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A comment on An artificial glacier growing in the desert (2017).

Re:An artificial glacier growing in the desert (2017) by saagarjha on Monday December 09, 2019 @04:07PM (#21746591)
> But a cone has more desirable properties: "It has minimal exposed surface area for the volume of water it contains."

That would actually be a sphere. Cones are actually not that great, especially if they’re tall.

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Re:An artificial glacier growing in the desert (2017) by IanCal on Monday December 09, 2019 @04:37PM (#21746886)
I'm not sure that's true. I think they're talking about how much they're in the Sun and I think I can construct a single counter example, r=2 h=1 for the cone, r=1 for the sphere should be the same volume. For light at 90 degrees the area in the sun would be 2m^2 for the cone and pi m^2 for the sphere.

That's not a perfect calculation so I don't know where the limits are here but I don't think they're talking strictly about surface area.

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