• 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle


  • Condensation shouldn’t be an issue as long as you’re not cooling below the current dew point.

    However, after experiencing one of these underfloor cooling systems once, I can say that the biggest issue is that cold air tends to be heavier and thus stay down. So in order to cool the entire room, not just the layer of air right above the floor, you need something to move the air, which is probably why they’re providing fans. Either that or you can just lie on the floor all the time…

    Floor heating works because warm air rises. I never understood why ‘floor’ cooling wasn’t piped through the ceiling, instead. There are probably some engineering or heat transfer issues there, though.







  • I mean, all life on Earth is basically carbon based and that’s how oil formed in the first place, organic matter burried deep and left there for a very long time. We’d just have to find a way to put organic matter in the places we extract oil from now.

    Living things already pull carbon out of the atmosphere (via plants, for instance - plants pull carbon from the air and nitrogen from the soil, and along with water build up all manner of sugars and proteins. animals then eat those and they become the building blocks for the animal’s body). They also put some back as byproducts of metabolism - CO2 for higher organisms, methane for some bacteria. Living things just go through a cycle and none of the carbon remains locked away, as it was in the case of oil deposits. All that oil was at some point huge hunks of living, breathing, eating, multiplying beings. So we wouldn’t actually need to form it into a solid rock before disposing of it.

    I don’t know, maybe we can just dig an extremely deep pit and shove all our organic waste down there. Or make some very sturdy concrete tombs (similar to nuclear waste, minus the lead) and just seal it all away, but it’d have to be completely sealed so as not to seep into the environment around it. Or deep enough so that it won’t contaminate groundwater if it does.







  • It’s ok, I’m sure Austria and The Netherlands will have UK’s back and just veto their Schengen joining ad infinitum for no apparent reason. As for the Euro, the UK can just pull a Sweden or purposefully maintain a highly variable exchange rate so as not to fulfill the requirements for joining the Eurozone.

    Alternatively, pull a Denmark and peg it to the Euro and do some voodoo with interest rates when it’s in danger of changing parity outside the agreed upon limits. (Not sure if this is what pre-Brexit UK did?)




  • I share your feelings there regarding the choice or lack thereof with being born and seeing some of the points of antinatalism.

    I don’t think that community fully understands what antinatalism should be. Casually browsing it though, it seems more like they’re more going towards eugenics than an actual antinatalist approach - i.e. applied to everyone, nondiscriminately, for reasons of morality (choice vs forced into existence, overpopulation and its ties to resource allocation and requirements and such). Arguably some posts there could be reasonably expected from non-antinatalist people, the sort of ‘if you can’t afford to raise them, don’t have them’.



  • I mean sure, if you’re talking just manipulating some cell mechanisms to produce the enzymes required for digestion like we manipulate yeasts and e. coli to make drugs - the bugs don’t actually use those for anything and they’d lose the trait out in the wild or just keep it as a vestigial mechanism in limited populations.

    But I was thinking more in a sense of what happened to lignin digestion. In the end, it’s still a source of carbon that can be used as a building block and the chemical bonds can be broken up for energy, so there’s no reason to think there would be no pressure to evolve to eat the monomers once they’re there and to adapt the gene for the enzymes from ‘professional use’ to ‘personal use’ by the bugs.

    Case in point - mushrooms eating fallen logs and strains of S. cerevisiae producing amylase. At some point it made ‘sense’ to just keep those and that gave them an evolutionary edge, so the trait remained. And now we have another pest on our hands - S. cerevisiae var. diastaticus, a pox on non-belgian breweries everywhere. And critters that eat improperly treated wood beams and cause unpleasantness in wood framed houses.