Tag: solar

I need this.

It records the hours of bright sunshine by burning a hole through a card.

The Campbell-Stokes Recorder (sometimes called a Stokes sphere) is a type of sunshine recorder. It was invented by John Francis Campbell in 1853 and modified in 1879 by Sir George Gabriel Stokes. The original design by Campbell consisted of a glass sphere set into a wooden bowl with the sun burning a trace on the bowl. Stokes’s refinement was to make the housing out of metal and to have a card holder set behind the sphere.

[Found here via here.]

I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Hot LInks

“Look, I got this. Just gimme a coupla minutes.” –Cristobal Columbo circa 1492

The Great American Solar Eclipse is tomorrow. Plug in your location here to find out what time you need to start banging your pots and pans to drive the dragon away. If anyone tells you it’s safe to look at with the nekkid eye, he/she is a fool.
Don’t do it.

Apparently The Ancients blamed dogs for the temporary darkness of a solar eclipse.

Every time I hear it, it seems she’s singing about her cat. On the other hand, it’s a good Solar Eclipse party song.

The Mystery of the U.S. Navy’s Ghost Blimp is still unsolved after 75 years.

84 year-old folk artist Denny Lunn tells some stories [via].

The last Blockbuster store is still open for business.

An honorary statue in New Orleans, depicting a famous military figure on a horse, was defaced with the words “Tear It Down” recently. The honored warrior was captured, tortured and killed by fire decades before Europeans even knew about this continent, and centuries prior to the founding of the United States of America. TRUE.

Walter E. Williams on Rewriting American History.

[Top image from here.]

 

Casa de Coprolite

It’s a house. It’s a very ugly house. It’s a very ugly house created for a competition by people who have no concept of aesthetics, let alone standard construction practices. Here’s a partial description justifying the brilliance of the design:

DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
Faced with the typical house model of a “box construction” made up of standard industrialized components, we chose to build a clever house with systemic logic components, rising into what we call a distributed intelligence. This means that each component of the prototype contains the same level of technology, energy, structural, etc… With this we say that the logic of all is found in each of the parts, and not vice versa.

That is, distributed intelligence can be understood as the development in fusion research systems and materials, implying a change of procedures, multi functionality in the construction field. Opening the possiblities of digital parametric design from the traditional assembly of standardized industrial components of the home-computer.

In other words, they’ve not only designed one of the ugliest dwellings ever imagined, they’ve invented a brand new lexicon to justify it. Archibabble at its worst. Phew.

To be fair, the design is clever in one respect, that the shape was generated based upon solar tracking, that is, a computer model engineered a shape that maximizes the amount of surface area that receives direct sunlight throughout the day and throughout the year, thus determining the configuration of the solar panels. Win.

Unfortunately, the maximum efficiency is compromised by site orientation, its global latitude, and, um, unpredictable cloud cover. And it’s ugly. Fail.

[More info and images here via here.]

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