My late father told me the first time he saw a TV. He was in Ann Arbor, Michigan making a sales call in 1947. When he drove in he noticed there was a huge crowd around a store window but couldn't see what was going on.
After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.
I remember a similar story from my father, of people in the small town he was in crowding standing in the front yard of a neighbor, crowding around a picture window to look in at the first TV in town in the mid-1950's.
When I was born my parents bought a TV. Back then it was sold as a way of enhancing the education of children. I remember the early days of the web when the same case was made. Pretty sure you could have predicted it would descend to the lowest common denominator ;<).
The family stayed with black and white until the late seventies. I remember the entire family watching the first moon landing. For the longest time I didn't know whether NASA was recording in color or not ;<).
I have believed for a couple of years that AI could do a better job of managing farm crop marketing than the average farmer. It would remove the emotion involved in selling the crop.
Managing all the decisions in growing a crop is too far a reach. Maybe someday, not today. Way too many variables and unexpected issues. I'm a former fertilizer company agronomist and the problem is far harder than say self driving cars.
This is pretty big news for an AI and Robotics company to move from Austin to Detroit. Granted the owner grew up in the D. This house is pretty amazing but kind of run down. But he is planning on investing $5 million to restore it.
Former Detroit Pistons star, John Salley, of the 'bad boys' era first bought this place from the church. He wanted to do movies after he was done playing basketball. He would invite movie stars, script writers and directors to live in the various bedrooms and that is how he built his network which is pretty shrewd.
The story talks about Dearborn which is adjacent to Detroit but not part of the city. However as Detroit underwent its well publicized bankruptcy fifteen years ago one of the benefits was turning back on the city's streetlights. The entire system was updated at that time and one of the benefits cited was they were spending the extra money so that they could easily add EV charging. To my knowledge it was never implemented, even on a trial basis.
Instead the governor spent millions repaving a short stretch of road that could recharge EV's. But most EV's couldn't make use of it and its such a short stretch of road you couldn't easily get any meaningful recharge.
As I have mentioned on here often I spent twenty years as a fertilizer company agronomist before transitioning to tech. So I know all about NH3 or anhydrous ammonia. If these guys are really able to cut both the price and the pollution generated from manufacture by 40% this is a really big deal.
Where I disagree is using anhydrous ammonia as a power source. I was safety officer at the last fertilizer plant where I worked. We had to identify every home owner within a certain distance according to state law. I knew every house, their phone number as well as the total number of the people at the residence. If we had a leak on ammonia (which is a gas) everyone needed to be contacted to evacuate. If we were unable to reach them we needed to physically go to their house and knock on the door.
Luckily ammonia leaks are fairly rare, the company I worked for had five locations and in their fifty year history had never had it happen. But the stuff is really that dangerous.
The previous company I worked for did have a leak before I worked there. The delivery driver didn't know what he was doing and overfilled the tank. The owner put on a suit with an oxygen tank, shut everything off and then started filling empty portable tanks (that the farmers used for application) until the big tank was below 85%.
So I cannot imagine a train or semi-truck running on the stuff since they do have real accidents each year.
This is genius, here in Michigan the city's along Lake Michigan get 'lake effect' snow that is a multiple of what occurs in the rest of the state. Muskegon tackled it with tunnels although most of them are closed now.
Could a data center that was water cooled end up melting snow off streets and sidewalks? It would be an easier sell to the public imho if it did.
> Most datacenters have no way to return their boiled, sterilized, [demineralized] water for water treatment, and so they don't give or sell datacenter waste water back, it takes heat with it when it is evaporated.
You could potentially pump the heat into the ground to use as a seasonal energy store, or otherwise switch to air cooling when you're not in district heating mode. Perhaps sell the heat energy as ConEd sells steam service in NYC [1] (serving 3M people).
Given the age on here it is doubtful you will see the virtue in what these guys are doing. But as someone older who has had friends fall and break hips, it's one of the worst things that can happen to a person. I cannot prove it but am absolutely certain that breaking a hip will shorten your life.
I think they need to lose the LED's and bring the price way down but I am watching this one.
I thought it was still up in the air whether the majority of the time geriatric people fell and then broke their hip. Or their hip breaks first, causing them to fall.
After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.
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