Category: learning curve

Five Useful Moving Tips From Stuttaford Van Lines

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This arrived on my Facebook stream as a “suggested post” and having read it, I thought I’d share it with you just in case you were planning on moving any time soon and were looking for professional movers (Stuttaford Van Lines).

Here’s the screenshot:

Screenshot_2013-03-25-20-45-40

and here’s a link to the full post on their Facebook page.

Finally, here are those tips:

Moving your precious belongings need not to be a Hassle.
Five Useful Moving Tips.

1. Count all the furniture to be moved, and let the professional movers (Stuttaford Van Lines) know about the number of valuable goods.

All too often, moving my precious belongings is a Hassle, so you can see why I was looking forward to reading more about how it need not be a Hassle. And, aside from an unnecessary comma, this first tip makes good sense. (Unless you’re using a professional mover other than Stuttaford Van Lines, of course. Then there would be very limited use in letting Stuttaford Van Lines know about the numbers of anything to do with your furniture.)

2. Paper work and all other furniture insurance work should be done consciously, discuss their rate of service and all the additional charges.

100% on this one as well. Attempting paperwork and all other furniture insurance work unconsciously is a recipe for disaster. It just never seems to get done. So yes, conscious work only please!

3. Labeling all the packed cartons organizes your moving. Do all home-related work prior to calling, furniture movers.

I hope you’re listening, furniture movers, because this tip is directed at you. In addition, I hope that before calling, you ensure that you have done all the home-related work. This is a basic requirement of furniture movers (Stuttaford Van Lines).

4. Furniture movers (Stuttaford Van Lines) are experienced people, your relocation area is near by or far, all your furniture should be insured.

I think we can see from this tip that furniture movers (Stuttaford Van Lines) are experienced people. And that’s an important consideration. However, it is also worth bearing in mind that they have then apparently just flung random sentence fragments and punctuation at the rest of this tip, which is hardly the mark of experienced people.
No, experienced people write in full sentences which actually make sense when one reads them.
This dichotomy leaves me hugely confused, but at least I am comforted by the fact that all my furniture should be insured by experienced people.

5. Ask about the safest route and ask if their can take the route which is less accident prone and make sure there are no bushes on the path.

Accident prone routes are the bane of my life. Only the other day, I saw a route which had just had an accident and according to bystanders and witnesses to that route’s accident, it was that route’s third accident this month. Talk about an accident prone route.
That’s why I always ask my furniture movers (Stuttaford Van Lines) if their can take the route which is less accident prone. Thankfully, my furniture movers (Stuttaford Van Lines) are experienced people and their can always make a plan to take a less accident prone route.

And then finally, slipped in at the end like an afterthought, like it’s almost inconsequential, the whole “no bushes on the path” thing. Less experienced people might get a bit hysterical over this. For example, I’m a less experienced person and I’d be all, like:

OMFG! MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO BUSHES ON THE PATH!!!!!1!

But no, my furniture movers (Stuttaford Van Lines) are calm and collected. Yes, it’s hugely important to make sure that there are no bushes on the path, but they just take it in their stride – as one surely would after taking a route which is less accident prone.
This is the sort of benefit that experience can bring, like knowing to do your paperwork and all other furniture insurance work while you’re actually conscious.

I find it amazing that in one short Facebook post, included within just Five Useful Moving Tips, so much useful information can be imparted. Wow!
I know for sure that next time I want to move, Hassle free, I’ll be contacting professional movers (Stuttaford Van Lines).

Disclosure: This was in no way a sponsored post for professional movers (Stuttaford Van Lines).

Slow Physics – SCIENCE!

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Amazing video stuff coming up in The Mystery of the Prince Rupert’s Drop (aka Dutch Tears or… er… Rupert’s Balls).
They explode. Ouchies.

The nice thing about this is that you can watch as much or as little as you want. If you just want to see exploding glass at 130,000 frames per second, that’s cool. If you want to see exactly why and how quickly that glass explodes, just watch a little longer.

Hint, it’s about 5½ times the speed of sound. Whoosh!

SCIENCE!

It seems clear that Prince Rupert did not discover the drops, but played a role in their history by being the first to bring them to Britain, in 1660. He gave them to King Charles II, who in turn delivered them in 1661 to the Royal Society (which the King had created the previous year) for scientific study. Several early publications from the Royal Society give accounts of the drops and describe experiments performed. Among these publications was Micrographia of 1665 by Robert Hooke, who later would discover Hooke’s Law. His publication laid out correctly most of what can be said about Prince Rupert’s Drops without a fuller understanding than existed at the time, of elasticity (to which Hooke himself later contributed so greatly) and of the failure of brittle materials from the propagation of cracks. A fuller understanding of crack propagation had to wait until the work of A. A. Griffith in 1920.

HISTORY!

Now, don’t you feel educated?!?

Still in the dark about Earth Hour?

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Yes yes, I’ve been told that Earth Hour is all about “raising awareness” about “climate change”. I’ve also commented that I really don’t think it’s necessary to raise any more awareness about something we can’t get through a single Pistorius-free day without having rammed down our collective gullet.

In addition, I may also have mentioned that Earth Hour gives slacktivists the perfect opportunity to enjoy their favourite pastime, namely thinking that they’re making a difference without actually making a difference at all. In fact, as that article on Slate pointed out, lighting an inefficient candle (which most bunny-huggers and pseudo bunny-huggers will do this evening) is actually more harmful to our precious environment than using a fat incandescent light bulb for an hour (or, by extrapolation, any given period of time). But how much more harmful?

Well, I’ve found someone who has done some rudimentary calculations to find out exactly how much:

I know candles are nice and romantic – but you’re taking paraffin wax, in the form of a candle, and burning it, very inefficiently, at a low temperature. This stuff is pure hydrocarbon – it’s a heavy alkane fraction distilled straight off crude oil. This stuff is getting so scarce that nations are prepared to go to war just to secure it, remember?

A candle flame burns at a low temperature – so it’s a thermodynamically very inefficient source of energy – and most of the energy released in a candle is wasted as heat, anyway.

Even if 80% of your electricity comes from coal and fossil fuel fired power stations, as it does in Australia, burning candles is very polluting and certainly very greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions intensive, even more so than electric lighting.

Luke Weston then spoon feeds us through his calculations, just so that there can be no confusion as to how he reaches his conclusion. I’m not going to reproduce all those calculations here, but suffice to say that the results (standardised for the amount of light produced – apples with apples and all that) are as follows:

A incandescent bulb produces 1.11g CO2 for each hour that it is burned.
A candle produces 10.69g  for each hour that it is burned.

Therefore, for every candle that is burned to replace electric lighting during Earth Hour, greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the one hour are increased by 9.6 g of carbon dioxide.
If the light output from a 40 W light bulb was to be completely replaced by candles, this will lead to the emission of an extra 295 grams of carbon dioxide per over simply using the electric lights – if the equivalent of one thousand 40 W bulbs are replaced by candles, that’s an extra 295 kilograms of CO2 emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I can feel it getting warmer already.

Thus, if you really want to “make a difference” this evening (a positive difference, that is), you’ll be far better off sitting in the dark for an hour. And, if you want to DOUBLE the your contribution to saving the planet, you could do it for two.

But then we have to remember that there’s football and rugby in Cape Town tonight which you’ll want to watch on your dirty, still not ever so energy efficient flatscreen TV, dwarfing any potential benefits of switching off your lights and (not) firing up a candle.

Fortunately, this darkness and/or watching sport will (possibly) restrict the amount of “other activities” that some people have been suggesting might be an enjoyable and romantic by-product of an environment-destroying candlelit evening. I say “fortunately” because my wife is away this evening because each baby produced from those “other activities” will add so much to your household carbon footprint that you might as well stop washing out those Marmite jars and begin weeping right now:

Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.

So. Please spend your Earth Hour in the dark. No lights, no candles, certainly no TV and ABSOLUTELY NO HANKY PANKY!

And even then, please don’t pretend that you’re actually making a difference.

Feedly so far

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As part of that “What do we do now that Google Reader is disappearing?” post, I mentioned that I was going to try the “seamless transition” for Google Reader users promised by Feedly.

It’s been a few days since I “defected” (according to Engadget), but I took at least 499,999 others with me.

It multiplied its bandwidth ten times over, added new servers to cope with the sudden influx and hopes to keep the service up as much as possible as more users pour in. In an effort to keep its new clientele happy, Feedly has promised to listen to suggestions and add new features on a weekly basis as well.

What is interesting is that with so many different RSS aggregators out there and with Google Reader still working as usual until 1st July, if 500,000 Google Reader users have already gone to Feedly, exactly how many users did Reader have?

Lots of upset people.

As for me and Feedly, we’re getting on just fine. Syncing is quick and accurate across devices and the UI is decidedly similar to where I came from, which is nice as well. Sharing is easy and I’ve also installed Pocket, which integrates beautifully with Feedly and which I’ve already used more than I thought I ever would.

So, no problems thus far here: I’m happy with my choice and I’d recommend it if you’re still looking for an alternative RSS reader.

Slate: Earth Hour is all wrong

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Ah yes. Another annual opportunity for slacktivism approaches. If you’re all done with clicking LIKE to cure some Indian child with a facial abscess and you’ve signed that online petition against whales (or Wales), you too can switch your lights off for an hour and save the planet.

Or… er… not:

If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759?
Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes.

Well worth it then? No.

As the United Kingdom’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.

But if you do still decide to continue with switching the lights off, then don’t even think about lighting a candle:

[They] are still fossil fuels—and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs. Using one candle for each switched-off bulb cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2.

That won’t bother anyone taking part though, because they will feel that they are doing their bit, making a difference. And while a little bit of me wants to correct them on that fact, it’ll only upset them. And the only thing worse than a misinformed tree-hugger is a sad tree-hugger.

But, if you are one of those people who thinks that they can absolve themselves of all their environmental misdeeds simply by clicking a switch on Saturday, perhaps you should consider a better way of reducing your impact on the planet, because what you are planning is a complete waste of time – and electricity.