111–119 of 119 posts
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Which city is that?
Edinburgh? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Geology )
"But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream,
Fitful and dark,
Unseizable in Leith
And wildered by the Forth,
But irresistibly at last
Cleaving to somber heights
Of passionate imagining
Till stonily,
From soaring battlements,
Earth eyes eternity."
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Ohio is probably doing nothing about it because their state Supreme Court decision contradicts the national Supreme Court decision in San Antonio vs Rodriguez. I'm no legal scholar, but I think this is right up there with Dred Scott and Citizens United for worst-supreme-court-decisions-of-all-time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...
I believe the Ohio ruling was based on Ohio's own state constitution.
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The Center For American Progress released a 2017 study[1] based on fiscal 2013-2014 data. The top 50 richest PTAs are listed in Appendix I. [1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/04/180...
Thanks! So for these top-50 schools, it comes out to about 10% extra budget. And there are about 100_000 public schools in the USA.
When a PTA can afford to pay for extras that the school doesn't or can't (e.g. extra art & music teachers, computer labs, playground monitors, etc.), a student's quality of life at such public schools is generally objectively better compared to students at public schools without the extra budget. The year-over-year budget boosts are profound.
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> where black dust covers every surface inside a home unless one dusts and brooms and slops every single day. You can't just close your windows and run an air purifier?
Of course you can, but that won't do anything. The situation is such that you sweep the floor and in a couple of hours everything is again covered with black dust. Unless you keep the windows (and the balcony doors and the lightwell windows) closed and the air purifier running 24/7, year-round, you wouldn't achieve anything in the way you propose. Besides, keeping the windows and doors closed 24/7 during the summer m…
By the way, this is why traditional Japanese homes have shoji screens instead of glass windows. Japan has a lot of dust and pollen. Shoji paper is permeable to air (and so convective heat) and light, but not to dust or pollen. So essentially the entirety of the house has a HEPA-like "firewall" between the inside air and outside air, without needing any powered forced-air system to get fresh air inside. The windows are "open" in a breeze sense, while being "closed" in a dust sense. (Thus why they don't actually "open"; this is already kind of an optimal combination.) The wind still blows air into and through the house—especially when the doors are also shoji panels.
The only downside is that, like a HEPA filter, the screens will get dusty/sooty on the outside, and need to be wiped clean. (But shoji is not a rough material, so the dust doesn't adhere very strongly, and can be wiped off pretty easily.)
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Of course you can, but that won't do anything. The situation is such that you sweep the floor and in a couple of hours everything is again covered with black dust. Unless you keep the windows (and the balcony doors and the lightwell windows) closed and the air purifier running 24/7, year-round, you wouldn't achieve anything in the way you propose. Besides, keeping the windows and doors closed 24/7 during the summer m…
> That saves a lot on AC costs (and energy waste) - but of course it lets the dust back in. By the way, this is why traditional Japanese homes have shoji screens instead of glass windows. Japan has a lot of dust and pollen. Shoji paper is permeable to air (and so convective heat) and light, but not to dust or pollen. So essentially the entirety of the house has a HEPA-like "firewall" between the inside air and outsid…
I agree that it sounds like an elegant solution, regardless. I'm just concerned it would be difficult to convince 7 million Athenians to adopt it :)
There's also the issue of noise, of course. Especially relevant for people living close to main thoroughfares, which is very common in Athens, a city of many main thoroughfares.
That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies! It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille w…
I was looking at the top image in this article and thinking "that'd be even more amazing if all those cars were kicked off that street and it was more pedestrianized." And in your comment you talk about the noise from the cars too. Cities are not loud, cars are loud. I think many of the areas of issue you discuss with this could be solved, and many of the strengths that the article's author expresses could be maintai…
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> That saves a lot on AC costs (and energy waste) - but of course it lets the dust back in. By the way, this is why traditional Japanese homes have shoji screens instead of glass windows. Japan has a lot of dust and pollen. Shoji paper is permeable to air (and so convective heat) and light, but not to dust or pollen. So essentially the entirety of the house has a HEPA-like "firewall" between the inside air and outsid…
To clarify, do shoji screens allow a current to form? In Athens, homes that have balconies or windows on opposing sides, so that opening them creates a (stronger) draught, are highly valued (also partly because they are brighter because they let more light in). I haven't lived in a house with shoji, but I would think that the paper stops a draught forming? I agree that it sounds like an elegant solution, regardless.…
I believe how this works, is that you wait for wind or sun to be hitting the house on one side, and then open the windows/doors on the opposite side of the house from the wind/sun. Then, either the vacuum created by the turbulence at the far side of the house (in the case of wind)—or the air-pressure difference between the hot and cool sides of the house (in the case of sun)—will create a low-air-pressure area on the outtake side, and so suck air out of the house through the outtake gap. There's then a pressure difference between the inside of the house and the high-air-pressure on the intake side; and since shoji is permeable, the house will suck air in through the shoji to balance the pressure difference.
Probably, in a modern house designed to take advantage of the same principle, you could avoid having to run around opening and closing doors, and instead passively automate this, by putting low-friction one-way valved vents on all exterior walls of the house. Then, no matter which way the air-pressure-gradient formed, the house would release air in some direction and then intake air from every other direction to fill it.
I believe this system falls down when the house is equally-lit (e.g. at noon) and the wind is stagnant (e.g. when you're in a high-pressure system.) But at that point, there's also no wind to blow dust in, so you may as well open all the doors and turn on a fan.
Also, rather than needing a passive environmental pressure difference, you could just run a blower fan that pushes air out of the house, e.g. an oven hood fan or bathroom vent fan. That'd also create an air-pressure difference with the power to suck air in through the shoji.
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Thanks! So for these top-50 schools, it comes out to about 10% extra budget. And there are about 100_000 public schools in the USA.
Yes. It exacerbates the inequality because most of the top-50 richest PTA schools can afford extras that boost student engagement or provide in-class assistance via teaching assistants thus lowering the student:teacher ratio. When a PTA can afford to pay for extras that the school doesn't or can't (e.g. extra art & music teachers, computer labs, playground monitors, etc.), a student's quality of life at such public s…
And this is the top fraction of 1% of public schools. The merely top-20% schools, nice suburbs far away from wall street, they raise a fraction of this. I don't think it can explain very much of what's different there compared to the bottom-20% schools across town.
Athens is an extremely ugly city. It's so ugly that, if you grow up there or live there long enough, the ugliness slowly seeps inside of you and empties your inside, too. Everything looks as if beauty has no role to play in our lives. The ugliness is not confined to the buildings, people dress in ugly clothes and are poorly groomed and rude. Working for a Greek employer is hell. People hate working and all the time t…