Sitting in my cold, air-conditioned classroom the last week, while it was 85-95ºF outside, a design for a new thermostat came to me. Currently, thermostats cool (or heat) a building to a desired temperature. My new design would create a floating target temperature, that moves up and down as the outside temperature changes. The goal would be to target a temperature that is half-way between the “comfort zone” (generally 65-72ºF) and the outside temperature.
For example, if the temperature outside is 92ºF and the comfort zone max is 72ºF, the air conditioning would be set to 82ºF.
An example of a cold day: If the temperature outside is 45ºF, and the comfort zone minimum is 65ºF, the heater would be set to 55ºF.
Progressive vs traditional thermostat
What’s the advantage?
Physics principles state that the greater the temperature difference between two bodies, the faster the heat is transferred between them. Thus, if the outside temperature is 92ºF, it takes less energy to cool a house from 92ºF to 82ºF than to cool it the next 10ºF, from 82ºF to 72ºF. And since hotter and colder days place higher demands out our electrical grid (especially hot days), these are the days where we need to save energy the most.
Other adjustments/design alternatives
This new design could allow for adjusting the percent difference for hot and cold days individually. For example, if a person can handle heat better than cold, s/he might change hot days to only 25% of the way from the outside temperature to the comfort zone (using the previous example, cooling the house to 87ºF), but on cold days s/he would set it to 75% (the example above heat to 60ºF).
The thermostat could easily be designed to have a maximum hot temperature allowed (e.g. never over 82ºF) and/or a minimum cold temperature (e.g. 50ºF). This would be useful in extremely hot or cold climates.
With wireless technology as simple and inexpensive as it is these days, it would be easy to place the outside temperature sensor in an appropriate location, not necessarily right outside the thermostat.
Questions/comments
Please leave your comments below. I’d love to hear what others feel about this idea.
The video below is just “raw” footage from CBS News. There is no narration, just a collection of images. I really enjoy this format, you can focus on the images and not on what the newscaster is saying. Powerful.
Typhoon Slams China
Sun Aug 09 11:26:08 PDT 2009
“CBS News RAW”: Millions evacuated the area after typhoon Morakot slammed into China’s east coast. It was the island’s worst flooding in 50 years and left dozens missing and feared dead.
In 1983, the Cooperative Whole Grain Educational Association published Uprisings; The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book. The Foreword of the book is at the bottom of this page.
As a former collective member of Uprisings Baking Collective in Berkeley (one of the contributors to the book), I didn’t want this book and organization to just fade away. There were 32 collective/cooperative bakeries who contributed to the book, many of which are still in business. Collected below are a list of links to the bakeries that are still operating. If I missed any, please fill in the form at the bottom so I can update the page.
The book is a valuable resource for bakers and wannabe bakers. One of its strengths is the index—including the traditional categories of major ingredients and types of foods, but also including a special section on Recipes by Special Dietary Characteristics such as No Eggs or Dairy; No Dairy (but contains Eggs); No Eggs (but contains Dairy); No Wheat; No Sweetener, or Fruit-sweetened; No Added Oils or Fats (may contain high-fat ingredients); No Baking; and No Salt, or Optional Salt.
While Uprisings is out of print, many used copies are available. If you can’t find it at your local bookstore, try abebooks.com using the search box here. abebooks.com is a network of independent bookstores around the country, your independent alternative to Amazon.com.
Click this link to search for Uprisings on AbeBooks:0938432125
There is another book out there with the exact same name, but a different author. If abebooks doesn’t return any books using the ISBN number provided here, try a search for the title Uprisings Bakers to get the other book. I’m not sure if this is the same book, re-published by a new group of authors. If anyone knows about this, please let me know.
Welcome to Uprisings, the whole grain bakers’ book. Uprisings has been collectively compiled by expieneced bakers from many small independent bakeries. If draws its inspiration from a number of uprisings—of grain, of bread, and of people. The most basic of these is the grain growing from the earth, nourished by the rain and sun. Wheat, rye, corn, barley, buckwheat, millet, rice—these are the fundamental ingredients of whole grain baked goods. Bakers, with a little help from yeast and other leaveners, create another uprising, as dough rises to produce fresh-baked loaves, filling our senses. The third uprising is the cooperative ethic of the bakeries we work in. There are no bosses, no employees. Instead we all do the work toegher, sharing the responsibilities and the rewards. Our businesses put priority on serving the needs of the community, not on making profits for a select few.
We think it’s a great loss that so many of us are unfamiliar with these uprisings. Few people enjoy the delights of eating fresh whole grain bread, let alone those of making it themselves. It’s also a loss that so few people have the satisfaction of helping to run their own workplaces, doing interesting work that meets real needs. Cooperative whole grain bakeries are part of a rising tide of people taking more responsibility for what goes on in our lives. We want more and more of us to regain power over our food, our work, our health and well-being—in short, our personal, social, and economic existence. To achieve this, we heartily encourage these and other kinds of uprisings in all areas or our lives.
Science Friday had a great piece on snakes slithering today. The main researcher in the video is Dr. David Hu from the Applied Mathematics Laboratory, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY.
Turns out it’s much more compicated than one would think. The scientists used smooth surfaces and even Jello to test their hypotheses. Here’s the article about the video.
For an end of the semester project in my physics classes, I posed the following question to my students:
If you put 100,000 miles on a car, which is a better deal, a hybrid or a traditional car?
Students were asked to look up a car they would be interested in buying, but the car has to come in both hybrid and traditional engine models. They were asked to look at the price of the car and the cost of gas over the 100,000 mile “life” of the car (OK, some are going to sell it at 50K, and others hold onto it until it dies, but 10,000 seemed like a good average). We just finished a unit on energy, and I thought this would be a good way to get them thinking about energy and money.
If you want to know their results, you’ll have to keep reading, but I’ve since had time to think about making this question more open-ended, inquiry (thanks to Dy/Dan for keeping my on my inquiry toes). So now I’m thinking of the questions that could be raised in a class discussion:
Write an equation for the cost of each car as a function of the miles driven.
Using these two equations, solve for the intersection of the lines. What does this intersection represent?
Car mileage is rated in both highway and city. Expand your equation to include a variable for the percent of driving that is city.
How many extra fill-ups will it take to drive the traditional engine car? If your time is worth money, how much will this cost you if you make $50,000/year?
How much gas is saved by driving the hybrid? What percent is this?
The list can go much further than this. Leave it up to your students to develop more.
Oh, the answer.
Students did calculations from the Honda Civic to the Cadillac Escalade (yes, it comes in a hybrid). None of the hybrids broke even with the traditional engine in cost for 100,000 miles. Students were asked to write a short paragraph saying if they thought buying the hybrid was “worth it.” They gave great responses, including those who even looked at the gas they would save just from switching from the car they are now driving to a more fuel efficient car (one student said it wasn’t worth it to buy the hybrid, but certainly was worth it–financially and environmentally–to buy a new car to upgrade her mileage.
It’s that time again. Time to wander the aisles of the college town “free stores.”
These stores don’t pay rent, and the aisles move daily (if not hourly). The merchandise are the items the students don’t feel like taking with them. Walk around student neighborhoods as finals and graduation come to an end, and you’ll find all sorts of treasures. A couple months ago I got a “new” CD/tape/radio player that a neighbor had nicely set out on the curb (replaced with an iPod and speakers?). Then, a couple bike wheels. Today, a nice hand-vacuum.
So, help keep these items from the scrapbin of history; give them another life in your house.
The San Francisco Bay Area’s 15th Annual Bike to Work Day will take place on Thursday, May 14, 2009. Bike to Work Day is the premier bicycling event taking place in all of Northern California with all nine Bay Area counties participating in the celebration. The event is just one day of many events taking place in May as part of National Bike Month.
Yesterday I stopped by my local Peets (Walnut and Vine, the original) to see if they had organic decaf beans (about 7:00 pm, very slow inside). The bean counter worker looked at the selection and said “No, not certified, but they’re all basically organic except for the certification.”
I said thanks and left the store, but a few doors away I was upset enough about his response that I decided to go back. I asked him what he had meant by “basically organic.” He said that they don’t really use any pesticides, that Peets is careful who they buy coffee from, and implied that therefore they used no/fewer pesticides. I asked if he could show me this in writing, and he went in the back to see. When he came out, he said they had nothing. I asked if the manager was in, and he went and got someone.
The shift leader (“I’m not the manager”) repeated his claim that all the beans are grown with “almost no pesticides.” I again asked if they had this in writing. She said no, but that was what they were told in trainings. (Peets website “Lean: How Coffee is Grown” make no mention of pesticides or organic farming practices.) I left with three of the workers there wishing me a good evening in tones that didn’t seem to convey any real sense of sincerity.
After this experience, I thought I’d see what response I got at the Starbucks down the street (Cedar and Shattuck, “Mortuary Mall” for those who’ve been in town a while). I asked if they had any organic decaf. The woman at the counter told me that no, while they had organic beans that were decaf, the decaffeinating process made them not organic. I said that the “Swiss water process” didn’t make it not organic, and she replied that Starbucks doesn’t use the water process, and she wasn’t sure why. We had a good, short discussion about how at least the beans were being grown in an organic matter, so it was better for the farms and farmworkers, even though at the last minute some chemicals got added to it.
I must say that I was pleased about the honesty I got from the worker at Starbucks. She said that she had convinced many people to get the chemically treated, formerly organic decaf beans, but was very clear on what made them non-organic.
By the way, both companies sell organic regular coffee, just not organic decaf.
So, bad marks for both companies for not carrying organic decaf. Peets gets serious bad marks for not even admitting that their coffee isn’t organic unless they can say so in writing, essentially trying to sell me that there’s no real difference except for the label, what I would consider deceitful marketing–and this all the way up to the top person in the store. Good marks to Starbucks for honesty and knowing what actually happens to their beans, and not trying to sell some that weren’t grown organically as “almost organic.”
Science Friday, my favorite radio show when I’m not teaching on Fridays, had a great piece today on carbon sequestering on the ocean floor.
What if you could take CO2, pump it down a deep hole in the sea floor and turn it into something harmless? New research suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. David Goldberg, Taro Takahashi and Angela Slagle of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published a study on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.
Click the “Play” arrow on the lower left side to start the video. It does a great job of using breakfast cereals to help explain the process.
The San Francisco Bay Area’s 15th Annual Bike to Work Day will take place on Thursday, May 14, 2009. Bike to Work Day is the premier bicycling event taking place in all of Northern California with all nine Bay Area counties participating in the celebration. The event is just one day of many events taking place in May as part of National Bike Month.