Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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   condensation-combatting condom
Monday, September 6 2010
Periodically the solar hot water collection system fails to collect hot water and, when I go to figure out why, I discover that the thermistor shoved into the side of the hot water tank is shorting out because it has become damp. When the thermistor shorts out, the Arduino controller thinks it is detecting plenty of heat, and so more heat isn't collected. Usually the shorting out happens after a period of prolonged cloud cover that has allowed the tank to cool and water from the atmosphere to condense out into the brass nipple that penetrates the tank from the side (where it forms a pocket exposed to the temperature of the inside water but not the inside water itself). I've tried covering the thermistor in various materials (caulk, epoxy, and latex) to protect it from condensation, but these materials either form incomplete seals (epoxy) or they break down in the often high temperatures (~150 degrees Fahrenheit) that they're exposed to. Today I found myself making yet another thermistor probe after the old one (which had been covered in epoxy and latex) shorted out and corroded. I coated today's thermistor in my newest favorite molten material, JB Weld epoxy. I know from those gasoline fill pipe repairs back in August that it can be used to make a liquid-tight barrier. (Since I was mixing up a batch, I decided to pull the right rear wheel off the Subaru and do some more patching on the fuel fill pipe, which actually hadn't proved entirely leak-free since the Virginia trip.)
Since one layer of barrier is never enough when it comes to the hot water tank thermistor, I made a second layer out of a piece of vinyl hose. I needed the hose to form a test-tube-type shape, so I borrowed a technique from glass blowing. I took a foot-long piece of vinyl tubing, held the middle over a small blue flame, and twisted. The vinyl heated up and melted and the hose pulled apart into two objects resembling flexible test-tubes. Their bottoms were a little singed and rough, and one of them leaked, but the one without a leak one seemed to work as sort of condom when shoving the thermistor into the side of the tank. The venereal disease hopefully being prevented in this case was condensation moisture.

This evening when I was reading the New Yorker (in the bathtub, the only place aside from vacations where I read whole New Yorker articles), I came across an article about Francis Collins, the new head of National Institutes of Health under President Obama. I already knew Collins to be one of the very few outspoken Christians amoung respected American scientists. What I learned in the article is that Collins and I share two remarkable things: we were both raised by back-to-the-land proto-hippies, and our back-to-the-land childhoods both happened just outside of Staunton, Virginia. Though we were both raised without religion, Collins found Jesus during graduate school (though in a preposterous manner that makes me question the rigor of his scientific worldview).
I have a feeling that nobody would have ever heard of Francis Collins had he not become an outspoken Christian. According to article, only 7% of members of the National Academy of Science "believe in God." Thus religious scientists are something like black Republicans: their existence, though rare, allays deep insecurities. So there will always be jobs and media appearances waiting for them whenever they want them.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100906

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