• 8 Posts
  • 297 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • That sounds like a nightmare. I live in Australia and used to work in a 2nd floor office with very weak vented AC. In summer afternoons the sun would beat down on the one exterior wall, and it would heat up like a radiator. On hot days the wall and window glass became too hot to touch from the inside. You could feel the radiated heat when you walked in the room, like walking past a pizza oven.

    Modem building codes require some sort of weird looking air-gapped cladding on the sunward side of buildings, steel, aluminium or concrete panels suspended 100mm away from the wall on pegs, and gridded awnings over windows so that the sunlight isn’t beating directly against the wall, otherwise the buildings are basically unsurvivable.

    Technology Connections did a video on awnings and how much they were useful before AC, and how they’ve fallen out of fashion despite being needed more than ever















  • The strait of Malacca isn’t an exclusive choke point like the strait of Hormuz or the Dardanelles. Ships can take other routes avoiding belligerent countries in the area. Even the Suez/bab al-mandab isn’t an exclusive choke point, because you can still just go all the way around Africa, it’s just a pain in the ass.

    The Straits of Denmark, Hormuz, and Dardanelles are uniquely strategic choke points because the are the only seaward access points to their respective seas, Baltic, Persian and Black, which are controllable by one country and which other countries rely on.