This whole post is a good illustration to how math is much more creative and flexible than we are lead to believe in school.

The whole concept of “manifolds” is basically that you can take something like a globe, and make atlases out of it. You could look at each map of your town and say that it’s wrong since it shouldn’t be flat. Maps are really useful, though, so why not use math on maps, even if they are “wrong”? Traveling 3 km east and 4 km north will put you 5 km from where you started, even if those aren’t straight lines in a 3d sense.

One way to think about a line being “straight” is if it never has a “turn”. If you are walking in a field, and you don’t ever turn, you’d say you walked in a straight line. A ship following this path would never turn, and if you traced it’s path on an atlas, you would be drawing a straight line on map after map.

In case you are in this community but haven’t religiously read everything on Low Tech Mag.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/history-and-future-of-the-compressed-air-economy/

Unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t seem like aquavoltaics is actually a real thing like agrivoltaics.

With agrivoltaics, you get benefits to the agriculture (shade helps some crops), and the solar panels (less need for weeding between panels, transpiration cooling panels for higher efficiency). Obviously, probably the biggest benefit is monetary; the money per land area goes up, enabling different crops to be profitably grown, or grown on land that would otherwise be too expensive for agriculture.

With aquavoltaics, it doesn’t seem like they specify a benefit other than “sticking solar panels on ‘unused’ land makes the land use more profitable”; there’s no interaction. I suppose there is still the effect of making aquaculture profitable where it otherwise might not be, and allowing for different species that may be otherwise unprofitable.

Still though, it doesn’t seem like there’s an “interaction” unless I’m missing something. Maybe if the panels were literally over the water, you could keep the water (and the panels) cooler and grow different species?

I feel like if it’s just the money piece, we could coin a whole bunch of other “-voltaics”.

The idea works great if you stop allowing cars the utilize the space

Yeah, this is literally just highlighting the huge amount of land dedicated to cars. People complain about the space used by solar, but a small subset of roads take up as much space as a solar farm that could provide the majority of our energy.

I just read into it a little bit. Seems that I was wrong, and “tar paper” is typically not completely waterproof, it’s just water resistant. Most stuff these days isn’t technically tar paper, either, it’s roofing felt. I guess it’s only called paper if it’s made from cellulose. Apparently they did make the felt from asbestos back in the day.

Seems like it’s definitely common enough to use it under flooring, especially if it’s a thinner grade.

I haven’t heard of tar paper being used as underlayment, but I have used big rolls of paper for that. In my understanding, the point for the paper is to allow the wood to be able to move seasonally, and to prevent squeaking.

I don’t think I’d want to use tar paper, though, cause it’s hydrophobic. Whatever finish is going on the wood is going to also be a water barrier, and it’s a general rule of thumb to never have 2 water barriers next to each other in a house. That’s how you get trapped water that can damage stuff. If you spill water, and it makes it in a little gap between floorboards, it could just sit there indefinitely.

I could be wrong, though.

They still use the same principle a lot with those misters they put everywhere for like outdoor restaurant seating and whatnot. Humidifiers placed inline with your AC ducts will also boost the cooling performance of your system, too.

Current air conditioners can act like a battery, too. A house has a lot of thermal mass, and you can intentionally use it to your advantage. Smart thermostats are commonly integrated with electric utilities such that they can bump the set temp up during times of high cooling demand. Something they could and should set up is additional pre-chilling, so you could preemptively cool your house down a few extra degrees when demand is low, then when demand is high, you wouldn’t pass your set point by much.

The “used in an evaporative cooling process” is the part where it sounds like it adds moisture to the air. I think it happens outside, though. It sounds like their whole thing is to run moist outside air over the dessicant, then run that dry air over water that is on a heat exchanger. This would cool the heat exchanger that would be tied to ductwork or whatever to cool the house. Evaporative coolers already exist (both as in-house “swamp coolers” and external chillers usually used on bigger buildings). They don’t work if the humidity is already high, though, so this system would enable them to function better in high humidity areas, and it could take advantage of only doing the energy intensive step of drying out the dessicant when there is surplus energy.

In plenty of places, the wet bulb temperature is high 24 hours a day. At night, the temperature goes down, but relative humidity goes up, so you feel cooler, but also worse. You still need AC during that time, but mainly to dehumidify.

Also, in many places, peak demand is actually in the early evenings because people let their houses get hot while they are at work, but turn the AC on when they get home.

Any way you can store energy for even a few hours is really nice, and these kind of solutions could help adjust the daily demand curve to meet the supply curve.

The problem I have with that is the same problem I have with the way people talk about most colonizer-colonizee(?) relationships. In many cases, you don’t have the big bad powerful people going in and doing violence against natives. The powerful sit at home, and force their local poor into a position where they have to do violence in order to survive. Yeah, you had your Christopher Columbus types, but they weren’t/aren’t the majority.

Odds are, those loggers are members of another local tribe, who have been economically forced into illegal logging. Logging is super dangerous, and there’s no way that the people actually responsible, who are the ones making real money off of it, are out there with chainsaws.

Tl;dr, they need glocks and bus tickets

I was thinking about potential for inaccuracy due to refraction from thermal inversion layers or other temperature anomalies, but then I realized that the refraction would equally affect the optics, provided that the optics remain on target throughout the firing.

If you live somewhere reasonably sunny, you can expect about 1 kW per square meter during the sunniest part of the day. To charge something like a 15 kWh electric motorcycle battery, you’d need 15 square meters of 100% efficient panels.

this explains it a bit. The quick and dirty answer is that when you boil a mash, you are boiling a solution, not just 3 individual liquids (ignoring all the other stuff in there). It’s similar to how adding salt to water lowers the freezing point and raises the boiling point.

Water is polar, while ethanol only has mild polarity. Methanol is more polar than ethanol, so it holds onto the water more. If you had a mixture of methanol and ethanol with no water, you’d probably get more methanol first, but the water changes things.

There’s actually more methanol in the tails than the foreshots due to complicated chemistry.

They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.

Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.

I think it really goes back through history. Finland was a possession of Sweden and then Russia. The nobility would have spoken either of those languages depending on who was in charge, and ethnic Finns were essentially pawns for the larger powers, and the finnish language wasn’t even written down much.

This changed when Russia started to crack down on Finnish culture, leading to a surge in pro-Finnish sentiment. People even changed their names from Swedish versions to finnish versions, and went from using “Christian” names to names from finnish mythology or culture. Actually, it’s somewhat similar to how black Americans changed naming conventions in the Civil rights era. The very concept of finnish-ness was somewhat of a working class concept. This, combined with a similar law of jante type belief meant there was and is much more of a focus on the collective good than in other countries.

During the Russian revolution, a Civil War erupted between left wing and right wing, with the right wing wanting a German aristocratic monarchy over finland. The right wing actually won, but it was very short lived because Germany lost WW1 right aftwards, and a liberal democracy was formed. Finland was super poor, but started to build itself up as it’s own country.

When WW2 rolled around, most people are familiar with the Winter War where they held their ground against a Russian invasion. Most people aren’t as familiar with the Continuation War against Russia, where they (with the support of germany) continued to fight against Russia, or the Lapland war, where they actually had to fight against Germany to kick them out of the country. The Germans actually used scorched earth on finland as they retreated, knowing they were losing WW2.

After all of that, a huge swath of finland was destroyed by the Germans, or annexed by the Russians, leaving many homeless. Finland had to provide for those people, so homes were rebuilt rapidly throughout the country. Since they were in the soviet sphere of influence, but they weren’t a Warsaw pact country, they didn’t get any assistance from the eastern bloc (and they actually had to pay reparations as an axis country). They were also not included in the Marshall plan that helped provide recovery to western Europe.

They survived as a people by taking care of each other, and they are very proud of that. If you go to a Finnish museum, next to works of art and science, you’ll see things like the baby box, or other displays about the establishment of the welfare state. Many countries have a welfare system, but treat it like a dirty secret, while they celebrate what they were able to accomplish.

One last thing I think is really cool is that they are not afraid to experiment with policies. Many governments will do little trials of policy here and there, but not many go to the point of actually doing scientifically rigorous studies.

Only if you live in New Jersey

Is my reading comprehension bad today, or is that article written weirdly? If I’m reading it right, this statue was dug up in Rome, in 1781, and purchased by Hitler (with shenanigans) and moved to Munich, where it was placed on a base made in the 1600’s. After WW2, the Italians took the statue back, but not base. Now the Italians are asking the Germans for the base, while the Germans are asking for the statue, claiming that hitlers purchase was legitimate.

I’m assuming the base was actually made in the 1700’s, after this statue copy was unearthed, which makes the article less weird. Either way, though, I can’t imaging the base is anything intricate, and as an “aftermarket” addition, I don’t know why the Italians would care much about it.