We just put in some new windows. Bubble wrap was our second choice.
I had a similar revelation about storm windows. The Girlfriend admitted yesterday, when I was talking about putting them down, that she didn't realize they existed.
The latest thing to do in England is burn your rubbish.
The problem with the bubble wrap is that it wouldn't do much to control air leaking around the window frames. It just thickens the glass. I'd think that if you have older single pane windows, you could save a great deal of energy by putting 2" Styrofoam into the window and using a good silicon caulk to seal that to the window frame.
I was amazed when my roommate put the storm windows down. I hadn't realized those extra panes of glass were there.
Then he hung some really hideous curtains in our living room, which seem to have good insulating effects at the expense of making the place look like a hotel room.
The latest thing to do in England is burn your rubbish.
Not effigies of your MPs?
(You probably have to be following the tuition fees demo live whilst reading that comment shortly after I wrote it to get that one.)
A friend of mine has lined a wall with jiffy bags - shall suggest the bubble-wrapped windows to her.
3: I don't think the English have a good grasp of window sealing.
I put the screens up at the first norther. Close the window partway if it drops below around thirty windchill. It's a north window, so if the winds are from the South I put a window fan on intake in the window.
Or, you could just live here and not worry about this shit.
at the expense of making the place look like a hotel room.
Bolt down the lamps and TV to complete the effect.
8 - Stanley asked about winterising in general! I was simply offering an alternate heating option. Works best outdoors, preferably in large public squares.
And make all the lighting a complete pain in the ass and don't have overhead lights.
13: Our house, when we moved in, had no overhead lighting in the bedrooms. I'm all for a nice reading lamp, but we wanted to be able to light-up the whole room so we had that fixed very quickly.
Thought unfogged might find this interesting:
Protest-facilitation in the cloud (Stanley) FTW.
Except for a few replacements, I have almost totally non-insulated leaded glass windows that date from 1913. Hasn't been a problem, ever, and I mostly don't run the heater except late at night, so bills are low. I did fill up the tiny "attic" (ie, crawlspace) with tons of insulation strips.
Next ten days we have eight above 62. 65 with sunshine and light winds is perfect dog walking weather.
Winter isn't here yet, and last year was cold. But with luck, give or take 5 degrees, I'll see 60/40 til April. We set the therm at 64-65, and the heat goes on 3-4 hours a night. Sometimes.
Not as nice as SoCal, and then there are the summers.
We don't have overhead lighting in the living room, and are underlamped generally. But we also both like it dim: the appropriate lighting level is enough to keep you from tripping over the dog, or small pools of light for reading. I worry that we're bringing up the children to think that our troglodytic ways are normal, but I figure it won't be the weirdest thing about them.
from link at 15: Godzilla emerges from Thames to support protests.
Hurrah!
Huh, maybe that second pane in my bedroom is a storm window, rather than proper insulation.
16, 17: It was 23 degrees this morning and colder last night.
Or, you could just live here and not worry about this shit.
Halford keeps warm thanks to massive wildfires, and spends his time worrying about mudslides, earthquakes, and a collapsing state government instead. Win-win!
21: Same here, basically. 24° yesterday morning when I went running. That was cold.
It's so cold I'm going to eat at Arby's.
15 is interesting. The use of the golfer icon for the riot police is inspired.
My last couple of places have been (surprisingly) nice enough that they had modern replacement windows, but the place before that was a nightmare - very old-fashioned storm windows that were bolted on from the outside, which made me worry about escaping if there was a fire.
Growing up, we always used rope caulk and plastic film to insulate the windows during the winter. The plastic film is still a fine layer - and bubble wrap would do if you don't mind the hit to visibility - but rope caulk was always terrible crumbly stuff. I've since found this sealing product (and a couple of competitors), which is kind of like low-tack rubber cement. Makes a great seal, fills in wide openings, stays in place, and pretty much peels right off in the spring. Smells nasty and solventy while it cures, though, so you want to do it when you can still open one more window for ventilation.
My place has what I've heard referred to as "ghetto heat," i.e. radiators that blast all winter and make the place ridiculously warm to the point that many people open their windows. (I don't because I hate being cold more than most things.)
I sort of like the term as a shorthand (for something I rarely have cause to reference, but whatevs) but have never really used it after a conversation in which I was told that "ghetto"--used as a noun or an adjective--is always problematic. Not sure how to feel about that but it isn't really important enough that I need to risk offense.
Ghetto radiators are all fun and games until you start waking up every morning with a bloody nose. For right now, I've decided that I'd rather have the bloody nose than be cold, but I'll probably close the damn valve pretty soon.
As for the linguistic question: the two places I've lived that really had the radiator heat a-blast have been Harlem and Bed-Stuy, so...
28.2: I once dated someone who referred to Jägerbombs as Ghettoblasters. It didn't make drinking them any better of an idea.
30: Drinking Jägerbombs is a bad idea as well.
29: Hot air makes your nose bleed? I'm missing a connection.
Very dry air can make a nose bleed.
Radiator heat leads to dry air leads to nosebleeds.
Pwnage can make your soul bleed.
I do get nose bleeds from dry air, but I've never had the problem with radiator heat. Only with forced air heat.
Drinking Jägerbombs is a bad idea as well.
I almost said "It didn't make drinking them (or dating her) any better of an idea" but then I felt bad talking smack about an long-ago ex-girlfriend on the internet.
Forced air systems cook the air and send moisture up the vent, but a radiator shouldn't do that since the heat is containing a bunch of pipes.
but then I felt bad talking smack about an long-ago ex-girlfriend on the internet.
I'm sure you were both young and needed the money.
40: Air in a radiator-heated building is marginally less dry than its forced air equivalent, but they share the same primary issue, the much lower relative humidity for the same amount of water vapor in hot versus cold air.
My freshman dorm had ghetto heat. One morning shortly after it got turned on I woke up literally in a pool of blood. Looked like a crime scene.
42: I thought that it was humidity, not relative humidity that affected me, but I've never really studied the issue or spent much time in a place with low relatively humidity in the summer. I do recall running a ghetto humidifier one winter (a pot of water on the stove at simmer), but I stopped after the pot turned into giant mess of lime scale.
I almost said "It didn't make drinking them (or dating her) any better of an idea" but then I felt bad talking smack about an long-ago ex-girlfriend on the internet THE CLOUD.
I have had zero luck with humidifiers, ghetto or otherwise.
Ghetto: a baking tin with water set atop the radiator. Result: empty, lime-scaled baking tin, every damn morning. Nosebleed.
Non-ghetto: plug-in plastic doo-hicky.
Result: puddle of water on floor. Nosebleed.
Realistically, I need to close my radiator valve most of the time and rely on my Caribbean neighbors on the floor below to keep their heat turned up to thermo-nuclear. Either that or spend more than $100 on a really nice humidifier, but that's unlikely.
My neighbor is Danish, not that we have a way to steal his heat. Maybe I can steal some of those cookies in the tin cans.
I heard today that Dutch cookies are the new etchings.
44: Relative humidity (ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor to the saturated vapor pressure of water at a given temperature) rather than absolute humidity (amount of water vapor in a given volume of air) is what determines (for the most part*) how moist or dry the air feels. The significant factor is that the warm air can "hold" (not technically the right way to view it ...) substantially more water than cold air (2 or 3x between freezing and room temperature) , so no matter how you heat it, the relative humidity of air drops significantly unless you provide another source of moisture.
*Since the air is warmed as it enters your respiratory system, you get this effect somewhat even when you breathe in very cold air with high relative humidity*, it can dry out your respiratory membranes. But it is less likely to cause nosebleeds as it is not had a chance to warm that much (and therefore dry out) as it goes through your nose, but it does contribute to the burning lung feeling.
51: That makes sense. I understand the difference between absolute and relative humidity, but I wasn't thinking how the inside of the nose would be different from the outside of my poor skin.
I heard today that Dutch cookies are the new etchings.
Those still lifes really can be amazing.
57: If you are eating your cookies while they're still alive, you need to wait a little longer. Or beat the eggs a lot more thoroughly.
I've had the blasting radiators in two apartments: Park Slope and Inwood. The Park Slope building was poorly maintained and my guess was that the landlady was trying to drive out the woman across the hall who was the only person who lived there aside from my roommate, and who had been in the building for decades.
I left the radiator on in my room the whole time I was there (end of December to February) because the closed window sucked out a lot of heat. The bathroom was heated by an extremely hot pole that must have extended through all floors. We had to open the window to cool that room down because the heat in the pole was centrally regulated.
In Inwood my room was heated with one of those poles. It's the only time I routinely slept in my underwear instead of pajamas because it was so damn hot. No nosebleeds, though.
60: Park Slope, Inwood, and a sort of non-named neighborhood around the Lincoln Tunnel* are my points of reference. I AM FOLLOWING YOU.
*I tried to make "the BLT" for By the Lincoln Tunnel happen, but shockingly it didn't catch on. Ok I didn't really try that hard. I mention it at all because some annoying Yahoo article tells me someone out there is trying to make "CanDo" (Canal Downtown) happen for the area I work in. Nothing on earth could compel me to use this combination of syllables in this context.
Using this definition of "ghetto", every East Coast and Midwestern university dorm is a ghetto. Actually, that works.
Last year I had the feeling the winter dry air was irritating my breathing passages and I spent I think around $100 on a humidifier with weird strips of silver to keep crap from growing in the water, and a pleasing blue streamlined form and silent operation, but I was waking up coughing every morning anyway.
This year I bought a humido-mo-mometer (whatever) from amazon for like $10 and I love measuring things! Turns out it's 15% relative humidity at work! Much worse than home where it's about 30% these days, up to 40% if all the mammals are sleeping in one room. I stopped using the humidifier and haven't been waking up coughing. I guess crap was growing in the water.
The pink stormtrooper outfit is a nice touch.
And the BBC economics editor channelling his inner hipster:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2010/12/9122010_dubstep_rebellion_-_br.html
Danish ≠ Dutch.
Well, sure. But I don't know what X Danish cookies are the new X of.
Personally, I avoid anything that's been in a Dutch oven recently.
(Hi, I'm twelve.)
I just remembered we have Humidifier Frog. I wonder where that thing went. It really helped the boy's skin last year.
66: Somewhere Stuart Hall is shaking his head wearily and/or smiling.
I picked a bad year to start running in the winter. It has been F'ng cold here!
Our house is well insulated, but our darn old dog needs to taken outside several times a night. Sadly, we cannot keep a rubbish fire burning all night long where we live.
61 seemed more profound when it was a reply to 60. Yes, I too am a follower of the Way of the Nacho.
||
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11966645
>
How do these backbencher rebellions work? Does everyone who voted the wrong way get punished? Or in the case of a sufficiently big rebellion, it's not plausible to punish everyone? Or did the party leadership signal it was okay for a certain number of people to defect?
The Commons vote mean fees will almost treble to £9,000 a year.I didn't realize it was that insane. (Yeah, I should have been following the news.) For public universities? I guess the U.S. (in-state) costs will catch up with that eventually.
Hmm. Apparently the blockqoute tag is not self-closing after a carriage return.
re: 74
The parties have whips -- politicians whose job it is to turn the screw on MPs who vote against their party position -- but they can only exercise imperfect discipline, and MPs ultimately have to weigh up party discipline, their constituency view [some Lib Dem MPs are very likely to lose the next election over this issue], and their individual conscience.
In the case of this vote, iirc, the Lib Dems had already agreed when they went into the coalition that this was one vote on which their members might abstain. You'll notice that the (three) junior government ministers, including one Tory, who voted against the Bill also resigned their government posts.
See the wiki article on whips in general, and specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip_(politics)#United_Kingdom
re: 75
It's more complicated than just that, although you'd not learn that from reading the mainstream UK press. The fee rises are accompanied by massive [in some cases total] cuts in central government funding which are supposed to be replaced out of fees income. In the case of arts and humanities subjects the funding cuts approach 100%, effectively privatising their funding, and the funding of entire institutions, which may entirely lose their central funding and which will either be forced to survive entirely on fees, or close. It's a much more sweeping 'reform' than just the fee issue would imply.
They've also ended the EMA -- essentially a grant given to older school pupils on low incomes to encourage them to stay on at school long enough to gain qualifications and/or achieve university entry -- which is a particularly regressive measure and an explanation for why so many working class 15 - 18 year-olds have been out on the streets protesting.
Also, all [well, except one] British universities are public institutions, or at least they have been until now,* so the comparison between public and private institutions that you might make in the US doesn't really apply.
* the upshot of these reforms may be a sort of worse of all worlds crypto-privatisation of education, where funding is entirely out of fee income but the state still retains regulatory and governing power over the institutions.
74: the largest threat the whips have is deselection by the party, which usually but not always makes it very hard to get reelected. It seems unlikely the party leadership could get any of the rebel backbenchers deselected. Perhaps the rebels will lose a chance at a ministerial job, but they may think that such a job isn't actually desirable.
79: This isn't strictly true. All UK universities are private, in the sense that they are autonomous foundations separate from the state. They just happen to receive a lot of public money for teaching and research, and to be highly regulated, and as you say the big privatisation question is whether (a) and (b) are connected. It's not really clear to me that "privatisation" is actually a helpful lens for what might happen here.
re: 80
80.2
Perhaps, yeah, 'privatisation' is a simplistic lens through which to view it. It is, nonetheless, a substantial redrawing of the compact through which education funding has worked up until now with the balance shifting from state funding, to state funding with student contributions, to (effectively) total student funding of non-STEM subjects, and subsidised student funding of STEM subjects. Which will, if I read all the various articles on the Browne recommendations correctly, effectively defund many institutions.
81: I think there's an imaginable future where the state basically offers universities two possible outcomes: keep taking the money and have tough regulatory regime A, or turn the money down and have lax regulatory regime B. At that point the privatisation question becomes a live one.
But in the current situation I think the state is trying to get more involved in university decisions - basically getting them addicted to STEM, but on the cheap and subject to heavy employer input. There won't be much state money available, but universities will be under a lot of pressure to chase it. I don't think it would serve govt purposes for a university to announce that they just can't be arsed any more, take your money back, we're going our own way, etc, and they would probably regulate to prevent that.
re: 82
Yeah, to all of that. This government isn't at all interested, for all their 'free' schools bullshit, in deregulating education; they want to retain control.
If you're a minister and you want to vote against the government, you have to resign because the ministers are all collectively responsible for whatever they eventually decide in cabinet. The idea is that you express your disagreement in cabinet, and then either suck it up or quit.
Whips are weird; they're half-official, half private, and their role is partly parliamentary business manager (shared with the leader of the house of Commons, whose job this is) and partly pure thuggery. They don't have any constitutional status, but the whips' office does have a budget, civil service staff, and offices in the Palace of Westminster, and the job of whip has a government salary. And the government chief whip is usually allowed to sit in on cabinet meetings although he isn't technically a minister - one unusually fastidious cabinet secretary refused to let his officials talk to the whip on the grounds he wasn't a member of the cabinet, so there would be a "political cabinet" session after the real one without the civil servants present. The usual fix for this is to give the chief whip a sinecure ministry for form's sake.
Among other things, they deal with relations between the government and the opposition, but this isn't formally meant to happen so the term of art is "the usual channels".
Being a whip is one way to get access to actual power as a new MP, but it can prejudice your chances of being a minister as you're basically guaranteed to make a lot of enemies. Ted Heath was chief whip but made it to PM, but then he wasn't known for caring that anyone hated him.
Of this lot of rebels, Ming Campbell and Charles Kennedy are former party leaders who are known to be opposed to the coalition and therefore ruled out of being ministers, David Davies ran against David Cameron for the party leadership, and he also resigned his seat in order to run for election again as a protest against identity cards, so the whips probably see him not only as an enemy of the boss but also an, ahem, maverick who might pull something weird at any moment. Simon Hughes, who abstained, is probably planning to be the next Lib Dem leader in so far as being such a thing would be worth a good shit.
I don't know what Davies' beef with the policy is, because he's a fairly hardcore sound-money budget-hawk eurosceptic king-and-church type. He's perceived as the chief of the traditional right wingers in the Tories, so perhaps he's just doing it to piss off the whips and demonstrate that he and his followers have a credible capability to fuck shit up. It was fairly clear they would win last night, so it was a good opportunity to do some deterrent signalling without taking too many risks.
It's also possible that he's angry about the EMA - he is a rare bird, a Tory from a poor background, and he's been quite passionate about education in the past. In a Tory sort of way, of course, selective grammar schools and uniforms and house points and whatnot.
I was wondering about Lee Scott, too. I presume something like:
he is a rare bird, a Tory from a poor background, and he's been quite passionate about education in the past. In a Tory sort of way, of course, selective grammar schools and uniforms and house points and whatnot.
FWIW, we had uniforms and house points at my school, which was about as far away from an English grammar school as you could possibly get while remaining in the UK. That said, the headmaster who introduced it was a teuchter, so maybe there was some sort of semi-conscious imitation of places like Gordonstoun, or Dollar.
He was born in a Jewish family in West Ham in 1956 and is a Leyton Orient fan, so we probably have an answer there. He's in Davies' caucus, the Cornerstone group, too.
87
From 1972-82, Scott was a Director of Scott & Fishell.Born 1956 and a company director by 1972? Talk about achievers!
They'll have no choice but to reverse the policy now that Cameron has lost the critical Smiths fanship.
88: presumably his dad's trading company since his surname's in the company name - given that he was from an East End Jewish family and went to the London College of Distributive Trades, this is very likely to have been a garment importing business, but let's not get too ethnically stereotypical here.
Lee Scott of the well-known London Jewish Scotts?
The idea is that you express your disagreement in cabinet, and then either suck it up or quit.
I think Jean-Pierre Chevènement said it best:
"un ministre ça ferme sa gueule, si ça veut l'ouvrir, ça démissionne"
This came after he resigned as defense minister in protest against Frances decision to take part in the land operations of the Gulf War in January 1991, and was responding to a question asking why he'd not only been saying nothing against it, but positively reporting on France's preparations.
Lee Scott of the well-known London Jewish Scotts?
A lot of the British Jewish community's progenitors came from eastern Europe in rather a hurry during the 19th century, and as such had little baggage except for long, alien, unpronounceable and vowel-poor Polish surnames, which were brutally shortened or completely replaced by British customs on arrival. A lot of the ones in Scotland, for example, turned up calling themselves something impractical like Szymonowicz and were greeted on the quay with the words "Oh, we'll just call you Cohen like the rest of them". (Which often became Cowan later.) "Scott" may well have been the result of the same process. Or perhaps the original immigrant just liked it.
This crossed my desk today. Pretty generous portrait of Ken Clarke. Fair?
"Oh, we'll just call you Cohen like the rest of them".
I've got Polish forebears who (once in the US) went by the surname Polack, and Norwegian-Jewish forebears with the last name Berg. I like to imagine it's all the work of some bored, racist immigration clerk at Ellis Island (actually, they all came in through Philly, but same idea).
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sznorzuhkznki, you said? Right. P-O-L-A-C-K. Next!"
re: 94
He's reasonably decent for a Tory, I think, and fairly liberal on law and order issues (again, for a Tory).
Or, you could just live here and not worry about this shit.
I thought I had responded to this, but apparently not. Anyway: the person that informed me of the bubble-wrap thing? Totes from California (albeit more northern climes than Halford's).
The thing about California homes is that very often the insulation is not great. So during the few legitimately cold spells they can be a bit colder than you'd like, even with the heat set at whatever you consider the "normal" temp for the season.
I need to cock the leak around my sliding balcony door, but really i'm probably going to rope my family into helping me move in the next month or so so i might just skip it. last year i guled togetehr some styrophome boards over the door, but that refelcted too much lite
anyone know how to query landlord/ladies about the insulation quality of their offerings? or hwat the good sites ot foind new living spots is?
Clarke is sort of the Tory It's OK To Like. Socially liberal, economically Keynesian, pro-European on foreign affairs, jazz obsessive. The real question is what on earth he's been doing in a party that despises him on all three counts (and possibly the fourth) all these years.
Then you remember he was on the board of directors of British American Tobacco, so presumably the essential Toryness was channelled into giving the third world lung cancer.
