In 1962 Bob Dylan was worried that the world would be engulfed in nuclear holocaust and he would not have time to write all the songs he had ideas for. So he put them together into one song: A hard rain's gonna fall. Fifty four years later he won the Nobel prize for literature, and Patti Smith sang that song in Stockholm.
I'm not too worried about nuclear holocaust, and would be even more speechless than Dylan to receive a Nobel Prize, but I do have over 700 emails in my drafts box, of which over 100 are nascent blog posts. So here are some of the bits, all thrown into one mass of mildly interesting information.
Design
Interesting piece here from January 2008 by Dr Andrew J Marsh saying the biggest energy savings can be made in the first couple of weeks of the design process. If you read nothing else about low energy building, read this!http://naturalfrequency.com/ar
Should cups be made out of plastic or paper, or neither? That old chestnut!
http://carbon-clear.com/files/Reuseable_vs_Disposable_Cups_2012.pdf
Buildings
A passive house retrofit of a block of flats in the UK
http://europhit.eu/cs14-wilmcote-multifamily-house-portsmouth
A passive house in Ireland
http://passivebuild.blogspot.jp/2012/05/getting-passive-house-passivhaus.html
A Japanese company providing dome houses
https://www.bess.jp/products/
A guy who built a house in about six weeks.
http://themetapicture.com/this-guy-started-with-nothing-after-6-weeks-he-built-something-awesome/A very cool-looking shed
http://www.mnn.com/your-home/remodeling-design/blogs/tetra-shed-for-all-of-your-home-office-and-adult-time-out-needs
Increasingly random but not necessarily any more interesting
Solar powered airships
http://www.solarship.com/
http://www.solarship.com/
How to market green building features to home buyers
A nice design for a desk light
http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/05/led-desk-lamp-made-from-recycled-e-waste/
A recipe for white concrete
http://www.concreteconstruction.net/concrete-articles/some-notes-on-white-concrete-mix-design.aspx
Primary energy factors - how much energy was used to get the energy to your house
http://www.slideshare.net/sustenergy/webinar-primary-energy-factors-for-electricity-in-buildingsPros and cons of induction heating
http://theinductionsite.com/
A paper on Phase Change materials for thermal energy storage by Alvaro de Graciaa, Luisa F. Cabezab (Energy and Buildings, 103, 15 September, 2015)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778815004338
And if you're still thinking about building an igloo, but wondering what the U value will be, here is a forumla for the thermal conductivity of snow depending on its density ρ (in g/cm3):
keff = 0.138 - 1.01ρ + 3.233ρ2 {0.156 ≤ ρ ≤ 0.6}
This puts compressed snow at around 0.2 W/mK, which is slightly worse than wood.
