Mark Brunnr

T Melville wrote:Replacing petroleum with people, during the zombie apocalypse?

Exactly right, I see zombies being used as a free labor resource for as long as they last. Draft horses have blinders to the left and right; I see zombies having a modified metal hat with blinders above like a ball cap. A fishing rod is attached, holding a tempting piece of... whatever zombies find appealing... and when that is lowered into the zombie's field of view you get forward power to pull a plow, a cart, you name it. The modified hat covers the zombie's ears and holds its head still, so the farmer can steer by dipping the food to the left or right, and the zombie never gets distracted by what it walks past. No more accidents picking up the kids from school, with this cool customer pulling the cart!  Call now while supplies last, to get your homesteader zombie today!

Meg Mitchell wrote:

ray Bunbury wrote:can we compost zombies?

It depends on what kind of zombie apocalypse you're in. Sometimes the zombie virus only affects humans, but sometimes, animals can also be infected. Putting zombie flesh in your compost pile could infect birds, rats, or even worms. (A worm is probably not going to have an easy time eating your brains but could transmit the disease when eaten by something else.)

Perhaps most worms are in fact Zombie Worms, all that's left from a zombie invasion (the REAL cause of the Dark Ages, but it was covered up, dontchaknow!), and it really is their goal in life to eat human brains; sadly they are unable to see or hear us in normal ways, so they just wish a human nearby dies and hope for the best reaching the brains...

As far as composting, it all depends on whether the cause of the disease can survive hot composting heat, or if there's a time frame before the virus/etc dies outside a host. But if we thought people were touchy about humanure being composted, just wait until it's zombie juices being composted!

I expect deer would get used to zombies once they understood the undead were harmless to deer. I've walked by wild deer that lived in a spot they knew was safe from hunters, and you could get within 20 feet of the deer and they would watch you but just lay in the grass so long as you didn't get closer. So I'd still consider deer a greater threat than zombies, zombies typically aren't known for eating half a garden of new growth overnight.

On the other hand, zombie mice and rats would suck, they can get into tiny openings and already know ways into many houses. They seem conditioned to people, so might be the first to overcome any fear to start biting folks. Or perhaps we all die the good-old-fashioned way because of the fleas hopping between the living and the dead. Some say history repeats itself, this could certainly be one way.

I planted several elderberry cuttings 2 years ago in early winter, and the week after we had really cold weather, like 0-5f, for a couple weeks which froze the ground. Despite that, over half the cuttings are now about 7 feet tall and producing fruits. Other berry cuttings failed, likely due to cuttings being too thin to handle the weather.

The nice bit with having the bucket exposed is that despite the weep hole the bucket will remain full from the ongoing rain landing in the bucket. Only after it stops raining and has had some time to drain does it reset, so you arent losing that diverters worth of water as often as the T it would seem.

Burra Maluca wrote:[
Yup, my little red dragoness has been busy creating a hoard of that stuff!

I think she's done rather well...

Now you just need a miniature of Bilbo Baggins, sneaking away with a glow stick...

A stick and a spill plane (or probably any plane that can make curls) quickly makes firestarter that shouldn't make the fly ash that paper and cardboard can create correct? I've used a small knife to make feather sticks as well, where you don't pop the curl off the stick, and instead carve them up into a little row on the stick, so you can light the end and stick into the burn tunnel so it burns like a wick.

I'm still using a heavy duty, cloth bag I received for donating to an environmental group back in the late 1980s or so, still going strong now after 35+ years as my primary shopping bag. I keep it in the car and enjoy making cashiers roll their eyes by telling them my bag is older than they are.

While there are a lot of people who are fans of kombucha, to date there are no controlled human studies showing any health benefits, while there is a long history of liver damage and other issues related to its consumption, including intervention examples where people were quite sick when taking it, got better once they stopped, and then got sick again after restarting the drink. Perhaps all the negative issues were due to the ease of contamination when making it, but to date there's only been evidence of negative effects in people. Maybe it's treated as a supplement, which allows it to avoid proper regulation? Those who are selling it certainly push health benefit claims, but they aren't backed by any real proof of such:

Libraries are becoming MORE important now more than ever before IMO, for several reasons. It's one of the few public places where a person can go and just be, without being required to be a "consumer". A homeless person can come in, drink some water and use the toilet, then sit down in a warm space in winter or cool space in summer, and read without having the police called for 'loitering'.

It's still a reliable place to find information that isn't laced full of advertising, clickbait, and misinformation, while the internet overall is becoming less info and more garbage. Reading a book causes more active-use brain activity than passively watching a screen, and encourages our attention spans to expand. Reading online, or even using an e-book reader, tends to distract us with ads and the like. Even worse are sites like tiktoc or youtube reels, with short little clips (usually of silly nonsense) that encourage a lack of attention, training our brains to move on to the next thing if we experience more than a few seconds of boredom.

My local libraries offer a ton of free resources, like $5 per day of free photocopies/printing (no need to waste money on inkjet printers and ink that is always low or out!), free laptop and desktop use, free dvd movie loans, access to databases that aren't behind paywalls, even free meals for kids up to 18 Mon-Fri at various locations, the only requirement is that it must be eaten there.

I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy kind of person, but I do believe there are at least some businesses that would like libraries to go away, so they can move in to fill the void left - for a "small" fee of course. And those fees will always go up, and more and more "revenue streams and advertising partners" get added over time once they have their hooks in. It's just how businesses work, they primarily (or sometimes only) exist to make as much profit as possible. Our society deserves to exist and thrive without being beholden to profit centers, and libraries are one way to do that.

Tiffaney I'd suggest flipping the cushions up into backrest form if possible any time you aren't using it, or for as long as the heat is tolerable. The cushions will definitely insulate the mass and cause significantly higher temps than RMH users normally see with one of those temp readers, or at least I've only ever seen people taking temps from exposed surfaces of the mass. Placing a cushion on top that traps in the heat for a couple hours, and I'd expect to see the mass surface temp higher than normal. Keeping the mass surface exposed most of the time will help there, as would anything that would allow air flow between you and the mass.

Perhaps you could break up just the top several inches of mass above the pipes, and then add a thin layer of perlite-cob, say an inch of it, where it's at least 50% perlite, then add back the last couple inches of normal cob. This would reduce (but not eliminate) the heat flow into the top of the mass, and also encourage the lateral heat flow into more mass that doesn't have that perlite in it. The top surface would also heat up eventually, but it might take long enough that your evening sits wouldn't need the cushions at all, if the primary use is heat shielding.

As for the wood support in the wall next to the mass, allowing the wood to heat up over 140F over time will lower the char point of the wood. I recall seeing a strawbale house (online) that had a RMH built against a wall with no air gap, and I'm not sure if it was months or a couple years, but eventually the strawbales in the wall caught fire and burned a significant portion of the house. So you definitely want to ensure an air gap between your mass and anything combustible. Even better IMO would be to use stand-offs to position a piece of material that quickly radiates heat away (typically a metal sheet), and leave a gap between the metal sheet and the floor, with an inch between the wall and the metal, and at least another inch between this heat shield and the mass. The floor gap allows fresh, cooler air to draw in as warmed air rises up and away from the mass and wall.

If a mass rebuild is an option, you could position the ducting pipes lower in the mass, so you can have more material between the ducting and butts. This will allow more time for some of that heat to move laterally into more mass, which should lower the temp on the surface directly above the pipes if all other variables are the same. I'd call this a distant second option if you find adding the perlite layer mentioned above doesn't help enough.

Another option would be to make thinner pads, maybe you could fill them with cotton clothes that you no longer are wearing? Instead of turning old t-shirts into rags, you can roll them up the way some do when packing a suitcase, and have them packed into a less-gicky cover that doesn't off-gas when warmed up?