Cold Inside the House

this is an older post from another blog of mine, but its quite relevant again to me (having just come back from Finland... where there is a saying "as warm as houses")

One day, walking around the shopping center I saw this advert for cold and flu medicine. It reminded me of one of the mysteries of life in Australia

That while its not typically cold here during the day we get quite cool in winter overnight. A lack of thermal insulation in most homes means that the heat leaves quickly over night and the radiant insulation (usefully slowing the sun from heating the house in summer) means that in winter we tend to be cold inside our homes, despite pouring a few kilowatt hours of electricity into the home every day (and people wank on about CO₂ production).

I can only assume that its a tradition we have followed from the English.

Academics ponder the issue but builders keep churning out the same designs and Aussies keep buying them.

They then sit around inside complaining about how cold it is while just having argued that "it doesn't get cold in Australia". They even defend the perpetuation of this ... Strange how its often actually warmer outside ...

Why don't we laugh at Australian chimney and fireplace design next

:-)

of waves and motion (and bell curves)

I've been considering an idea of modelling society based on what we know in two areas; social science and physics.

As a picture paints a thousand words I'll leave my description of my diagram brief.

The levels intelligence within society are described by a bell curve (lets not discuss how skewed that is here). Knowing that society is a dynamic thing I looked to the behaviour of waves to see what happens as society becomes more shallow.

A standard wave changes shape as it moves into shallow waters



and eventually as the wave reaches the "social media shallows"  the mediocre and dumbos form a dumper that pummels the higher intelligence groups.

An intelligent person (surfing the wave) must observe this formation and know when to "flick back" and not get smashed against the rocks by the rest of the wave.

I cite the "Cultural Revolution" as a clear example.