Stupid Designers

Crop yields are up enormously in recent decades. Thank

Fertilizers, mostly derived from oil and gas

Farm machinery and transport, using diesel

Irrigation, diesel

Insecticides and weed killers, mostly derived from petrochemicals

Increased CO2, partly from burning fossil fuels

Warm weather, mostly natural from the ending of the LIA.

Major problem with that one was the shoddy prefab construction technique that allowed it to collapse spectacularly like a deck of cards.

Some older people can't smell it at all! Slow build up of gas overnight also saturates the sense of smell so that you are unaware after a while.

Mains gas explosions happen more often than you might think - this recent UK one particularly spectacular (caught on doorcam video).

Nitrogen (mostly as urea) and phosphates. Oil and gas may be energy sources used now to produce them, but electric power works just as well

But batteries would work just as well.

Irrigation is pumps and you can power them any way that suits your. Diesel is just fuel.

But you don't have to burn the petrochemicals and turn them into atmospheric CO2 to get insecticides and weed killers. The process of producing them does use power , but electric power works just as well as any other kind (and better than most).

The first artificial nitrogen fertilisers were make with electric arcs which got the nitrogen in regular air hot enough to form nitric oxides.

It was a shockingly inefficient process, and eventually fell out of favour

It helps, if the plants are getting enough water and sunlight and the other - less important - nutrients they need. Plants grown in a higher C02 atmosphere reliably have fewer stomata in their leaves than those grown in lower CO2 atmosphere - they can get us much CO2 as they need (which is readily available) while losing less water (which often isn't). Fossillised leaves show that this has been true for some 100 million odd years now.

The little ice age was a north atlantic event, not a planet wide event.

The statistics are real enough, but they don't mean what the climate change denial machine would like you to think they mean.

It was widely recognised as "shoddy" after the Ronan Point partial collapse. It had been used for some years on lower - up to six storey - apartment blocks,and hadn't seen as shoddy there. When Ronan Point was finally pulled down, it did turn out that the prefab structure hadn't been put together as carefully as if should have been.

"It was discovered that most of the mechanical connections between floor slabs and flank walls had not been attached properly during construction. Significant corner-cutting had also been undertaken during the construction, with bolts often missing. Holes that should have been filled with concrete were found stuffed with rubbish and newspaper."

It wasn't so much that the prefab construction technique was shoddy, as that Ronan Point had been put together by cowboy builders. England has never been short of them -

I can vouch for that.

Simon Simple snipped-for-privacy@nottoday.co.uk> wrote: [...]

All last week I cooked on a single-burner pressure stove running on diesel - the food tasted just as good as usual.

Ours appeared to have been a "potted" bimetal strip. They (there were three or four of them) didn't "talk" to the control board but, rather, to the gas valve.

E.g., I think the controller bypassed them for a short period of time -- to allow them to heat up -- then let them maintain the circuit to the gas valve.

It was puzzling to (visually) diagnose as there *was* a flame. But, obviously, not a hot enough flame!

Newer gadgets have microprocessors and fancier sensors and of course many internal states.

Like the infamous water-heater Honeywell Frankenstat.

What British food XXXX could we use to be the equivalent to tofu-dreg?

XXXX = Marmite?

I've never used an induction cooktop but the only two negatives I've noticed while researching them to be prepared for when my 50 year old gas stove dies are the cost and the coil size, which are actually two sides of the same coin. They are getting cheaper but are still the most expensive to purchase, and I have hopes for more economies of scale before I'm forced to purchase one :-). Biggest con is that to keep the cost down most cooktops have coils sized for smaller pans and skillets so you get uneven heating with larger cookware, such as a cool outer inch or more in a 12" skillet or Dutch oven. Makes browning lots of chunks of stew meat or caramelizing several chopped onions evenly more finicky than it should be. Units with bigger coils are available but seem to cost 50+% more.

The cookware test is "if a magnet sticks to the pan it will work".

Our electric cooktop has "burners" subsets of which can be used based on the size of the pot. E.g., the largest is 11.5" (for a 12" pot as the contact surface of same is really only 11.5"), 9.5" (for a 10" pot),

My complaint (with gas) was that you couldn't get the heat LOW enough AND widespread to let something simmer, evenly, for long periods of time (without BURNING one portion)

I've found it nice that I know the entire surface comes to the same temperature at the same time -- no need to preheat pans, no hot spots (or cool spots), etc. I can get the *entire* pan as hot (or as "warm") as desired.

I routinely melt chocolate in a frying pan (no double boiler) without worrying about it burning *or* cooling based on its location in the pan. (chocolate gets a funny texture when heated and cooled repeatedly -- melt it and then use it!)

To remove the heat quickly, I have to resort to lifting the pan from the cooking surface as that remains hot for some time after powered down (something that wouldn't happen with induction -- but, you're still stuck with the heat stored in the pan!)

Yeah, so "no" to glass/ceramic, copper, aluminum clad (?), etc.

You could make a small loop and explore the field with an oscilloscope.

What also seems to work is put a small metal dish in the microwave. It will get very hot very quickly, and stuff it it will melt. Watch the dish, hands on the stop-button!

And so are all the concomitant excess deaths...

Bi-metals have traditionally been used as safety cutouts and not thermostats.

(The Leidenfrost Effect)

And, if you read my post, that is the role they played.

The thread structure makes it look as if you are reacting to John Larkin's post.

John Larkin was celebrating modern technology that makes it possible to grow more food on the same amount of land.

About the only way that that produces "excess deaths" is by making the population larger so that more people can get old and die in much the same ways as they have always done.

In fact they die older than they used to - we now only get famines when some local war gets in the way of emergency food distribution.

Once you educate the female children, the population stops getting larger. Pretty much all the advanced industrial world has now gone through the demographic transition and any population growth comes from immigration from countries that haven't.

The US was slower than most to make the transition - their constitution predates universal education, and while they've now got it, it's paid for by tiny local districts and the quality is erratic.

Trump got his second term with a majority of the popular vote which does suggest that a majority of the US population was very poorly educated. John Larkin is living proof that you can graduate from one of their lesser universities without getting an adequate education.

Even for a furnace that cycles automatically?

Here, the multiple bimetals sample the flame at several places and all must indicate "sufficiently hot" to HOLD the valve open. They are bypassed fora short time while the gas is ignited and allowed to come to temperature.

If the flame extinguishes (because one or more bimetals were not hot enough -- open), then the combustion chamber is actively vented (because the controls don't know if ANY of the gas dispensed was burned and they want to avoid gas accumulating). Then, the cycle repeats. Once ignited, the blower forces air through the heat exchanger and into the living space.

What was surprising (to me) was that "flame" is not synonymous with "(sufficient) heat". Perhaps I would be able to see the difference between "normal flame" and "reduced gas supply flame" if shown at the same (or near same) time. But, I would have sworn the furnace was heating properly with this reduced supply. My diagnosis was based on discovering that my neighbors "didn't have heat" (though I doubt many of them had taken the time to observe the behavior of THEIR furnaces) -- it's highly unlikely that ALL of our furnaces have failed simultaneously!

You're right. The older type with a pilot light behave as above, but newer boilers relight themselves.