end you need enough disposable income to do stuff.

I've seen a lot of harebrained theories about what cause the 80's game crash, but fact is it was just a massive recession.

"Websites don't come with a nationality,"

Mine has an America flag in the website logo.

https://github.com/kogmbh/WebO...

I like Dojo in part because it attempts to make all the core widgets accessible. From:
http://dojotoolkit.org/referen...
"Dojo has made a serious commitment to creating a toolkit that allows the development of accessible Web applications for all users, regardless of physical abilities. The core widget set of Dojo, dijit, is fully accessible since the 1.0 release, making Dojo the only fully accessible open source toolkit for Web 2.0 development. This means that users who require keyboard only navigation, need accommodations for low vision or who use an assistive technology, can interact with the dijit widgets."

ARM didn't make the ARM1/2 either, they were fabricated by VLSI (the company, not the acronym). ARM has always been fabless.

Impressive, but can you fit a timecube into it?