Quick notes: Agrivoltaics | NEP...

• Agrivoltaics: Generate electricity and produce nutritionally-superior crops simultaneously with tinted, semi-transparent solar panels. The tinted solar panels absorb blue and green wavelengths to generate electricity. Orange and red wavelengths pass through, allowing plants underneath to grow.
  
  While the crop receives less than half the total amount of light it would get if grown in a standard agricultural system, the colours passing through the panels are the ones most suitable for its growth.
  
  Agrivoltaics work best for plants that grow well in partial shade. Potential functioning crops include hog peanut, alfalfa, yam, taro, cassava, sweet potato, along with lettuce.
  
  Food, water, energy at its best.




• NEP: Syncing education with practical knowledge and the needs of the times, the policy recommends that from the sixth standard onward, students be taught coding in school... The premium on “English-medium'' should also ease a bit, with the government encouraging early learning in the mother tongue or regional language.

Coding & AI is skill like that of the carpenter and the artist.

India teaching coding only via English is like asking children of merchants to make furniture.

Explains why Indian coders lag those from China, Japan, Russia, or US where coding is taught in via own languages.

— Subhash Kak (@subhash_kak) August 2, 2020




• Alexa Fund: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products. In some cases, it has met with startups about possible takeovers, figured out how their technology works and then refused to invest in them when it launches a competing product at a later stage.



• Energy-based-weaponry: Israel's Iron Beam, the laser that could destroy Iranian missiles



• Three Gorges Dam: Was it worth it? Some geologists say instead of relying on dams to stop flooding, we should give rivers space and allow them to expand during the flood season. "Large alluvial rivers naturally flood during the wet season. Floodwater is not a problem, that's simply what rivers do. The problem is when you have a lot of people living in the areas that are subject to flooding". Many dams in the northwestern coast of the US were actually removed because they blocked the migration of fish from the ocean up the rivers, causing their populations to drop. In the southeast of the country, upstream dams in the mountains created environmental problems, driving fish species to extinction, causing water pollution, and the recession of coastlines due to the blocking of sediments.



• Reverse migration: Pandemic triggers reverse migration from India cities to villages. Creating ways to earn a living for migrants who have lost jobs remains India’s biggest challenge as it grapples with the pandemic and a faltering economy.



• Moon-bathing, to cool off your heat: A kinesthetic experience of nature, close at hand, that can soothe away anger, which is a pitta condition, and aggravated vata (of anxiety).