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Heat wave 2018: Mother nature's smackdown
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The last summer I can remember being as hot as this was in 2007 (or maybe 2008? I just remember being laid down playing 'Jade Empire' all summer whilst suffering/soaking in my own juices)... :P
I hear ya, it's not dropping much at night (especially tonight, good grief it's bloody ridiculous). My ceiling fan is an utter godsend, but even at full speed constantly it's only making it distantly approach "tolerable".
I want a good thunderstorm I can go and stand outside in!
Steam | XBL
Plants only grow so fast. Also, a good chunk of the sinking ideas are trying to turn air CO2 into something useful. Or sometimes something that just offsets further fossil fuel use- eg making fuel. In and of itself seems a bit silly, but if you use solar/nuclear/hydro power to make fuel, and that fuel is then used instead of fossil...net gain.
Plants are not efficient, they are "good enough to survive and procreate" like most organisms
If you want the most bang for your buck in terms of efficiency and power, you build machines to do it. That's why we made things like computers and AC, because they don't exist in nature and the closest analog you can come up with isn't really the same thing.
Steam | XBL
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I'm still mad about european powerplants.
Meanwhile the it seems like a good third of the state is on fire again.
Some basic heat survival strats from someone who lived without a/c in southern summers for a good chunk of their life.
Drink more water than normal. Consume 1/2 as much caffeine and little to no alcohol. Add a little lemon juice to water, drink orange juice, or eat a few extra snacks to keep your electrolytes up. If you're thirsty and sweating you're already not drinking enough.
Set fans so that your home has air circulation. You want air passing in and out, not just air blowing in. You can set an ice bucket in front of a fan to give yourself a little extra cool air.
Take a couple extra showers during the day. Wakeup shower, home from work shower, bedtime shower.
Feet, head, and hands are like the body's heat sinks. Soak your feet to cool off (not in ice cold water). You can soak cloths in ice water and drape them over your head and neck to cool off.
If you're getting dizzy, nauseous, stop sweating, feel weak or get a headache, find a cool public place or one with a/c to get out of the heat. Drink a room temperature hydrating drink, like a warm water or sports drink (Gatorade, ect). Drinking something too cold could cause problems.
Now then, I've only been lucky enough to live in climates where the nights are at least passable. If you live in a place that's still a furnace outside at midnight, this probably doesn't work.
Eat watermelon. Salt it. Win at summer.
Plants are incredibly efficient at gathering co2 from the environment and turning it into stuff. The problem is that they turn it into things that they and other things want to eat. So if you want to sequester with plants you need to hide all the sequestered co2 away so bacteria can’t get it.
Not really. The rate limiting enzyme in the pathway is somewhat famously slow. They compensate by producing a whole lot of copies, but I wouldn't call it efficient.
Or just add iron to the Pacific and Antarctic Oceans to cause plankton blooms. Those happen fast. Much faster than waiting for trees to grow, and requires much less tech than giant CO2 sucking machines, since we don't really have that yet.
The weather has been hot in Nottingham, but only the past week has it been unpleasant with the humidity really ramping up. I've also been in the fortunate positions of being in one of the only offices at work with air conditioning (we have hot water pipes running through the corner of the room).
I was camping in Wales last weekend and the temperatures then were a real struggle. The tents turned into saunas as soon as the sun came up. Surprisingly things were much better on exposed hillsides as we actually got a breeze going.
We do have a few prototype devices that can scrub CO2 from the atmosphere.
Here's one of them: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/switzerland-giant-new-machine-sucking-carbon-directly-air
My youngest son slightly burned his feet last week.... on the pavement path of a water park ><
I don't really understand your definition of efficiency here. Thats like talking about the efficiency of electric circuits by counting how many electrons they contain. My definition is...
"For the minimum amount of human effort,support and utilized land area, how good is a thing at removing C02 from the environment and how effectively can it be scaled"
And, by those standards plants are absolutely FANTASTIC. They make and copy themselves, clean themselves, repair themselves, regenerate damage and can remove tons of C02 from the environment. They are functionally free, and specialized versions of them exist for every conceivable environment, and each version will grow exactly as fast as is needed for that environment.
The problem is that they turn C02 AND water into sugars and starches, which bacteria can eat. So humans need to get involved at the end and bury them or modify them.
Yo take this to the science thread if you wanna get all sciencey
Efficient? Hardly.
And yes, sure there's an environmental carrying capacity too, but machines don't have that and can do much more in a smaller amount of time because they're not limited by that same carrying capacity and, you know, actually needing to get things growing.
(trying to move this away from deep science)
We need solutions that we can deploy in the next 10 years, not the next 10,000.
It will be 90 on Friday when guys are moving all of our shit out of our house
I feel bad for them already
Tip them with a large amount of very cold beer.
When we moved into our house about 5 years ago we hired 2 Guys & a Truck. One of the guys sat in a chair most of the time, with a damp, cold towel over his head that we gave him, along with drinking a cold Gatorade I pulled out of the freezer because his legs wouldn't stop cramping. At first I was like "oh this is some buuuuuuuullshit", but then I noticed you could literally see the guy's calves like turning into that ridiculously-flexed, completely-solid muscle on occasion.
They sent another 2 guys out and apologized and everything, but I wasn't upset in the end. The "sending more guys, because our guy's down" was enough. Plus, I've had calves cramp (admittedly just in the middle of a couple of golf matches) and holy fuck no no no no no no no. I can't imagine trying to move furniture like that.
What the what
*reconsiders the whole "watermelon" thing*
I got a face full of Josh Brolin as Thanos, thinking I was about to
So now I've nailed that sucker to the wall.
I always try to avoid all unecessary motion in the summer months. As a northern Floridian, this means Nov-Feb is my busy season.
I had to hire a lawn guy last month because the window for not sweating to death in 10 minutes was basically "when you can't see the grass"
Going to give that chilled salty watermelon thing a try this weekend; because apparently my grass is adapted to the fucking cambrian period and seems to have grown a full foot in a week and a half.
The night between July 31st and August 1st is horrible in most college towns.
Back in Ames, there were so many students sleeping on the streets with their stuff because they were switching apartments, but couldn't move into the new one until morning.
Huh, that could actually work.