
Solar-panel "trees" really are inferior - DevX101
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JmlMNqVPKlsJ:uvdiv.blogspot.com/2011/08/solar-panel-trees-really-are-inferior.html+http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2011/08/solar-panel-trees-really-are-inferior.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
======
raganwald
I didn’t find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a
thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring
the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this
becomes news without critical thought.

In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why
should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the
personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish
first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend
their right to publish things they know to be false.

How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same
way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being
digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their
preconceived biases.

A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And
indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool
here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who
knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review
and/or corroboration?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I disagree, but I really believe he didn't do it intentionally. He was
ridiculing the MSM and the people who jumped on the bandwagon without doing
any analysis.

Unfortunately, nobody will see it that way. People will see it as him/her
attacking Aidan Dwyer (the boy who did the experiment). He doesn't help his
case by never referring to Aidan by name, instead using a fairly pejorative
sounding "the kid.

If Aiden was my kid, I would try not to let him read the article, though I
would explain the article and what went wrong within a teaching framework that
included pointing out when other scientists did similar thing (don't know any
off the top of my head, but I've no doubt the stories are out there).

It is sad, too, because this article _needed_ to be written, but instead of
writing it to help Aiden succeed in spite of the fanfare, the author has
likely hurt Aiden. There is every reason to tell kids they are wrong when they
are wrong, but there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways to do it.
This was inappropriate.

Finally, I've flagged this submission. Since the author took down the
original, it is obvious he is rethinking whether the article was a good idea.
Yes, the internet is forever, but people's wishes should count for something.

~~~
AJ007
13 years old is old enough to take a dose of reality. Science isn't about
people's feelings.

I can think of more than a handful of science fair projects that other kids
have done, with incorrect results, that win the grade school science fair due
to judges who have zero qualification. That multiple major tech news sites
picked this up goes a long way in saying what the qualifications are of those
who run those sites.

As for the story itself, I know nothing about solar power and little about
electrical circuits. However, when I saw the picture of the thing I couldn't
help but laughing.

~~~
ugh
Tone matters. You shouldn't lie but you also shouldn't be tone-deaf.

~~~
dereg
Tone matters for rhetorical persuasion. The only tone I desire from a
scientific piece is the truth.

~~~
jtheory
This wasn't only a "scientific piece" -- his stated reason for writing the
post was to make a comment on the MSM -- and certainly it wasn't targeted only
at scientific readers.

Anyone (like me) who read the commentary about the media, and mostly skimmed
over the exhaustive detail on why the experiment was broken, was reading
primarily an opinion piece, and certainly tone matters in that context.

I don't agree that tone "only matters for rhetorical persuasion" in the first
place (or perhaps I disagree with the idea that rhetorical persuasion isn't
always playing a role in scientific writing) -- but that's a larger
discussion.

------
raganwald
Coming back to this almost eight hours later, I ask: What is the problem here?
On HN, we upvote articles that are _interesting_. My idea of a downvote is an
article where I felt I lost IQ for reading it. In the case of the kid’s
mistaken result, is there any question his research and theory were
interesting? Does anyone honestly feel stupider for having read about it and
considered the possibility that he was correct?

Quite honestly, almost everything that makes it to the front page of HN is
wrong. We talk about software development, startups, muse about whether Apple
is brilliant or is lucky enough to have lame competition, argue about Haskell
and Erlang... All stuff that is non-empirical and therefore unfalsifiable.

How does that stuff get a free pass to be on the front page of HN without
peer-reviewed research backing it up? I’ll tell you how: We’re smart enough to
know that all of that stuff is probably at least partly wrong, but if there’s
something in there that makes us smarter, it’s worth reading and upvoting and
discussing.

If the kid’s ideas had in them just one thing that made us smarter for having
thought about it... That’s a win, that’s worth upvoting and repeating. Why
wait for peer review? As long as nobody ran out and dropped a million bucks on
manufacturing solar arrays, what’s the harm? If anything is wrong with an
article, a day or so later, all of the flaws will be corrected. And thats
exactly what has happened here.

Thinking about this, I don’t see a problem with the “blogosphere” or with HN
upvoting and tweeting and repeating the original article. Thank goodness we
don’t put everything through a peer-review first. I’d say things are working
just fine, and I encourage every other thirteen year-old kid to experiment and
publish.

No harm, no foul. There’s nothing in there that’s more wrong than anything
I’ve ever said in a blog post or a comment, it’s just easier to prove where
empirical science is concerned. But even when they’re wrong, my posts are
useful if they help people think, and I suspect his post is useful for the
same reason.

~~~
wicknicks
The whole idea behind science is to try out what seems most impossible. That's
the whole magic and beauty behind it. What annoyed me was the fact that the
author seems to be personally offended over the kid's article and all the hype
it got. Considering it was a 13 year old kid doing a science project, it
doesn't make much sense to put in so much of hardwork in proving what he did
and wrote about was completely wrong or "nonsense" (as he likes to call it).

~~~
freshhawk
That's not even close to the idea behind science. But publishing your ideas
and having someone tear them apart definitely _is_ the idea behind science.

The majority of everyone's ideas turn out to be wrong, or at least not worth
further effort. Science is a process that makes sure that the ideas we do
promote have been tested and argued over by other experts in the field so that
fewer wrong ideas are promoted. That's why our lives are so much better today,
because of this process.

I think the author seemed offended that the main stream science news didn't
bother to check a result that is, apparently, very naive to those who work on
solar cells. And he should be, now thousands and thousands of people will have
this little factoid that they think is true in their heads. And all because
the "lone inventor" story makes for good news, even though it's not how real
science gets done at all.

Do you really want this kid to keep going with this and waste his own time
(he's obviously very smart and motivated) and make himself look worse in the
end? Better someone nicely points out that his math is wrong and he can change
his design.

~~~
wicknicks
"Publishing your ideas and having someone tear them apart definitely is the
idea behind science."

Peer review is definitely a part of science. But not the complete idea behind
it. If it were, then slowly the whole field would converge to publishing
"safe" ideas so lesser and lesser of it gets torn apart. Because torn apart
means rejection of papers (which translates to no research done). The complete
cycle of science involves:

    
    
      1. Understanding the different ideas and problems that are out there.
      2. Manifesting a different perspective on the matter.
      3. Understanding and experimenting with this perspective.
      4. Publishing the result 
      5. Gaining feedback and talking to people about the results.
      6. Continue.
    

"Better someone nicely points out that his math is wrong and he can change his
design."

Exactly. Calling it "nonsense" on a public blog where thousands of people can
read it is not the best of pointing out mistakes.

Yes, it makes for good news, and thousands of people will think this is good
news, but for anyone who seriously does solar cells, will either find that
this is impossible or as the author of this pointed out violate the basics of
solar power technology.

------
waterlesscloud
This doesn't address what I thought was the insight, which is about finding
optimal placement and facing for stationary solar panels when the light source
(the sun) is not stationary. Neither throughout the day or through out the
year.

It doesn't seem impossible that some placements are better than all-in-one-
direction, especially over time, and that's what I thought the experiment was
about.

Am I misunderstanding something basic?

EDIT:

Going back and reading the kid's writeup at
[http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201...](http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html)
shows some interesting details.

He's not using voltage as a proxy for power, he's using it as a proxy for
"sunlight collected". There's two voltage graphs on that page that are machine
drawn, not hand drawn. The point of interest in the two graphs is that the
Standard graph has narrower peaks of voltage, whereas the Tree graph is
broader. This represents the idea that the Tree was generating electricity
over a longer period of time. NOT that it was generating more power, but that
it was collecting sunlight for a longer period.

The 20% and 50% pie charts indicate this same idea. The percentages are hours,
not watts or volts. 12.5 hours vs 8 hours in one timeframe, 13.5 vs 11 in
another. Hours. Not volts, not watts. Time, not power.

~~~
ghaff
Yes. If you subdivide a solar panel into, say, 10 pieces and orient each of
those 10 pieces in an orientation different from the orientation that produces
the maximum power output over the course of the day for a single panel, the
sum will still be less.

~~~
aptwebapps
But a distributed layout might have higher minimums than a single orientation.
For an actual tree, at least, that might be important. The sun doesn't just
move during the day, it changes its course over the year, so it might be very
beneficial to the tree to ensure that it get's at least a certain amount of
juice each day.

There might be other reasons than optimal solar exposure. Maybe structural
reasons, or, I don't know, sap distribution ...

Finally, maybe the Fibonacci sequence gets selected in nature a lot because
it's easy to select. What I mean is, the very best algorithms are not
necessarily the ones that get selected - the ones that actually get tried and
are good enough to survive are the ones that appear. My theory is that
organisms stumble into stuff like the Fibonacci sequence or that fern fractal
because they are likely to and because they work well enough for whatever
purpose.

~~~
jwco
So there is some theoretical and experimental work arguing that the Fibonacci
sequence minimizes the energy of soft particles interacting repulsively when
constrained to the surface of a cylinder. In 2009, some physicists found the
pattern when they made a "Magnetic Cactus": <http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0622>

------
llambda
It's refreshing to see a counterpoint to the MSM's enthusiasm for over-
dramatization and poor fact-checking; this wasn't a breakthrough in the
science of photovoltaics, as some headlines seemed to read. And I'm
particularly happy that the author took great care to not target the boy. He
should be encouraged to continue this kind of scientific pursuit and not be
dissuaded by mistakes in the research. In fact this is a good example of how
peer-reviewed research actually functions. That said, I feel the MSM only does
him a disservice by misrepresenting the implications of his project as
something more than it might be.

~~~
mpclark
Journalists aren't all Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, most of them aren't.
They are, in the main, _reporters_. They report what they've been told,
pausing only to package it up and make it more digestible to the reader. To
hold the media in general to some higher 'you must be a domain expert to write
about this subject' standard is to have a starry-eyed view of the world.

<bracing myself for the downvotes>

~~~
Goladus
Science writers should have some understanding of the field they're writing
about, though. If they don't understand the scientific details and none of
their domain expert contacts are able to help, they should at least able to
recognize the difference between a peer-reviewed article and a blog entry.
Spotting unverified claims doesn't require any science knowledge at all.

 _< bracing myself for the downvotes>_

Don't be lame.

------
callenish
When the blogger used the phrase "Fibonacci mysticism" it becomes clear he has
far too much bias to pay attention to what the kid was actually doing.

He points out that voltage in solar cells is essentially boolean. Ok. That
means that the kid has shown a way to orient the cells so they get sunlight
for a longer period of time. If evolution is anything to go by, his approach
likely reveals a local minima for maximizing the time that sunlight is
collected.

Is that worthless? No, it is not. It may well explain why trees orient their
leaves the way they do, and there could well be practical applications. If
your solar array produces more than the peak power you need but the cost and
energy loss of storing the power are significant, you may well want to use a
pattern like this that mimics what trees do.

What impresses me is that the kid noticed something in nature he hadn't
noticed before, read up on it to see what was known about this pattern, and
then went out and measured to see whether what he had read was accurate. Once
he had verified what he read, he then figured out how that knowledge might be
applied. In doing so, he discovered something that, while obvious in
hindsight, is not something that would necessarily have occurred to someone
trying to figure out how to maximize the time for solar panels to deliver
energy. I think the kudos are appropriate, even if the stories are misleading.

An important point here is that in any news story about something that you
know a lot about, there are always errors. Always. We should all keep that in
mind when we read or watch or listen to the news.

------
skrebbel
I don't think you can put this out there any less harsh than this. Plus, all
the harshness that's there is towards stupid journalists, not to the kid. And,
well, they deserve it.

------
robryan
I wonder, if this idea come from a someone older without any real experience
or qualifications in solar would it have been fact checked a little better
before it ended up everywhere?

I would want to encourage young people as much as possible, it's just that
some of the things you heard about are only considered impressive when those
doing the story have factored age into it. If the person was say 30 it
wouldn't even be a story.

~~~
nikster
The idea had apparently been around for a while, since 2008 or so, there were
other, similar studies. I don't know if they were similarly flawed or not
though.

I also would not completely dismiss the premise - trees are probably very good
at converting solar energy.

And to add to that, I don't buy the counter argument that a tree arrangement
can't be better than a flat panel - why not? The sun moves around so the flat
panel might be optimal at one point in the day, but will certainly be sub-
optimal at other times. This isn't a clear cut argument at all. There are many
variables in play. Cloud cover; seasons; etc. Keep in mind the experiment was
done in a cold climate.

~~~
daemonize
I would imaginr that the flat panel could be hooked to a servo and a control
loop be used to optimize poiting attitude in real time to compensate for the
sun's natural cycle.

~~~
shabble
This is already extremely common, with significant efficiency gains. As ever,
the downside is added complexity and cost.

See <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_tracker>

------
DevX101
This article was posted last night, but taken down by this morning. I
recovered it from google cache.

~~~
bhousel
The author is exactly right. There's no way that a tree array of panels that
are half not even pointing at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels
that are mostly pointing at the sun. Panels efficiency is measured in Watts,
and this kid is not going to be able to record their efficiency with a simple
probe DMM. In order to get a full picture of what's going on with his arrays,
he would need to hook both arrays up to a load and measure throughout the day,
or better yet a battery array / charge controller and measure at the end of
the day which array produced more power.

I kind of wanted to say something yesterday, but really didn't want to pile on
the kid, and everyone here just wanted so badly for the kid to be a genius.
The few comments that pointed out that he was wrong were voted down.

This is something that really bothers me about science fairs. Back when I was
13 years old, I did a school project to redesign a local troublesome
intersection. I just made a model of what it might look like and people loved
it and they even wrote about it in the paper and displayed my model in the
municipal building, and talked about what a bright young kid I was.

Now that I'm older, this bothers me a lot because in doing the project I
didn't do any real research, I didn't talk to any traffic engineers, I didn't
learn about intersection designs.. I didn't learn anything really. As an
adult, I can see that my plan for the intersection was silly and unworkable.

I kind of wish that schools emphasized mentorship programs rather than science
fairs. Kids would learn far more by partnering with knowledgeable adults to do
their experiments, rather than having these silly competitions where nobody
learns anything and the winner is the kid who puts the most work into having
the nicest presentation.

~~~
babebridou
> There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing
> at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing
> at the sun.

While this is so very true in the theoretical sense of the term, I gave this a
very short thought, and there might be edge conditions that could indeed lead
to "better power with tree-shaped panels" (1), now that I think about it.
There is a term that you are (rightfully) neglecting: the size of the system,
and incurred energy loss due to Joule Effect.

If the distance between panels arranged in a linear way is large, then it
might be more efficient to place additional panels closer to the output
circuit, maybe above it, in such a way that it doesn't overlap and yep, maybe
even with a different orientation, just to optimize the distance between
producer and consumer, and thus reduce resistance and energy losses. But that
would probably only be valid for specific sets of distances, positions, hour
of the day (seasons, voltage, quality of the conductor material...), but
that's only because the studied system shifts to be more of that of an Energy
Transmission System than that of an Energy Production System

(1) or sphere-shaped or pyramid-shaped or pokemon-shaped for that matter...

~~~
waterlesscloud
Genuine (if idle) question- why _do_ plants have leaves which permanently face
away from the sun? It's not zero-cost to the plant to produce such leaves...so
why does it?

~~~
DevX101
My educated guess is that there is some benefit to having a uniform
distribution of solar power over the course of a day. If all leaves pointed in
one optimal direction, then more energy would be directed at the tree in a
single day, but it would collect this energy in a narrow time span. It's
possible a tree could not efficiently process this energy in this time span,
similar to how you would not be able to eat a deer in one sitting.

By having a generally spherical orientation of leaves, the tree is always
receiving power throughout the day.

Again, this is all just my hypothesis.

~~~
salem
All the cells in one string (i.e. all the cells in series, connected positive
to negative terminal) need uniform sunlight. Otherwise some cells can go into
reverse bias and dissipate the power of the other cells in the string. This
happens, for example where there is uneven shade, or dirt on the array.

------
DanielBMarkham
I voted this up -- it read very well -- but I am a little uncomfortable about
voting up an article the author clearly wanted to delete.

------
jshort
Regardless of Aiden's findings about solar energy his ability to see a pattern
in tree branches and ten to attempt to answer the question why is impressive
in my books.

~~~
sqrt17
The problem is: there are plenty of 13-year-olds that apply the same
astuteness to ants, pet rabbits, pocket calculators and other things that are
not really interesting to the mainstream.

So the reason why everyone is excited about it is that there's a hope to get a
contribution towards a socially relevant problem. Except there's not, because
no one is there to explain to the kids how to design an evaluation for their
solution that makes it possible to relate it back to the important problem.

As a comparison, consider a cake baking contest in which only the participant
himself/herself is allowed to taste the cake where everyone else can only
look. This would not be a recipe to develop good-tasting cakes, even though
you probably get some very beautiful cakes made out of styrofoam by people who
believe that styrofoam tastes great.

Besides giving up the claim that science fairs are more relevant to science
than high school orchestras are to music (because, reasonably, a high school
orchestra delivering a crappy performance of a virtually unknown piece may
still make some kind of contribution), another possibility would be that
somewhere between regional and state levels, participants get expert advice on
their creation and formally have to factor in the expert advice into a revised
version of their experiment.

~~~
lurker19
Ironically, your example is reality!

Cake artists use fondant to make gorgeous high-price wedding and party cakes
with intricate and beautiful decorations, but that taste awful.

It makes one wonder why we have an industry of cake art instead of wedding
sculpture. I guess people appreciate the time-limitedness of the artwork for
some reason.

------
snorkel
Nonetheless I give the kid credit for exploring Fibonacci and biomimicry. Cool
concept.

------
its2010already
All I have to say is the guy writes pretty darn well for a 13-year old.
Perhaps his experiment is flawed, but I was very impressed by his writing
skills, and I know it will serve him well in the future.

------
njharman
> to orienting panels at sub-optimal angles

My understanding is tree is not at "sub-optimal" angles. But at varying angles
throughout the day and seasons as sun _moves_. Sometimes those angles < than
flat panel and sometimes those angles > than flat panel. And that over time
the tree was more often optimal than the flat panel.

No one is gonna convince me that millions of years of evolution hasn't
resulted in efficient solar collectors. But, from the original announcement
the biggest issues I noticed was that actual tree leafs _move_ during day and
many trees just give up in winter. Neither of which was replicated in solar
tree. Therefor solar tree very likely not as good as nature's trees.

------
ramy_d
is this like that time when some kid in india found a way to make solar cells
out of hair?

------
salem
I think one of the comments of the linked article made the best point, his
science teacher should have caught the mistake. Education and journalism
FAIL...

~~~
glimcat
What you have to understand about middle school science teachers is that they
optimistically have less electronics and physics knowledge than a first-year
undergraduate in either of those majors - and the same goes for most tech
bloggers.

But the media should really learn to stop taking anything that's published as
being gospel truth. Maybe making this mistake over a 13 year-old will teach
them that. (Yeah, right.)

~~~
lurker19
The media publish what their audience wants to look at. Don't wait on the
media, wait on the public, and seek out media outlets not by how much you
respect the publisher, but by how much you respect the taste of the audience.

------
EGreg
Wait a second bro.

Trees don't rotate to face the sun. In order to have an optimal angle
throughout the whole day, it would have to keep facing the sun, i.e. rotate.

I believe he may have missed this point.

As for the voltage measurement being the wrong metric -- agree.

~~~
gmartres
No, he explains that at the end. I can try to reformulate it. Imagine that you
can find the orientation which gives you the maximum amount of power for a
day, say E_max. If you have N panels, the total energy produced at the end of
the day will be N _E_max. If instead, you decide to put each panel in a
specific direction, they will all produce energy E_i < E_max at the end of the
day. So the total energy produce will be E_1 + E_2 + ... + E_N < N_E_max.

The flat array is the more efficient design.

~~~
EGreg
that assumes the power of the sun absorbed by the panel has a linear
relationship to the angle to the panel, or some similar assumption. It may not
be the case

------
realou
I think the point here is that Aidan's system has no moving parts and does not
track the sun. If you accumulate the total energy produced by the array over a
period of one year in, say, capacitors, then I am not certain at all that his
tree configuration would not be better than a fixed array of cells.

Of course, the fact that the picture in his paper showed a bright white wall
just besides his experimental setup removed credibility to the whole thing.

But this prevents no one from repeating the experiment with better control
over the variables and who knows...

------
justsomebloke
If the young budding scientist is wrong then why hasn't nature followed our
ideal 30 degree angle, he's certainly got me thinking?!

------
acex
walter: am i right? dude: yes walter you're right you're also an asshole.

------
nknight
Absent an explanation of why the author chose to delete this article, I can't
bring myself to find it credible. It might be right, or it might be very wrong
in a non-obvious way that the author finally realized, causing him to delete
it. There are other reasons it might have been deleted, but I have no good way
to judge.

Given that, I don't think it really adds anything to the overall debate.

------
randomanonymous
You listened to the comments in the last post's comments (the one with only a
couple comments).

This is MUCH healthier for a 13 year old, title wise, and article wise.

------
defdac
This reminds me of a newspaper in Sweden asking people on the streets 1) Do
you care if children have made the merchandise you buy? 2) Do you do anything
to follow up on it? Where one woman responded 1) Yes, children have no sense
of quality and it shows on the product. 2) No.

------
kubrickslair
A bigger point here is how we all mistook the results. There is always a
struggle between extreme peer review, which leads to insularity, and going by
the net real impact- 'don't publish, build'. In the latter approach, the
winner often forgets whose shoulders he stands on. In the former, you cannot
stand too high from your peers' shoulders, and there are few real winners-
'everybody is great, everybody wins /s'.

~~~
dramaticus3
all ?

speak for yourself

~~~
kubrickslair
You missed the point of what I am saying, if you are debating on this
minutiae.

~~~
pingswept
It could be the case that 95% of the readers who encountered the original
article on HN thought it was bunk, but didn't want to spend the time to
correct it. Or maybe it's the reverse-- maybe 95% of us believed it was a
brilliant invention. I can't think of a way to estimate which is true.

~~~
dennisgorelik
I personally suspected that something is likely to be wrong with that "solar
battery tree", but didn't have time to dig deeper. I quickly took a look into
comments, didn't find any heavyweight names there, didn't find any solid
comments and quit without upvoting the article:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902329>

Unfortunately 630 other people upvoted it.

I do upvote this "Debunk" article
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906538>

Important conclusion:

In news ranking I would clearly prefer to rely on subset of Hacker News
readers. Not on the full set.

I actually would prefer not to see articles that are upvoted by the same
people who upvoted junk science article.

~~~
kubrickslair
My comment was NOT about a solar battery tree, but a general philosophical
statement about how we interpret and judge information.

The moment I start loving HN, I start seeing such Aspergeristic tendencies. So
downvote me to hell, but I am stuck between people loving kittens & user-
generated 'rage' comics, and between people cannot appreciate broad
philosophical ideas.

PS: This comment does not have much to do with what the parent said, but a
broader problem with HN. And somehow I think this too (like the orignal
comment) will be misinterpreted and downvoted to oblivion.

~~~
pingswept
Consider an alternative possibility, which I think is what actually happened:
your comment was written in the context of a discussion about a solar tree,
and the first sentence, which did not establish any broader philosophical
context, was a statement that several people disagreed with. The remaining
three sentences didn't make a coherent argument, at least that I can tell.

I don't think that's worthy of downvoting. Still, I think you might get more
satisfaction from HN if you framed your arguments more clearly instead of
blaming the readers for what you see as their Aspergistic tendencies.

~~~
kubrickslair
I would agree with you, but the comments were initially upvoted a lot, which
tells me some people got it. I think it's my mistake to write it without
providing context in the first place. The comments probably made sense to
some, but not most because I presumed too much prior knowledge. The comment
assumed that every one had more than a cursory idea of peer review. I have
worked with people who have published in the best of places (including the
venerable Science) and still think that process in badly broken and flawed.
And I have seen pretty bad stuff make through great journals. Now this
experience is probably different from that of most HN readers, who would view
peer review as a purely benign thing. I agree that I did not provide a good
enough context to what I was saying.

Also to talk about 'Aspergistic tendencies', it's a negative term and I used
it because I was irritated. But I would like any of you to please answer this.
How should I have phrased the first line any other way, and not appear
arrogant. 'We all' is a construction of language thing, to take all off you in
the fold. And I think it was pretty obvious 'we all' did not mean literally
all. And anyone engaging in a bit of second-order thought could have
deciphered that. One can say that the problem is partially because many HN
readers are not native English speakers, but I would say neither am I, and
it's more of an attitude thing. Programming is almost completely literal, most
life is not.

~~~
pingswept

      How should I have phrased the first line any other way, and not appear arrogant.
    

The original: "A bigger point here is how we all mistook the results."

Suggested revision: "It's odd that an article that now appears mistaken
originally received over 600 upvotes. I wonder how many people would downvote
it, given the chance."

------
earbitscom
This post reads to me as if the person took personal offense to Aidan getting
"undeserved" recognition. He claims to be angry at the journalists and
scientists who didn't do their research before jumping to the conclusion that
he had created something amazing, but the tone is just unnecessary.

> Some poor 13-year-old kid is all over the news

"poor 13-year-old" is hardly the words I use to describe a kid who got a bunch
of press because they conducted an interesting science experiment, no matter
how incorrect the end results of that experiment were.

> blindly parrot the words of this very misinformed (not to blame him, he's an
> unguided 13 year old) kid.

If a 45 year old scientist posted the results of an experiment that challenged
the furthest reach of their abilities, and some scientists with more
information or a different perspective explained why the experiment was
conducted incorrectly or why the results were inaccurate, nobody would call
the original person "very misinformed" or "unguided".

There are just a lot more ways to tell a 13 year old conducting solar panel
experiments using concepts beyond most adults abilities the ways in which they
could improve their experiment. The last thing you need to call a kid doing
this kind of work is "very misinformed".

------
Kilimanjaro
It is not ridiculing those who fail that we advance science, it is about
thinking differently even if we fail, for we learn and improve and someday we
will succeed.

What if we use solar cells on one side of the leaf and mirrors on the other so
they can reflect sunlight when the leaf looks east and the sun is going down
west?

What if we use a sphere shaped cell? like a mango tree? or a cone shaped cell?
like a pine tree?

What if we put solar trees on every sidewalk, even if they produce less
energy, but are more ergonomic and easier to accomodate in our daily lives?

What if we sprinkle some water on that solar tree? What if we make it taller?
wider?

Go on kid, continue your experiments, listen to those who give you sound
advice, ignore the ones who only add noise to the harmonious melody of nature
and science.

