How do hydroelectric plants unnaturally cool water going through them?
My reasoning would be that hydroelectric plants dam up the water and the water at the lower levels of the reservoir is that which spins the turbines (and is released). I would imagine the "original" depth of the water being discharged has a non-trivial impact on downstream river temperatures - though I lack any and all qualifications necessary to say this with any degree of certainty.
Huh. I couldn’t find anything about it one way or the other.
This: "there were no humans on board" Made me think of this: "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
Is there more to that quote that makes it make sense? Otherwise both the human and the dog are redundant as a pair as their purposes are circular and don't benefit the factory.
Depending on the exact shape, sometimes dropping giant bits of steel in the ocean can be very good for shipping; we purposefully sink ships that are EOL for this exact purpose fairly often.
That's the first I've heard of something like this. What's the purpose of dropping specifically-shaped steel into the ocean?
As someone else said, it helps coral reefs grow.
And I meant to say that it’s good for fishing, not shipping. My bad.
There's quite a lot of ocean that doesn't hardly have a "native habitat". Most ocean doesn't look like a coral reef, most ocean looks like water sitting on top of dirt. Unfortunately, the living parts of oceans are also the parts that tend to be easy to get to, and putting stuff farther away will be more expensive. But careful placement may be able to mitigate that. It is still ultimately a 3D environment where the v…
Our 2D intuition leads back on track though, since 2D (or really 1D, or whatever fractal dumention represents thecoastliine) is almost certainly where data centers will get built, not on the middle of the pacific.
3D is relevant to the heat dissipation, and floating submerged data centers doesn't sound so difficult, at least, once you have the idea of a data center not on land. Fortunately, you don't have to go to the middle of the pacific to get away from the living parts of the ocean. You just want to get off the continental shelves, which is easier in some places than others.
That's a good enough reason to pull it out, replace/upgrade the equip, and drop it back in with the new setup (new sources of energy), and if they get the whole thing to transmit wireless-ly with a 1% failures per 2 years (8 out of the 855 servers) then it's a truly set-and-forget thing. And they can be bringing them up every 2-5-10 years to replace/upgrade the HW and drop it back in.
If that was the reason, we'd know about it from the PR release. This must have been a failure.
It’s amazing how quickly one gets downvoted for criticizing M$. But the point was legit. Whenever M$ does something it thinks is good you would hear about that. Remember how WSL was touted as a perfect solution for all your Linux needs? And then WSL2 was touted even louder? They had to forgo WSL and start again with a completely different approach because WSL never really worked well. How many bad things have you heard about WSL? None?
Is it? I want to talk with aliens as much as the next guy, but so far it seems like the vast majority of the universe is a vacuum--biologically speaking.
No one ever said the vacuum has to be filled biologically. The universe is a vacuum but even there you get spontaneous virtual particles getting created out of nothing as far as we know.
That's a good enough reason to pull it out, replace/upgrade the equip, and drop it back in with the new setup (new sources of energy), and if they get the whole thing to transmit wireless-ly with a 1% failures per 2 years (8 out of the 855 servers) then it's a truly set-and-forget thing. And they can be bringing them up every 2-5-10 years to replace/upgrade the HW and drop it back in.
Microsoft probably has enough money that they could leave the original one in, and pop down a new one with the new green energy. (Of course, individual projects still have finite budgets.)
My reasoning would be that hydroelectric plants dam up the water and the water at the lower levels of the reservoir is that which spins the turbines (and is released). I would imagine the "original" depth of the water being discharged has a non-trivial impact on downstream river temperatures - though I lack any and all qualifications necessary to say this with any degree of certainty.
Huh. I couldn’t find anything about it one way or the other.
Anecdotally, I know the water outflow from Lake Raystown in Pennsylvania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raystown_Lake) is SIGNIFICANTLY colder than the lake surface is. I spent a week in the summer there one year and we spent a lot of time boating/swimming in the lake as well as tubing down the river and the days we spent tubing were much warmer air temperature but much colder water temperature.
this! another way to look at it: your solar panels are temporarily "stealing" heat generated by sun rays hitting a surface of equivalent color. When you use electricity to do some work, it will be turned back to heat. so if you want to be 100% "heat neutral", all you have to do is to ensure that for every square meter of solar panels you also paint an proportionate area with a color that reflects the right amount of…
Solar panels don't work on IR, they work on visible light. IR might be reflected or absorbed. The visible component is absorbed. Whether it would have turned into heat or reflected back in to space is about a 1 in two chance.
sorry I don't understand the comment; visible light carries energy too and thus can heat materials it hits. what happens to the IR part of the spectrum is irrelevant and can be captured by the general concept of "color of the object", defined as the spectrum of reflected vs absorbed EM radiation
Is it? I want to talk with aliens as much as the next guy, but so far it seems like the vast majority of the universe is a vacuum--biologically speaking.
No one ever said the vacuum has to be filled biologically. The universe is a vacuum but even there you get spontaneous virtual particles getting created out of nothing as far as we know.
Virtual particles aren't particles, and don't get created out of nothing. They're a mathematical trick to simplify (read: make tractable) physics in a particular formalism.
Apart from being drawn as particles on diagrams, they violate every rule of what a particle is supposed to be.
There are formalisms where they aren't necessary, for example quantum lattice models.