It's possible that blue class workers got those blues real bad. I asked their women for comment, but they said they woke up this mornin', upped, and left 'em. The only ones I could catch up with were very old ones from the Missisippi Delta region, who admitted to feeling like a broke down engine...
I'm afraid I think the long term coevolution of gut biomes ship sailed around the time we started indiscriminately slaughtering those gut biomes with antibiotics. (not to mention importing large numbers of unfamiliar alternatives through changes in food systems, and at least in some cases raising kids in crazy-sterile environments). So I tend to agree with you that this doesn't seem like a good thing to rush into, but it's interesting as a possible form of repair.
Tosh! Thousands more people die in winter, not from cold, probably because they're stupid enough to see NHS doctors. They don't actually die of cold in a country where uninsulated old houses rarely even form ice on the inside of the windows these days. Even that isn't harmful; you should try it, it might make you realise you are much less fragile than you believe. In mentioning the architecture I was merely referencing that Britain having less-insulated houses than some countries is not some moral failing but an historical accident - but if I could trade all modern houses for beautiful ones I would do so in an instant. Even without heating they do not get cold enough in winter to kill you; if you transplanted them to Poland they would, of course, but we don't do that.
Really? Was fairly sure Splinter Cell really didn't invent this, but it was what came to mind. Didn't know it went back that far. I'll have to look that up, I only know Max Headroom from clips.
Ironically, you have to keep rooms quite hot to have anything to recover - and you're committing quite a few kWh to run the ventilators. If your house is new enough to seal properly and you really do want to be hot indoors, it's definitely more economical. Some big "if"s there. But skipping the heat and ventilating naturally is free :-) Can't beat that. It wouldn't be a practical plan in places that regularly get serious cold, but Britain is not one of those places, barring a few Scots mountaintops.
There is nobody with this viewpoint in government. Quite the opposite, the government are running up huge debt subsidising the hell out of people's gas consumption, incentivising them to gobble it, which raises the risk of it running out as mentioned in the linked article. Why do you prefer this? It seems much more disruptive.
It is basically never cold enough to die of cold in the UK. Winter death "surges" are just death by NHS. Anyway insulation is only worth bothering with if you give up on ventilation (excepting expensive heat-recovery mechanical ventilation very few people have in any country) which is far more important - being a bit chilly is easily fixed with tweed but lack of fresh air really fucks you up. Turn off the heat, open a bloody window and put a jacket on!
I for one am grateful the UK managed to keep loads of nice Victorian townhouses because the Luftwaffe weren't that great at their jobs. They're nice, proper high ceilings and woodwork.
I agree with you that the government energy subsidy we have now is appalling. Should be dumped immediately. I'm paying £15/mo less than I did before - this is the most stupid use of national debt ever devised, I would rather pay what energy actually costs than be forced to be complicit in this.
Other way around in locomotives. The fire goes through the tubes, the water surrounds them. The large number of tubes gives a really large surface area over which the fire's heat can be transferred to the water - it's a form of heat exchanger. The last energy of the exhaust steam from the cylinders is sent up the exhaust to create a forced draught that drags the fire through the tubes.
Later industrial and marine boilers turned this inside out and sent the water through tubes in the fire like you describe. This can be more efficient (because it's easier to hold high pressure in water tubes than a loco boiler) but only a few locos tried it and it didn't deliver much benefit there - seems to have been hard to make work well in loco format.
Design is really important and a genuinely difficult skill. Unfortunately UI/UX design is a growth area that is currently attracting useless chancers like shit in a honey-and-vinegar sauce attracts flies. I feel a bit sorry for chancers because it must be a bit grim to know you are useless and have to fake it... but not so sorry I will hire one, or treat the one hired by someone else as the star they claim to be.
"Tools don't spark joy": is this a case of "each to their own" or is it a case of "owning the wrong tools"? There are a lot of people out there for whom tools spark joy (ok, ok, I am one) and given that they provide a much-needed bit of control over your context/environment this seems reasonable.
As for hiking equipment, I think you really need to be somewhere remarkable to be somewhere where kit, rather than understanding and attitude, really makes a difference. These places exist. But there are a lot of places you can enjoy just fine with little or no specialised stuff and I feel the kit fetishists waste a lot of energy and material while putting normal people off.
If your garb is JUST an unbelted housecoat there is indeed a risk of cold extremities and not just hands and feet. Now pardon me while I clean the "mental images" screen. I should probably have caveated my remarks with "if appropriately dressed"!
Ordinary mobile network use is not all that location-private. Wifi is worse. Looks like the mmwave 5g is even worse than that. Exact location privacy rarely directly matters to me personally but it doesn't follow that there is no risk of society-scale bad effects, or impact on other people that I ought to be concerned about. What I questioned, though, was whether it will really be practical for anyone to choose how much they engage with this. It's not so hard to turn wifi off when out and on when at home, lots of people do mote because it can be a nuisance than out of privacy concern. Will it really be equally easy to choose which bits of 5g spectrum a phone uses? If you think so, I have a a bridge for sale...
Pretty sure 4 gig RAM was common consumer level then, but I take your point. I think the average consumer user became rather less affected by the benefits of increased RAM somewhere around 8 and that let manufacturers get away with keeping on turning out machines that size. Specialist software and common OSes carried on getting better at using more if you had more demanding tasks to do, which is probably quite a lot of the people here, but not a high % of mass market computer buyers.
Honestly I think the pace of advance has left me behind too now, as the pool of jobs that really need the next increment of "more" goes down. There might be a few tasks that can readily consume more and more silicon for the foreseeable, but more and more tasks will become "better doesn't matter". (someone's going to butt in and say their workload needs way more. Preemptively, I am happy for you. Maybe even a little jealous and certainly interested to hear. But not all cool problems have massive data)
It gets down to about four or five in bedrooms, six in the room I work in, 8 to 10 in rooms closer to the kitchen. Been doing this for years, no ill effects.
3.6x, given 50% efficient generation and transmission, would require a heat pump COP about 7.2. Unfortunately real heat pump COPs are 3 or less, meaning the gas goes 1.5x further or less. This is still great (since it saves gas and there are other sources of electric) but unfortunately it's really high monetary cost (since the electric costs about 3x the gas, so even if the heat pump were free, it costs twice as much to run; electric prices follow gas prices closely so they don't get cheaper when gas runs short). So it's a hard sell. I think they're clever devices, I like them, I will probably buy one. But they're no panacea.
I think he's asking about the common trap people seem to fall into where, trying to keep heat in, they shut down air changes too far. Human breath puts a surprising amount of moisture into the air, and cooking can too. If you let that build up and have a cold wall it can build up a film of damp very quickly and if it's left damp and cool it can encourage mould. That kind of bad air quality is far worse than a bit of a chill.
Draughts :-) It's an old place, it doesn't seal. That and sleeping in rooms with the window open just a crack as much as possible. Mould tends to hit when people obsessively seal everything up.
I still have a condensation problem in a few specific places I have to keep an eye on. It's not general.
Thanks! that looks technically similar to the heat pumps aimed at space heating but a bit better - perhaps there's an efficiency in it being meant to do just one job? It looks like it (or its ilk) might be a good fit for me.
Outside wobbles around -2 to 8 in winter here, inside rarely less than 6, which is nippy but not dangerous. A not very insulated house with solid walls (this one's from about 1890 and has only had the easy things done) doesn't really sink to outside temperature if you live in it, cook, have appliances etc. There are plenty of heat inputs, just they do another job first. Hence my interest in water heat, I think it would start to be grim without it. Stove for a small number of really cold evenings, plus visitors. It would be a really bad idea to use it all the time but it would be hard to fit a radiator-type system to the job of "one hot room occasionally".
Genuine, this-never-occurred-to-me question: are there lots of people out there with boilers that DON'T do this, or areas where it is not normal?
If so - this might explain something that's been mildly irritating me. When looking for alternatives to fuel-burning boilers it seems easy to find positive stories about space heating - and much less info on water heating, to the point where it's starting to look like maybe some of these options might not be great. Water heating is my largest home energy usage and space heating very little because it is grossly overrated; if you are not really unwell an indoor temperature around 10 c is quite pleasant, so I tore my (rubbish) radiators out in 2017 and never looked back. This is making it surprisingly hard to figure out what replaces the boiler. If the marketing is aimed at pure heating boiler replacers, this difficulty is at least easier understood if not easier solved.
The first half or so of Snow Crash is a great entry point if the recipient already read some cyberpunk and thought "this has something interesting but also has a stick up its arse, it's about time someone ripped the piss out of it" - and I say this as a fan of Gibsonian prose excess.
The only problem is this puts the recipient in a too-cynical, too-stylistically-demanding mode for the rest of Stephenson.
- Posted on my Ono-Sendai Rig, from some kind of Zone, while experiencing Hacker News as some kind of geometric hallucination, under a sky the colour of a television switched off...
What on earth? UK selfemployment tax is far more aggressive than this and the tax authorities have been on an aggressive campaign against selfemployed people for many years, leading loads of people - including me - to give up selfemployment and end up paying LESS tax as a result.I miss selfemployment! but it doesn't bring enough benefits to justify being reamed AND demonised.
And fuck the NHS. Smash the shit out of it. We'll all die exactly the same number of times without it, but be healthier and happier on the way.