Drying clothes near the ceiling

July 9, 2021 by Francis Rogers Filed Under: Clothes, Laundry, Random

“It’s winter in northern Europe, and there’s no electricity. How can you dry your laundry? One of the best places of all is a laundry room in the servants’ quarters of a mansion house. A generous ceiling height means you can have frames for wet clothes and household linen in the warmest, dryest part of the room. The estate handyman would make them, and by the later 19th century he would probably add ropes and a pulley to raise and lower the rack. No need to climb on a chair to hang laundry.”

Read more: Drying clothes near the ceiling, HomeThingsPast.

How to Build a Small Town in Texas

July 7, 2021 by kris de decker Filed Under: Cities, DIY, Random

“Of all the questions I get on Twitter the most common is this: ‘How do you build a town?’ We know well how it used to be done, but these last one or two centuries we have forgotten how to do it (with only a handful of notable exceptions during the last century).

The other day I was asked again, but this time with a set of premises that made the question a little easier to approach. I have anonymized all the details but the general idea remains: four guys (friends) with money have bought a suitably large piece of land in Texas and now want to create a car-free human-scaled town of the kind that I am always writing about.

In this text I intend to set out the most bare-bone basic premises for how to start a good town, what is needed to build something anti-fragile and sustainable under the above mentioned scenario.”

Read more: How to Build a Small Town in Texas, Wrath of Gnon, July 2021. [Read more…]

The bicycle friendliness of European railway operators

July 7, 2021 by kris de decker Filed Under: Bicycles, Bikes, Random, Trains, Travel

The European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF) has released a new report, “Cyclists love trains: An analysis of the bicycle friendliness of European railway operators,” which aims to guide industry and policymakers in identifying ways to improve the combination of two of the most sustainable modes of transport: bikes and trains.

This timely new report analyses and ranks 69 European train companies and services according to six key indicators for combined bike-and-train travel, such as bicycle spaces in trains and the quality of bike ticket or reservation channels. The report’s rankings show that there is much room for improvement in Europe.

Only one train service, NS-DB (Intercity Berlin), which runs between Amsterdam and Berlin, scored in the “excellent” category. Operators that scored in the “good” category in facilitating bike-and-train travel include SNCB/NMBS, SBB, Deutsche Bahn and MÁV-START.

One fourth of the 69 operators and services scored in the “moderate” category, including České dráhy, SNCF and Trenitalia, while the rest perform either “poorly” or “very poorly” on most indicators, including Flixtrain, Greater Anglia, Renfe and Eurostar.

A Design Inquiry into Degrowth and ICT

July 5, 2021 by kris de decker Filed Under: Internet, Random

Roel Roscam Abbing wrote a conference paper about Low-tech Magazine’s solar powered website: ‘This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline’: a design inquiry into degrowth and ICT.” Workshop on Computing within Limits. 2021.

[Read more…]

Reversing the Glow-Worm’s Decline

April 19, 2021 by kris de decker 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)

April 13, 2021 by kris de decker Filed Under: Health, Random

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…]