The Very-Many-Questions-Not-Worth-Their-Own-Thread Thread XLIII

[CKS]

You could use LEGO to build it for real at whatever scale you like.

I have no software suggestions, though. I've not used much, and it wasn't easy to use and is now ancient. I don't even remember what it was called to help you avoid it.

 

[warpus]

Is that closed-in rectangle supposed to be a closet?

Yeah, except that this software doesn't allow me to make a hole in the wall where the door is, or customize the door so that it's the size I want. That's where I got stuck.

Turns out my mom is a CAD expert w/ a license to CAD software that is perfect for this. She has volunteered to do this all for me, and has already got one of the rooms mapped out. I wanted to do it myself, but what can you do, I'm not going to turn down motherly help either.

IKEA's website lets you design a room. It has a limited number of items you can place (and most of them are their own cabinets, of course), but one of those items is a box that can be made any dimension you want. So, for example, I have a room with a half wall. IKEA's options don't include that, but I made a "box-like object" that was 8" wide (the width of the studs) and 4' high and 99" long and dragged it into the right spot, and it looks sufficiently like my space that it helps with the envisioning that CAD is supposed to allow.

My mom was using that too actually, to plan out one of my closets. I didn't realize it was that versatile. I am going to give it a closer look, thanks!

The CAD solution seems to work, but if I can also do this via IKEA's site then that's even better.

 

[Samson]

Do people use text books these days?

I was prompted by the news of new texas book bans, which is bad and all, but it made me think. I have used text books a lot in my time, but not really in a last couple of decades because the internet has everything and it much easier to access. Is there actually a use case for text books in school these days, or is this adults having an argument about things that have been obsolete for longer than their children have been alive?

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I haven't touched a textbook since my O-level days

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Do people use text books these days?

I was prompted by the news of new texas book bans, which is bad and all, but it made me think. I have used text books a lot in my time, but not really in a last couple of decades because the internet has everything and it much easier to access. Is there actually a use case for text books in school these days, or is this adults having an argument about things that have been obsolete for longer than their children have been alive?

How can students not use textbooks these days? Whether they're physical books or ebooks, they can't just expect students to learn everything from Youtube videos.

So are these "redacted chapters" in ebooks, or are they talking about new editions of print books that omit the information these anti-education POSs don't want the kids to learn?

Even as far back as the late '80s/early '90s, when our provincial government decided that parents could pull their kids out of school the moment any syllables were uttered about sex education and evolution, I realized that if I'd ever had kids, I'd homeschool them. Not to indoctrinate them with religion and pseudoscientific nonsense, but to prevent indoctrination in those things in public schools.

Thirty years later, they're still trying to do this. This situation in Texas could almost be written about the situation here in Alberta. The government we have now is rabidly anti-science, anti-LGBT, anti-age appropriate sex ed, and a slew of other things kids should learn but for political ideology reasons this pack of sociopaths doesn't want them to know.

I haven't heard of "chapter redactions" here, but I suppose it's not impossible.

You could have knocked me over with a feather yesterday when the premier posted on her FB page about funding and a new display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller. That's a world-class museum and research facility dedicated to dinosaurs and other prehistoric fossils, and it was such a surprise to see her promoting it - because there are so many of her supporters who hysterically insist the world is only 6000 years old and climate change is a hoax.

One person kept insisting to me that archaeologists had studied the dinosaurs from 60 million years ago and concluded that climate change has been happening ever since that time so there's no need to worry about it in the present. It took multiple posts from me just to convince him that archaeologists don't study dinosaurs or any other prehistoric lifeform. They study the artifacts of human culture.

Next step is convincing them that the dinosaurs weren't around 60 million years ago because the asteroid hit us several million years before then. And then there's the woman who shares the same delusion as a couple of women who used to post on YT - Kristin Auclair, who thinks dinosaurs never existed and evil, greedy paleontologists created the fossils from plaster, buried them for other paleontologists to dig up, pretend to "discover" them, and then somehow run off with "billions of dollars of taxpayers money" - and "Megan Fox, Creationist Mom", who thinks that dinosaurs never existed but dragons are real.

So my view of homeschooling for the purpose of ensuring a well-rounded grounding in science and the other things I mentioned, because if the current government has its way, the kids won't learn them, hasn't changed. The situation has just become even more appalling over the past several years.


Relying on the internet for information previously accessed via physical print books is getting more and more risky, given the way ebooks actually can be altered as the article describes, not to mention the proliferation of fake books created with AI. There were actually books that made it onto Amazon about wild mushrooms. There's incorrect information in those books about which kinds of mushrooms are which, and which are safe to eat. Anyone following the information in those books is likely to get very sick at best, and very dead at worst.

Without a thorough grounding in a subject so ebooks can be vetted for accuracy, how can school boards and teachers ever trust that what they're teaching the kids is accurate?

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

How can students not use textbooks these days? Whether they're physical books or ebooks, they can't just expect students to learn everything from Youtube videos.

If you just want to get passing grades, YouTube videos are good enough. They do a very good job of a no-frills end-oriented presentation of any subject. Of course it comes with the downside that students don't know why they're doing what they're doing, they only just know what to do and how to do it

 

[Samson]

How can students not use textbooks these days? Whether they're physical books or ebooks, they can't just expect students to learn everything from Youtube videos.

I am talking about physical books, as opposed to the web or "ebooks" (you mean like a pdf or epub?). I was always somewhat science focused, so I cannot remember what sort of stuff I would look up in other subjects, but to answer the sorts of questions that I used to go to a science or maths text book is so much easier online than with a physical book that I cannot imagine a child these days actually going to a read dead tree book to find points of information for school work. But of course I could be completely wrong, it was a long time ago I was in that situation.

While I think youtube science videos are great, they are certainly not a substitute for a text book. Wikipedia however seems really close. For proper science one really has to check it, but it very rare I find errors and I bet it has a lower error rate than an average school text book.

If you just want to get passing grades, YouTube videos are good enough. They do a very good job of a no-frills end-oriented presentation of any subject. Of course it comes with the downside that students don't know why they're doing what they're doing, they only just know what to do and how to do it

It seems to me that youtube is to lessons what wikipedia is to text books. If you want to generally learn about a subject you may want to put on a youtube video and you may learn similar stuff to sitting in a lesson. If you want to do a homework assignment that involves knowing a specific fact or technique in the olden days you would have taken a text book, looked up in the index some word relating to what you want to know and hunted it down. Now you just google it, perhaps with "wiki" to ensure you get a wikipedia link. I just cannot imagine where text books fit into that these days.

 

[PhroX]

When I went to uni to study civil engineering (I graduated just over 10 years ago), I used probably 3-4 textbooks in the entire 4 year course, and only 1 of those did I buy, the rest were borrowed from the library when needed. The lecturers just gave us printouts of all the material we needed.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I am talking about physical books, as opposed to the web or "ebooks" (you mean like a pdf or epub?). I was always somewhat science focused, so I cannot remember what sort of stuff I would look up in other subjects, but to answer the sorts of questions that I used to go to a science or maths text book is so much easier online than with a physical book that I cannot imagine a child these days actually going to a read dead tree book to find points of information for school work. But of course I could be completely wrong, it was a long time ago I was in that situation.

While I think youtube science videos are great, they are certainly not a substitute for a text book. Wikipedia however seems really close. For proper science one really has to check it, but it very rare I find errors and I bet it has a lower error rate than an average school text book.


It seems to me that youtube is to lessons what wikipedia is to text books. If you want to generally learn about a subject you may want to put on a youtube video and you may learn similar stuff to sitting in a lesson. If you want to do a homework assignment that involves knowing a specific fact or technique in the olden days you would have taken a text book, looked up in the index some word relating to what you want to know and hunted it down. Now you just google it, perhaps with "wiki" to ensure you get a wikipedia link. I just cannot imagine where text books fit into that these days.

Well, I should mention that I have a few favorite history channels on YT, all of them related to medieval and Plantagenet/Tudor history. Between those and Wikipedia, it's so easy to get sidetracked into things I hadn't intended to learn, but ended up going down a rabbit hole. That's how I spent an evening learning about the kingdom of Mercia (and consequently getting confused when I started watching Merlin because while it's a fun TV series, it takes quite a few liberties with history that go well beyond tomato sandwiches in the 6th century and modern prom dresses), and another evening learning more than I'd ever wanted to know about crossbows.

For science, it depends on what I'm interested in. Throughout the '80s and '90s I'd get my science fixes either from the library or from documentaries on PBS. And in more recent years I had a subscription to BBC Earth and could spend all day binge-watching David Attenborough and Brian Cox documentaries.

But I kept most of my college textbooks and still have quite a few of them on a couple of shelves and right at hand if I want to look something up that's not likely to have become inaccurate since they were published.


Inaccurate textbooks are a problem, of course, as are situations where the people who make up the curriculum aren't teachers, aren't even Canadian, and have no clue what they're talking about in too many cases. But because their ideology fits what the provincial government is pushing, that somehow makes it okay.

Which is how one of the assignments in the new curriculum told students to get a map of Alberta, locate Regina and Duck Lake, and calculate the distance between them. How the Minister of Education didn't notice that this is an impossible assignment is beyond me. Regina and Duck Lake are in Saskatchewan, so they can't possibly be located on a map of Alberta. And then there's the one where the students are told to "locate gravity on a globe."

 

[The_J]

I am talking about physical books, as opposed to the web or "ebooks" (you mean like a pdf or epub?).

I've not touched a physical non-fiction book for work for... uh... more than 10 years?
Online obviously. Physical books don't have the search function you really need.

 

[warpus]

How do Americans usually convert inches to feet n inches? Is there a trick or a go-to that you use?

By that I mean.. Say you have 582 inches. How do you figure out how many feet n inches that is? Do you pretty much perform the following 2 formulas:

1. 582 / 12 = 48 with change, so that's at least 48 feet
2. 582 mod 12 = 6, which means that the remainder of the division is 6, so you're left with 6 inches

Therefore 582 inches = 48 feet 6 inches

The slightly longer form of this is:

1. 582 / 12 = 48 with change, so that's at least 48 feet
2. 48 * 12 = 576, so 576 inches = 48 feet
3. 582 - 576 = 6, therefore 582 inches = 48 feet 6 inches

Is there an easier or faster way that I'm missing? Going in the other direction seems easier, you just need to multiply the feet by 12 and add the inches. A calculator is required with larger numbers, which is annoying, but it seems there isn't an easier way. But is there an easier way when converting inches to feet n inches? Like, is there a method Americans learn in grade school for this?

When doing home construction or DIY projects in North America you gotta work with feet and inches.. but IKEA's software for instance only gives you measurements in metric or in inches. So you'll get numbers like.. "This wall is 856 inches". But when you go to a hardware store, nothing is written down in inches, it's always feet n inches. So you gotta convert all those amounts, which is annoying. I'm looking for a shortcut, if one exists.

Secondary question: Some places will write 4.2 feet. That's not 4 feet 2 inches! That's 4 feet and 20% (0.2) of a foot. 20% of a foot is 2.4 inches (12 * 0.2), which North Americans write as 2 2/5 inches (right?) So 4.2 feet = 4 feet 2 2/5 inches. Is there an easier way to do this calculation?

It's not really that complicated overall, but when you've got a lot of numbers on a sheet of paper, it can be tedious, so it would be nice to have shortcuts. For metric it's super easy, you just shift the decimal point around and that's it. But I didn't grow up with imperial, so it's more complicated for me.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Nobody ever gives that many inches in the first place. If it's over 120", your source itself will give it in feet and inches. I know what you mean about IKEA's website, but they assume you're redoing a kitchen, that will be, say, 120 x 180 inches max. And then the stuff they want to sell you to fill it out is best expressed in inches.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I just divide by 12 and estimate the leftover inches. But often, if the nches number is going to be large, we meaure in feet instead. Rooms are usually measured in feet + inches. I rarely see 4.2'. That is mixing two systems. Americans are pretty tied to using both feet and inches. All of our common tape meaures use feet and inches. If one is using a spreadsheet to calculate feet and inches, yes, it is more complicated. My wife used to do home appraisal and did all her measurements in feet and inches, then entered them into a software package that did all the calculations.

In comverting from inches to feet a lot depends n how exact you need to be. If your wall is 8' long, will a 112" sofa fit? If you need even more precision then it is best to meaure in the most precise unit.

 

[Synobun]

I need a good, affordable brand for socks. I've used Dickies for the past decade but their durability has plummeted since the pandemic. I am lucky to get a year out of a pair now. They're cheap (6 pairs for $23), but not "replace every year" cheap.

Any recommendations? I've never worn ankle socks and I have thick calves, so some good stretch factor would be nice. Amazon has the usual suspects at the top like Fruit of the Loom, Hanes, and Puma, but I figured I'd check with real people first and see if there's a sleeper brand that I should look into. Especially if there are any fellow monstrous calf owners.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@Synobun Bombas and Darn Tough would be the place to start. Fabulous socks.

Bombas

 

[EgonSpengler]

I need a good, affordable brand for socks. I've used Dickies for the past decade but their durability has plummeted since the pandemic. I am lucky to get a year out of a pair now. They're cheap (6 pairs for $23), but not "replace every year" cheap.

Any recommendations? I've never worn ankle socks and I have thick calves, so some good stretch factor would be nice. Amazon has the usual suspects at the top like Fruit of the Loom, Hanes, and Puma, but I figured I'd check with real people first and see if there's a sleeper brand that I should look into. Especially if there are any fellow monstrous calf owners.

I bought some Dickies a few months ago, and I noticed a hole in the toe of one of them just the other day. I was like, 'WTH?'

 

[Synobun]

@Synobun Bombas and Darn Tough would be the place to start. Fabulous socks.

Bombas

The very first thing I see when clicking the Bombas link is a pop-up telling me they no longer sell outside the US.

I've heard of Darn Tough, but $32 for a single pair of socks is probably not going to happen. I'm sure they're great, but affordable is not the word I would associate with that price tag. Might be something I subtly put on my wishlist the next time someone tries to get me a birthday present.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The very first thing I see when clicking the Bombas link is a pop-up telling me they no longer sell outside the US.

I've heard of Darn Tough, but $32 for a single pair of socks is probably not going to happen. I'm sure they're great, but affordable is not the word I would associate with that price tag. Might be something I subtly put on my wishlist the next time someone tries to get me a birthday present.

Oh my. I did not know that. Bummer. Try Farm to Feet. but these also might be out of your price range. Good qualityis often pricey.

 

[warpus]

Nobody ever gives that many inches in the first place. If it's over 120", your source itself will give it in feet and inches. I know what you mean about IKEA's website, but they assume you're redoing a kitchen, that will be, say, 120 x 180 inches max. And then the stuff they want to sell you to fill it out is best expressed in inches.

I just divide by 12 and estimate the leftover inches. But often, if the nches number is going to be large, we meaure in feet instead. Rooms are usually measured in feet + inches. I rarely see 4.2'. That is mixing two systems. Americans are pretty tied to using both feet and inches. All of our common tape meaures use feet and inches. If one is using a spreadsheet to calculate feet and inches, yes, it is more complicated. My wife used to do home appraisal and did all her measurements in feet and inches, then entered them into a software package that did all the calculations.

In comverting from inches to feet a lot depends n how exact you need to be. If your wall is 8' long, will a 112" sofa fit? If you need even more precision then it is best to meaure in the most precise unit.

Yeah, the only reason I was asking was because I saw both 4.2 feet and 300+ inches listed in various places, where I was looking up furniture & software used for 3D room mockups. So I wanted a good way to make all these conversions, but I guess there isn't one.

Everything is proceeding according to plan btw! I will post my library mockup in another thread. I have measured everything in my rooms in both cm and inches, just to have more data on hand, in case I run into one or the other, so I don't have to convert.. Also because metric is a bit more specific and easier to work with. Dealing with fractions is annoying, but it's easy to just write 5.85 cm.

 

[Samson]

Why do central heating heat pumps use water to heat the house?

Every house I have been to (all in the UK) that uses a heat pump to heat the house use the refrigerant to heat hot water, and the hot water heats the house, as per this diagram:

Spoiler Standard central heating heat pump system :

Note the radiators / floor heating are more likely an either/or thing

Every house I have been to (most/all outside the UK) that uses an air conditioner to cool the house use the refrigerant to cool the air directly, as per this diagram:

Spoiler Standard air conditioner system :

The whole of the second diagram is contained in the first two boxes of the first, the indoor and outdoor units. Everything else in the second is "extra".

If we forget the "Sanitary hot water" for a moment, the hot water based system seems to have two large and insurmountable disadvantages:

Thermodynamic efficiency

I have worked a little in refrigeration, which is all about maximising efficiency. While I have never worked directly with this side of it, the basic gist as I understand it is that while the free energy is "trapped" in the phase change of the refrigerant it can be easily moved about without loss of energy. As soon as it goes through the heat exchanger that free energy is in the form of heat differential and you get efficiency losses. The answer is to have as little insulation as possible between what you want to control the temperature of and the heat exchanger, and as much insulation around them both as possible. All that water plumbing in that diagram looks like a lot of insulation between the heat exchanger and the people, which will only introduce inefficiencies.

Engineering efficiency

In both cases you pump the free energy around the house in pipes and put it through a heat exchanger to transfer that to the air, either cooling or heating it. In the case of the water based central heating you are carrying it in the form of thermal energy, so the pipes and the heat exchanger are the same temperature. In the case of air conditioning you are carrying it as the phase change of the refrigerant. This has all sorts of implications to the engineering/home building front: A) Lots of extra stuff, including having all the energy go through two heat exchangers B) the size the the heat exchanger in room heat exchanger. Because the water is not that hot you need either under floor heating (which is really expensive to add at build time, and needs a lot of work to retrofit) or big radiators (which are not cheap and take up a lot of space). With refrigerant you can gave a very small heat exchanger for a large output. C) There is also the point of the pipes, water needs big pipes that need real building work to fit and possibly insulation. Refrigerant can be run in small pipes that can be fed more like wires than water pipes and they are at room temperature.

There is the question of "Sanitary hot water". While there is some overlap in engineering between the two systems, it is not obvious that this actually introduces any advantage to this system. I cannot find anywhere saying why on demand hot water cannot be provided by a heat pump, that seems the obvious way, something like this but with refrigerant rather than electricity going in.

The pure air ones seem really cheap, for example here is a 2.5 kW one for ~£500. If these work to heat a house why does anyone spend thousands on an under floor heating system for their heat pump? It is so obvious that there must be a good answer, but I do not see it.