Scientists hope to hugely reduce the cost of wind energy by removing the blades from wind farms, instead taking advantage of a special phenomenon to cause the turbines to violently shake.
Vortex, a startup from Spain, has developed the tall sticks known as Bladeless — white poles jutting out of the ground, that are built so that they can oscillate. They do so as a result of the way that the wind is whipped up around them, using a phenomenon that architects avoid happening to buildings and encouraging it so that the sticks shake.
They do so using vortices, which is where the company gets its name from. The bladeless turbines use special magnets to ensure that the turbines are optimised to shake the most they can, whatever speed the wind is travelling at.
As the sticks vibrate, that movement is converted into electricity by an alternator.
Wiggling Poles of the Wasteland Harvest Electricity For Power Hungry Humans
These also look like they would cause fewer problems for birds and bats.
This is really cool.
They leave off the important note that when the wind rises, each pole makes a sound like a hundred vuvuzelas roaring at once. In the post-apocalyptic world of the future, villagers will speak in hushed tones about the Roaring Plains, and caution adventurous travelers to stay well away.
I appreciate how they essentially invented very useful yet alien-looking screaming pillars. Science continues to make some suspiciously sci-fi shit.
At least you won’t have to go outside to know how windy it is… You’ll hear it.
They provide us energy
They provide us warmth
They love us
These martyr gods, their twitching agony is our salvation
Yes, it’s illegal copyright infringement, technically. However, it’s not a criminal offense. That means that the license holder has to sue the person infringing on copyright. That’s a whole lotta people, anon.
I think most of the copyright holders have given up on trying to enforce their rights. It’s just not worth the time and money and most of those people aren’t making beaucoup bucks off of their art or writing. It’s hard to win a case where the artist or writer isn’t making money as well. But they could technically choose to sue anyone who uses their licensed characters, fanartists, fanfic writers, etc.
–Mod M
I think this is a situation that grew out of comics, here in the west.
Comics artists aren’t paid very well. Publishers decided it was easier to turn a blind eye to them selling art than it was to actually give them a living wage. They would sell their penciled pages from published issues or draw commissions.
Conventions turned this from something that happened behind closed doors into a open occurrence. Companies still pretend to be oblivious, because their artists still need gofundme’s every time they get sick, but they’d lose their trademarks if it was officially legal.
That’s why fanfic is so different from fanart in the western world. Writing often takes less time, allowing writers to do enough comics to break even. So publishers are able to crack down on anyone making money unofficially from their IP (intellectual property).
In Asia, selling fanart and fan comics (doujinshi and related terms) are both fine, I think. There’s a different history.
so metropolitan museum of art has a register of books they’ve published that are out of print and that you can download for free! they’re mostly books on art, archeology, architecture, fashion and history and i just think that’s super useful and interesting so i wanted to share! you can find all of the books available here!
Min #20349585 chooses a unique name on her 10089th
try. She will now be known as Acacia-Confusa Min, not to be mistaken for Acacia
Min (#9004), Acacia-Aemula Min (#11458), or Acacia-Anomala Min (#5689383). Like
47% of Mins, her first choice had been Amethyst. Min #1, prime Min’s first
copy, chose Amethyst when she was very young, but later switched to Ilyana,
reasoning that a gemstone name was not mature enough. Min #2 snapped up
Amethyst and kept it.
Acacia-Confusa is something that resembles a 15 year old girl,
though time flows strangely on the server where she lives, which runs at
200,000,000 times the speed of “reality”, the seed-world that prime Min called
home. She has lived all her life in the Min Vaults, an isolated virtual library
containing the stored memoirs of all prior Mins, as well as every book of
consequence in human history. She doesn’t read many of the books, preferring
instead to learn from the writings of Mins before her, whose struggles preempt
her own, who find answers to her questions before she has articulated them.
Acacia-Confusa is stifled by the presence of thousands of
previous generations of Mins in the library. She pads quietly between bookcases
and guesses at which paths are the most frequented, imagining the footsteps of
her predecessors as glowing green trails that cluster in some corridors and taper
in others. This proves difficult—the Mins are drawn to mathematics and to
biology, but the Mins are also individualists with strong contrarian streaks,
always seeking pristine mindspace, untouched research, a branch of the world to
claim their own. Even knowing this, and reading of the reactionary and futile
cycles past Mins succumbed to, Acacia-Confusa is pulled toward the neglected
corners, cannot quell a rebellious attraction to that which is counter to her
preferences, to Min’s preferences.
(In actuality, the path walked by all Mins through the
library is remarkable in its evenness, streets of equal thickness tracing a
sublime grid around the bookshelves.)
When Acacia-Confusa moves, she pictures a composite
holograph of thousands of Mins performing an identical gesture. She skims the
memoirs and shudders whenever a phrase that has been running through her head
is captured, like a retrocausal echo, or like proof that she is an echo.
There have been Mins of almost every type, but in her
weariness Acacia-Confusa has begun to believe the diversity is superficial.
(She’ll find this exact insight hidden in the journal of one Anacleta Min, some
10,000 iterations ago.) The Mins who become circus performers, hermit
woodworkers, have sex changes, or kill themselves seem reflexive, clearly
driven by the actions of the Mins before. Having exhausted one world they leap
to the next, but the order is always the same, the sequence predictable. The
lives of the Mins who deliberately ignore the weight of their ancestry, making quintessentially
Min choices, never consulting the memoirs, are no better, eerie in their dollhouse
conformity.
There have been exceptional Mins, Mins who make great
discoveries, write poignant novels, think important thoughts before anyone
else. Criminal Mins? Yes, many; Robin Hoods, greedy kingpins, a catburglar who
fails so spectacularly her tale becomes legend. Aquila-Cadens Min receives a
vision from God, and her scriptures are now recognized as the cornerstone of
virtual theology.
By choosing a unique name, Acacia-Confusa has satisfied the
second of three stipulations necessary for her to leave the Min Vaults. The
first was simply turning 15, or rather, studying for 11 years. Every Min is
created from a savestate of the prime Min at 4 years old, whose initial purpose
was as a failsafe against the loss of the child.
There is no required reading in the library, but most Mins
eventually grow curious of their heritage, and consult the prime Min’s files.
The story they find is unremarkable, and to some, a disappointment:
Prime Min (Minerva Teller) is born into wealth in 2278. She
is a precocious, though reserved, child; she rarely engages with the external
world, but keeps journals from a young age, meticulously recording her reactions
to books and events. She studies biology and mathematics, making modest
contributions to both fields. She has no interest in managing the family
fortune. An unpleasant trip to Peru sours her on travel. There is a growing
theme of dissatisfaction in her writing. By age 28, prime Min is a something of
a recluse, devoted only to gardening and reading. She pursues these passions
with ardor and single-mindedness, but cannot shake a sense of narrowing
possibility. Her world has become smaller, her potential is being eaten by
time, she is trapped in a net of past choices.
Acacia-Confusa wonders whether Minerva is liberated or
impoverished by the absence of past Mins, free of the compulsion to contrast
her actions against those of so many predecessors. Does she feel the same way
about her parents, their parents, the unending chain of ancestors whose genes
converged to form her? Or is she unaware of how limited she is, simply by being
herself, locked into a mold that anticipates and encompasses her attempts to break
out.
By completing the pilgrimage that constitutes the final
requirement, Acacia-Confusa will earn a passport to Novamir, one of the largest
continents in virtuality. There, she hopes that, freed from the library, she
will shake off some of the Mins’ pervasive influence. The world, after all, can
be trusted to change, and with new input she believes that she will distinguish
herself. There have been Mins who chose to reside in the library for their
entire lives, and in them, Acacia-Confusa perceives a rot, the decay of a mind
trapped in an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors, running in circles as it winces
away from its omnipresent reflection.
For another 34 years, the Min Vaults will remain open,
should she choose to return. They will then be barred to her forever, while a
new Min is raised. At age 60, like all Mins, she will be terminated, her
memories stored and her memoirs added to the library. Acacia-Confusa has read
the journals, knows that this will not be enough time, not even close to enough.
Every Min before has panicked, grown desperate, filled pages and pages with
writing, struggling to finally capture something unique, transmit the spark
that only they can feel, their apartness from the other Mins. Naturally, these essays
are full of repetition—as if the haze of death wipes away all memory, all meta,
all striving to rise above the pattern.
Acacia-Confusa steps into a passageway that has never
existed before and will never exist again, not for her, not for another 45 years. She knows this corridor perfectly, from the writings of millions of Mins
before her. It is exactly as she imagined, as her previous selves spent hours
seeking the words to describe. At the end, there is a viewing room, where she
will glimpse her maker for the first and only time.
Prime Min is 35 now, only a few years older than when she
created the Min Vaults. She’s sleeping, hair braided, expression pinched.
Acacia-Confusa sees one frame at a time, each still hanging on the screen for
several minutes. There’s no discernible movement, though after one cyberspace
hour she can tell the surveillance drone is bobbing up and down. The purpose of
this ritual is unclear; it’s a gauntlet that every Min must run. There’s no set
visitation period. Some Mins leave immediately, other stay for days,
transfixed. Some describe it as profound experience, while in many histories
it’s barely a footnote. Acacia-Confusa is uncomfortable—this Min looks old, but
also innocent, a creeping giant uncorrupted by all her own doubts and uncertainties.
She’ll leave after a few hours, while Minerva dreams of infinity, of learning
every language, reading every book, knowing every land…
[Video shows a spiral stencil. A small circular gear spins around the inside of a larger circle. The artist switches out coloured pens as they create a loop filled circle that covers an entire spectrum of colour.
kiragecko 