- Delusions of sanity — Deconstructing madness in an insane world. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
- Subscriber City. What happens when you need an app to access anything. “How long before different customers are charged different prices for the same goods in physical grocery stores?”
- The death of the festival. “The overarching crisis of our time – more serious than ecological collapse, more serious than economic collapse, more serious than the pandemic – is the polarization and fragmentation of civil society. With coherency, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is.”
No Tech Reader #27
June 29, 2021 by Filed Under: No Tech Readers
The forgotten era of Light Reflectors in London’s alleys
June 29, 2021 by Filed Under: Lighting
A visitor to Victorian London who found themselves in its many narrow alleys would have seen large numbers of wooden shutters reflecting sunlight into the offices. These weren’t just wooden shutters though, but Chappuis’ Patent Daylight Reflectors, invented by a French photographer based on Fleet Street in 1850, and there was a whole range of them to improve lighting inside buildings before widespread electric lighting.
Read more: The forgotten era of Light Reflectors in London’s alleys, Ian Visits.
Reversing the Glow-Worm’s Decline
April 19, 2021 by Filed Under: Biodiversity, Random, Trees
Coppicing & pollarding trees could provide us with energy, materials and food — but also with a lot of glow-worms (or fireflies), a research paper argues: [Read more…]
Number of Hospital Beds per 1,000 Inhabitants (1960-2018)
Corona restrictions around the world are primarily aimed at not overwhelming hospital capacity. But hospital capacity is not what it used to be. In the 1960s and 1970s, the US and many European countries had around ten hospital beds per thousand inhabitants. Nowadays, the US has less than three, while many European countries have less than five.
Hospital beds are defined as beds that are maintained, staffed, and immediately available for use. Total hospital beds include acute care beds, rehabilitative beds and other beds in hospitals. [Read more…]
Solar Powered Website: Uptime for 2020
In 2020, our solar powered website obtained an uptime of 95%, meaning that it was offline for 444 hours or 20 days. Unsurprisingly, most of the downtime is concentrated in the winter months.
The graph above (click to enlarge) shows battery storage capacity in relation to the weather in Barcelona from January to December 2020. Yellow is sunny, grey is cloudy, blue is rain. From May to November, we were online without interruption for almost 6 months.
The data were collected and visualised by Roel Roscam Abbing and David Benqué.
The “Lavet”: A Sink, Bathtub, Shower, and Washing Machine on 1m2 of Space
April 1, 2021 by Filed Under: Bathing, Random, Washing machines, Water
Image: Marktplaats.
The lavet is a typically Dutch invention that was mainly used in social housing in the 1950s and 1960s. It was produced up to 1975, with a total production of about 1 million. The lavet is somewhere between a sink and a bathtub. It consists of a plateau with a raised edge, in which on one side is a 40 cm deep tub with a diameter of almost 60 cm. Unique to the design is the multi-functionality. The lavet fulfilled the functions of a bathroom and laundry room but required only one square meter of space. [Read more…]
