Modular electric farm traction
Currently, farm tractors almost all burn diesel, and (with very few exceptions) burn fossil fuel. To reduce the carbon cost of farming, either electric or hydrogen powered tractors are necessary. This document considers electric power.
Battery weight, and modularity
Bondage Safety: or, how (not) to kill your partner
Bondage Safety: or, how (not) to kill your partner
Content warning: This is about rope bondage. I'm normally fairly shy about talking about my weird sexuality on my public blog, and I published this note some years ago in more private parts of the web where odd people hang out. If rope bondage isn't your bag, do not read on.
What we're doing, in modern western societies, when we play with rope, is fundamentally an artistic, or a meditative, or — very often — an erotic practice. Rope hasn't often, historically, been used in this way. Historically, people have mostly been tied by people hostile to them: by people who were their enemies, who didn't care, greatly, about their safety or wellbeing. Indeed, tying has often been a part of intentional torture, or a way to deliberately kill — usually slowly.
A rant about strappado
A rant about strappado
Strappado is a very simple tie. It requires no special skills, no fancy technique. It requires only one rope. It results in permanent, irrepairable injury to the victim, and that's intentional, that's what it was developed to do.
Very simply, you tie the victim's wrists together behind their back, and then you hoist them up by their tied wrists.
The Storm
I did not expect the storm of the night of Friday 26th November to be exceptionally severe. I was aware that there was going to be a storm, and aware that the wind was expected to peak at a strength which rates as 'violent storm' on the Beaufort Scale. But such events are not actually that rare here. I made some preparations — I did close the cattle shed doors, for example, and fully fastened down the last new panel on the north side of the roof.
I thought of moving the stack of panels for the south side of the roof, that had not yet been installed, into the wood for safekeeping, but it would have been a lot of work and I very fortunately did not do it.
The Everyone Dies Event Class
The climate, globally, is warming. Everyone acknowledges that. It’s not warming equally, or consistently, or evenly; I think everyone acknowledges that as well. Rather, the atmosphere is a heat engine: as you put more energy into it in the form of heat, you get more work out of it, in the form of turbulence. Winds get stronger, precipitation more intense, and heat waves hotter.
Human beings function in a fairly constrained temperature band. The healthy body temperature is 37° Celsius, plus or minus about one degree. The human body cools itself by evaporation. If water can’t evaporate from your skin, you can no longer cool yourself. Rather, you take on heat from the environment. Body temperature above 40° Celsius is a life threatening emergency, and above 42.3° denaturing of proteins, especially in the brain, may occur rapidly. This is not survivable.