"We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games."

This seems like a prima facie bad conclusion to their hockey study, considering that the Panthers won the cup while being effectively tied for the lead in penalty minutes, with #3 not being particularly close. Yes there's a weak correlation between penalties and losing, but considering that the absolute best teams usually have a high rat index, there's a big lost opportunity to go into the rat factor in hockey and how it translates to the corporate world!

if this is due to that specific manufacturer having battery fires, i don't hate it as it seems like the battery replacement option is basically the same as a recall. completely different from a random bug causing it or an across-the-board EOL update. pixel longevity isn't great, but at least they're relatively easy to maintain and the device protection program is acceptable.

I guess even if we didn't hate it, it'd be nice if they said that, so people knew that it's not a buggy update, but rather, they have a ticking time bomb in their pants pocket.

This isn't really accurate, they're targeting industrial wastewater yes but they are working with and have tested brackish water up to several thousand TDS. They had a working EDR system for drinking water installed in Gaza until relatively recently and several in India as well. I'm also skeptical they can make it work with seawater, but it absolutely works with undrinkable brackish water in many other cases too.

This is a questionable way to present what's an excellent project and hopefully soon to be commercialized technology. The big deal here is it's a presumably installation ready application of EDR for desalination instead of RO which most systems use. This is a big deal because the membranes use electricity instead of pressure as the filter, which means everything can run at low, normal plumbing, pressures instead of the crazy high pressure RO stuff. For seawater it's borderline whether or not it will match RO for performance, but for lower salinity groundwater and industrial wastewater, it should be significantly higher performance for the same power as well as lower maintenance and capex.

The no batteries thing is basically irrelevant to the innovation, and in fact Genius Water already offers no battery RO systems, also with questionable benefit (as well as being difficult to work with).

I run a solar and water focused EPC in East Africa and will hopefully be working with these guys in the future when they're off the ground with a commercial system. The potential is extremely high, particularly if the maintenance overhead and operational complexity can come down in practice.

It sounds lime an MPPT on the supply side, with an ideal load-point tracking on the demand side. My understanding is that there are controllers (including for solar water pumping in the East Africa market) that pursue this. The concept applies more generally to systems where the load presented is configurable by system plant parameters, such as flow-rate & height.

Yeah; the solar part is really questionable. In an installation without batteries, they’d need an additional large tank to store excess daytime output.

Without such a tank, they’d need to somehow power the thing at night, which means a big battery, just like RO.

Also, the article suggests the power input needs to be steady and they use a computer to run it at higher rates when the battery would be charging.

Assuming there is a small battery or power grid (as both systems require), you could oversize an RO system and then change its duty cycle to keep the batteries at (say) 80% to prevent the solar production from curtailing. Round-tripping electricity through our home battery loses about 20%.

So, the “advantage” boils down to two questions that the article doesn’t answer: (1) what are the relative energy efficiencies of this system (in theory) vs RO? If the new system is 20% worse, RO wins, regardless of this optimization (2) what is the relative equipment cost vs. max throughput? (Since both setups assume oversizing to get better solar utilization).

I’d also like to know if the new system requires plastic, since the RO membrane probably leaches all sorts of nasties into its output.

I do like the fact that they are focusing on brackish water. We have this problem even in the coastal US (in the form of water softener output), and I’m sure they could sell a premium alternative to RO as a way to get scaling advantages on the manufacturing of the equipment.

Tanks are fairly cheap, and you'll need one anyways. But yeah, the solar angle is not what's interesting here. It's the electrodialysis.

i'm down with solar robots, but this is definitely one of those problems that's only a problem because of overly restrictive immigration laws. installing panels is pretty easy, there are tons of people who would be delighted to come to the US and install for $20/hr.

source : have a solar engineering firm in Kenya, and have never had problems with panel installation labor (QA is another story).

How did this become about immigration? A lot of americans would also do it for $20 an hour.

Have you ever seen a non-hispanic landscaper in the desert southwest metropolitan areas? Me neither.

Now try to find ANYBODY willing to work out in the middle of the Mojave or Sonoran deserts. Espero que hables bien español.

Hispanic!= Immigrants. Much of the southwest was formerly even part of Mexico, many of those people didn't even move in the history of the US.

Try talking to a landscaper anywhere in the desert southwest and see for yourself. Not the guy who has his name on the truck because there are a few natives who still own the business because inglesa, talk to the guys actually doing the work out in the sun. 100% Hispanic immigrants.

I haven't used their product, but in a former life I had these guys as a customer: https://raptormaps.com/

It seemed like a pretty solid idea re: the QA part.

This is really cool research, but to say "symplectic geometry, an abstract field of math that is generally far removed from messy real-world details" in the context of orbit planning is a gross mischaracterization. All serious solar system dynamics research happens in phase space not cartesian space, which means symplectic geometry - that is the orbital parameters are integrated instead of x,y,z. This amusingly named website has a fairly approachable description of what's happening : https://wiki.tfes.org/Symplectic_Integrators

... did you link a website advocating that the shape of Earth is flat?

Flat Earthers spend thousands of times more effort on their research than Roundies do, because they understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Few know this.

well only most "roundies" don't waste time on settled concepts. So flat earthers can easily spend 1000 times more effort than no effort at all. its just too bad that their research is stupid and fruitless.

I also think they understand very little.

i thought it was making fun of flat earthers? it's pretty amusing they have a good writeup on a very technical piece of very circular math if that is not the case.

They have newsletters going back to 1977, I can't find any evidence they are satirical.

you can only account for 6hrs of sun per day, so it's more like 30liters per day. that gives you 10m^2 per American. however serving Americans is not a practical use case. i agree these kinds of systems are not going to be competitive with large scale PV driven RO (i build medium scale solar RO plants in africa and they're pretty good and surprisingly affordable). however having a mobile one you can put on a vehicle or deploy in a small scale distributed manner with little to no expertise would be extremely useful in low population density or nomadic context.

I took couple years off coding to build a Kenyan infrastructure engineering firm - we're still going although I've started programming again. The biggest thing we've done is 6.7km of a mountain / lakeside ring road in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria (Kodula village section specifically, the work is visible on satellite). We're actually not completely done with it but watching the community growth from having the paved road reaching completion and improving the accessibility was absolutely incredible. Extremely frustrating sector to work in and difficult to pay yourself a salary even when it's not charity, but sometimes the rewards are awesome. I have a physics background so doing civil / electrical / mechanical stuff is tractable for me beyond programming, then we use the classic PM tooling to make things run ~relatively better than most people doing stuff out there. All Kenyan engineers other than me, lots of smart people who are highly motivated to meet and work with.

Moving atoms must be 6x10^23 more satisfying than slinging electrons. Kudos to making the leap to building infrastructure for the community.

May I ask what made you take the leap?

Wow, super cool, I was in Kenya and Cameroon last year on two different projects (one tech, one traditional consulting doing market research) and there are so many problems still to be solved. If you're thinking about impact/scale for problems to tackle over there, what would you be working on? Somewhat crazy q, given how bad traffic and roads are, what do you think about dirigibles for goods transport between some major cities (or even regions like cobalt mines in DRC to Zambia)?

What's Kenya like for infrastructure development compared to regional neighbors? Seems always that Kenya is miles ahead of other countries in that part of Africa on almost every metric?

I was in Kenya and Cameroon for projects last year and went to Uganda on holiday, Kenya is far ahead of Cameroon, Uganda actually had decent infrastructure but it was all two lane highways so when you get heavy freight there can be huge delays (ditto for much of Kenya, but they built a rail line at least). Power was a bit better in Kenya than Cameroon, but in my apt (in a nice part of Nairobi) it went out about once a day and had to switch to generators for a bit.

love foraging seaweed and eating it in a bunch of different things. large scale consumption of it is pretty difficult unless you're somewhere that conveniently has both a lot of good stuff locally and has a food culture that knows how to prepare it. cooking with eg kelp is not trivial. there are probably lots of interesting industrial and processed seaweed products that could be very good, especially the animal feed applications, but i think these kinds of articles overlook the very real problems associated with building cuisine from ingredients that aren't widely adopted.