
The building is driven by 10 megawatts of solar power, of course.
China has decided to use the power of supercomputing to help in its on-going quest to beat the smog that is turning the country into an international coughing laughing stock. The Tianhe-1A, which took number one spot on the oft-changing Top 500 list for a few months in 2010, will be set to work trying to figure out the cause …
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I'm sure many readers will remember seeing footage of roads in Beijing in the 70s and 80s: Stacked with people on identical black bikes. I'm also sure I'm not the only one that thought that if the day ever came when they swapped their bikes for cars then this kind of pollution was inevitable.
so they decided to study the problem a bit longer.
Or with other words: let's win some time until winter is over or the weather changes. (Whatever comes first).
And no, it has nothing to do with the long, long delays in introduction of stronger emission standards. (cough, cough)
We tackled that with the Clean Air act and its friends. Low-emmissions fuel and a big push to electrify (and gasify) domestic heating.
Should be relatively easy for a more centrally-controlled setup to reproduce. Wrap it in a 5 Year Smog Plan and Chang-e's your bunny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Dust says that similar events have been recorded as far back as AD174, but these smogs are becoming more frequent/deadly and it's fairly clear there's a human component to them
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_brown_cloud
It would be nice to think that eastern countries might look at the gross mistakes of western ones wrt pollution and use the lessons learned to avoid generating simliar catastrophes, but so far it seems that they're just using them as a set of instructions to make matters worse.