John Jacob Astor IV (July 13, 1864 – April 15, 1912) was an American business magnate, real estate developer, investor, writer, lieutenant colonel in the Spanish–American War, and a prominent member of the Astor family.
Probably explains why the description of the book sounds like American power fantasy. Interesting to hear of sci-fi from so long ago though.
Actually, Jiggawatt is gigawatt mispronounced. So they are the same thing. :) There is an article in the NY Times regarding this that when they were doing research, someone mispronounced it to them.
A 100-watt bulb is so named because it uses 100 watts of energy for every hour of operation.
This does not make sense. watt is not a unit of energy.
Neither does this:
We’re still nowhere close to a gigawatt, we’ll need 1,000 megawatts to get there. That’s enough electricity to keep the average American home powered up for 100 years.
For anyone curious energy is the ability to do work and power is how fast that work can be done. Power represented in watts is the relationship of units of energy per unit of time or 1 watt = 1 joule (energy unit or work that can be done) per second.
When I read those things I always assume they're talking about megawatt hours.
Considering that the average american home consumes a little under 1000 kilowatt hours a month then the math starts to line up.
1000 KW hours is 1 megawatt hour. 1,000 megawatt hours is 1 gigawatt hour, so 1,000 months, while being a bit shy of 100 years, is still 83 years and change.
The article does lack any conversion to Olympic swimming pools, bananas, or infinity stones so some of us may never truly grasp the scale of this power.
Fun fact: The music video was filmed in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel (now the L.A. Grand Hotel Downtown) in Los Angeles in December 2000. Directed by Spike Jonze
It would be nice is someone built a spin gravity space station with lunar and martian levels. We could see how people fare after several months in that environment before setting off to build permanent bases.
The Discovery Channel series “MythBusters” featured episodes in 2004, 2006 and 2010 testing out scenarios for the purported death ray but ultimately declared the legend to be a myth when each test failed to light a wooden boat on fire. In 2005, a class of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inspired by the show’s first episode, was able to ignite a wooden boat once with a similar technique to Sener’s on a larger scale, but failed on a second attempt.
Sener said he believes that combining MIT’s findings with his own, the data could suggest the death ray was plausible, and Archimedes likely could have used the sun’s rays with large mirrors to cause combustion. But the technology may not work in cold temperatures or cloudy weather, and the sea’s impact on the ships’ motion affects the practicality of this device, he added in his paper.
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