I have friends with one of those valves on their shower, and it’s really easy to use. One thing I wonder about is how it effects things down the line. They have a septic tank, but I’m also thinking of greywater systems for watering plants or whatever.

Could the concentration of soap in the water interphere with things?

You are thinking of legionnaires disease

They try really hard not to explain how the system works. It doesn’t mention it at all in this news story, or anywhere easy to find on their site. I crunched some numbers, and it seems like this device has about double the heat capacity for the mass than just plain water would have. That means it probably has to be a phase change material. All of the “smarts” and app control is nice, but at its core, it’s really simple concept. I think this kind of thing would sell better if instead of trying to make it sound high-tech, they just admitted it was a low tech solution that they’ve made user friendly.

I did find this mention in the site q and a:

Q: What is the storage medium made of?

A: Proprietary mix of high-density, inert, non-toxic and low impact materials

Yeah, if you watch a video on old water powered mills, they had all sorts of transmissions built out of wood, including clutches to turn on and off the power.

The headlight thing is really cool

I’ve heard (though I can’t say authoritatively), that while “american” is obviously used for people from the USA, “americano” applies to all residents of the New World in Spanish in most countries that speak it. Wikipedia seems to agree:

In Spanish, americano denotes geographic and cultural origin in the New World, as well as (infrequently) a U.S. citizen;[13][14][c] the more common term is estadounidense (“United States person”), which derives from Estados Unidos de América

Here’s some thoughts off the top of my head.

There are loads of wiring in a car, that can all be reused.

Depending on the vehicle, the wheels/suspension could be converted to like a trailer or something.

The seats can be pulled out as chairs.

Various pumps can be used for moving fluids (though you’d probably want to be careful with that, hazmat-wise).

The transmission could be rigged up to a wind/water mill to adjust rotational velocity of a sawmill or some other industrial application.

Windows are tricky cause the shapes are weird, but they could be set in clay or concrete or something.

Alternators are definitely useful.

Headlights for spotlights.

That lance Hedrick video had a lot of good relevant info.

I’ll add that the definition of “light” changes as much as the definition of women’s pants sizes do. Its essentially “vanity sizing”, but for flavor. Most consumers, at the end of the day, want their coffee to taste exactly how they are used to, but they paradoxically also want to be having something “different” or “unique”. It’s why Hawaii is full of roasters selling $70 bags of coffee that taste the same as $8 grocery store bags.

Roasters have to weigh whether to give accurate info that will appeal to us nerds, or whether to aim for the general populace. There are probably many roasters who legitimately don’t know better, but I’d reckon many roasters are just making the economical choice.

Basically, it’s the opposite of a water heater. When you have extra energy, you freeze water. When you don’t have any extra energy, the ice you made keeps your food cold. How you freeze the water doesn’t matter. Most efficiently is a heat pump like a normal fridge, though.

I’ll second heating water. A water tank is a battery. Alternatively, if you want to get really techy with it, you can make a refrigerator that runs on ice.

I’m sure I read it somewhere, but I just checked one of my books, and it doesn’t say that, and reading online, I can’t find anything with evidence either way. Seems like the main risk is of you don’t clean them very well and get a lot of plant matter encased in it. Doesn’t take much yew to make you sick.

Either way, though, thanks for calling me out! I don’t live near any yews, so it’s not something I’ve ever had to think about.

Definitely chicken of the woods. Looks a little different than the species in my neck of the woods. Main thing to look out for in the pnw, from what I remember, is to make sure you aren’t harvesting them off of pacific yew, cause then it can absorb the toxins from that. Yours definitely isn’t on a yew, though.

I think there’s a difference between “is this mushroom edible?” and “does this mushroom i know is edible agree with me?”

I guess it depends on where you are in Chicagoland, but if possible, you could burn your lawn. Much of the Chicago area should be a burr oak savanna . It’s a fire-adapted prairie ecosystem. You could buy seed, but honestly, there’s plenty of ways to get seed from native plants living in local ditches, waysides, and parks.

When it’s young, it’s dripping wet when you cut it, and it cooks up really well. When it gets too old, it gets almost like an overcooked chicken breast texture. You also should cook it same day you get it, otherwise it will either dry out too much, if you store it in a too well ventilated space, or too slimy if you bag it.

Do you do anything to improve pollination? There are massive groves all around me, but since they are clonal colonies, they don’t self-pollinate, and I always have to hunt around for whatever groves actually got pollinated. I’ve read that some people will spray trees with fish emulsion to lure in flies.

I had a simple box fan break a blade from falling over due to its own power. A fan with better materials should be able to survive a short fall (and probably shouldn’t be able to blow itself over).

The short answer is that there are a lot of variables, so your process has to be dialed in per bean, which is why most people end up just sticking with 1 type of beans.

Different roast levels are going to have different densities. Different bean varieties (and localities) are going to have different density and size. The age of the bean comes into play as well.

Some variables affect the actual brewing, others affect how the beans grind. Every once in a while, i’ll have a bean that just seems to make more fines for whatever reason. I guess it’s just down to the stiffness of the bean and the size.

If you want to be able to switch beans at will, you’ll need to keep notes for each variety, and adjust back and forth as needed.

I don’t think you’ll be able to get a new bean right on your first shot no matter how you try to adjust. If you adjust for one variable, there’s still all the others.

Counting beans isn’t particularly helpful, either, cause they come in a range of sizes. A pacamara bean, for example, is huge, while peaberries of any variety will be tiny. Coffee mills generally sort beans to consistent sizes so they roast well, but you could get coffee from the same farm from 2 different roasters, and each roaster could be buying different sized beans.

The effect of larger shipping noise on whales is something we don’t talk enough about. Also, there seems to be a bit of a gentleman’s agreement on sonar usage to avoid power/frequencies that would be really harmful to whales, but the moment one countries breaks that agreement, they will have a leg up because they could get better long range and more detailed data on the movements of another country’s navy.

There have been isolated test events that have lead to mass whale suicide.

That’s an interesting idea. A water heater is a really underutilized battery that most households have. I suppose you could hook it up to a thermostat with a set point a couple degrees higher than the mains (or gas) powered thermostat.

A quick search says in my location with a 100W panel, I’ll generate 400Wh as my daily average (1.44 MJ). With a 150 L tank, that gives you about 2.25 K increase in temp for a day.

That’s not nothing.