New York City never sleeps. Energy has returned to the streets. And what supplies the energy to heat New York? Steam a relic of the Industrial Revolution, is the invisible force warming thousands of buildings. Here’s how the city keeps its pipes hot — and its streets occasionally spewing mist like a Gotham movie set:
“Today, the network, now owned by utilities giant Consolidated Edison – ConEd – operates four steam production sites in Manhattan and one in Queens. They also purchase additional steam from a 322 megawatt plant in Brooklyn, which is managed by a separate company. ConEd’s largest facility sits along the East River, taking up the lion’s share of a city block on 14th Street. At this plant, a dozen massive boilers heat water to approximately 177 degrees Celsius and push it into the network at 150 pounds per square inch (roughly equivalent to ten atmospheres). The scale of all this is considerable. The six boiler sites together have a total capacity of roughly 11 and a half million pounds of steam per hour; at peak times they use over nine million. Every gallon of water produces just over eight pounds of steam, which means that the system consumes nearly two Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water per hour during the winter.”
From Works in Progress, Steam networks
If you want to understand why Canada “needs” to be the 51st state and Greenland needs to be part of the US, consider this. In an age of climate change, population surges, and strategic recalculations, land redistribution is the game no one admits they’re playing — unless you squint hard at the history:
“Today we are in the middle of a ‘great reshuffle’ of land. Over the past two centuries, nearly every society has reallocated land ownership and property rights. And because of the power that land confers to those who hold it, this reshuffling has set societies on distinct trajectories of development. It’s helped some countries become more egalitarian and productive, whereas for others it has embedded racial hierarchies, deep inequalities and economic stagnation.
The global population bubble and climate change will amplify the reshuffling, and a picture of how that will happen is starting to emerge.”
Whether it is justification for a new colonialism is a different question. From Aeon, On Unstable Ground
Talking out of turn, as with “Signalgate,” has a much longer history, especially regarding wartime communications. Once upon a time, there was a telegram that changed the course of World War I and proved that overconfidence in encryption is an age-old vice:
“Normally, Zimmermann would have dispatched such a sensitive diplomatic “instruction” via one of five German-owned transatlantic cables, which would have guaranteed secure transmission of the message. But the British had cut all five cables at the outset of the war, forcing the Foreign Office to encode its communications and dispatch them over wireless or through other means. Zimmermann was so confident of the strength of German encryption that he not only dispatched his telegram over wireless, via Sweden, but sent an additional copy via the American embassy in Berlin.”
From The Atlantic, a trip down history’s memory lane, Worse Than Signalgate
And since there is always something to learn, a gentle reminder that in science, words mean things.
“In science, a bona fide theory doesn’t lend itself to “only.” A theory is an explanatory paradigm that has stood the test of theoretical coherence and—most important—empirical validation. So, if someone tells you that they have a theory that Elvis still lives, you might or might not want to correct them about Elvis, but you definitely should downgrade their “theory” to a hypothesis (more accurately, a ludicrous notion). The theory of evolution resides comfortably among other powerful fellow theories, including the germ theory of disease, the theory of continental drift, atomic theory, number theory, the theories of general and special relativity, and quantum theory.”
From Nautil.us, 10 Misconceptions About Evolution
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
