I don’t have a problem. I can quit any time I like. I only swipe recreationally. Every five minutes. Maybe I’m in denial. First stage, right?

update: Auto-correct and I are in a toxic relationship. Swiping just enables it. Tried quitting once. Worst 5 minutes of my life.

update: There’s this 12-step program… Step one was turning off predictive text. Didn’t make it to step two.

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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • Vienna isn’t even the worst place for solar power. Consider places like Ireland, Scotland or Sweden for example. No wonder why wind, hydro or even tidal power suddenly begins to make a lot more sense. IMO, solar really begins to make sense in Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Those places actually get some decent sunshine. Using solar power in Austria should be ok, but it’s not great by any means.

    Nearby mountains probably get in the way of building large solar facilities. Maybe you could combine solar power with farming. The panels can provide some shade to more sensitive plants.
    See also: Solar Atlas
    Sidenote: Iceland and the northern half of Norway, Sweden and Finland aren’t even on the map. I guess Solar Atlas is trying to tell you that you don’t need a fancy map to know that building solar in places like that is a waste of money.



  • Oh ok. So when the peak of the emission spectrum is in the IR range, the visible color will definitely be closer to red or orange. The amount of blue light emitted in that case will be very low. That’s what the thermometer experiment can definitely demonstrate clearly.

    However, if the black body is hot enough that the peak is in the blue wavelength band, then the total IR output should also be pretty high, just like everything else is at that point. I wonder if it’s even higher than in the first example. Would need to calculate that properly… Anyway there will also be a fair bit of UV, so don’t try this at home. Maybe even some x-rays if the arc is hot enough.

    As far as traditional carbon-arc lamps are concerned, people at the time wrote that the light was white. Maybe the arc was not hot enough or be perceived as blue. Also, the human eye is not particularly sensitive at those wavelengths, so that could explain some of it too.






  • Hmm… I didn’t think about black body radiation that much. The filaments in a toaster really are red/orange/yellow when hot. I wonder what it would take to to squeeze blue out of black body radiation. Theoretically, it should be possible. Probably thousands of degrees… I think we’re moving into plasma physics territory at this point. Regular filaments just wouldn’t be able to handle blue light production. Electric arcs are blue though, and that plasma is pretty hot. Such an edge case, but still…





  • Oh that is a good point. The sun really is pretty orange. Long before the first fire, people probably associated orange and yellow with warmth.

    However, cultural associations can change over time. What we consider warm is largely sustained by old paintings and pictures. Modern day artists use orange to convey a warm atmosphere, and that’s why the idea of orange as a warm color persists.

    People don’t really use fire that much any more, so realistically speaking, warmth doesn’t even have a color today.