Water scarcity causes societal collapse throughout the American Southwest. Well written book, interesting premise - just an all around enjoyable bit of fiction.
As someone who knows nothing about canals (or what they are even used for), anyone want to explain why they are used, why they are dumb, and what we should do instead?
Imagine a canal which is 3 feet wide at the minimum. It contains a constant volume of water. This canal ultimately waters farm land. By way of example, California has the imperial valley which contains these canal systems. They feed desert farm land. The problem is these canals are often:
open
in a hot dry desert
cheap
Water rights have perverted water usage. People take cheap water which was grandfathered in by old laws and agreements and they waste it to evaporation. If you think “well the water isn’t lost, just evaporated, right?” You’d be close, but slightly off the mark. The water is evaporated but it’s transported often hundreds or thousands of miles from its original source. We are basically bleeding rivers to feed a desert. And deserts might as well be an infinite sink for water.
We should not have farm land in deserts. But if we do, we should at least conserve the water we are using. Just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it’s good (not that you’re implying that, just saying).
This guy has never been to the Phoenix area :P we even have rivers with no water, too! Bring the whole family, camp out and have imaginary marco / polo by the hill infested with scorpions, only a half-mile from the city dump! Bring your RV so you can feel like a complete moron with the other people who thought it was a great idea to buy a mini house on wheels that gets 6 miles to the gallon. And if you are early to rise, you can make Laughlin a day-trip to lose all your social security check by dusk, before sauntering back to the depression-rut of a life you have carved out for yourself. Because living in a desert with a large elderly population, just-barely-enough power during the summer even though there is a fucking nuclear power plant 20 miles out of town, and has been in a drought for my entire life while everyone waters their lawn 3 times a week, never felt so good!
Oh sorry I got mixed up with my “fuck off and stop moving here” speech. Give me 10 minutes.
An irrigation canal like this is a big ditch to move water from a river to near farm fields. Without the extra water taken from the river, there wouldn’t be enough water in the soil for crops to grow in the area.
Being a big ditch open to the sky, the hot sun and dry air make a bunch of the irrigation water evaporate before it even gets to the field. So we went to all the effort of taking water out of the river just to waste it humidifying the nearby air.
Why did we do it in the first place? Because it’s way easier and cheaper to dig a ditch than to lay a big pipe, and I don’t know if the US had any other water-delivery tech at the right scale when these were built.
There probably are, but Saudi Arabia owns a bunch of land in Arizona and decided it was the perfect place to grow alfalfa, a very water intensive crop. That said, some farming does make some sense even in the desert, since it is almost certainly cheaper to have local produce than to need to import everything from places that have an abundance of water, even if that means building canals to water them.
The US has lots of land that doesn’t require irrigation, but also lots of land that can grow crops if irrigated. Some of that land in California is some of the best farmland in the whole country, growing things that prefer California’s Mediterranean climate (similar to parts of Australia’s southwest coast).
We have the technology and have had it for a while. But we don’t have the laws and habits of dry countries so US water laws are a wasteful mess.
Evaporation. You lose a phenomenal amount of water moving it by canal over large distances in an arid climate. Ideally you’d enclose the whole system to reduce loss but sticking a roof over the top helps to some degree and is less complicated.
There are several companies working on solar covers for reservoirs. I agree, seems like a win win. Reduce evaporation and have a large, level, “field” for solar arrays.
The economic viability of this solar-over-canal approach is a key aspect. The need to acquire additional land is eliminated by utilizing the existing canal infrastructure, making the project considerably more cost-effective than traditional solar farms. This cost efficiency is critical in ensuring the scalability and replicability of such projects on a larger scale.
Arizona is a mixed bag, but I guess everywhere kind of is. They hire that crazy sheriff, that election craziness, and paint their lawns, but then do stuff like this.
The influx of folks moving in from more expensive big city locations plus the general shift of young people rejecting conservative views even as they age is turning the state away from its traditionally republican voting tendencies as seen in recent elections.
Inflation adjusted… those canals cost $50 billion to construct and the project took decades. It would cost far more now, since getting access to the land rights would be a nightmare.
They’re already not providing enough water, so if building more canals is your proposed solution then you needed to start construction 20 years ago.
Upgrading the canals can potentially double the amount of water they provide. It’s far cheaper, and quicker, than building more canals.
Solar panels alone wouldn’t get you to 2x efficiency but it’ll help a lot, and unlike other upgrades it also provides ongoing revenue. It’s an absolute no brainer to start with this and do other canal upgrades later, when every inch of the canals are already covered in panels.
Nobpdies expecting unlimited water access besides stupid farmers and stupid rich people. Phoenix for example has rather strict laws on population expansion because of this if memory serves me right. But the dumbfucks growing fucking alfalfa use our rather esoteric and outdated water laws, atleast here in California. Even rice would be better since the fields can serve triple as water foul refuge and fish spawning pools.
I said that was California that painted their lawns. I lived in Arizona for a couple years, and I don’t even remember seeing lawns. But I lived in Tucson. Almost everyone had a xeriscaped yard.
Seattle does this but with plantings and rain gardens. Nice to see them using alternatives. I haven’t been to Arizona in years, I just go by what I hear. You guys don’t have that great of a reputation.
It’s also a win win design. Shade from the panels reduces evaporation in the canals and the water helps cool the panels which improves their efficiency.
It would be cheaper and easier to maintain separate instaaleions of a lightweight cover for the aquaduct and solar panel installed on solid ground. You could use the same money to add square miles of panels.
The reason include the increased efficiency of solar panels, government incentive measures, the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, and advancements of battery technology, especially lithium-ion batteries. solar and energy storage are expected to continue becoming more affordable, contributing to efforts to address climate change.
The argument is that processing data physically “near” where the data is stored (also known as NDP, near data processing, unlike traditional architecture designs, where data is stored off-chip) is more power efficient and lower latency for a variety of reasons (interconnect complexity, pin density, lane charge rate, etc). Someone came up with a design that can do complex computations much faster than before using NDP.
Personally, I’d say traditional Computer Architecture is not going anywhere for two reasons: first, these esoteric new architecture ideas such as NDP, SIMD (probably not esoteric anymore. GPUs and vector instructions both do this), In-network processing (where your network interface does compute) are notoriously hard to work with. It takes CS MS levels of understanding of the architecture to write a program in the P4 language (which doesn’t allow loops, recursion, etc). No matter how fast your fancy new architecture is, it’s worthless if most programmers on the job market won’t be able to work with it. Second, there’re too many foundational tools and applications that rely on traditional computer architecture. Nobody is going to port their 30-year-old stable MPI program to a new architecture every 3 years. It’s just way too costly. People want to buy new hardware, install it, compile existing code, and see big numbers go up (or down, depending on which numbers)
I would say the future is where you have a mostly Von Newman machine with some of these fancy new toys (GPUs, Memory DIMMs with integrated co-processors, SmartNICs) as dedicated accelerators. Existing application code probably will not be modified. However, the underlying libraries will be able to detect these accelerators (e.g. GPUs, DMA engines, etc) and offload supported computations to them automatically to save CPU cycles and power. Think your standard memcpy() running on a dedicated data mover on the memory DIMM if your computer supports it. This way, your standard 9to5 programmer can still work like they used to and leave the fancy performance optimization stuff to a few experts.
Interesting, in this particular case it’s implementing a single operation, but I can imagine they can implement other single operation dedicated chips as well. So I’d expect ASICs but no CPUs
By setting the conductivity of each transistor, we can perform analog vector-matrix multiplication in a single step by applying voltages to our processor and measuring the output
Still, i don’t think it’ll need to get much more complex to be very useful for AI workloads.
People have been discovering that more, and simpler, calculations seem to work better? the trend in AI workloads seems to have gone from FP32 -> FP16 -> INT16 -> INT8 and possibly even INT4?
Seems like just having lots of simple calculations is more efficient/effective than more complex stuff.
Well these chips perform analog math, which means high precision high speed. It’s not as accurate as fp32 as in repeatedly and deterministic outputs, but that’s def not a problem for a deep and wide neural network such as used by llm
I seriously doubt these could be mass-produced in any meaningful way due to the rarity of the requirements. I’d love to hear a more practical argument for this though.
“2D” fab isn’t new, and correct me if I’m wrong, that is sort of how AMD got its start. It’s just the idea of fixing heat dissipation to solve for Moore’s Law, but requires novel materials that didn’t exist yet. This has cropped up in various forms for metal and silicon dynamic replacements over the decades, and I think the last big news I heard about this was 10 years ago regarding graphene being a cheap and plentiful replacement for silicon, and here we are with no proofs of concept.
It’s a paper I guess, but not anything that has the feasibility of showing up in the real world. If anything, I think these labs are working on shrinking quantum computational units down to be more useful for everyday computing, since they kind of already “work”.
Edit: also some recent news about transistor heat dissipation.
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