There is an interesting symbiosis developing between NYC Mesh and my startup Canopy: the data mesh wants power, the power mesh wants data. Both want the other to be more resilient and less expensive.
In the pic at the top of the article, taken on my rooftop, you can see a white, round thing. This is a ubiquiti nanobeam wifi radio. Just below it you can see a solar panel. It belongs to an off-grid solar power unit called Ra http://canopyrising.com/#ra. The nanobeam is now bolted directly onto the solar power unit Ra enabling the node to support the local data mesh during a blackout.
On the roof and inside Ra, a beaglebone black runs the http://sunpress.co network of websites directly on off-grid solar power.
Ra also delivers solar power for lighting and usb charging in the form of the Canopy Cuba table http://canopyrising.com/#cuba , a bedside table that stores days worth of power and is found in the http://tremolino.co guest rooms 1 floor down.
Canopy aims to create a marketplace where neighbors who invest in the products to generate solar power trade with those who invest in capacity to store it.
Unlike traditional solar and storage, which is limited to property owners as it requires financing, design, permitting, and installation; Canopy is accessible renters and owners as it is low cost and requires no financing, no design, no permitting, and no install.
How does the cost and resiliency compare to purchasing energy from the grid?
For reference, I buy 100% wind source power from Xcell @ $0.14 / kWh. Reliability is generally very good, but to compare apples to apples it would cost ~$500 to purchase a backup generator [1] for the 1-2 hours of outages we have every year.
[1]: a battery system would fulfill a similar role, but I'm not sure of the cost -- and for something that I would essentially never use, it may actually be better for the environment to keep the generator.
1. The target price for Ra http://canopyrising.com/#ra is $600-800, just under what you would pay for a 1kw emergency generator. Initial market is apartment renters in flat-roof, multi-floor urban buildings, who can not run generators indoors b/c of fumes, etc.
2. Battery capacity built into the Cuba table http://canopyrising.com/#cuba allows power arbitrage, buying power at the lowest price during off-peak hours to charge up, then drawing from batteries during peak pricing on the grid. In NYC, Conedison sells power for 7-19 cents during the day, but from midnight until 8a, it costs just over a penny. Voluntary time of use programs are common across the country, but few products exist to leverage them. http://www.coned.com/customercentral/energyresvoluntary.asp
> Claude Pouillet greatly contributed to the development of climate sciences by estimating the solar constant, i.e. the incoming solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere (also called total solar irradiance) ... He also evaluated the total absorption of solar radiation by the atmosphere.
Alas, it is in French and I am unable to read more than a few words of the language.
People who work in solar radiometry tend to come from astronomy, metrology, space science, and physics.
Your conceit (and I use that as the literary term; an "extended metaphor with a complex logic") is that some E.T.s provide guidance that 1) elevated temperature in people is 'very similar to the process in the human body'.
At best these E.T. are using Wittgenstein's ladder, a.k.a. "lies to children." This is about as true as saying that a pain on your stomach from a stomach ache is the same as a pain from appendicitis, is the same as the pain from taking a punch in the stomach. They all certainly cause pain in the belly, but the reasons for the pain, and the ways to resolve the pain, are very different.
The other part of the conceit is that 2) these E.T.s can say 'Planetary temperatures are common when a species, typically a young one, upsets the balance'. This implies that temperature increases are a common result of upset, but decreases, or other sorts of ecosystem collapse, are not common.
I am not ignorant. I chose 'Snowball Earth' precisely because it is not an ice age. Certainly these E.T.s must have come across cases on otherplanets where a new species ended up breaking the greenhouse effect that was keeping their ecosysem alive, and ended up with a snowball cascade.
Since the statements from this 'wise group' of entites doesn't pass a basic sniff test, they end up being straw puppets uttering only the words you think they should say. I feel like your conceit ends up being nothing more than a wordy attempt to elevate your personal beliefs, instead of the insightful metaphor you meant for it.
> Recreating Herschel's actinometry: An essay in the historiography of experimental practice
> In the course of a four-month period of research I worked with a replica of the so-called `actinometer', an instrument to measure the intensity of solar radiation, which was invented by John Herschel in 1824
The French word "actinométrie" has its own Wikipedia entry, which seems to be more focused on the sun than used in recent English. See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinom%C3%A9trie . Get your E.T.s to learn French and there's no problem.
Your insistence on "one word" is about equal to numerology in its usefulness.
Spaces are a question of orthography. In English we happen to use spaces to write "air raid shelter" instead of "airraidshelter". (Some even write 'air-raid shelters'.) In German they use "Luftschutzbunker" - "air protection bunker".
Had English gone a slightly different way some 1000 years ago, then we would write "solar radiometry" as "solarradiometry". There's no deep meaning to the space character on our psyche.
Indeed, the English compound expression "solar radiometry" is the single German word "Sonneradiometrie". Here's a paper which uses it to describe the focus of activities in the PTB laboratories - http://www.ptb.de/cms/fileadmin/internet/fachabteilungen/abt... .
It's also the Danish word "solradiometri", used in ftp://ftp.oami.europa.eu/bulletin/ctm/2012/2012_075_PDF/2012_075_DA.pdf .
In the pic at the top of the article, taken on my rooftop, you can see a white, round thing. This is a ubiquiti nanobeam wifi radio. Just below it you can see a solar panel. It belongs to an off-grid solar power unit called Ra http://canopyrising.com/#ra. The nanobeam is now bolted directly onto the solar power unit Ra enabling the node to support the local data mesh during a blackout.
On the roof and inside Ra, a beaglebone black runs the http://sunpress.co network of websites directly on off-grid solar power.
Ra also delivers solar power for lighting and usb charging in the form of the Canopy Cuba table http://canopyrising.com/#cuba , a bedside table that stores days worth of power and is found in the http://tremolino.co guest rooms 1 floor down.
Canopy aims to create a marketplace where neighbors who invest in the products to generate solar power trade with those who invest in capacity to store it.
Unlike traditional solar and storage, which is limited to property owners as it requires financing, design, permitting, and installation; Canopy is accessible renters and owners as it is low cost and requires no financing, no design, no permitting, and no install.