Notices by Quixoticgeek (quixoticgeek@social.v.st), page 4

@Hypx in fact. All I say is a heat pump is like a fridge run in reverse. You're griping that I didn't mention that fridges can be run on hydrogen. That's your gripe. I'm not misleading anyone. You're just embarrassing yourself here.

@BashStKid British not-invented-here syndrome is incredibly infuriating.

@antonia @mw1cgg @tony @Porcia there was supposed to be a trial of it in the UK. And some lobbyist blew up my mentions evangelising it earlier this week. It's a stupid idea.

@antonia @mw1cgg @tony @Porcia I thought their strategy was to close all the nukes and burn coal and then be confused as to why their emissions are so high...

Wow. According to the hydrogen industry lobbyist in my mentions I've gaslit you all by suggesting that heat pumps are great.

Which is weird. Cos heat pumps are an amazing technology. There's even moves to develop air/air heat pumps they use propane as the refrigerant, so DIY installers can easily install them. But what's truly amazing about heat pumps is how they can scale. In the city of London they've installed a big ground source heat pump to drive district heating. It's awesome.

I wonder if the when the US stops burning dinosaurs in it's cars, and is fully electric, if the electric car chargers are going to work in the metric kilowatt hours, or if they are going to have them calibrated in Horsepower per fortnights or something...

Boo. An evening of voiding the warranty on this oven has been thwarted by a pair of triangle head screws. I really need my own iFixit kit. Will have to put this project on hold until I can borrow an iFixit kit.

Ah fuck it. This is the second time this year I've been tripped up like this. Time I owned my own set.

*Orders manta bit set*

I've tooted in the past about how most of the low hanging fruit of energy savings for the average home have already happened (light bulbs 60w->9w, standby devices limited to 0.5w etc...). But this shows it nicely. A massive drop in total electricity used by the UK over time. Despite there being almost 1m battery electric cars in the UK.

This is likely to change a bit as heat pumps become more common. But it's still an impressive change nonetheless.

https://mastodon.green/@christineburns/111635180067371525

@christineburns Yeah. LED lighting has been such a massive improvement When I bought my flat 18 years ago the bedroom had 3 100w light bulbs. Now it has 3 11w bulbs. A 90% drop. Unfortunately I think most of the low hanging fruit for big gains has now gone, and with heat pumps, we're gonna see demand go up in a few years.

Would be interesting to see this graph including gas usage.

@BethanyBlack happy birthday!!!

My notifications have gone kinda nuts the last couple of days. If you've sent me a toot and I've not replied. Feel free to resend. Turns out when you write a 40 post thread. There's a lot of people who hit like 40 times... Triggering 40 notifications... The mastodon app on android (or the web interface). Don't handle this well.

We have an utterly fucked up idea of what counts as technology. Something that projects many of our biases including gender, and race.

To many these days it's only technology if it's electronic, and used by western men. But to take such a narrow definition is to ignore the amazing technology that surrounds us, and upon which our society is built. As such. It's time for a thread. I'm gonna talk about two different items you use every day, and the technology that goes into them.

1/n

Unless you happen to be sat naked on a warm beach somewhere, you're probably wearing clothes as you read this. Have you ever stopped to think about how we got to the very probably woven cotton clothing you're wearing right now ?

Archimedes said there are three basic machines, the lever, pulley, and screw. In the renaissance the wheel and axle, the wedge and the inclined plane were added to the list. But I think something else should be added, a discovery that changed humanity.

String.

2/n

Without string, or as some call it, cordage, we would be a lot colder today, and wouldn't be able to build many of the great structures and machines that make up modern life.

When Otzi the iceman was found in the Italian Alps, he had clothing and equipment which used lots of different types of cord from multiple different materials. One of the earliest cords was simple sinue taken from dead animals. This is an interesting material to sew with, but it's strong and quite durable.

3/n

The next big technological development in the world of string was to twist fibres together. The bow string on Otzi's bow was made of sinue fibres twisted together. This allows for a strong longer than the raw material, but also stronger. Much stronger. There more to twisting fibres than you might think tho. If you twist a set of fibres one way to make a cord, and do that a few times, then twist those cords together the opposite way. The twists work to keep the cord together.

4/n

In the world of spinners depending on which direction you twist the fibres, it's called either z twist, or s twist. And using the two in combination makes for the world of cordage and fabric we have today.

The next big leap is rather than using cord to sew bits of animal together to make clothes, we tangle bits if thread together in highly specific arrangements to make bigger pieces we can use to make clothes from. The invention of weaving changed humanity.

5/n

Weaving was essential to move away from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to a settled farming one. It was also necessary for population to grew. It's a lot simpler to farm a field of linen, or to collect fleece from live sheep, than to have to kill an animal each time you needed a new jacket. That's not to say the process of producing fibre from plants is easy. To find a gootube video in how to make linen from flax plants. It's many stages. Laborious and complicated.

6/n

Like when Billy Connolly said "who discovered milk came from cows, and what were they doing at the time ?" You have to wonder how the first human came up with the method for getting fibre from the flax plant. It's a multiple step process that requires days to do. And then it all needs to be spun before it can be Woven.

For millennia spinning was done with a tool called a drop spindle. It was slow, and repetitive, and it took a lot of time to make the thread for a simple garment.

7/n

Spinning was something typically (in western cultures at least) done by women & girls. Picture the Norse Goddess Frigg weaving clouds from her distaff. (Distaff is a tool used to hold the raw fleece while you spin it with a drop spindle). But using a drop spindle is something you can do while you stir the dinner, watch the kids, walk to the market. But it takes ages. It wouldn't be until as late as the 18th century that this technique would be replaced by the more familiar spinning wheel
8/n