| When the blogger used the phrase "Fibonacci mysticism" it becomes clear he has far too much bias to pay attention to what the kid was actually doing. He points out that voltage in solar cells is essentially boolean. Ok. That means that the kid has shown a way to orient the cells so they get sunlight for a longer period of time. If evolution is anything to go by, his approach likely reveals a local minima for maximizing the time that sunlight is collected. Is that worthless? No, it is not. It may well explain why trees orient their leaves the way they do, and there could well be practical applications. If your solar array produces more than the peak power you need but the cost and energy loss of storing the power are significant, you may well want to use a pattern like this that mimics what trees do. What impresses me is that the kid noticed something in nature he hadn't noticed before, read up on it to see what was known about this pattern, and then went out and measured to see whether what he had read was accurate. Once he had verified what he read, he then figured out how that knowledge might be applied. In doing so, he discovered something that, while obvious in hindsight, is not something that would necessarily have occurred to someone trying to figure out how to maximize the time for solar panels to deliver energy. I think the kudos are appropriate, even if the stories are misleading. An important point here is that in any news story about something that you know a lot about, there are always errors. Always. We should all keep that in mind when we read or watch or listen to the news. |