Lego are just like those brick. If you just pile them on you have no strength, if you interlock them you have strength in one direction, if you have 2 rows interlocked, you have strength in 2 directions.
Imagine a posterboard, one of those 3 section things you can by at a supermarket kids use in science fairs. What happens if you attempt to stand that posterboard up with the sections in a strait line? Now take the outer two sections and place them at an angle to the central board. One will fall over by itself. The other will stand upright and even take a non-trivial amount of downward pressure (weight) before it falls over.
It works the same way with any thin and tall building, it needs to have support perpendicular to the main body. You'll note that most straight brick walls have thicker "towers" at regular intervals. Or it needs underground support, like concrete in the ground for a fence post.
Unrelated: Go buy a lego set! If you've forgotten the joy of LEGOs I encourage you to rediscover it. The kinds of sets they have available these days are vast and the cleverness of their building techniques needs to be seen to be appreciated.
Same parent company and same technology (the 2 is basically an XC/C-40 with a different body). Yes they will make the move, just need the announcement.
Yeah, and I came here to mention this, as I tried to watch it and got 4-5 episodes in before giving up.
Some of it was really frickin cool, and you can even feel some of William Gibson voice shine through into the world.
I probably want this to work more than anybody, but even for me the show was just unwatchable. So often the characters get nothing to do, nothing to say, it's nobody's job to create narrative momentum. It's just brutal.
That said, I'm still not deterred from wanting to watch necromancer just because I want that type of show to work. A show where technology isn't just window dressing, and there's real curiosity about how it impacts the world, and there's real imagination about how to extract original and interesting visual aesthetics from it.
I'll offer an opposing viewpoint that the show was totally watchable and not "brutal" for me. Some of the acting/story was a bit over the top, but overall still a pretty good show and interesting idea. I've read Neuromancer but wouldn't say I'm a William Gibson expert/fan, so maybe the show is more appealing to the average viewer like me.
I was enjoying the show a lot, and liked to watch it all the way to the end, but for the second half I felt like I was just watching a series of scenes that I liked, not a coherent story. I couldn't make heads or tails of why what was happening, was indeed happening. I chalked it up to being tired at night, and made a note to rewatch sometime soon, but now I have doubts...
I mean, this is more or less how I felt reading the first quarter to half of The Peripheral. Each chapter (scene) seemed disconnected and out of context, even once I understood the two time periods.
And it's a legitimate criticism of the books. Fidelity to substance of the original is one thing, execution is another. I think the weaknesses of the books as transposed to film, combined with poor execution of craft are what make one different from the other.
Isn't that kind of appropriate, though? You create a world where there are enormous technological and sociological forces that are outside of your characters' control, and those forces change who the characters are. That's a big part of the point.
It's about characters, technology trends and plot details that are a thousand times more specific. The execution of it is bad, and it's only through extremely lazy equivocation that those two things can be said to be the same.
The "go ahead, take some of this money" scene is bone-crushingly stupid, just for one and it's one of a raft of examples of the dialog is so lacking in any world building detail or signal of character motivations.
The greatest credit I can give it is that it fails in an interesting way, and doesn't fail from lack of interest in source material. And I'd rather live in a world full of shows that fail in interesting ways than ones that successfully execute familiar and shallow "is technology bad?" themes over and over.
I loved the book and struggled watching the show. You could tell which scenes were written by William Gibson, and which ones were written by the Westworld people. Around episode 3 or 4 the plot completely diverges from the book, and almost all of it is generic 'prestige TV' type writing. I would have dropped the show around episode 4 or 5 if it I didn't love the book. Can't really recommend it to anyone.
To clarify: so much of the show's runtime feels like filler. Every episode has 1-2 scenes of characters arguing which are completely inconsequential to the plot. Every once in a while a character will suggest an interesting idea for how the time travel technology could be used in a novel way. But every time characters have a conversation with any depth, the show runners feel the need to cut away to an inconsequential fight scene so a hypothetical viewer won't be bored.
Same, managed the first few episodes which were full of good ideas from Gibson, and then it meandered off into drivel. The adaptation of Neuromancer will be garbage, I plan on actively avoiding it.
Looks like I stopped right about where you did, even though I was quite impressed with the potential in the first 2 episodes, while my hope really started to wane by episode 3.
Yeah, and it's pretty good, although if you like the idea, I'd recommend just reading the book. It's very different from Neuromancer, it feels like a very different Gibson has written it (more considered, but perhaps less agile - there's nothing quite as vivid as "the sky above the port"), but the central conceit is really interesting. There's already a sequel (Agency), and supposedly a third book on the way.
For those mega cargo ships, why is civil nuclear power vessels are not a thing? Seems they would massively reduce the footprint while providing better clearner power.
Because it's all about cost. Those 400m container ships are ran by a low cost crew of 15-25 with some 3rd party maintenance personnel sprinkled in. Try fitting a more expensive fuel and more maintenance into that. On top of all safety concerns.
For ocean crossing vessels they are more closely looking at e-fuels and hydrogen since that gives the same benefitd at cheaper cost with not a too large change in the shore side infrastructure.
Servicing marine nuclear reactor units requires very special skills and is expensive. So is the initial capital cost. Servicing large marine diesel systems uses labor that is much more available globally.
For big container ships, that's a good question. I think it comes down to: low quality diesel fuel is cheap enough, and the regulatory hurdles would (presumably) be immense.
(Something else worth noting is that about half of all ocean shipping is just moving fossil fuels around. If we could just stop using fossil fuels, that by itself could cut ship traffic in half.)
I've wondered about the viability of battery-electric ships. Crossing the Pacific on a single charge isn't realistic given current battery technology as far as I know, but it seems like it might be possible to have transcontinental undersea power lines on heavily-used routes, and buoys at regular intervals with charging ports. So you'd have a ship travel for a day, then stop a few hours at a buoy to charge. The ships would probably have a small backup diesel just in case.
With nuclear, you could also imagine ship convoys. You have one small-ish ship with mostly just the nuclear reactor that trails electrical cables that other ships attach to. No need for every ship to have nuclear reactor.
One could even imagine a government operating the power-plant ships. For instance, let's say the U.S. Navy were to operate a dozen power-plant ships that travel a fixed route across the Pacific. Any ship could, for a fee, connect to the power-plant ship and be supplied power as it makes its way to its destination, and then switch over to batteries or diesel if the convoy route doesn't go all the way there. It seems plausibly feasible.
Cost, safety, scale (there are 80,000+ commercial vessels), reliability, crew training and costs, etc.
Combustion's highly proved, reliable, and safe technology. Range is sufficient for transoceanic transport. Emissions (both CO2 and other factors) are an issue, but could be mitigated with synthetic fuels, possibly biofuels (though even shipping would strain capacities required).
