In my church we still use the Genevan Psalter in our worship. It is not the same as Sacred Harp, but many of the same principles apply, and it makes for excellent communal singing. I could definitely hear the similarities, but it is hard to explain exactly what they are.
The principles used during composing the Genevan Psalter was:
1) It should be easy to sing for untrained singers
2) It should sound sacred
3) It should be of high artistic quality
Also, the article meations the "deepest past." The Genevan Psalter comes from the 1540's, and many Reformed churches still uses it all over the world. That's some serious deep past.
I wonder if the Genevan Psalter influenced Sacred Harp?
EC2 is so much more expensive than a standard VPS from almost any other provider though. If you're not embedded heavily in other AWS products I don't think it's worth bothering with EC2 - LightSail is way more cost effective and gets you most of the features.
And from the Brookings (linked) article: "For the results we describe below, we rely on a two-wave panel survey in which the same respondents were interviewed twice: first pre-COVID in June and July 2018 and then in the midst of the COVID pandemic in July-October 2021."
That really was not a good time period for institutional trust in America.
A kettle uses ~1.5KW, a geyser ~2KW, an oven ~5KW, a stove about ~3KW. These are fairly high estimates I got from some quick googling. If you add these all up, and account for some more appliances (HVAC, fridge/freezer etc.), I think it is safe to estimate that a household less than 20KW at peak, even though it is a fairly high estimate.
So going backwards from there, 1.2MW = 1200KW and 1200KW / 20KW = 60 households at peak usage. Which is a very conservative estimate.
For future reference I will use 1MW = 50 households as a conservative rule of thumb. Maybe 100 households per MW is closer to reality, but that feels fairly lenient to me.
If the average home was using 10kW constant it be using 240 kWh a day, which is enormously high.
In terms of average usage an average sized home in the US is much closer to 50kWh a day, so roughly 2kW average demand. That would mean 1 MW is enough for 500 homes on average. The one thing that doesn’t is peak demand load, say when everyone gets home from work and turns everything on at the same time or a particularly cold or hot day.
Edit: the average US home uses just shy of 1000 kWh a month, or just over 30 kWh a day.
According to to stat.gov.pl [1] the average Polish household uses ~24.6 GJ of energy annually per 1 inhabitant. That's 6800 kWh annually per 1 inhabitant.
According to eia.gov [2][3] the average US household uses annually 56.6 million BTUs of natural gas and 10500 kWh of electricity. 56.6 million BTUs is 16600 kWh. That would bring the total to 27100 kWh.
But wait...the Polish data is per inhabitant. The average number of people per household in the US is 2.6. Dividing 27100 by 2.6 gives 10400 kWh. Alternatively, the average Polish household is 2.47 people, which would give Polish per household usage of 16800 kWh.
The US does appear to use more energy per household (total or per inhabitant) than Poland, but by a factor of about 1.6, not 5.
Finland is probably like 15000 kWh/year/house (for a new house more like 10000 kWh/year). All the heating of the house & water is done by electricity, though.
Ok, but what do you actually use? I have a very small 3-bed house in the UK, and over the last few months we've been averaging 1100-1200kWh of electricity per month(and we heat using gas, although we do have an electric car).
Last month I used 1402 kwh in Washington State, which is high for me.
2600 sq ft home kept at 71f, electric heat pump, & heat pump water heater, but I had a few holes in the walls for several days due to repairs during the coldest month of the winter so far which messed up my average using electric heaters to backfill the gap.
Obviously, the holes were covered over when not being worked on but it wasn't as air tight as compared to buttoned up and fully insulated as usual.
My power consumption is usually 30 to ~75% of that depending on weather and activity.
Also relevant, houses aren't boiling a kettle and running their oven 24x7, so this is more like worst-case peak load and will be spread across different houses. Having some kind of battery storage closer to the houses will help a lot - the tidal generator can run fairly constantly and fill the battery, and the houses can draw in short bursts from the battery.
Yeah. I always feel that the solution for clean and abundant energy globally is to start with better energy grid management (and storage). There's already so many fit-to-all-geography solutions available. It's just that current grid is used to supporting lines centralized around big energy plants and not small producers.
I also always feel that there's a lot more to take down from energy consumption per household by simply making more efficient devices (especially for heating and cooling). It's possible that modern AC/heaters are already close to the peak electrical efficiency, but I guess even better producer standards for things like insulation, thermal conductors or precision sensors could still squeeze something out of the nation-wide usage.
I think 100 households per MW in milder climates is very conservative.
Anectdata: I have a ~150 square meter, 50 year old house heated by electricity and heat pump. I live I Norway, and where I live winter temperatures usually don't get lower than -12C. I have 2 EVs that are driven around 50k km a year combined, charged at home every night, simultaneously.
I peak out below 15kW (1h average). That number is deliberate since I get a higher tariff if I go above 15kW. I have some minor smart house installations that most significantly cuts power to my hot water heater if I get close to 15kW, but even without that I would rarely get above 15kW, and never above 20kW.
Average power this January was 4.75kW, December was 4.96kW, August was 2.25kW.
From top of my head: my grandma used to have one. There was always a little flame running for safety in case of leaks, but when she used hoy water, I think the geyser just heated it on the go, instead of preheating a reservoir.
A device for heating water on-demand, usually a gas burner with a spiraling water pipe surrounding/above it. As opposed to a boiler, which pre-heats water and stores it for later use (and also needs to keep reheating the water as it cools if not used).
I completely agree with you. My wife and I made many lifestyle "sacrifices" in order to have kids. I put "sacrifices" in quotes, because driving in a cheaper car than your professional peers is only a sacrifice if you you are consumerist.
In early 2010s Java was widely used but the language and ecosystem was stagnating. This lead to an explosion of alternative JVM languages: Groovy, Scala, Clojure, etc. But most people didn't want an entirely new language, all they wanted was basically 'Java with lambdas'. One such language was Ceylon, and Jetbrains (after unsuccessfully trying Groovy) decided to create their own Ceylon and called it Kotlin.
I found the following 3 measures quite helpful to make my smartphone less intrusive in my daily life:
1: I don't bring my smartphone into my bedroom. My bedroom is a personal and intimate space, no need for the outside world to barge in via smartphone.
2: I disable or silence every notification I get. The only time my phone draws my attention is if I am getting a phone call, my wife texts me, or if I get a Pagerduty.
3: I uninstalled or disabled all social media apps.
Number 2 had the biggest impact on my family and work life. When I spend time with my kids, my phone only rarely interrupts me.
My phone is like yours, it only rings for a certain few. I do not know what "Pagerduty" is, but I purchased numeric telephone paging service [to a "beeper"] and give this number to the few important people in my life that need to be able to get my attention.
Surprisingly, paging services still exist across metro-US, even in 2024 [I use pagerdirect, no affiliation].
#4: I rarely leave my house with a cell phone, and it is heavenly. Asking anybody to "leave their phone behind" invokes constant anxiety in most travel companions...
Skip pagerduty. When I was oncall I carried a regular pager. Cost about $10 bucks a month, took 1 AA battery per month, very reliable, clipped onto my belt, and it gets service Everywhere. basements, underground garages, top of the towers. And it beeps VERY loudly.
My wife and I take the approach of allowing our kids take risks too. Even though it is not that socially acceptable. If people want to judge me for letting my 4yo boy help with building and lighting a fire, then let them.
There is so many things you can do in the home as a parent to encourage kids to take controllable risks. My oldest was helping his mother with knife-work in the kitchen from as early as 3. I also removed the enclosure net from the trampoline in our backyard. I buy bicycles for my kids as early as possible. I rough-and-tumble with my kids on an almost daily basis.
Of course there are limits. We try to keep it age appropriate, around some dangerous areas (fire, deep water, the road) we always keep them supervised. We teach them about the dangers. We teach them how to manage the risks.
Luckily my brother-in-law also removed the enclosure net on their backyard trampoline after he saw that my kids were OK jumping on an open trampoline. So it seems our attitude is starting to have a positive affect on the families around us.
What is the perceived benefit to removing a trampoline enclosure, though? It doesn't make the kids have more fun, it just makes the activity riskier (and trampolines are pretty much death traps). I say this as someone who had one as a kid (no enclosure) and would probably buy one for my kids (with enclosure).
Huh, interesting that this is the hill I have to die on. If I google "are trampolines death traps" the results seem to be about 50/50 yes/no.
Anyway, here are the benefits:
1) More freedom, as they can get on the trampoline from any side instead of just the entrance. This Makes for more interesting games on/around the trampoline.
2) Easier for a parent to get to them when necessary.
3) I also jump on the trampoline.
4) Without the net, there is more to the trampoline than just a place to jump (ties in with point 1). E.g. We had our family dinner on the trampoline more than once.
5) The increased risk makes it more fun. Kids have and enjoy adrenaline too.
To answer the drawbacks (increased risk):
1) I also got hurt falling from a trampoline once as a teen, that was because I behaved the way a teen boy would.
2) The kids know where the dangerous parts of the trampoline is (i.e. near the sides).
A big pit works fine if you remove the legs from a standard trampoline. The downside is that you do not feel like you are bouncing as high, because you don't get to start with the extra 4 feet in elevation.
Death trap is the rooftop of an 12-story apartment building, yet I had enough sense not to try my luck too much, because I knew firsthand how easy you can perform an uncontrollable falling manoeuvre.
Is there a downside of having an enclosure net around a trampoline?
Asking because I did hurt myself badly once as an adult when using a non-enclosed trampoline with a hard ground next to it.
I don't see what kids could benefit from when not having the enclosure
The thing that immediately pops into mind is that learning to be careful when there's a moderate risk of injury makes people better at finding the limits in dangerous activities that they'll face later in life without going too far.
This is assuming that being careful and finding the limits of a dangerous activity without being injured is a skill that needs practice, but that doesn't seem like too much of a stretch.
You could test this by seeing if kids who had trampoline enclosures were less likely to hurt themselves seriously as an adult.
