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13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

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Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#121

Post by bane »

ColinWright wrote: post #69
llambda wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colin, It seems a great deal of your comments have begun to fall into either the "this has already been posted" or "you're not following the rules" category. Do you see the problem with "contributing" material on top of material you see as less than satisfactory? You're only adding more cruft to the cruft. We get it. You don't like reposts. We get it. You don't like it when people don't follow the rules to a "T". Gue…

Yup, OK. I'll stop. Despite lots of people saying they appreciate it, you've convinced me. I won't cross-reference, I won't point out when people break the guidelines, I'll just silently downvote and flag, leaving people - often newbies - with no idea why their contributions disappear or get negative karma. That might or might not lead to still more bewildered posts saying they don't understand, but that's OK. There'…

Perhaps a "merge with other post" option in HN would suffice. Both posts get merged (with the links of the submissions there), the conversation threads are merged and people with an urge to curate can enjoy doing so and we can all enjoy not having duplicate (or near duplicate) posts clogging up HN?

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#122

Post by dkersten »

scott_s wrote: post #109
llambda wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colin, As civil adults and in all seriousness, would you stop? Do you see why I've complained? Cruft is cruft is cruft. Clearly your strategy to mend the dupe problem isn't having a positive effect. Maybe this is because new users aren't aware of the rules (but there will always be new users) maybe it's because people are willfully ignoring the rule (but in this case why should they pay you any attention?) or perhaps…

As a long time HN reader and contributor, please do not ask other community members to stop helping the community. If I go to the discussion page for a submission, but find it mostly empty except Colin's link to a dupe, I can then read the discussion that happened.

I agree. I've found the links to dupes extremely useful, because usually people will only comment in one such thread and without the links, I'd have no easy way of 1) knowing that there already was a discussion and 2) finding the discussion.

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#123

Post by Edog »

pixcavator wrote: post #100
uvdiv wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Basically the tree of cells are arranged in different angles so that as the sun moves some of them will always be receiving optimal sunlight when their normal is parallel with that of the incident light." Except it's trivially impossible to generate more energy like this (as he claims)! If a set of solar panels is independent and non-interacting (e.g., they don't shade or heat each other), then their total power out…

>If there is an unqiue optimal orientation for a single static panel (which under realistic assumptions there is)... If you have some kind of “continuous function attains its max” argument here, I think you should elaborate. Because it’s interesting but not really “trivial”.

He used the extreme value theorem. The theorem asserts that a continuous function on a compact set (for our purposes closed and bounded set) has a maximum (and a minimum). In this case the the closed and bounded set is the sphere of all possible orientations for solar panels. The theorem is mentioned in most introductory calculus courses, but the proof is definitely not 'trivial'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_value_theorem

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#124

Post by colanderman »

run4yourlives wrote: post #120
colanderman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I get the point. I hope he reads my message because that's the kind of feedback he needs, not the deluge of "oh you're so smart for a kid!" comments he's probably getting. (Disclaimer: I get paid to teach engineering to precocious youngsters part of the year. I'm quite familiar with the demographic.)

I hope you realize then that there is much more to teaching than telling a child - no matter how precocious - "pfft, that ain't so great." Being an asshole is never excusable. While I understand your point about not over-praising, this actually is something that few of his peers are able to do. Proper praise for the boy would be to appreciate the effort, applaud his commitment to the problem and recognize that he may…

I hope you realize my initial comment wasn't addressed to the child in question, or I would have e-mailed it directly to him and worded it less strongly. Rather, I intended to discuss with the HN community the technical merits of the article. (If treating his article as the work of an adult isn't praise I don't know what is!)

On a side note, I feel mildly insulted that you feel the need to tell me how to do my job. If you're interested in the intricacies of the art of teaching self-directed youth (which mostly involves understanding the child in question, and saying the right thing at the right time) I'd be glad to discuss them with you.

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#126

Post by joshaidan »

He needs to do the same experiment during the wintertime when the angle of the sun changes. You won't get accurate results until the experiment is performed year round. Different angles of inclination perform better at various times of year, and there are some thoughts that multi-inclined arrays average the same output as uniform arrays.

Remember, a tree only has leaves in the summertime, not the winter. :)

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#127

Post by RobertHubert »

Anti-Ratfish wrote: post #30
RobertHubert wrote: post #22

Cant get much better than millions of years of try and die I guess. Mother nature is pretty crazy! We should copy her work more often :)

Ponder that when you have impacted wisdom teeth. Teeth are a good argument against intelligent design as well!

Well I didnt say she's perfect lol. Trees are just a great example of how evolution has done a pretty good gob on a specific trait. Now compared to how long humans have been around and our constant changing environments and diet, medicine and other advancements keeping us alive, trees have had quite a head start for getting stuff "right"! But yes intelligent design is garbage. But what happens if we design an intelligent race and set it loose on another planet and they start doing stuff they weren't designed to do? lol. Bad designer or stupid creatures? I'm just having fun here...

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#128

Post by marshray »

joshaidan wrote: post #126

He needs to do the same experiment during the wintertime when the angle of the sun changes. You won't get accurate results until the experiment is performed year round. Different angles of inclination perform better at various times of year, and there are some thoughts that multi-inclined arrays average the same output as uniform arrays. Remember, a tree only has leaves in the summertime, not the winter. :)

The second page said something about "The most interesting results were in December..."

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#129

Post by joshaidan »

marshray wrote: post #128
joshaidan wrote: post #126

He needs to do the same experiment during the wintertime when the angle of the sun changes. You won't get accurate results until the experiment is performed year round. Different angles of inclination perform better at various times of year, and there are some thoughts that multi-inclined arrays average the same output as uniform arrays. Remember, a tree only has leaves in the summertime, not the winter. :)

The second page said something about "The most interesting results were in December..."

I may have my logic backwards, it should be tested in the summer time when the sun is higher in the sky. Either way, the test needs to be done year round to see how the results vary.

Re: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence

#130

Post by postfuturist »

marknutter wrote: post #89

Is it just me, or do most articles about young kids doing intellectually notable stuff start out with something along the lines of "while most 13-year-olds spend their free time playing video games or cruising Facebook...."

Yes, it's a journalistic cliche. I would hazard to say that the average adult is also more likely to be playing video games or cruising Facebook than pursuing scientific research.
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