Interesting Links for 29-07-2017

[andrewducker]

Kalashnikov develops autonomous weapons

(tags: robots military weapons )

Interesting piece on suicide

I've never craved suicide. And only once thought that not existing might be nice (and even then only in passing, and purely theoretically).
(tags: suicide viaSwampers )

High refined sugar intake linked to a 23% higher risk of mental disorders

(tags: mentalhealth sugar )

Rules for data science, explained using xkcd

(tags: data research xkcd comics )

Lessons from Denmark: how district heating could improve energy security

(tags: heat power uk denmark )

CEO says iRobot will never sell your Roomba data

(tags: robots cleanliness privacy )

Comments

[cmcmck]

I would disagree with the assumption that other animals have no concept of death- it's clear that some creatures- elephants and great apes spring readily to mind- do.

Suicide? Yes, I considered it when help looked like it wasn't going to come, but then it did. There are times you just want the hurt to stop and it's times like that when just ceasing can look like a good idea.

[danieldwilliam]

Retrofitting district heating is difficult in the UK.

You have to dig up the road to lay an extra set of hot water pipes which costs as much as any other pipe or cable laying exercise.

You have a coordination problem with existing boilers. Most people have gas central heating. If the average life of a boiler is say 10 -20 years then you only have 5%-10% of the population who are changing heating system each year. You don't need everyone in the street to change to district heating at the same time but it would be helpful if you were able to get more connected.

Our houses, particularly older tenement blocks, are also a bit harder to fit new pipes in to.

Then you have a bit of chicken and egg position with suppliers of heat, you need a decent sized network before you can take heat from intermittent suppliers.

Dad and I spend a lot of time thinking about this and about the furthest we've got is "Tricky." and "Expensive." For retrofitting you need a system where the operating costs are sufficiently reduced to offset the inefficiencies of the capital expenditure of retrofitting. They are competing against an existing network of gas.

I'm all for district heating and I think it should be mandated for new builds with a provision that individual district heating schemes must be designed to be linkable to other district heating schemes if any are built nearby but tricky to do in the UK.