Above 35 mph, your risk of dying falls below 50:50.
From a study for the London DOT in 2010.
https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_fatal_injury_pedestrians_and_car_occupants_richards.pdfSunday, September 29, 2019
Drinking Nasty Swamp Water (to save the world)
Cool! -P&G sells packets at a loss (@ 5:06) that coagulate, flocculate, and disinfect a surprisingly large quantity of water for such a tiny packet.
Interesting interview with Bill Gates near the end making the point (@8:43) that helping developing nations
1) promotes stability (prevents war)
2) promotes our health (by thwarting a pandemic easier through improved healthcare) and
3) helps our prosperity by freeing developing nations of menial tasks and allowing higher education and academic pursuits to flourish, prompting innovations that encourage prosperity.
50000 ton press
Castings to make the press were over 350 tons, and the vertical columns are 270 tons each. The hydraulic fluid runs at 4500 psi to generate 100 million pounds of pressure, or 50,000 tons.
Coca-Cola lies about plastic.
Sadly, Coca-Cola has fallen far short of its 2008 promise to put 25% recycled plastic in its bottles by 2015 - they only managed to get 7%.
Despite their bold recycling initiative, the company is busy going in exactly the opposite direction in their factory in Tanzania, currently re-tooling their factory there from glass bottles to plastic at great expense.
At 12:03, they announce a bold initiative in Jan '18 to have 50% recycled materials by 2030. Coke used to come in glass bottles, and Coke suppressed a report they commissioned which concluded, at 19:51 in the video, that glass bottles are far more environmentally friendly than plastic.
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Cosplay anime worker in Japan.
https://youtu.be/O82o15Asq54
Everything about this "day in the life" is so odd. She dresses up as an anime character both online and for photo shoots. Her downtime is in a karaoke booth with one friend where they song to each other. Her main revenue is from streaming her character online for two hours. (The interviewer is kinda creepy too, when he photo-bombs his face into a quiet shot of her and whispers about what she's doing.) Very odd.
Friday, September 27, 2019
These Sandwiches Are Superb
Harlem Taste (Hajji's)
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ocnbHxwHFGP5Yhp59
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ocnbHxwHFGP5Yhp59
Elsie's (sandwiches made of pickles instead of bread)
Bombay Frankie Company - scratch-made Indian wraps, at a gas station in LA
https://maps.app.goo.gl/xR7GnaypsZYb4q286
For the next time you're in NYC, this hidden gem of Puerto Rican food looks great! A true "hole in the wall" gem. New York
Colbert interviews Paul McCartney
Such a great, candid, intimate interview:
Favorite moment, at 4:52: "Plus, I'm a genius."
Here's the rest of the interview:
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Boston Dynamics Spot hands-on: new dog, new tricks
And, their bigger robot is showing off too.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
The Glossary of Happiness | The New Yorker
A lovely 2016 essay about the words used in different languages to express things for which there's no word on English. Like sisu, a Finnish word for the psychological strength that allows a person to overcome extraordinary challenges. Sisu is similar to what an American might call perseverance, or the trendier concept of grit, but it has no real equivalent in English. It connotes both determination and bravery, a willingness to act even when the reward seems out of reach.
And Heimat (from German, "a deep-rooted fondness towards a place to which one has a strong feeling of belonging")
This Woman Makes People Look 2D with Body Paint | Obsessed | WIRED
An intriguing body of art.
My favorite part is at 5:38. Sunday, September 22, 2019
The Person Who Cut You Off In Traffic Is Right - oh, and cranio-rectal inversion.
Side-zoomers vs. liner-uppers are right.
Here's an article from a decade ago with a similar point.
Here's an article from a decade ago with a similar point.
The Urge to Merge, 2008
By CYNTHIA GORNEY
Published: August 3, 2008
HERE IS THE CALDECOTT TUNNEL PROBLEM. If there's another person with you right now, you may end up raising your voices as you consider it. I'm just warning, is all. The last time I brought up the Caldecott Tunnel Problem among friends, two people who had been a happy couple for a long time started arguing, and then they looked at each other as if something new and disturbing were presenting itself, and when I got up to go, one of them was pounding the table and yelling at her beloved, "But that is so wrong!"
Anyway, the problem. Near where I live, which happens to be Northern California but that's not relevant, there's a three-bore tunnel that runs east-west under some steep hills that separate the suburbs (east) from Oakland and Berkeley and eventually San Francisco (west). If you're driving east-west around here, you use the Caldecott Tunnel; you could go winding over the hills and bypass the problem altogether, but it would take forever and you don't want to. The freeway leading to the Caldecott is called Highway 24, and on the suburban side of the tunnel it courses like a river beneath open sloping grassland, all golden and Tuscan right now in summer.
So here you are, let us say, heading west toward the Caldecott at the end of a July afternoon. The geography, what with the hills rising on either side, pretty much requires you to focus on the thing that is about to happen in front of you — you can see it coming, and sometimes from quite a distance, depending on how bad the backup is. The trick about the Caldecott is that although each bore is two lanes wide, the middle bore switches direction, by means of signage and mechanically raised cone separators, contingent on the flow of the main morning and evening commute. So if you're driving out of the suburbs toward Oakland at the end of the day, the cars coming the opposite way take that middle bore, which means your side of 24 is being coned off into the one remaining bore on the right — a four-lane to a two-lane funnel.
This is the point at which the North American driving populace, as you know, cleaves into two camps.
Two-thirds of us, according to calculations I have made while brooding inordinately about this inside my Subaru, are lineuppers, slowing rapidly from 70 to 30 or 20 or whatever and taking our places — courteously and patiently, as our mothers taught us to do, respecting the broad tenets of social justice and the primacy of fairness to all persons on the road, regardless of income or ethnicity or car model or perceived level of personal importance — where was I? Oh. Sorry. Taking our places at the end of the line, I was saying, the long two-lane line that has formed to the right, creeping toward the mouth of our tunnel bore. There is still some empty lane space beside us on the left, true, where the cones are gradually closing those left lanes down. But people are already lined up. If we passed them on the left to get in farther ahead, we would be cutting the line.
One third of us, on the other hand, zoom on by. For purposes of this problem, I shall call these sidezoomers. (When I raised the Caldecott Tunnel Problem with my father, who is 83, he startled me by suggesting a longer label that included more bad words than I believe I have ever heard him use at one time.) Sidezoomers have a variety of strategies, each exaggerated by the configuration of the Caldecott but replicated in bottlenecks across the land: there are the ones who zoom by a few dozen cars, angling in when they see a plausible opening; and there are the ones who zoom all the way up, to the very top of the cone-off funnel, at which point they thrust their aggressive little self-entitled fenders toward the lineup and nudge themselves in. And there are those who opt for frontage-road sidezooming, which requires maneuvering into the far-right highway lane in order to get off at a certain pretunnel exit that dumps cars onto a surface street alongside Highway 24. They zip along that street and get back on 24 at the next entrance, slipping in ahead of the bumper-to-bumper highway lineup they just bypassed. So now they're cutting the line, too, but from the right.
And that very last exit lane before the tunnel, also on the right? You can't get back onto the highway once you've exited there, but if you're a sidezoomer you can slide into the empty exit-only lane, still on the highway but pretending you're leaving, and then you drive and drive right past all the lineuppers until whoops, now at the last minute you've changed your mind and you're not exiting at all; you're sneaking back into the line.
Not in front of me, though.
Until recently, I had the idea that I was somewhat overwrought about this. I supposed there were not all that many drivers gritting their teeth behind their steering wheels, practicing what Jerry Seinfeld once called the stare-ahead, while declining to let the sidezoomers in and musing at the same time that this is the problem with modern American capitalism, really, this anti-aristocratic all-men-are-created-equal narrative we pretend to cherish while simultaneously celebrating the individual's right to do whatever advances his own interests without technically breaking the law, Gordon Gekko triumphant over Cesar Chavez, and that is an exit-only lane, you rodent, so no, you are not cutting in front of me unless you look as if you might have a gun in your car, in which case, O.K., but you're still a rodent.
I was mistaken, as it turns out. There are a lot of people who feel this way.
I know this because a while ago I began asking around — politely, I mean, trying to avoid words like "bullying" and "lowlife," making inquiries as to who lines up at bottlenecks and who sidezooms. The truth is, I had come to be a tiny bit rattled by uncertainty. I kept studying that empty lane space on either side of our lineup. Something about the physics was not working out. I bought a textbook called "Traffic Flow Fundamentals," hoping for instructions as to the technically correct way to enter a lane-drop funnel, but the explanations looked like this:
When k = kj,µ = 0 (vehicles bumper to bumper but no movement):
0 = α0 1n (C2/kj)
So I started consulting professionals on my own: traffic engineers, the highway police, queuing theorists. The learning curve, it must be said, was robust. I hadn't known queuing had theories. But of course it does, mathematicians and business-operations people have to work them out, the heart-attack patient gets in ahead of the sprained ankle and nobody has a problem with that, and anybody who has been to Europe intuitively understands what one engineer meant when in midsentence he said to me, "perfect England," meaning culturally mandated compulsive queuing, and, "perfect Italy," meaning culturally mandated compulsive nonqueuing. I learned about the father of modern queuing theory, an early 1900s Dane whose specific who-goes-first challenge was the new Copenhagen telephone system, which required callers, disembodied but queued nonetheless, to be moved along in a way both maximally efficient and acceptable to all. I learned some of the ways a crush of traffic is and is not like a crush of opera fans outside Lincoln Center — the speed factor, the isolating qualities of an auto's steel bubble, the coarsening effect of no-eye-contact anonymity. I learned that Officer Sam Morgan, of the California Highway Patrol, occasionally uses the term "cranial-rectal inversion" when referring to drivers of especially poor judgment, which was one of the most satisfactory things I learned all summer, come to think of it. I asked each professional the same questions:
1. If you were inside your personal vehicle, approaching a bottleneck that offered you the options of lineup or sidezoom, which option would you select?
2. For practical purposes — maximum vehicle flow, minimal hang-up — who's right?
A University of Washington engineer named Bill Beaty, who was one of the first traffic scholars I located, has come up with his own bottleneck-behavior labels: Cheaters and Vigilantes. He disapproves of both. When I acknowledged belonging to the choleric wing of the vigilante order, he was unyielding but sympathetic. "That's just human," he said. Beaty is a proponent of the third-way prescription, which I'll get to in a minute; he's an electrical engineer, not formally trained in traffic flow but so interested in it that for a decade he has kept up a link-filled Web page,amasci.com/amateur/traffic/links.html, connecting to scores of diagrams and scholarly papers and discussion groups, a whole subuniverse of people preoccupied with the physics and psychology of traffic. (You can click from Beaty's page to a comic Italian animated traffic short, a German traffic-flow simulator that twitches and rotates and a live-cam shot of one nasty section of Seattle's I-5.)
It wasn't until I'd spent weeks wandering this subuniverse that Tom Vanderbilt and I stumbled upon each other, like tourists buried in the same obscure travel guide, and started comparing notes. Vanderbilt is a journalist in Brooklyn who got worked up over an East Coast version of the Caldecott Tunnel Problem a few years ago, after negotiating a freeway bottleneck one day in what he described to me as a "very 'Sopranos' " stretch of urban New Jersey. A lineupper by disposition, Vanderbilt unaccountably switched modes, joined the sidezoomers and cut in late. Then he worried and ruminated about what he had done. The book he ended up writing just came out: "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)."
Vanderbilt's book is terrific. He writes about the traffic law Julius Caesar imposed to manage chariot jams. He deconstructs "injunctive norms" (what the law tells us to do) versus "descriptive norms" (what the behavior of those around us tells us to do). He has a chapter called "Why Ants Don't Get Into Traffic Jams (and Humans Do)," which was particularly interesting to read; it seems there's an ant species, the New World army ant, that organizes its perfectly flowing commute processions along principles similar to those Beaty and my traffic experts invoked as they explained why the Caldecott backup is not entirely, and I say this with some reluctance, the sidezoomers' fault.
The experts drew schematics in my notebook for me. They asked me to envision rice pouring smoothly through a kitchen funnel. They pointed out, as a Virginia Techcomputer-science professor named Chris Barrett put it, that "if you move over too soon, you have this big empty piece of real estate, which could absorb that many more cars." And I would say, yes, but they still all have to squish into the same two-lane tunnel, right? And the experts would say yes, but what really botches the flow is the stop-and-go part — which is accentuated both by the guy hanging around up there trying to last-minute jam his way in and by the hostile party in the Subaru who won't let him, thus prompting him to try again in front of the next car, whose driver brakes while deciding whether to go into high-, medium- or low-level snit, and so on. Nearly every time I asked one of the traffic people to assume the role of the great vehicle arranger in the sky, remote-controlling each of us bottleneck drivers as if we were so many video-game characters, the reply went as follows:
FIRST, EVERYBODY REMAINS UNRUFFLED, without abrupt changes of lane or speed, as the lane-drop comes into view. Everybody takes three deep, cleansing breaths — all right, the experts didn't say that, but they meant to — and considers both the imminent needs of everybody else and the system as a smoothly functioning whole.
Then everybody begins to slow, not too much, all in concert. All cars remain in their lanes, using all the real estate. (On the question of frontage roads and exit-only lanes, the experts waffled; those are arguably part of the real estate, they agreed, but they are meant for a different purpose, and this scenario relies upon everybody buying into the same rules. So no frontage-roading or fake-exit-laning, unless there's a sign specifically instructing otherwise.) People in the narrowing left lanes refrain from shooting ahead, while people in the right through lanes — this is hard to swallow, for those of us inclined toward vigilantism, but crucial — leave big spaces in front of their cars for the merging that is about to commence. We resist the freeze-out-the-sidezoomer urge. We prepare to invite them in.
Finally, at clearly marked or somehow mutually agreed upon places, everybody starts conducting beautiful "zipper merges." That's the technical term — one-two, one-two or one-two-three, one-two-three — as indicated by the roadway configuration. The process has now worked at its ideal efficiency/equitability ratio: if all have behaved correctly, the tunnel passage has been both benign and, relatively speaking, quick. Personal sacrifice has been called for, to be sure. The former sidezoomers have sacrificed the pleasure of high-speed bypass, also known as I Beat Out the Stupid Sheep Just Now, Ha Ha (less truculent rendition: I Want to Get Home More Than I Care About Strangers Whose Faces I Can't Even See). The former lineuppers have sacrificed the pleasure of self-congratulatory umbrage, also known as Hmph, Good Thing Society Has People Like Me. Together we have all ascended to the traffic decorum of the army ants, who as Vanderbilt observes are among the earth's most accomplished commuters, managing to get from one place to another in large groups without cutting each other off, deciding their time is more valuable than everybody else's, or — apparently this is the fast-lane domination method for certain traveling land crickets — eating anybody who gets in the way.
ONE AFTERNOON A FEW WEEKS AGO, Sam Morgan took me out to the Caldecott in his California Highway Patrol black-and-white, a big sedan that Morgan pulled to the shoulder so we could watch the lineupper-sidezoomer minuet from a neutral vantage point. I figured it would take a seriously dumb person to do something offensive with Morgan sitting right there, but lo, here came the exit-only-lane zoomers, gunning it past the lineup and then cutting in. Red Dodge pickup. Black Camaro. Blue Prius — great, Mr. Environmentally Superior, you have the personal-sacrifice thing down big time — white Toyota. Morgan watched them, alert but calm. "No violation here," he said.
Morgan resembles John Wayne, except African-American and in a CHP uniform. Every time I tried to prod him into moral pronouncements about fairness, he assumed a serene Buddha face and reminded me that his job was to enforce the law. It is legal to use the exit-only lane for sidezooming — in California, at least — as long you do your cut-in before the lane line turns solid (meaning no more lane-changing permitted) near the end. It is legal to frontage-road sidezoom, as long as you observe the stop sign along the way. It is legal to be a full-on lineupper vigilante, for that matter, since you are "established" and therefore have priority in your lane, as long as your refusal to let a sidezoomer in doesn't rise to the level of unlawfully unsafe driving. "It's not a matter of fairness or unfairness," Morgan said. "It's a matter of there's no violation, no one is being injured. Ergo, chill out. Enjoy life. You're spending too much energy pounding the dashboard."
Morgan gave me the Buddha look, crinkled the corners of his eyes in amusement and drove us to the operations building above the Caldecott. In civilian life, he said, he's primarily a lineupper, just because he knows this will occasion the least vitriol. As a rule, he lets all sidezoomers in. "When I'm plainclothes, people cut me off all the time," he said. "My thought is, If you knew who I am, you probably wouldn't do that."
Well, exactly. No disrespect toward Morgan, but if you've spent your working life being a big-shouldered guy in a patrol car, you have maybe transcended the tendency many of us have toward driving around in a state of constant micronegotiation with the world, which is so unfathomable in most respects, so beyond our field of vision and our ability to do anything about it, although not by God along the asphalt beneath our wheels. The first time I deliberately made special invite room for a sidezoomer this summer — a lane-drop bottleneck en route to Lake Tahoe, me dubiously opening the extra-long space in front of my car — I swear I could see the zoomer beside me start to accelerate, hesitate and then with me murmuring, Come on pal, we can do this together, finally shrug his S.U.V. into the merge. Neither of us had to brake. I'll be honest, though: I missed my minuscule occasion of power, and I'm guessing he did, too, both of us having recently paid $4.69 per gallon even assuming he uses regular. "In the overall scheme of things, it's a very short amount of time," Morgan remarked as we got out of the black-and-white, and I followed him up some stairs to the monitor room, where two operations workers were gazing at multiple screen images of the Caldecott.
We all stood there, watching sidezoomers cut in one after another at the top of the line. One worker, Anthony Padilla, said, "That's what I do."
The other worker, Tim Miller, swung his head around fast. "I get in line," he said.
I asked Padilla to elaborate — to present his case to Miller and me, as if he were chatting with us right after we'd all made it through the tunnel. "Um, I'm an aggressive driver," Padilla said. "I would say. . . . " He stopped and smiled. He didn't look even a little bit apologetic. He looked, in fact, like a fisherman holding up a big shining catch. "I would say, 'Well, the lane was open — and I took it.' "
Padilla and Miller studied each other. Then Miller turned to Morgan, who was contemplating them both impassively, his hands folded before him. "But I don't have to let him in, do I?" Miller asked.
"Nope," Morgan said. "You don't."
Cynthia Gorney teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent article for the magazine was about Spanish-Language advertising.
November 18, 2005, 10:52 pm
Making profits from incivility on the roads
I hardly ever drive anymore since I moved close to where I work. So whenever I do, the incivility on the roads leaps out at me. People do things in cars they would never do in other settings. Honking. Swearing. Cutting to the front of the line. And that is just my wife. The other drivers are far meaner.
One obvious reason is that you don't have to live with the consequences for any length of time. If you cut in line at airport security, you will be in close proximity to the people you insulted for quite some time. With a car you make a quick getaway. Making that getaway also means you are unlikely to be physically beaten, whereas giving someone the finger as you walk down the sidewalk has no such safety.
When I used to commute, there was one particular interchange where incivility ruled. (For those who know Chicago, it is where the Dan Ryan feeds into the Eisenhower.) There are two lanes when you exit the highway. One lane goes to other highway, the other goes to a surface street. Hardly anyone ever wants to go that surface street. There can be a half-mile backup of cars waiting patiently to get on the highway, and about 20% of the drivers rudely and illegally cut in at the last second after pretending they are heading toward the surface street. Every honest person that waits in line is delayed 15 minutes or more because of the cheaters.
Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity." It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision. That leads you to take actions that are seemingly not in your short-run best interest. In economics, George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton popularized the idea. I had read their papers, but in general have such a weak sense of identity that I never really understood what they were talking about. The first time I really got what they meant was when I realized that a key part of my identity was that I was not the kind of person who would cut in line to shorten my commute, even though it would be easy to do so, and seemed crazy to wait for 15 minutes in this long line. But, if I were to cut in line, I would have to fundamentally rethink the kind of person I was.
The fact that I don't mind when my taxi driver cuts in these lines (actually, I kind of enjoy it) probably shows that I have a long ways to go in my moral development.
All this is actually just a rambling prelude to my main point. I was in New York City the other day and my taxi cab driver bypassed a long line of cars exiting the freeway to cut in at the last second. As usual, I enjoyed being an innocent bystander/beneficiary to this little crime. But what happened next was even more gratifying to the economist in me. A police officer was standing in the middle of the road, waving every car that cut in line over to the shoulder, where a second officer was handing out tickets like an assembly line. By my rough estimate, these two officers were giving out 30 tickets an hour at $115 a pop. At over $1,500 per officer per hour (assuming the tickets get paid), this was a fantastic money making proposition for the city. And it nails just the right people. Speeding doesn't really hurt other people very much, except indirectly. So to my mind it makes much more sense to go directly after the mean-spirited behavior like cutting in line. This is very much in the spirit of Bratton's "broken windows" policing philosophy. I'm not sure it cuts down the number of cheaters on the roads in any fundamental way since the probability of getting caught remains vanishingly small. Still, the beauty of it is that (1) every driver that follows the rules feels a rush of glee over the rude drivers getting nailed, and (2) it is a very efficient way of taxing bad behavior.
So, my policy recommendation to police departments across the country is to find the spots on the roads that lend themselves to this sort of policing and let the fun begin.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Motorized scooter head injuries on the rise-- ScienceDaily
"...frequency of head and facial injuries resulting from motorized scooters... The incidence tripled annually from an estimated 2,325 nationwide in 2008 to an estimated 6,947 in 2017. Most of the people injured were men between 19 and 65; 33 percent were children between 6 and 12."
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Working On A New York City Food Truck
Monday, September 16, 2019
Puget Sound creel reports | Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife
Saturday, September 14, 2019
Beef Country of Origin Labeling
Tesla Autopilot Detects Cars Cutting in Front
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Medicolegal lawsuits
This Houston lecture about lawsuits was very informative about the process and how to cope.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.houstonpathologists.org/8%2520-%2520Allen%2520-%2520HSCP%25202018%2520-%2520Medical%2520Malpractice%2520-%2520How%2520to%2520Cope.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj-o7nL4cvkAhVXo54KHV1TCzkQFjAMegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw1Y17tZ_OSV5QCZIyKgni28&cshid=1568314300314
Regarding depositions:
Plaintiff's attorney's questioning style at the deposition:
1) "Pal" - joking and banter, casual dress - recognize this and ignore
2) Freight train: rapid-fire, to get you to answer without thinking
3) Butterfly - confusing changes from one line of questions to another, attempting to elicit conflcting statements (ignore and answer consistently)
4) Time-bomb - leaves contentious questions to the end when you're tired (ask for a break)
5) Ignoramus - attempts to get you to volunteer information, leaves time and gestures you to continue
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.houstonpathologists.org/8%2520-%2520Allen%2520-%2520HSCP%25202018%2520-%2520Medical%2520Malpractice%2520-%2520How%2520to%2520Cope.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj-o7nL4cvkAhVXo54KHV1TCzkQFjAMegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw1Y17tZ_OSV5QCZIyKgni28&cshid=1568314300314
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Making a 350 liter engine.
At 11:28, it takes two weeks for the freshly-poured crankcase to cool before it can be lifted out of its mold.
At 28:38, they show how high hydrauliuc pressure is applied to the bolts before tightening the piston rod assembly. The reason is for precisely even and uniform tightening, putting even pressure on the whole gasket. "Even loading in each stud is important, especially in applications with gaskets. [Recomended] for applications with more than one stud. These Hydraulic Tensioners are [inter-connected to each other] and to the pump. As the hydraulic pressure increases, the tension in each stud is the same, and the flange comes together simultaneously and evenly."
High pressure hydraulic oil from a pump applies an accurate, axial load to the fastener. Once the system reaches a predetermined pressure, the operator uses a small bar to run the nut down by hand. This is easily accomplished because there is no load on the nut.
https://www.htico.com/how-hydraulic-tensioners-work.html
4 season RV
There are four important factors to consider when purchasing a four season RV or improving an existing RV to be four season ready.
- Insulation
- Wall Structure
- Window Size
- Venting and The Heating & Cooling Systems
A quality built four season RV should have:
- A nice living area where occupants can experience a comfortable stay during temperatures lower than 20 degrees and higher than 90.
- Sufficient insulation to prevent holding tanks and valves from freezing at any temperature.
- Air circulation that keeps the RV cool at any heat and reduces condensation.
- Insulation to keep unwanted air from entering the RV through windows, walls or cabinets.
A Few Ideas for modifying an RV for All-Weather Camping
There’s a high probability that the RV your searching for is a bit unqualified for extreme weather. In this case you can modify the RV for all-weather conditions. Here are some ideas:
- Add self-adhesive insulation to your windows.
- Add new weathers stripping around the entry door.
- Use foam to cover vents or spaces that let cold air slip inside the RV.
- Apply foil-backed insulation sheets to line your windows.
- Don’t worry about freezing and buy a tank heater.
- Cover water lines and dump valves with heat tape.
- Add antifreeze inside your holding tanks when not in use.
- Purchase a dehumidifier to rid the air of excess condensation.
- Try a hydronic heating system.
The Best Cold-Weather RVs for Extreme Cold
Including -
Lance 4 Seasons Travel Trailer
Heartland Bighorn
- An insulated in-roof A/C duct system
- A furnace that runs at 42,000 BTUs
- A below-floor heating duct that’s a single piece
- R-14 upper deck flooring insulation values, R-38 main flooring and radiant insulation values, R-34 roofing insulation values, and R-11 wall insulation values
- An insulated, heated underbelly
Keystone Montana
- Heated city water low point drains and a heated exterior convenience center
- In-floor water lines
- Dump valves and holding tanks that are insulated and enclosed
- A heated underbelly that is also insulated and enclosed
Monday, September 9, 2019
Death-Defying Climb for Honey
Sunday, September 8, 2019
JetSuiteX To Launch Service At Seattle's Boeing Field This Summer
Cheaper flights from Boeing field - currently just service to Oakland
Friday, September 6, 2019
Forward Parcels from USA to Canada
Parcel companies have brokered deals with delivery companies at far better rates than individuals can get. This service gets around the "we only ship to the Continental US" restriction on a lot of auction items.
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Asian flush, explained
The Amazon Rainforest Doesn’t Produce 20% of Our Oxygen, Here’s Why
Ignorance about the world | Hans Rosling
This is one of the very first TED talks, and it's twenty minutes of refreshing and captivating info. You can access the data interface yourself at gapminder.org to learn about world issues like poverty, birth rates, life expectancy, immunizations, and so on.
They returned in a later TED talk to fight against ignorance.
Lessons from 80 years of market history - MarketWatch
"famous maxim from Warren Buffett: Don't buy something unless you would be willing to hold on to it if the market were shut down for 10 years."
[Looking at various portfolio types over 70 years,]"when measured in 10-year increments, the market was up most of the time. The table shows 32 10-year returns; 28 of them were positive, and only four were negative...The most consistent high-performance winner was small-cap value stocks. "
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
Preventing food waste... by law
Nice to see a large-scale effort enforcing donation of food that's otherwise thrown away. At 5:28, they mention that stores are filled $4000 each time they are caught not donating it (though no one has been fined yet.)
Monday, September 2, 2019
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