Maybe a more flexible policy could be something like: for every parking spot, you must add 1 kw of solar somewhere on your property (whether that's the parking lot or building roof or whatever is up to you) or add 2 kw of solar somewhere within a 20 miles of the site or add 3kw of solar somewhere in the US.

A lot of companies might find that the last option is the cheapest, and if that's the case we should want and encourage them to do that instead.

If you go to 100% electrode positive you tend to heat the metal rather poorly, but can turn the end of your tungsten electrode into a molten blob -- which is usually not desirable.

Like the Ukraine war, maybe one good thing thing we can say about this terrible situation is that it may encourage a lot of countries to move to renewables (or nuclear) sooner than they otherwise would and cut back on fossil fuels.

The energy crises of the 1970s caused people to start caring a lot more about fuel economy. Now we have the technology for people not to need to buy gas to propel their vehicle at all, and many of them once they switch they're never switching back.

(Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switching to EVs is something that happens one household at a time over many years. So, it shouldn't come as a sudden shock, and its something the utilities can make long term plans about. It just means power utilities need to be on the ball about not putting off infrastructure upgrades, and it means somewhat higher electricity prices for residential customers.)

(Though something that happens in just intonation is that you often find out you need more notes than you might have originally thought, because JI makes distinctions between notes that are treated as the same in 12-TET. For instance, you might have 10/9 or 9/8 as your major second, or your minor seventh might be 9/5, 16/9, 7/4, or 12/7 depending on context.)

I don't think any just intonation guitar has been mass produced, but you can definitely build one or modify an existing guitar if you have the right tools and are willing to do a bunch of math and learn how to install frets.

This page is about a JI keyboard I built a while back, but there's also a few pictures of a couple old Harmony guitars I adapted to JI: https://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/keyboard.html

Here's a so-so performance of myself playing a Bach piece on a newer and vastly improved version of that just intonation keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbWnDhip0A

In 12-EDO the song has 11 distinct pitch classes. (Bach used the tritone, but not the minor second.) In my straightforward JI interpretation, I use 15 pitch classes. (I would have used 16, but my keyboard simply doesn't have a key for that note.)

Israel did in fact do that. In fact there were several months of Israel not allowing any food or supplies whatsoever into Gaza. That was about a year ago. (It's possible Israel may have been supplying rival groups unfriendly to Hamas with food/supplies/weapons in secret, but all regular humanitarian aid was shut off.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens

Sometimes the harmonics aren't exact. On a piano, if the fundamental is 100hz then the 2nd harmonic might be, say, 200.1hz or something. Some inharmonic instruments like gongs aren't anywhere close to the "ideal" harmonic series.

For overtones, there's less of an established standard, but usually the 1st overtone is twice the fundamental, the 2nd overtone is 3x, and so on. (I tend to avoid talking in terms of overtones because of the ambiguity.)

Not every project aspires to such things, but if you do then the path to success requires at a minimum not treating users as a burden.

Some users might be particularly rude or entitled, in which case you can politely decline their feature requests and move on.

Basically, it's never rude for a user to file a bug report or request a feature. It's never rude for the maintainer to decline to implement a feature if they haven't budgeted time (or other relevant resources) to do it, it doesn't align with the fundamental goals or architecture of the project, or they simply don't know how to do it.

It would be rude for a user to demand of maintainers more than they're willing to give, and it would be rude of a maintainer not to be at least somewhat mindful that spending at least a little bit of effort to respond to reasonable requests, fix known bugs, and keep documentation accurate and up-to-date can prevent a lot of random strangers from wasting a lot of time on something that isn't useful to them. No one has any contractual obligation to provide anything, but I think everyone should treat other people's time and attention as a scarce and valuable commodity, not to be wasted.

Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article that sun synchronous orbits are a thing. This was a new one to me. Apparently there's a trick that takes advantage of the Earth not being a perfect sphere to cause an orbit to precess at the right rate that it matches the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, you can put a satellite into a low-Earth orbit that has continuous sunlight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

Is this worth all the cost and complexity of lobbing a bunch of data centers into orbit? I have no idea. If electricity costs are what's dominating the datacenter costs that AI companies are currently paying, then I'm willing to at least concede that it might be plausible.

If I were being asked to invest in this scheme, I would want to hear a convincing argument why just deploying more solar panels and batteries on Earth to get cheap power isn't a better solution. But since it's not my money, then if Elon is convinced that this is a great idea then he's welcome to prove that he (or more importantly, the people who work for him) have actually got this figured out.

I'd be curious where exactly they plan to put these datacenters... In low Earth orbit they would eventually reenter, which makes them a pollution source and you'd have no solar power half the time.

Parking them at the Earth-Sun L1 point would be better for solar power, but it would be more expensive to get stuff there.

It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expensive is it to solve this problem, what are its limitations, and does the project still makes economic sense once you factor all that in?