It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. People often go into their basement and think "wow, it's cool down here. If only I could make my house this cool." But, as soon as you moved the air from your basement to your house, the air in your basement would be replaced by ambient air and would take time to be cooled by the Earth. And so you quickly realize you need a lot of thermal mass and an efficient way to move heat in order to keep up with removing the heat from your house.
Yes, but it needs to work both ways. Heat needs to be extracted during the winter. Otherwise the ground would just be heated up to much. That is what a ground source heat pump does.
It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.
Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.
Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.
It's hard not to trust answers which are superhumanly plausible.
Imagine being offered a choice of two oracles. The first oracle would give you an answer that is inspiring yet mysterious and oblique. The second gives an answer that is guaranteed to be unoriginal but also highly, highly plausible. It also maintains a record of all the questions and makes them available to unknown persons.
I miss being able to spontaneously buy a ticket and travel off to see a friend in another town or city. I did quite a lot as a young man with the help of my 'young person's railcard'. The cost would be prohibitive nowadays because only tickets bought well in advance are cheap.
Yes. There are distinct male virtues, such as courage, nobility and authority. But if a man isn't honest then he's not worthy of consideration. Or, if you like, he hasn't yet matured into manhood.
This is why so much of totalitarianism is about getting men to repeat lies. Or why those check boxes 'I have read and understood the terms and conditions' are harmful.
Doubling down and doubling down on some feeling (or lack of feeling) repeatedly isn't merely a strategy. It is the selling of ones's soul. There's no one left inside by the end of it, just a shell, with no creative power or freedom.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.
I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.
This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
Could this be made the basis of an efficient cooling system?
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