Stupid questions

[Lainie]

There's also a lot of extreme weather in the US. IDK whether that's true in Switzerland or not.

[UrbanLegends101]

Originally Posted by Beachlife!

I've lived in my house for 30 years and only had a power outage more than a minute or two twice.

Like real estate, location, location, location.

The last significant power failure we had at the house in Clay County, FL, was about 15 hours or so. A large tree fell on a high voltage line feeding our area and that snapped a power pole. The damage was due to a hurricane.

I am not sure exactly where the lines go underground - one of these days, I need to follow the above-ground cables and see if I can spot where there is the line coming down the pole and into the ground.

Every few houses in our area, there is a slab mounted transformer which steps the voltage down from either 7kV or 14kV to the nominal 120/240V for the residences.

[dfresh]

We live on a rural road, in a rural area, and lose power probably at least annually for a few minutes. Every few years we lose it for a day or two, so we have bottles of water and other supplies for easy food for a week, and a battery for my wife's CPAP. The year we first moved here, we lost power for about a week in the winter. Luckily, we have a wood stove and the old owner left a pretty good pile of wood.

[mbravo]

We lost power for significant amounts of time (I'll arbitrarily quantify as greater than 30 mins) maybe about a dozen times in all the years I lived with my folks. We were without power for about a week due to Sandy, but our neighbors were extremely generous and shared an outlet on their generator that allowed us to run our refrigerator and a lamp.

Here in my apartment, I think something is faultily wired or is obsolete on the transformer near our building; once in July and once sometime last month we'd hear a loud BANG and then lose partial power. We also had the whole power turned off for half a day because they were doing construciton in the neighborhood. Back home we had the gas range & oven and water tank so it wasn't too bad, we could still prepare meals and keep clean. Here it was a lot more miserable. It's amazing how much a difference it is to lose power and not be able to cook or even make tea or take a shower- somehow just those things made the lack of electricity bearable, almost preciously quaint.

[thorny locust]

I don't really keep track, but I'd say power goes out here maybe two or three times a year; sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for several hours. The longest power outage we've had since I lived here was somewhere around ten to fifteen hours, I don't remember exactly.

That long one was because we were on the edge of a massive ice storm that took down lines over much of the Northeast. A little to the northwest of us, some people lost power for a couple of weeks. The lines were down in so many places that repair crews couldn't get to them all at once.

We were lucky in that last one not only in having been on the edge of the storm and not in the middle, but also in that the break in the lines affecting this road wasn't on the road itself, but at a spot on the main road which also serves a lot of other people. There are only four houses on this road, counting the one on the corner. If the lines had been down on the road itself, this would have been one of the last places hooked back up; repair crews in a mess like that, sensibly enough, start by fixing breaks that affect the largest number of people, then move on to breaks affecting fewer.

I have a wood stove, which I can also to a fair extent cook on top of -- there's no oven, and precise temperature control is difficult, because the stove's not designed primarily as a cook stove but as a heating stove, but I can certainly boil and fry things. (My teakettle, and often a pot of stew or soup, live on the thing in the winter, even when the power's on.) I can also heat water for washing on it. It won't heat the whole house if the weather's extremely cold, but it would keep everybody nice and warm who stayed in the room with the stove, and keep the rest of the place above freezing, even in below-zero temperatures. The regular water system works on an electric pump, but I have a hand pump on an old well outside the back door, and I've lived places with no plumbing and know how to manage -- actually much easier here, because the drains work without power, so you don't need to dump wash water outside and can use the indoor toilets. I also have lots of flashlights and battery lamps and batteries. The one thing I don't have a good backup for is refrigeration/freezers in case of a long outage in hot weather. In cold weather, no problem; freezers are in an unheated space, refrigerator would become an icebox, rotate the ice jugs back outside to freeze.

[Seaboe Muffinchucker]

Originally Posted by Die Capacitrix

During a few of the latest power outages in Seattle, one of the complaints was that the power company's website was down (or at least the page which showed the outages).

I'd like to note that there are two power companies in the Seattle area: Puget Sound Energy, which serves customers outside the city proper, and Seattle City Light, which serves customers inside the defined borders of Seattle. PSE is much more likely to have power outages than SCL.


Seaboe

[Die Capacitrix]

Originally Posted by thorny locust

Die Capacitrix, I don't know how Switzerland avoids them. Do you bury all of your lines?

That would be extraordinarily expensive to do in the USA; the population's scattered over a very wide area.

Many lines are buried. There are some quite famous outages (some years ago they had a problem where the entire train network lost power for some hours) and there was an outage near here last week.

But I am convinced that there are many companies and people who are not willing to invest in the infrastructure and would rather put up with the inconvenience of losing power sometimes. Where we live now is more rural than any place we lived in the U.S., but the requirements here for infrastructure is much higher and the investment seems to be more.

Did some searching:

Without greater attention to aging equipment, capacity bottlenecks, and increased demand, as well as increasing storm and climate impacts, Americans will likely experience longer and more frequent power interruptions.

Infrastructure Report Card

This I found from The Conversation, which has several more links within the article.

Several European countries – such as Switzerland, Germany, Norway and Finland – are ahead of the U.S. in the FM Global Resilience Index, a data-driven indicator of a country’s ability to respond to and recover from disruptive events. Though these countries are exposed to natural hazards and cyber risks, their infrastructure’s stability and overall high standards allow them to effectively survive disruptive events.

from The Conversation

[thorny locust]

I do agree that the USA's infrastructure, electric and otherwise, could stand considerable improvement; and that much of the reason we don't get it is that people don't want to pay OMG taxes!!!11!!

(An additional reason is disagreement over what's actually an improvement; nobody wants the bridge to fall down, but often some people want a new bridge in place x and others really don't want the new bridge in place x, they want it in place y, but place y will damage species z and/or business f, and replacing the bridge where it currently is will continue to produce a traffic bottleneck not to mention producing a much worse bottleneck while the work is going on . . . etc. Burying power/communications/fuel lines can cause similar problems. Not all that far from me there's a very large fuss over whether to bury a line beneath a trail in a conservation area, or to dig up city streets to bury it under a longer route in town.)

[Lainie]

Originally Posted by Steve

I've never been to Greece, but a Greek woman I used to know told me that their salads don't mix lettuce and tomatoes. Wikipedia agrees. Not sure about salads in the Middle East.

There are a lot of Greek restaurants in Columbus that are owned by immigrants and their descendants. A typical menu includes a Greek salad fitting the US definition, and another salad that fits the wiki definition and uses one of the names that it mentions (peasant salad, village salad, etc.).

ETA: At home, I make one with cucumbers, red or orange bell peppers, red onion, feta cheese, olives, and pepperoncini/banana peppers, dressed in a homemade balsamic vinaigrette with lemon juice, garlic and basil.

[thorny locust]

Can I steal a modification of that recipe to give out at farmers' market, Lainie?

I'll probably change it around a bit.

[Lainie]

Of course. It's good with chickpeas, too.

[Richard W]

Ganzfeld's question about the .gb top-level domain in Little Things That Annoy You sent me down a rabbit hole and I ended up wondering:

Which top-level internet domain represents the smallest number of people? My first guess is .sh for Saint Helena (population 4,534) but it's possible there's an even smaller one.

And how on earth did Saint Helena end up with its own top-level domain in the first place? England doesn't have one (because it's part of both .uk and .gb, which isn't really used), and that's not because .en has been taken by anything else, either.

(eta) For flip's sake, Saint Helena gets its own domain even though it's also covered under the .ac domain for Ascension Island, Saint Helena and Tristan da Cunha, so it gets one even though the same logic would apply for England, which doesn't get one. .ac would beat it for representing fewer people if it represented Ascension Island (pop. 806) alone, but it represents all three territories apparently. Tristan da Cunha (pop. 293) doesn't get one.

(eta again) Aha, .aq for Antarctica. Wikipedia reckons Antarctica now has a (permanent?) population of 1,106 rather than zero, but I should think that's arguable. And it beats Saint Helena anyway.

For the sake of the question, I was meaning the geographical top-level domains, not the ones for abstract organisations and entities.

[Richard W]

(Just missed the edit window for this eta) Bouvet Island (population 0) has .bv, but it's "not in use" otherwise it would be unbeatable...

[Don Enrico]

Vatican City (TLD .va) has a population of just 1.000 (2017 estimate according to Wikipedia) or even just 800 (according to the states own website).

[GenYus234]

Originally Posted by Richard W

And how on earth did Saint Helena end up with its own top-level domain in the first place? England doesn't have one (because it's part of both .uk and .gb, which isn't really used), and that's not because .en has been taken by anything else, either.

England never gets its own stuff.

[ganzfeld]

It's one of the first things Napoleon had them set up when he arrived.

[erwins]

I had a very recent model Toyota SUV behind me while driving today. It had smallish (DRL?) lights that were a very white color. When I looked directly at them, they were very bright. And when I looked anywhere else, so that they were in my peripheral vision in my mirrors, they appeared to be flashing quickly.

My questions are:

Were these likely some kind of LED conversion kit to replace non-LED bulbs?

Is this one of the reasons that such kits may not be street legal?

If it's not likely a kit, what the heck was going on?

I had to change lanes because it was extremely distracting and had me going back and forth between distracting flashing lights and blindingly bright lights.

[Beachlife!]

I made a pizza tonight. One half is mushrooms and ham, the other ham is ham, salami, bacon and pepperoni.

When I baked in the over, the cheese on the all meat half looks like it had been cooked much longer, the cheese was a rich orange-brown color. The difference was so stark that one could clearly see a line running down the pizza.

What caused this?

[GenYus234]

Mushrooms contain a lot of water. Cooking would cause it to evaporate, keeping that side cooler for longer than the non mushroom side?

[dfresh]

Also the grease from the meats might have cooked the cheese darker.