Funnily enough, a little bit of cleverness goes a long way. Mainly it's 'thinking outside the box'. Solutions more friendly to the environment can be equivalent or better, and cheaper to boot.
One topic highlighted recently by the fires DownUnda is housing design in forest/bush areas. One prominent idea which tickles my fancy is to live underground, or largely so. Imagine this :
- a sloping forested block.
- remove the topsoil from the house site. Put aside for later.
- dig into the hillside by an amount roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of the front-to-back length of the proposed hose. Put the soil to the side. For doubtful soil types or steeper blocks one can sink piles/anchors to stabilise.
- so you now have a roughly rectangular area, with the rear ( uphill ) face of the hole a bit more than the desired interior height.
- lay foundations, service lines, drainage, plumbing lines ....
- lay a pebble bed if quakes worry you.
- pour a slab, then the walls. All steel reinforced concrete. Don't forget damp courses/proofing. Put on the roof in similiar style. It is a concrete box/bunker with holes on one side mainly.
- outfit the interior. Double glazing for windows.
- a central water tank ~ several meters a side cube-ish. Literally a room full of water inside the house, you'd be walking around it everyday. Holds maybe 10 - 20 kilo-litres when full.
- replace the soil in a mound over the roof, then the topsoil. Rehabilitate the vegetation.
- finally the only thing showing is the front room(s)!
- insulated well with a central heat bank of water to moderate fluctuations. Plus few windows adds up to low heating costs forever. You heat the water in the tank. It then heats the house.
- improved security. ( You could even have a side tunnel(s) if you want more than one exit ).
- very much cheaper to build. No bricks, roof tiles, stumps and little fascia/painting etc. Literally begs for modular/prefab techniques.
- minimal visual impact, virtually none if done well. Lower maintenance in all aspects.
- from the point of view of flora and fauna : it is a cave.
- easier/simpler to give planning approvals as much less for the neighbours to worry about - no blocking of their sunlight etc.
- precisely NO NEW technology, tools, techniques or materials are required.
The remainder of the block is, say, a car parking spot and the usual outdoor stuff to suit. Wouldn't suit the McMansion multi-storey mindset, but we ought to get over that. Get people to compete on the grounds of exterior minimalism and/or indoor imagination.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
I have survived three winters in Trieste without any heating during last war because the windows were double (due to the "bora" wind) with shutters within them. In Germany all glass windows must have double panes, in Sweden three. In Italy this is not yet compulsory, so my home near Milano has single panes. I would spare a great fraction of heating methane cost with a better insulation. I have seen an infrared film taken by an helicopter at night over a big city (Rome) and it is amazing how much heat is getting lost, and CO2 increasing.
Tullio
I have survived three winters in Trieste without any heating during last war because the windows were double (due to the "bora" wind) with shutters within them. In Germany all glass windows must have double panes, in Sweden three. In Italy this is not yet compulsory, so my home near Milano has single panes. I would spare a great fraction of heating methane cost with a better insulation. I have seen an infrared film taken by an helicopter at night over a big city (Rome) and it is amazing how much heat is getting lost, and CO2 increasing.
Tullio
Heck triple glaze for sure. :-)
I think some designs can have the interior sealed window cavity full of Argon, say. Non-reactive and quite sluggish for heat conduction.
You could even have a wider glazed cavity as a fish tank! :-)
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
One other 'new' idea starting to catch on is the greening of roofs in cities. I saw a show on tv where City Hall in Chicago, Illinois was given a makeover with large planting beds and all kinds of other stuff, not cheap, but was saving over 10% of the heating and cooling costs of the building year over year. They even said that if enough buildings did it they could actually lower the temperature of the whole city in the summer by 5 degree F! This would be due to the replacing of the current roof design, ie heat sinks, with green space! Now there was some initial concerns of weight etc when doing the initial project but they discovered roofs are already able to withstand most projects as they exist. The runoff from the a/c units is misted over the greenscape on hot days to provide some of the moisture they need to grow and flourish, the rest of the moisture comes from Mother Nature. In this particular case they even provided sitting areas so people could go up and enjoy the outdoors on nice days, I do not think that is practical in all cases. They did talk also about putting in plants that died over the winter so the roof would become a heat sink in the winter again, but said the cost of the plants would offset any gains made.
Architect Renzo Piano adopted this idea in his project of a building for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. You can find it easily by Google.
Tullio
Oh, OK ..... so we'll let the article speak for itself then ? :-)
Quote:
Findings like these suggest that predicting sea level rise is even trickier than previously thought. If relatively small changes in winds and currents could have a big impact on ice sheets, we need extremely good models of regional climate as well as of ice sheets. At the moment we have neither - and while regional climate models are improving, ice sheet models are still too crude to make accurate predictions.
This is precisely why headlines don't create scientific merit.
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) Sorry Tullio. This is the sort of stuff the media revels in. Plaster the worst case in big letters as the headline and bury the disclaimer deep in. As a commercial tactic to sell more copy it is brilliant, as science education to the masses it is dismal.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Having worked in publishing I know perfectly well that headlines follow a different road from the articles' text. Once I published a news note on the Weber's attempt to detect GW. His article on Physical Review Letters was titled "Evidence for discovery of gravitational radiation". My managing editor titled my note "Scoperte le onde gravitazionali" and we received a scorching letter from prof.Antonino Zichichi. Your comments are always welcome.
Tullio
Having worked in publishing I know perfectly well that headlines follow a different road from the articles' text. Once I published a news note on the Weber's attempt to detect GW. His article on Physical Review Letters was titled "Evidence for discovery of gravitational radiation". My managing editor titled my note "Scoperte le onde gravitazionali" and we received a scorching letter from prof.Antonino Zichichi. Your comments are always welcome.
Tullio
Poor Weber, he really did get a pasting. But I still think of him as the true instigator of GW research because right or wrong he threw his results out there for discussion ..... and now we have LIGO and E@H as a rejoinder to the questions he raised! :-)
I went off reading New Scientist about 10 years ago .... much like Scientific American they just can't seem to separate plain reporting of fact from opinions about it any more. I think they both have caught the Fleet Street Infection.
Sure sea levels are rising. Note the article's placement/sequence of statements allows/suggests the reader infer anthropogenic causality but cleverly avoids actually saying that outright. Like the phrase 'climate change' compared to the phrase 'global warming' it allows researchers/journalists to keep their jobs without actually committing themselves to a firm position. It allows them to speak right up and down the spectrum without necessarily admitting ignorance.
If it's predominantly our fault then let's spend our energies attending to that. But if it's not then those same energies are better channeled to mitigation/preparation. As Bikeman says we ought be far more concerned about causes that we can't influence.
Here's a brilliant speech given some decades ago by Richard Feynman who perceived a change in his lifetime of the type of thinking labelled as science. I think it is very prescient of what we see now - an incredible reluctance of researchers to be ( or be seen to be ) self critical.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
I have the greatest respect for Joe Weber. He had the courage to go against common sense and also sent me photos of his detectors which I published in an article by Peter G.Bergmann (1970) on general relativity. Another grandfather of present GW research is Edoardo Amaldi. On the LIGO home page/scientific collaborations/Amaldi conference I found a paper by Carlo Rubbia which is the best biography of Amaldi I've read so far. Its only fault: it does not mention an article that Amaldi wrote in 1972 for Mondadori's Yearbook of Science and Technology on the CERN 300 GeV Accelerator. Here is a link: Amaldi.Cheers.
Tullio
Funnily enough, a little bit
Funnily enough, a little bit of cleverness goes a long way. Mainly it's 'thinking outside the box'. Solutions more friendly to the environment can be equivalent or better, and cheaper to boot.
One topic highlighted recently by the fires DownUnda is housing design in forest/bush areas. One prominent idea which tickles my fancy is to live underground, or largely so. Imagine this :
- a sloping forested block.
- remove the topsoil from the house site. Put aside for later.
- dig into the hillside by an amount roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of the front-to-back length of the proposed hose. Put the soil to the side. For doubtful soil types or steeper blocks one can sink piles/anchors to stabilise.
- so you now have a roughly rectangular area, with the rear ( uphill ) face of the hole a bit more than the desired interior height.
- lay foundations, service lines, drainage, plumbing lines ....
- lay a pebble bed if quakes worry you.
- pour a slab, then the walls. All steel reinforced concrete. Don't forget damp courses/proofing. Put on the roof in similiar style. It is a concrete box/bunker with holes on one side mainly.
- outfit the interior. Double glazing for windows.
- a central water tank ~ several meters a side cube-ish. Literally a room full of water inside the house, you'd be walking around it everyday. Holds maybe 10 - 20 kilo-litres when full.
- replace the soil in a mound over the roof, then the topsoil. Rehabilitate the vegetation.
- finally the only thing showing is the front room(s)!
Specific advantages:
- extremely fire-resistant design. Excellent weatherproofing.
- insulated well with a central heat bank of water to moderate fluctuations. Plus few windows adds up to low heating costs forever. You heat the water in the tank. It then heats the house.
- improved security. ( You could even have a side tunnel(s) if you want more than one exit ).
- very much cheaper to build. No bricks, roof tiles, stumps and little fascia/painting etc. Literally begs for modular/prefab techniques.
- minimal visual impact, virtually none if done well. Lower maintenance in all aspects.
- from the point of view of flora and fauna : it is a cave.
- easier/simpler to give planning approvals as much less for the neighbours to worry about - no blocking of their sunlight etc.
- precisely NO NEW technology, tools, techniques or materials are required.
The remainder of the block is, say, a car parking spot and the usual outdoor stuff to suit. Wouldn't suit the McMansion multi-storey mindset, but we ought to get over that. Get people to compete on the grounds of exterior minimalism and/or indoor imagination.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
I have survived three winters
I have survived three winters in Trieste without any heating during last war because the windows were double (due to the "bora" wind) with shutters within them. In Germany all glass windows must have double panes, in Sweden three. In Italy this is not yet compulsory, so my home near Milano has single panes. I would spare a great fraction of heating methane cost with a better insulation. I have seen an infrared film taken by an helicopter at night over a big city (Rome) and it is amazing how much heat is getting lost, and CO2 increasing.
Tullio
RE: I have survived three
Heck triple glaze for sure. :-)
I think some designs can have the interior sealed window cavity full of Argon, say. Non-reactive and quite sluggish for heat conduction.
You could even have a wider glazed cavity as a fish tank! :-)
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
One other 'new' idea starting
One other 'new' idea starting to catch on is the greening of roofs in cities. I saw a show on tv where City Hall in Chicago, Illinois was given a makeover with large planting beds and all kinds of other stuff, not cheap, but was saving over 10% of the heating and cooling costs of the building year over year. They even said that if enough buildings did it they could actually lower the temperature of the whole city in the summer by 5 degree F! This would be due to the replacing of the current roof design, ie heat sinks, with green space! Now there was some initial concerns of weight etc when doing the initial project but they discovered roofs are already able to withstand most projects as they exist. The runoff from the a/c units is misted over the greenscape on hot days to provide some of the moisture they need to grow and flourish, the rest of the moisture comes from Mother Nature. In this particular case they even provided sitting areas so people could go up and enjoy the outdoors on nice days, I do not think that is practical in all cases. They did talk also about putting in plants that died over the winter so the roof would become a heat sink in the winter again, but said the cost of the plants would offset any gains made.
Architect Renzo Piano adopted
Architect Renzo Piano adopted this idea in his project of a building for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. You can find it easily by Google.
Tullio
New Scientist magazine on sea
New Scientist magazine on sea levels change:
Sea levels
No comment.
Tullio
RE: ..... No
Oh, OK ..... so we'll let the article speak for itself then ? :-)
This is precisely why headlines don't create scientific merit.
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) Sorry Tullio. This is the sort of stuff the media revels in. Plaster the worst case in big letters as the headline and bury the disclaimer deep in. As a commercial tactic to sell more copy it is brilliant, as science education to the masses it is dismal.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Having worked in publishing I
Having worked in publishing I know perfectly well that headlines follow a different road from the articles' text. Once I published a news note on the Weber's attempt to detect GW. His article on Physical Review Letters was titled "Evidence for discovery of gravitational radiation". My managing editor titled my note "Scoperte le onde gravitazionali" and we received a scorching letter from prof.Antonino Zichichi. Your comments are always welcome.
Tullio
RE: Having worked in
Poor Weber, he really did get a pasting. But I still think of him as the true instigator of GW research because right or wrong he threw his results out there for discussion ..... and now we have LIGO and E@H as a rejoinder to the questions he raised! :-)
I went off reading New Scientist about 10 years ago .... much like Scientific American they just can't seem to separate plain reporting of fact from opinions about it any more. I think they both have caught the Fleet Street Infection.
Sure sea levels are rising. Note the article's placement/sequence of statements allows/suggests the reader infer anthropogenic causality but cleverly avoids actually saying that outright. Like the phrase 'climate change' compared to the phrase 'global warming' it allows researchers/journalists to keep their jobs without actually committing themselves to a firm position. It allows them to speak right up and down the spectrum without necessarily admitting ignorance.
If it's predominantly our fault then let's spend our energies attending to that. But if it's not then those same energies are better channeled to mitigation/preparation. As Bikeman says we ought be far more concerned about causes that we can't influence.
Here's a brilliant speech given some decades ago by Richard Feynman who perceived a change in his lifetime of the type of thinking labelled as science. I think it is very prescient of what we see now - an incredible reluctance of researchers to be ( or be seen to be ) self critical.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
I have the greatest respect
I have the greatest respect for Joe Weber. He had the courage to go against common sense and also sent me photos of his detectors which I published in an article by Peter G.Bergmann (1970) on general relativity. Another grandfather of present GW research is Edoardo Amaldi. On the LIGO home page/scientific collaborations/Amaldi conference I found a paper by Carlo Rubbia which is the best biography of Amaldi I've read so far. Its only fault: it does not mention an article that Amaldi wrote in 1972 for Mondadori's Yearbook of Science and Technology on the CERN 300 GeV Accelerator. Here is a link:
Amaldi.Cheers.
Tullio