Month: April 2016

90% renewables by 2030

Renewables like solar and wind are plunging in price. But there are impediments to powering a grid entirely, or even primarily, with renewable energy. How far can they go? A new paper suggests that wind and solar could power 60% of the US’s electricity needs, given a national grid, without any energy storage, and without massive overbuild. Another 20% of the grid’s electricity would come from CO2-free hydro and nuclear.

Medieval Fonts

Medieval script tells time, although usually not very precisely. Take for example the 3 major script families from the medieval period: Caroline minuscule, Pregothic script, and Littera textualis or Gothic script.

Despite the fact that these 3 families are relatively easy to distinguish and identify, they were used for extensive periods of time: Caroline from c. 800 to c. 1050, Pregothic from c. 1050 to c. 1250, and Gothic from c. 1250 to c. 1500. In other words, merely identifying the family of handwriting is not enough to pinpoint when precisely a book was made.

Do psychedelics make you weird?

the explanation that weird people gravitate toward psychedelics, even in the sciences, is a strong one. But it’s sufficient that I am hesitant to repeat the common view that psychedelics are not at all dangerous, or that they have no permanent side effects. There seems to me at least a moderate chance that they will make you more interesting without your consent – whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on exactly how interesting you want to be.

D&D maps

So here I’m collecting all my maps so you don’t have to dig through the whole archive of blog posts to find them. They are presented in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent maps and then proceeding into older and older examples of my work. I’ve also included a legend of the majority of the mapping symbols used throughout these maps (well, mostly the overhead maps – the side-views are pretty much the same and/or self-evident I hope).