I took one of the group's courses, Linear Algebra: Foundations to Frontiers, for fun at the beginning of COVID lockdown and loved it. Here's the course that teaches their basic approach to creating BLIS:
This is the first time I've "seen" Shinjuku Station. What a beautiful introduction. I first read about the station in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and always wondered what it looked like. Neat.
In all seriousness, I just learned about Sandstorm and think it could be a great fit for a local co-op I’m building. It’s a shame about the startup, but I hope we’ll get a chance to support the open collective.
JupyterLite is great! I use it heavily with my middle school math students — wonderful to have NumPy, matplotlib, and friends available without needing to set up accounts. I created a package called jupy5 that provides Turtle graphics and a p5.js-inspired sketchbook for JupyterLite as well.
Agreed except for the dig at Mark Jacobson. He was my undergrad and grad advisor, and I only knew him to be driven by data and a deep concern for the welfare of people and the planet. There are bad scientists out there but Mark isn't one of them. lol I recall him declining my request to put something about Al Gore in our common area because he didn't want to politicize the space.
Hah, point taken. When he sued other research over their research, I think he became highly political within the field, even if not along US national political lines.
Really glad to see this discussion! My former advisor, Mark Jacobson, is one of the authors of the paper cited in the article. His book "100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything" [1] is a good starting point for folks with a more technical background. I recently started working on my own version [2] for young people and beginners that uses code as a medium to explore these ideas.
Perhaps more directly relevant for the HN crowd, Tom Greenwood's book "Sustainable Web Design" [3] provides simple strategies for reducing the climate impacts of the software systems we build.
Hi, are there Jacobson papers for 100% renewables looking at geographical distribution of generation, storage and interconnectors, then modelling them against weather and demand, or are they cruder than that? If those papers exist, can you recommend an accessible way to understand these models, and their outcomes? For instance, are there areas for wind generation which are more valuable that others, to provide a balance to regional lulls, and is that data published?
Is model code available so that it can be run by any of us?
Great question! The studies do consider the spatio-temporal distribution of generation and demand. Here's a recent paper [1] that develops roadmaps for 145 countries and has infographics with links to additional resources.
I found the source code for the LOADMATCH model [2] used in the studies which can run on a laptop. You can email Mark about data, source code for the GATOR-GCMOM model [3], and advice on running it.
And here's a talk [4] he gave on the topic at NASA Ames Research Center a few years back.
I don't know if 18.065 was worth the time, it felt like a repeat of 18.06 with hardly anything new (and not nearly enough context around actual applications).
https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-programming/the-universit...
Neat stuff. The instructors are great, so I'll try to make room in my schedule for this later in the year.