Anybody know anything about Solar or Geothermal energy?

Weird Harold wrote:

McGuiness wrote:It's a reasonable supposition that the archangels instituted time zones, especially on the mainland where the church semaphore can speed messages along as quickly as 600 mph!

Actually, given the use of roman numerals and other restrictions, it is probable that Langhorne would have been opposed to Standard Time and/or time zones. Each Semaphore station would be, in effect, its own time zone. They would have a table with the offsets for any other semaphore station, if they even worry about time differences.

Clocks would be set to local "noon" or according to an offset for the nearest town or other point of interest someone wanted to stay synchronized with.

Standard Time dates from the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time for navigation purposes, but that was never used locally, just for navigation.

Actually, Standard time was established by law in 1918 in the US. The railroads generally ran on their own time depending on where they started from and every station showed the same time, depending on how far they reached. The Northern Pacific had 7 time zones, the Union Pacific had 2, Central Pacific and Southern Pacific used San Francisco time.

The Railroads agreed amongst themselves to adopt a standard time and time zones in October 1893, and completed their conversion to RR Standard time by Dec 2, 1883.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_time

Keith_w wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Standard Time dates from the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time for navigation purposes, but that was never used locally, just for navigation.

Actually, Standard time was established by law in 1918 in the US.

GMT predates US Standard time by a good bit; but it only really applied to ships and railroads.

[url=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time]Greenwich Mean Time was adopted across the island of Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House in 1847, and by almost all railway companies by the following year, from which the term "railway time" is derived. It was gradually adopted for other purposes, but a legal case in 1858 held "local mean time" to be the official time. This changed in 1880, when Greenwich Mean Time was legally adopted throughout the island of Great Britain. GMT was adopted on the Isle of Man in 1883, Jersey in 1898 and Guernsey in 1913. Ireland adopted GMT in 1916, supplanting Dublin Mean Time.[4] Hourly time signals from Greenwich Observatory were first broadcast on 5 February 1924, rendering the time ball at the observatory obsolete in the process.[/url]

My point was that Langhorne would NOT have wanted a "Standard Time" for Safehold even to the extent of GMT used for navigation.

I'm not sure how standard time relates to alternative energy; tide tables can be calculated according to Local Solar Mean Time as well as it can from any time standard and I'm not sure you even need to know the tide schedule to use it to generate power.

Our house is actually on the Greenwich Meridian, about 25miles south of Greenwich. Which means that GMT is perfect for us - and feel sorry for those who live further west in places like Devon and Cornwall and have to wonder whether their local sunset and sunrise times given by the BBC in its regional weather forecasts are GMT or actual local times. Fortunately a 2- or 3-hundred mile difference doesn't affect timings much, but over longer distances like those in Europe and North America there must be quite a difference from one side of a time zone to the other.

Cheers

John

quote="Weird Harold"]

Keith_w wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Standard Time dates from the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time for navigation purposes, but that was never used locally, just for navigation.

Actually, Standard time was established by law in 1918 in the US.

GMT predates US Standard time by a good bit; but it only really applied to ships and railroads.

[url=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time]Greenwich Mean Time was adopted across the island of Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House in 1847, and by almost all railway companies by the following year, from which the term "railway time" is derived. It was gradually adopted for other purposes, but a legal case in 1858 held "local mean time" to be the official time. This changed in 1880, when Greenwich Mean Time was legally adopted throughout the island of Great Britain. GMT was adopted on the Isle of Man in 1883, Jersey in 1898 and Guernsey in 1913. Ireland adopted GMT in 1916, supplanting Dublin Mean Time.[4] Hourly time signals from Greenwich Observatory were first broadcast on 5 February 1924, rendering the time ball at the observatory obsolete in the process.[/url]

My point was that Langhorne would NOT have wanted a "Standard Time" for Safehold even to the extent of GMT used for navigation.

I'm not sure how standard time relates to alternative energy; tide tables can be calculated according to Local Solar Mean Time as well as it can from any time standard and I'm not sure you even need to know the tide schedule to use it to generate power.[/quote]

John Prigent wrote:Our house is actually on the Greenwich Meridian, about 25miles south of Greenwich. Which means that GMT is perfect for us - and feel sorry for those who live further west in places like Devon and Cornwall and have to wonder whether their local sunset and sunrise times given by the BBC in its regional weather forecasts are GMT or actual local times. Fortunately a 2- or 3-hundred mile difference doesn't affect timings much, but over longer distances like those in Europe and North America there must be quite a difference from one side of a time zone to the other.

Cheers

John

I believe that each time zone is technically 15 degrees wide, so it's not really all that bad. The eastern Time zone, which is where I live reaches from the eastern Quebec border almost to west of Marathon Ontario, approximately 2,100 Kilometers.

However, consider China which is a huge country with only 1 time zone (utc+8:00) mostly called Beijing Time or China Standard Time. Checking out a time zone map, it does seem to center on Beijing. What a surprise.

What about the implementation of time zones in russia?




Time zones beneath or above other time zones, and not east or west, yet still a time difference, and time xones that change depending how far north or south you are.....

Keith_w wrote:

John Prigent wrote:Our house is actually on the Greenwich Meridian, about 25miles south of Greenwich. Which means that GMT is perfect for us - and feel sorry for those who live further west in places like Devon and Cornwall and have to wonder whether their local sunset and sunrise times given by the BBC in its regional weather forecasts are GMT or actual local times. Fortunately a 2- or 3-hundred mile difference doesn't affect timings much, but over longer distances like those in Europe and North America there must be quite a difference from one side of a time zone to the other.

Cheers

John

I believe that each time zone is technically 15 degrees wide, so it's not really all that bad. The eastern Time zone, which is where I live reaches from the eastern Quebec border almost to west of Marathon Ontario, approximately 2,100 Kilometers.

However, consider China which is a huge country with only 1 time zone (utc+8:00) mostly called Beijing Time or China Standard Time. Checking out a time zone map, it does seem to center on Beijing. What a surprise.

Spacekiwi wrote:What about the implementation of time zones in russia?




Time zones beneath or above other time zones, and not east or west, yet still a time difference, and time xones that change depending how far north or south you are.....

Yowza! Obviously the time zones have been arranged along political boundaries, but compared to the USA, where they try to keep entire states in the same time zone while keeping the zones at a somewhat consistent width, (although not always succeeding) that is ridiculous!

Of course I wouldn't much care for Beijing time either if I lived on the coast or deep in the Himalayas!

That's why I suspect that if Safehold has time zones, the archangels decreed the boundaries. Of course Safehold doesn't need time zones given its low tech level.

However, the inner circle constantly refers to how many hours apart its members are from each other, so I suspect time zones exist, or else RFC has divided the globe into 26 slices and assigns an hour to each for the benefit of the reader. (Consider Langhorne's watch a rounding error, or a minute+ included as part of each slice.)

An important point to remember when looking at that map of Russia is that the North Pole is just a little bit off the upper edge of that map. So those time zones which look like they are leaning inward are actually aligned with the meridians. So it is not as bad as it first looks. There are still some curious zones in it, but no worse than most regions that large.

McGuiness wrote:

Spacekiwi wrote:What about the implementation of time zones in russia?




Time zones beneath or above other time zones, and not east or west, yet still a time difference, and time xones that change depending how far north or south you are.....

Yowza! Obviously the time zones have been arranged along political boundaries, but compared to the USA, where they try to keep entire states in the same time zone while keeping the zones at a somewhat consistent width, (although not always succeeding) that is ridiculous!

Of course I wouldn't much care for Beijing time either if I lived on the coast or deep in the Himalayas!

That's why I suspect that if Safehold has time zones, the archangels decreed the boundaries. Of course Safehold doesn't need time zones given its low tech level.

However, the inner circle constantly refers to how many hours apart its members are from each other, so I suspect time zones exist, or else RFC has divided the globe into 26 slices and assigns an hour to each for the benefit of the reader. (Consider Langhorne's watch a rounding error, or a minute+ included as part of each slice.)

I think Beijing is pretty close to the coast, so that wouldn't be so bad. Tibet does have it's own time zone.

Hi Weird Harold,

This thread has been surprising in some ways.

We agree on a lot of things, but trying to blame IC engines for all the current sins of the world seems a bit much.

Suggesting Americans are at fault for liking privately owned vehicles seems bizarre when privately owned and operated vehicles have been around for millennia.

Your praise of RR seems odd given how quickly privately owned and operated RR carriages and trains came along; the royals and rich of Europe had them in the 1840's, they were widespread in the US by the 1850's, for example George B McClellan had a private car as one of the Illinois Central RR's Vice President's.

Listing all the rich and famous who exploited the RR for private purposes in its first century could take longer than any poster here should have to read.

Restricting ownership of any power, transportation or communication system from the general public and popular majority because some elitist thinks it's bad for some reason demonstrates the danger of popular fads especially those espoused by the 'chattering classes' who appear to prefer authoritarian leaders who agree with their programed biases than really benefiting the 'common people' they profess to want to help.

Given the expression of concern over the relative recent pollution expressed in the series, RFC is both mindful of it and has inner circles characters seeking to minimize it as much as possible, so trust him to deal with it.

Fretting over how much coal or oil when he's already stated there's plenty of both, especially for an oil based economy seems silly and not very observant of the textev.

Given how worried people are over RFC being able to finish the current series arc in a couple of books after HFQ, worrying about a transitory period in Safehold's energy history seems rather moot, especially if its part of what's cut to meet Tor's size limits.

L

Weird Harold wrote:

Zakharra wrote: *nods* Mass transit just isn't practical for most of the US either. It's only a practical solution for large cities. I live in the countryside as well and there is no way that mass transit, or even taking a train/bus into town would work (you'd have to take multiple trips just to get everything you need if you were shopping in bulk). You can pack a car or truck with what your getting and make it all in one trip. That's not possible with public transportation.

You can fit more into an inter-city train's baggage car than you can in even a 2.5 ton farm truck, let alone a "personal vehicle" of any size.

A mass-transit, electric powered system would require a different mindset that the post-WWII "Me First" attitude of Americans. Of course, Amazon and E-Bay might well dominate the Market-place much sooner than the R/W.

In the era of J.C Penney, Montgomery Ward, and other mail-order companies, it was possible to order everything from diapers for the baby to highway bridges for the town -- it just wasn't possible to get overnight delivery. It really wasn't necessary for most rural people to go any further than the nearest railway station.

Zakharra wrote:It seems like a fair number of people here hate the IC engine with a passion for some reason. So I'd like to ask those that don't like it, WHY don't you like the IC engine? Despite the problems an IC engine has, it is extremely convenient for a lot of people. It frees up people from needing to live within walking distance of their work or a railroad. It seems like thew benefits outweigh the costs to a large degree.

I don't hate Internal Combustion Engines, I hate the fact that they turn fossil fuels into air pollution and use up (burn) a finite resource that has better uses.

In the real world, I'm an advocate of converting the installed base of IC engines to Hydrogen or some other renewable, less polluting fuel. I'm an advocate of rational, economically feasible, mass transit both inner-city and inter-city.

Safehold has the opportunity to avoid the installed base of IC engines that so limits real-world solutions to fuel shortages and ecological issues.

its not just that though, look at the blue/green/light orange area on the right. light orange is 100% above green, while part of green is split off and above the blue. then theres the two small light blue in the red at the left, and the upper red island chain going all the way over yellow to the edge of that weird brown colour.

SWM wrote:An important point to remember when looking at that map of Russia is that the North Pole is just a little bit off the upper edge of that map. So those time zones which look like they are leaning inward are actually aligned with the meridians. So it is not as bad as it first looks. There are still some curious zones in it, but no worse than most regions that large.