All Activity

Do exactly as you say, but instead of sand and cement I use dry lining (dot & dab) adhesive which is far more robust and doesn't fray like S&C does. Use a load of plasterers scrim tape to bridge between masonry and new works, and wherever fixings timber back to masonry, use plenty of solvent free gripfill behind the timbers when fixing them back to the wall, which will go off rock solid.

Really smart. Lots of stone surfaces to absorb heat during the day and radiate it back out in the evening too. Really nicely done.

I would do a timber structure attached to wall and then skin with plasterboard

Excuse the drawing, no architect here ha. Blue lines are block walls of room that are sand/cement/plaster finish. At some point someone made a boxed in area (red colour) for services. The covering of the box is a bit crap, out of alignment with the block wall and damaged. I am going to strip off and put new plasterboard covering on then skim all the walls where the pink lines are. What is the best way to join the plasterboard to the existing sand/cement/plaster finish, where the green arrow points? The existing plaster on the block wall is damaged on that join but the sand/cement underneath is fine. I was thinking chip off a couple of inches of plaster, SBR the sand/cement mix, apply mesh tape over plasterboard edge / sand cement then skim whole wall?

Happy days. Glad you're sorted

Sorry to hear that. Thanks for sharing your experience though.

It can't do its own things, it needs to be off a balanced cold feed to comply with G3. Plumber sounds like a tit tbf, but if you handed him the spec and he did not grace you with his time to read it, then he'd be told to GFH and pay to change the manifolds on his own time and money. If you didn't then you've fallen onto your own sword.

If you think it through the answer must be that it does not. If you watch a toddler you can see the principle at work - they are happy operationalise, they understand it, although they perhaps cannot explain it. It only takes an inspirational teacher in a school to expolain it and suddenly its clear what the method is. Make an Observation: Identify an event or ask a question about the natural world that requires an explanation. (Can I climb this hill thing [stair]?) Form a Hypothesis: Propose a testable, educated guess or plausible answer to your question. (Let's see) Conduct an Experiment: Design a controlled test to see if the hypothesis holds true under specific conditions. (One step , crawl climb of whatever) Analyse the Data: Examine the results gathered from the experiment to determine patterns or trends. (Yep I am at the top / nope I have hit something that stops me - the stair gate!) Draw a Conclusion: Decide whether the evidence supports or rejects the hypothesis. If rejected, the hypothesis is modified and the process restarts. (I can climb / I need to modify my approach and try when the stair gate has been left open.) To operationalise it in any field of advanced research does need a lot more education and experience - that I agree, but not the scientific method itself - that is child's play!

We recently had self compacting concrete insulated raft with UFH fixed to the steel mesh. We were told it is as good as a power floated finish. It is not. Dapple bar ridges prominent, high areas needed grinding back. Not happy - should have ignored the hype and stuck with power floated.

I have lots to learn and need to understand that things are not always perfect and accept improvisation will be required.

This is what my friend, Rebecca, says. & she knows a thing or two: she explained to me how the moon landings never actually happened – the US government paid Stanley Kubrick to film them in a studio. & did you know con trails aren’t just water vapour? They’re biological sprays or something that the government use to control us. Something like that - I don’t really understand. I bet @Spinny could explain it to me.

Must be a couple of months since this conversation happened, may a couple of weeks - Sorry another boring is climate change real or fake thread. Fact, politics moves the truth to fit their own agenda, same as others on social media, most wouldn't know fact from fiction and say black was white if it suits the narrative they want. Another simple fact, glaciers get smaller at an ever increasing rate, so it not getting colder. Another is CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere pretty much starts increasing at the start of the industrial revolution and has kept increasing since then. Prior to this moment in time, CO2 was at a relatively consistent level - so made made or natural, I vote man made. So not sure I buy your view of the world.

Come on England ⚽

Yes of course. However we see characteristics of Cargo Cult science in 'Climate Science' and the narrative that has been built. The reality is that the whole thing is very uncertain. I disagree with things Hossenfelder says. There are multiple elements here: Climate Change - yes it is always changing, and yes on some timescale - most likely tens or hundereds of thousands of years it is a threat to mankind. Emergency - absolutely not Anthropogenic - highly uncertain and I think unlikely - mankind could impoverish itself for absolutely no gain whatsoever. I think many people now doubt and disbelieve the hugely over simplified mickey mouse greenhouse theory and chicken licken the sky is falling in nonsense. Controllable - extremely deluded hubris. people think mankind can control everything and everything is down to mankind. It is poppycock. For all our technological gains, man cannot control the climate any more than they can stop earthquakes or sunspots or remotely understand the spread of viruses. People suggesting we mess with a climate system we don't understand are off their head nuts. Immensely Costly - yes of course, but it is not just people not wanting to give up the good life. Why, for what, just because some people cry wolf. Where are the melted ice caps, where are th higher sea levels - barrier reef is doing fine, polar bears are so numerous they need to be culled. People see the lies now. That is why people like Gates and Blair are backing off. They know people are not going to bow down to climate tyranny based on clear falsehoods. Yes there are big questions over sustainability in general over millenia and the eventual exhaustion of fossil fuels, but equally huge hope from fusion power, huge hope and threats from man made proteins etc. Energy diversity yes good, energy efficiency yes good, insulated homes yes good. But evangelising virtue waving saviours of mankind offering simplistic solutions while enriching and empowering themselves need to be stopped.

I didn't say that it didn't. It's just that science has to recognise when the lense through which it is looking is inadequate - which is part of the philosophy of science. Saying that reductionism always yields the truth ignores the fact that a single component can be quite different when it is viewed in isolation as a constituent part compared to when it is in dynamic relation to many other, different, dynamic constituent parts. Therefore, what you claim to be truth or even real, from one perspective isn't from the other.

I am going to have to get back later as we are opening early, and finishing late today. Something to do with a game. But just to say that reductionism works very well. When the unexpected happens, it is generally found what caused it by reducing the components even more.

🤦‍♀️

... the manifolds were first fitted on the wrong (as per the MandE drawings) wall and I got them moved. But they are still in the wrong place so the cold to the kitchen is now going to be doing its own thing 🤦‍♀️ There's no way the plumber is ever going to read the M and E specs 🤷‍♂️ (Although in fairness a bunch of stuff changed since the original M and E spec hence I'm to blame for not being too strict after the documents were issued)

If you have the top hats then use them they work. the problem is these things get designed on a computer by a bloke who wouldn’t know what end of a trowel to hold. on site you very rarely get perfect conditions as you have found out with the pipe collar being exactly where you need to seal it. so you will probably find you chuck a couple of top hats away and just use more tape. Hardly heath robinson this one, it’s just done, finished move on get the concrete on top and it will become a distant memory.

But the existence of Cargo Cult Science doesn't prove anything about environmental change, nor whether the science is right, or going in the right or wrong direction. Here's another physicist's perspective, which doesn't question the underlying science (but she does regularly question a lot about the current world of physics and science):

I'd say that comment is quite wrong about science, research and academia today. It is a highly competitive environment with much pressure to publish and be cited. Asia churns out PhDs by the million, and even in the UK 1st class degrees are handed out like confetti. And much pressure to obtain research funding. Funding which typically comes from funding bodies, or from industry. As far as publication is concerned there are a plethora of journals and the key to publication (as to winning funding) is often to produce work supporting the fashionable narratives of the time. There are masses of papers published that are complete garbage and have been generated using AI engines and the like. Many examples of the corruption of the peer review process, and the active censoring of 'inconvenient' papers by editors. If you read this you will understand what Cargo Cult Science actually refers to https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/56/662/CargoCultScience.html It's practice certainly isn't limited to the social sciences. So called 'Climate science' is rife with examples. Many 'climate scientists' attracted to the field because of it's copious funding and the attraction of saving the world from the 'obvious evils of other men' practice Cargo Cult Science. They build and run climate models into which they programme quantified relationships between one factor and another, and various parameters. They then adjust their parameters until they get an output that matches their historical data series. Then they run the model on and proclaim they have done science and if we stop cows farting and shut down the oil industry the world will be saved. It is I am afraid as horseshit as Neil Ferguson's epidemiological models. Real science involves experiments. In experiments you isolate variables and remove confounders and very carefully test hypotheses, you make specific predictions and test them. It is pretty difficult to do that with climate, and largely people don't even try, yet they proclaim they know the impact of man made CO2 is the sole culprit in climate change. It is a good fear story - it appeals greatly to those of certain politics - and like the mass psychosis we saw during covid - works pretty well when repeated ad nausium through mass media. Anthropogenic climate change is just a theory, uncertain, doubtful - scientifically unproven.

Hi Iam looking for reccomendations for stair design apps, it is for a sawcut L shaped winder stairs, nothing fancy just functional. Thanks carl

No, it isn't. It's based in complexity, which physics seriously struggles with and the reductionist approach it has long held so dear really doesn't cope. This typical reductionism is exactly mirrored by your claim that it's based on basic physics and fundamental components - but the behaviours of the systems are based on their complex and dynamic relations. But, you've also kind of proved my point - you're making a statement that one small fraction of science is true science which indicates to me a misunderstanding of the scientific method and the philosophy of science itself. Science is actually about continually questioning whether what we think as true is really true and so moving forwards and that by definition this also involves questioning the basis upon which we think we know something. That is the scientific method.

Quite hard to answer that. I suppose critical thinking, and lots of reading about the subject, and the topic authors/institutions is all I can easily suggest at this stage. Yes and no. At the level of climate change, which is based on basic physics i.e. laws of thermodynamics, chemistry, atomic states, there is no need to get too deep into the philosophy. If you can imagine, experiment, observe/measure and test, most of the mystique is removed. No need to confuse it with Latin.

I think you're flying a bit close to the wind here. You said you studied the philosophy of science? This includes epistemology and ontology - there is not just one narrow fixed definition of these, which is what you seem to be suggesting. But also the philosophy of science is about exploring the relationship between science and what we consider to be truth, and certainly not anything like that certain sciences are real - which implies they have exclusivity over what is true, which of course they don't, it would be pretty naive and ignorant to suggest they did. 😉 I'd also suggest that being fixed about what is real, is pretty non-scientific to begin with and ignores the very important metaphysical component inherent the philosophy of science. 😉