Cooling with clay: Terracotta evaporative systems benefit both ancient and modern civilizations
June 21 marked the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and meteorologists are forecasting that temperatures will only climb up from here. People globally will need ways to stay cool in the coming months, and in certain cases, terracotta structures may be an affordable, eco-friendly solution to this need.
Terracotta, Italian for “baked earth,” is a type of earthenware pottery that fires to a distinct reddish-brown color. It has been around for thousands of years, serving in various applications spanning architecture, art, and functional household items.
Like other earthenware, terracotta is highly porous due to being fired at lower temperatures. This property allows it to be used as a conduit for evaporative cooling.
This is just under the current annual emissions of the US, the world’s second largest polluter after China.
“Protecting what’s still in the ground and rebuilding the soil carbon in our agricultural systems is pretty much a no-brainer, because of all the multiple benefits that we get. In a lot of our farming systems, soil carbon levels are at a state where, if you improve them, you get benefits in terms of water regulation, water quality, stabilising production and resilience in the systems.”
This is why we need to push for municipal composting as hard as our parents did for municipal recycling (in addition to implementing the things talked about in the article)
But while you’re campaigning, you can also get started yourself. Composting is dead simple, since it really is just letting stuff rot until it turns into dirt. Guides online tend to get really complex talking about ratios, what not to put in, turning it regularly, keeping it moist, etc - and that stuff will make it happen faster, but rotting is rotting. It’s gonna rot. All you really need is a corner of your yard to throw organic waste onto. No meat or dairy because it stinks like high hell, nothing cooked or salted, but egg shells work, as do most any plant products (including paper/cardboard). Put your waste in one pile until it’s decently large, then start putting it in another pile nearby while you wait for the first one to decompose and turn into rich black (carbon-filled!) soil
Or if you don’t have space or a garden to put the soil in, you can use services like ShareWaste and MakeSoil to connect with others in your area who are already composting. But all this is assuming you don’t already have a municipal program - there may be one that you’ve never heard about! Either way, restoring soil is free and easy and something we can all help with! Get composting!
Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.
(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)
Are you safe?
Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.
I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.
I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.
A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.
The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.
I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.
…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.
Remaining time: 2 days 8 hours
(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
All of this. Disaster befalls any company that holds no regard for the expertise of the lowest level staff.
In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.
“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”
“Is that important?” They asked.
“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.
“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.
“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.
“How often does that even happen?” They asked.
“Every day.” I explain.
“Bullshit.” They said.
“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.
“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.
“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.
“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.
“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”
They stared at me.
“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.
They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.
Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.
There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.
They wound up putting all the supplies in the cabinets under the sinks in the public bathrooms. And, surprising to no one, all of it got stolen after our first week in the new building. All our spare keyboards and monitors and phones and even our paper towels just walked out of the building. Because the CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it.
When they built a brand new, half a billion dollar hospital when I was a resident, they didn't move over the labor and delivery department or the cath lab. Two places where being able to get someone from the ED, which WAS in the new building, to the destination within seconds matters, like...a lot.
The walk to the cath lab was, no joke, nearly half a mile from the new building through transport hallways. It was the same for labor and delivery. You could cut that distance to about a quarter of a mile if you cut through multiple hallways not meant for patient transport and the main lobbies of the old hospital and new hospital but you can't transport patients through those places due to there being no critical elevators.
The ICU was put between the two hospitals along the emergency transport hallway. That hallway was only wide enough to allow for one stretcher. So any time someone needed to be emergently transported, if other patients were being transported in that hallway, the person having the emergency wouldn't be able to get through an already extremely long and convoluted hallway while having a heart attack, and of course, there were no alcoves to use to get out of the way (or that held code carts). So the hospital decided that they would announce whenever the hallway was needed for emergency transport over the sound system so people could get out of the way.
This was brought up multiple times. So was the fact that they covered the entire hospital in carpet (disgusting). So was the fact that the elevator leading to the helipad in the ED didn't have a badge or security access point on it. It was right next to the long stay patients in the ED, many of whom had dementia.
You can see why that was a problem. Dementia patients LOVE to wander. And when you are putting them in a part of the ED that no one can see because the people who designed the ED didn't think these patients would need a nurse's station nearby...
Yeah, they finally put a badge scanner on the helipad elevator after a dementia patient wandered onto the helipad. Twice.
The staff who were consulted about these issues were completely ignored. The staff at the ED that this was designed off of in another city ALSO complained about the problems once it was built and those were completely ignored despite having proof that the layout was completely unsafe and impractical in actual practice, the CEOs still decided to use that design for their brand new hospital.
When my parents came to visit me once, I knew that if one of them started having a medical emergency, over my dead body would I have allowed them to go to the hospital I fucking worked at.
Okay I JUST realized I never posted these on here—- BUT BASICALLY, about a year and a half ago I started doing these experimental black hairstyle posts that were threads long on Twitter, to give artists a source of inspo for their black ocs whose hair they wanted to try something new with! There’s more to black hair than just the selected styles portrayed in media, and I thought it would be fun to show people how much texture, shape, fades, length, and style can be combined when drawing black hair—-cause it’s a kind of manipulation our hair can do irl! The OG thread from when I made these a year ago were lost with the hacking of my original Twitter account (@/bagels_donuts) but I’ve since reuploaded the whole thread to my new Twitter (@/ItsDonutsFR)! I hope artists on tumblr find these useful, sorry it took me so long to post them here😭🙏🏾 I’ll upload them all in parts!
Part 1: Long masc hairstyles + playing with fades
💬 2 🔁 715 ❤️ 1008 · Part 2: shape, style, and length with femme styles!
Okay I JUST realized I never posted these on here—- BUT BASICALLY, about a year and a half ago I started doing these experimental black hairstyle posts that were threads long on Twitter, to give artists a source of inspo for their black ocs whose hair they wanted to try something new with! There’s more to black hair than just the selected styles portrayed in media, and I thought it would be fun to show people how much texture, shape, fades, length, and style can be combined when drawing black hair—-cause it’s a kind of manipulation our hair can do irl! The OG thread from when I made these a year ago were lost with the hacking of my original Twitter account (@/bagels_donuts) but I’ve since reuploaded the whole thread to my new Twitter (@/ItsDonutsFR)! I hope artists on tumblr find these useful, sorry it took me so long to post them here😭🙏🏾 I’ll upload them all in parts!
Part 1: Long masc hairstyles + playing with fades
💬 2 🔁 715 ❤️ 1008 · Part 2: shape, style, and length with femme styles!
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. It’s often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you don’t know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film – when you hear a word you don’t know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things you’ve already learned. That’s why it’s best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go “Hey! I recognize that!” This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think it’s not that important… because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you can’t 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of what’s going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but you’re not actively studying when you’re doing passive exposure. Remember the two things you’re trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff you’ve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You can’t learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesn’t need to be the “Active Learning” kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the “Passive Exposure” kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you don’t enjoy, because you won’t benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you don’t understand at the beginning. But A) that’s good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but I’m not sure if it’s still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess what’s going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (I’ve written a whole post about the latter here.) You don’t need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a “YMMV” piece of advice, but: if you’re having trouble memorizing stuff, just don’t. Don’t bother trying to remember anything. Remember that “passive exposure” bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again – but you’d be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so there’s nothing wrong with it. But I notice that it’s often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone who’s a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Don’t underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether it’s narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess that’s not technically “talking to yourself”), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, it’s actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And that’s about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
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