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Windmills, Pizzas, and Elephants

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This week I came across an interesting article about the new record for the world's largest wind turbine. The new windmill is 242-meters (794-ft) tall and will be capable of producing 16 megawatts of electricity.

What really struck me as interesting was that the blades of this turbine are only 19% larger than the previous largest ones made by the company, but the turbine produced 45% more electricity!

Basically, the bigger you make wind turbines, the more efficient they get. Why?

Because the area they cover is a circle, and the area of a circle is dependent on the square of the radius. In this case, the radius is just the length of one of the turbine blades.

The reason why wind turbines become more efficient as they get bigger is also the same reason why the largest pizza you can buy is almost always going to be the best deal. Pizzas are prices by diameter, but what you eat is the entire area.

However, everything doesn't scale and become more efficient as you get larger.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman would tell a story about if you could raise an ant to be the size of an elephant. As you increase the size of an animal, its mass increases in proportion to its volume, which is the cube of its height or length (approximately).

However, the pressure from the weight has to be supported by its legs, and that is on the cross section of its leg, which only grows by the square of its height or length (approximately).

So, if you made and ant the size of an elephant, it wouldn't work. Ant legs are fine for an ant, but they would collapse if it were scaled up to the size of an elephant.

Knowing what things can scale and what things can't is something you always need to pay attention to. Even growing my podcast, I have to plan for what things will continue to work as the show grows and what things will have to change.

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This Week's Episodes

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• August 27 The Number of the Beast​
• August 26 Domo Arigato Mr. Momofuku
• August 25 Starfish Prime​
• August 24 The Schlieffen Plan​
• August 23 The Dead Sea​
• August 22 Black Tot Day​

Past Episode Updates

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​Infinity and Beyond​

​Scientific American did a deep dive on why some infinities are bigger than others. This might be easier to understand visually than trying to grasp it from a podcast.

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​Why Does Liechtenstein Even Exist?​

Liechtenstein had their national day on August 15. It is a day where the Prince buys beer for everyone in the country. They have also been investing in casinos and they now have more per capita than Monaco or Macau.

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​The History of the Shipping Container​

The world is highly dependent on shipping containers and container ships. One of the reasons for increased prices and shortages has been an inability to process incoming shipping containers.

News for Curious People

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​Earliest South American migrants had Indigenous Australian, Melanesian ancestry | Science Magazine

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There has been a long standing debate as to where people in the Americas and the Pacific came from. In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl sailed a handmade ship called the Kon-Tiki from South American to the Tuamotus Islands in French Polynesia.
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He thought that humans migrated from the Americas to the Pacific. Subsequent DNA analysis showed it was the other way around. However, as this article indicates, it might not be that simple. I previously did an episode on Polynesian navigators.

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​Million-year-old mammoth genomes shatter record for oldest ancient DNA | Nature

DNA, being an organic molecule, doesn't last very long in the big scheme of things. However, researchers have been learning new techniques for getting DNA out of bones and teeth.

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​Analysis of Pompeii’s Garbage Suggests the Ancient Romans Recycled, Too | Smithsonian

So much of what we know about the lives of non-famous people from the ancient world comes from garbage and archeology. It shouldn't come as too much of surprise that they recycled material as it would cost too much to let it go to waste.

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