They covered most of the parking lots with solar cells a few years back at nearby Michigan State. The economics weren't there, but as a friend who worked there pointed out they viewed it as research.
It's great that when it snows you don't get nearly as much of the white stuff on your vehicle. But when it snows energy production slows to a crawl. We have a lot of snowy days a third of the year.
I wonder if there’s any situation where running heaters to keep the panels clear ends up with positive electricity generation. If nothing else it would help after the fact.
I think I'd go with bifacial panels, which can absorb light from their back sides as well as the front. Snow would be a concern at higher latitude, so the panels would be tilted, and if one row were covered with snow it would tend to scatter sunlight toward the back of the row in from of it. Most of the scattered light still ends up as heat which would tend to melt the snow.
I was a senior at Michigan State when Coach Litwiller invented the radar gun for measuring pitch speed. Used to attend games primarily to watch our star wide receiver, Kirk Gibson, try another sport.
He was so proud of the radar gun that they would display the radar speed on the scoreboard, the first and only time that I have ever seen that in baseball. When they built the new McLane baseball stadium I was happy to see they kept the pitch speed on the new scoreboard.
Most professional stadiums display the pitch speed, albeit usually on one of the auxiliary boards rather than the main video board.
Thanks to enhanced pitch tracking in the last few years, they can now display even more information. The Pittsburgh Pirates' first- and third-base ribbon boards show pitch speed, vertical and horizontal break, and IIRC even the name of the pitch (bucketed based on the speed and break characteristics). It's a really neat addition to have in real time.
When the Cubs signed Aroldis Chapman I went to the first game where he came out of the bullpen and I will never forget the entire crowd looking at the scoreboard and reacting every time he hit 100 miles an hour. Now every team has somebody that hits 100. It blows my mind people can throw a baseball faster than I drive on the interstate.
Given than scoreboards were updated by hand, and could be seen from the plate, one wonders if the reported pitch speed was ever altered to perhaps confuse a batter. The one person in the stadium not able to see the scoreboard is the pitcher, the one person with input on pitch speed.
I ran GEM on some of my early computers. Also bought both Windows 1 and Windows 2 to try. GEM was clearly superior from a user stand point. Windows 3 shipped and they just disappeared.
I was really interested in how they would respond to the challenge. IBM was working publicly with Microsoft on OS/2 so they had to know the market was going to change. The only real surprise was when Microsoft went all in on marketing Windows 3 and the rise of Office.
Borland tried to compete against Office and got killed. Perhaps with a competent GUI operating system it might have been different.
I do not know about other states but there's a strange thing about Michigan journalism. When I grew up and decided to become a newspaperman they did investigations and held people, regardless of party affiliation, to a higher standard. That has totally changed.
Most of our press whether its newspapers or radio/TV are owned by large conglomerates. They are interested primarily in selling ads. We believed there was a wall between editorial and advertising but it has been torn down. Politicians have discovered that if a journalist challenges the narrative all you have to do is ban them, call their editor and threaten to pull your advertising.
So as a result the only useful journalism being done is by independent media. I have never met this lady but I respected the online publication she started highly. Looking forward to whatever she starts next.
We do not have a lot of people in Michigan who have BHAG (big hairy audacious goals) and that is why this stands out to me. If they could raise $50 million there's a good chance they can succeed. If they do, it this idea could be a template used by other communities.
I grew up in Detroit in the fifties and sixties. Although I no longer live there it still feels like home and I return home.
From the beginning of the crack epidemic in the mid-eighties through the city's bankruptcy in 2012 Detroiters refer to those as the lost years. Everything slowly started falling apart and then it sped up. This story is about the human toll that happened. Things are a world better but the city is still slowly, determinedly coming back.
The imagery of 1969, I remember it well. The Vietnam war was the first war that was televised. Everyone would watch the nightly news at 6:30 pm (take my word for it) and hear the choppers, gunfire and real life screams of people.
I thought it was sheer genius that Hendrix was able to subtly bring that into the national anthem which made it resonate so well with those purchasing his music. But without that background reference I never supposed that younger generations would hear it entirely differently.
> "The imagery of 1969, I remember it well. The Vietnam war was the first war that was televised. Everyone would watch the nightly news at 6:30 pm (take my word for it) and hear the choppers, gunfire and real life screams of people."
Slightly off-topic--
Before my time, but my professor* recalled to our class his experience watching a _live_ news report from Vietnam. Something shocking happened during the broadcast. As a visual-media scholar he contacted the station to obtain a copy. No go. He remarked how he never saw that footage ever again (at that time it would have been over 15 years ago). In our modern digital age it's difficult to imagine anything going live to the nation, and then disappearing.
* (Charles Chess, Introduction to Film, SJSU, c1992)
He might want to search the Marion Stokes collection once the Internet Archive has it all digitized. She recorded thirty years of TV for most of the major networks.
The thing which blows my mind is that the NIC handle database is simply gone. This was the database of everyone who was responsible for some internet asset (typically a domain name) in some fashion such that it was recorded for operators' use. You could look it up, it was public. Now it's simply gone. (I'm FWM6)
It's great that when it snows you don't get nearly as much of the white stuff on your vehicle. But when it snows energy production slows to a crawl. We have a lot of snowy days a third of the year.
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