SteamyTea

Japan is on a par with us according to this https://www.japanlivingguide.com/expatinfo/money/utility-prices/ Electric is between 14 and 20p/kWh. Gas between 5p and 7p a kWh. And they have no natural resources, which is why they broke the 1973 energy crisis embargo. As you are a similar age to me, you must remember that we had higher income tax rates until the early 1980s. If you are now claiming a pension, you would have had an income tax band contribution towards it, but now you will only pay a lower rate, by at least 10% on that income. While we did have tax relief on our mortgages, we did pay higher interest. Council tax was considered high, so the poll tax was introduced (did not end well). It is really hard to compare between countries and between histories without taking everything into account. So even taking purchasing price parity into account i.e. how many hours do you need to work to by a similar product is not a good comparison i.e say it takes ten hours work to pay your monthly electric bill, but only 3 hours work to pay your gas bill, another country (or time in history) may have that as 9 hours and 5 hours, or 12 hours and 2 hours. You need to find some figures that show the who thing, not cherry pick to suit an argument. Exceptions are not the rule.

Why sleep quality is so important – and so difficult to measure Sleeping a solid 8 hours isn't the whole story and the quality of your sleep might matter more. But what does sleep quality mean and how can we measure it? By Sophie Bushwick 20 January 2025 Steven Puetzer/Getty Images How did you sleep last night? Your response might depend on how long you were in bed, how much of that time you spent tossing and turning or whether you feel rested. But it might also depend on whether you exercised today, what your wearable device says, or when you are being asked. This article is part of special series investigating key questions about sleep. Read more here. “Everyone has their own definition of sleep quality – and that is the problem,” says sleep researcher Nicole Tang at the University of Warwick, UK. Though sleep quality and what defines it is a puzzle scientists are still figuring out, we do know that a good night’s rest involves a series of sleep cycles, the distinct succession of phases of brain activity we experience during sleep (see diagram below). And for most of us, each stage of those cycles is necessary to wake up feeling refreshed. The average person experiences four to five complete cycles during a night and disrupting these can come with health consequences, both in the short and long term. “Poor sleep quality is associated with many adverse physical health outcomes,” says Jean-Philippe Chaput at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Similar to what you can expect from not sleeping enough (see “Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need”), these include a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and weight gain. Although there is no definitive consensus on what defines sleep quality, researchers and doctors frequently analyse sleep with an electroencephalogram (EEG), which tracks brain activity during sleep cycles, or using actigraphy, where body movement is monitored throughout the night as a measure of wakefulness. Such measurements show that the factors with the greatest impact on what scientists would broadly call sleep quality include how long it takes to doze off, how often you wake up and sleep efficiency – the percentage of time in bed that is actually spent in slumber. “Usually, the case is that not just one parameter predicts sleep quality – it’s a bunch of different parameters added up together,” says Tang. Read more Snoring isn't just a nuisance, it's dangerous. Why can't we treat it? But how those parameters stack up doesn’t always tally with subjective experience. For example, a 2023 study of 100 people grouped them by sleep quality using EEG measurements, finding that poor sleepers spent less time in the deeper phase of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep compared with better sleepers. However, self-reported measures of sleep quality didn’t match the EEG-based ones. A 2024 analysis of EEG data from more than 250 people over seven nights found that subjective sleep ratings were only moderately related to objective metrics, with sleep efficiency the most important variable in determining whether participants reported better-quality sleep. What that means is that your EEG or actigraphy measurement can reflect what looks like a stellar night’s rest, and yet you would still rate your sleep quality as poor, and vice versa. Exactly why that can be the case isn’t entirely clear, but other research backs up the idea that what happens in bed isn’t the only way we determine the quality of the sleep we have had. In a 2022 study, Tang and her colleagues found that participants’ perception of how they slept was influenced by factors experienced the following day, such as their current mood or their level of physical activity. “What you do during the day could affect your evaluation of the sleep the night before,” says Tang. This frustrating situation led a panel of sleep experts who reviewed the evidence for physiological markers of the “elusive, amorphous, and multi-dimensional construct of sleep quality” to conclude that “ultimately, the determination of ‘quality sleep’ remains largely subjective and inconsistently quantifiable by current measures”. That sleep quality is so difficult to assess objectively should give us pause when considering data from wearables that provide a sleep quality score. Many of these are based on measurements, such as heart rate or movement that can accurately determine whether you are asleep, but the makers of these gadgets typically don’t explain how these factors are weighted to determine the final output. Some experts caution against giving too much importance to these scores, as they can be unreliable and increase anxiety around sleep. How to get a better night's sleep by hacking your brainwaves Wearable technology that stimulates the brain to make you sleep more deeply promises to revolutionise your slumber – can it really lead to a better night’s rest? Even if we can’t always accurately assess our sleep quality, there are things we can do to attempt to get a better night’s sleep – for example, not drinking. Alcohol may help you nod off and increase the amount of deep NREM sleep in the first half of the night, but it triggers wakefulness in the second half and impairs rapid eye movement sleep. Maintaining a regular sleep schedule and good sleep hygiene habits will also help. Of course, some sleep fragmentation is unavoidable – tending to a crying baby, nighttime visits to the toilet – and circumstances change over your lifetime. So avoid fretting about one night’s interrupted sleep: precisely because sleep quality is so subjective, if you start feeling anxious about it, you may wake up thinking your night went even worse than it did. This article is part of a special series investigating key questions about sleep. Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need The surprising relationship between your microbiome and sleeping well How best to catch up on rest and pay off your sleep debt How to shift your circadian clock to beat your jet lag What nine sleep researchers do to get their best night’s rest Topics: mental health/ sleep/ health/ sleep loss

The darkest hour is right before the dawn. I got up the crack of dawn once, after going up a lane.

What sleep scientists recommend doing to fall asleep more easily Helping yourself get to sleep isn’t just about avoiding screens before bedtime. From cognitive shuffling to sleep-restriction therapy, columnist Helen Thomson finds out what actually works By Helen Thomson 26 June 2025 A restless mind is one of the most common barriers to sleep Andrii Lysenko/Getty Images Perhaps it’s age or the hot weather, but sleep is becoming a rare commodity in my household. Between my husband’s insomnia, my children’s high spirits and my racing mind, it feels as if our nights are often as lively as our days. As my social media feed started serving up videos of people recommending a technique called “cognitive shuffling” for drifting off to sleep, I wondered if it really worked and, if not, whether there were any other cognitive tricks I could use instead. One of the most common barriers to good sleep is a restless mind, and this is what cognitive shuffling tries to help with. Luc Beaudoin at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, developed the technique as a way of steering your attention away from spiralling thoughts and worries before bed. How to do cognitive shuffling The idea is simple: choose a random word, let’s say “plonk”, then try to think of all the words you can conjure using each of its letters. Plimsol, puma, prize… lion, lemon, levitate… and so on. As each word comes to mind, spend time picturing it – a process that mimics the spontaneous images characteristic of the “hypnogogic state”, that transient period between wakefulness and sleep. Good sleepers often report imagery in the form of hallucinations before sleep, whereas bad sleepers report planning and problem solving, says Sophie Bostock, a doctor and sleep consultant. “It’s not that we need to make the mind blank (and in fact, that can be counter-productive), but we do want to steer it away from anything too logical,” she says. Cognitive shuffling seems to promote this more fluid way of thinking. In a small study of 154 students who reported problems with “pre-sleep arousal”, it did indeed help them reduce the time it took to get to sleep. Your science-backed guide to the easy habits that will help you sleep well, stress less, eat smarter and age better. That said, there is no gold-standard research on cognitive shuffling – or, for that matter, any direct comparisons of bedtime cognitive techniques discussed in the scientific literature, something Beaudoin himself acknowledged to me. So instead, I turned to some of the world’s best sleep scientists to ask what they would recommend to someone hoping to quieten their mind at night. What works for insomnia Kevin Morgan, who established the Clinical Sleep Research Unit at Loughborough University, UK, pointed me straight in the direction of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBTI). “CBTI is the internationally recommended, evidence-based first line treatment for insomnia disorder,” he says. This therapy works by teaching you how to control intrusive thoughts, which would otherwise elevate cognitive arousal (mental alertness) and increase levels of hormones like adrenaline, interfering with the normal process of sleep. CBTI also tackles other aspects of insomnia from a variety of angles, such as helping people conquer their nerves around their lack of sleep or teaching them meditation techniques. While effective, CBTI takes around six to eight weeks to learn, so it has a high dropout rate. Nevertheless, elements of CBTI may be useful on their own. For instance, a 2021 randomised controlled trial showed that a popular meditation app can improve depression and anxiety in people with sleep disturbance, with the effects driven by improvements in pre-sleep arousal. Morgan says the component of CBTI that appears to have the largest effect is sleep-restriction therapy. This counterintuitive-sounding technique, which involves trying to get the number of hours spent in bed as close to the number of hours spent asleep as possible, “has proved very effective”, he says. This was similar to the advice I received from Colin Espie, professor of sleep medicine at the University of Oxford. The thing to remember, he tells me, is that you can’t get to sleep. “No one can or ever has,” he says. “You can only fall asleep. It’s an involuntary behaviour that happens to us, and for us, but not by us. So go to bed when you feel ‘sleepy tired’ and not before. Let sleep come to you.” Create a sleep sanctuary Another easy tip to enact is something several people advised: make sure your room is a sleep sanctuary. “A sleep-friendly space is critical,” says Joseph Dzierzewski, senior vice president of research and scientific affairs at the US National Sleep Foundation. Others concurred. “The single most important recommendation is to develop a bedroom that is conducive to sleep – cool, dark, quiet and uncluttered,” says Emerson Wickwire, head of sleep medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Of course, several people pointed out that you should avoid screens before bed – the blue light from them can suppress melatonin production and mess with our circadian rhythms, making it harder to sleep and giving your mind more time to start thinking. But Dzierzewski points out that consuming stimulating content, like the news or social media, before bedtime is also emotionally arousing, which could stimulate an anxious mind. “Unfortunately, more than half of Americans say they look at screens within an hour of bedtime or in bed before sleep,” he says. Something I might try with my kids is the practice of gratitude, recommended by Bostock, who points to research showing its effectiveness for helping improve pre-sleep worries. “It’s very difficult to feel grateful and stressed at the same time,” she says. Perhaps the best advice I received wasn’t a tip or trick to silence our collective thoughts at night, but a simple reminder to take the problem seriously. Many experts, including Aparajitha Verma, a neurologist specialising in sleep medicine at UTHealth Houston in Texas, emphasised the importance of prioritising sleep. Morgan also made it clear that anyone with insomnia “should seek professional help and engage with a recommended programme of treatment ASAP”. Chronic poor sleep is linked with increased risk of dementia, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even some cancers. That itself is enough to keep you awake at night. As is the thought of “uncluttering” my kids’ room. But it’s something I’ll be putting to the top of my to-do list as a matter of urgency – hopefully it’s a good first step towards a quiet night’s rest for all of us.

At 1:05 AM you are fast asleep after your normal BEDTIME ROUTINE FFS

Now, there is an old saying about the constipated mathematician's cure, he worked it out with pencil and paper.

A few years back I got monitored for sleep apnea. I frequently stop breathing during the night for up to 2 and a half minutes, then wake up briefly, gasping for breath. As I have had it most of my life, it was just normal (like the undiagnosed stomach ulcer I had for 40 years). This made me tired during the day, sometimes, in recent years. I tried the CPAP gimp mask, never slept a wink, so abandoned that, rapidly. Got myself a cheap sleep monitor, and tried a few things out i.e. supper times, bed times, exercise, reading, radio etc. Found that consistent bed times the most effective and sleep pretty well most nights. Now I am naturally an early riser, always have been, so for me, getting up at 3 or 4 AM is not an issue. I 'plod' in the morning, nothing strenuous before I start work. Very occasionally I have reoccurring nightmares. The usual one is a customer never getting served, this seems a common one in hospitality. The other main one is being a passenger on a bus that is sliding backwards, down a leafy lane (the lane is near Henley, went there recently and it has not changed in 50 years). The odd thing about the bus sliding to our demise is that I calmly open a tin of biscuits and hand them out to the other, faceless, passengers, as a final meal. Not going to say about the turkey dream, that is just (expletive deleted)ing weird. So basically, get a cheap step monitor that calculated sleep hours as well, see how far from normal you are, that takes a lot of anxiety out of it as there are hard numbers, not just feelings about it. An afternoon nap can help as well, culturally that was the norm for me growing up, but the (expletive deleted)ing British think it is idle, I miss them, but do them when off work (Archers and Afternoon Play time). I am also lucky that at my age, I don't have to get up to wee (can just do it in bed as I live alone). That must be a bummer, maybe something to look forward to in retirement. YouTube has The Sleepy Scientist channel. I like listening to that. The time between 2AM and 4AM is called the Witching Hour. It is normal for us to be awake, and active, then. Get up if needs be, have a look outside the cave, throw a log in the fire, and ponder life, it is what the Witching Hour is for.

I think one of the problems that many forget is that it is almost impossible to get more than 30% (on average) of the energy out of a combustion process. Domestic gas boilers are at the high end, vehicles are the low end.

As in a back up system, rather than an extra, unneeded system?

I wee into the box of wires.

Almost the same as production engineering. Then we sum it all up. Think those drug cheating cyclists did the same, they called it marginal gains.

Yes, and I call around every other evening to do the same. Thankfully @Pocster is paying for it though his livestream video channel.

May have to get back to you on this when I get home. But yes, the environment (as Einstein said 'it is everything but me') does have an effect, but one can change how one looks and deals with it. Today's Saturday Live had a bit about the power of doing nothing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qrb4

Does it do internal and external temperatures?

Yes. Biomass production, which is really just solar energy collection (as is wind power) has a very low efficiency, somewhere around 0.25%. PV is reliably over 10% for the finished product, electricity. To turn biomass into electricity, the efficiency would be even lower, around 0.12% overall. A slightly off tangent, but related example, came up at work the other day. We have a chef that always wants more, and better, equipment in the kitchen. The financial director (a very smart woman) suggested, because of the new rules about environment and safety, that an induction hob would be best. This was music to my ears. The chef, said they are 'not powerful enough'. So, just to show him that I am bright, and he is thick, I asked him how powerful the current gas hob was. He, predictable, had no idea. So I told him (7 kW per burner). I then asked him how much of that energy actually went into heating the food. Again, no idea, so I explained that to him (roughly 30% when up full on a small pan). I then asked him what experience, in a commercial environment, he had with induction hobs, none was answer. He had used a small, 2 kW, portable one once, at a friend's house, and could not 'control' it and it took ages to heat up some water. Asked if he had read the manual. I don't think he can read to be honest. So how is that related to the above. Simple, the end users often have no idea, and even less interest in, how things really work, but spout old memes as if they are gospel, and sadly, usually get away with it as they are preaching to the converted. Those of us that think that rapidly moving away from fossil fuels is a good idea have to keep banging on about it, those that don't, judging by the obfuscating, really know they are wrong.

Like the French Revolution, it is still too early to say what is happening. As I know you keep good data records, what data are you actually collecting?

Is it the term 'net zero' that some people have a problem with? Do people understand what the 'net' actually means in this context? Have people also forgotten what the end products are that the consumers use?

When I visited, I thought of asking to see it. But decided you and your family were too nice and kind to hear me laughing. Would have been rude.

The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common ancestry, history, and culture.[8] The English identity began with the Anglo-Saxons, when they were known as the Angelcynn, meaning "Angle kin" or "English people".[9] Their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain around the 5th century AD Or German. What the (expletive deleted), has reducing CO2 emissions become an ancestor issue.

Greatest Of All Time em "There are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it." Good job the M6 bypasses it now.

@SimonD Well done, and not just on the MCS stuff. I come from an engineering background, but moved over to education 3 decades ago. Public funded education services have totally lost their appeal to me so ended up in hospitality. May seem a strange 'career' but they all have a lot of similarities. The main ones is dealing with people, attention to detail and cost. I find dealing with people terrifying, but put some self created strategies in place, these help me cope. Building anything, be it a skyscraper or lasagna, is about detail at all stages, usually it is the early stages that make the difference. Cost, as opposed to price, is really about value, while those words are often used interchangeably, they need to be used correctly, with the interactions between them understood. Now none of that is of any help when you are down in the dumps, with the holes filling up with shit, so be careful about digging another hole, it may cause a bigger problem later on. Essence of most building is to keep it simple, that does not mean a basic, just that the processes has to be broken down into achievable tasks. If the task requires an extra pair of hand, ask for that help. Also, when undertaking just about any task, make sure you have room to work. This is usually an area of easily clearable space that you put your tools on, or your tea: your mind needs a similar space. If you feel there is no space left, stop. Making a bit more room is not waste, it is part of the efficiency process. The weather. You can't control that, but you can manage the effects. I do not claim to have any SAD (I actually think, with no knowledge, that it is a combination of things), but I know I hate the cold and getting wet (I grew up in the tropics). it is the rain that causes the biggest problems in my opinion. Hammering in a nail becomes hard work when you are dressed up like fisherman, with hammer that is slippy wet and a nail that has fallen into the mud. Sometimes it is just best to stop. So what are the solutions. For me it is to go out to a cafe and read (usually on the phone these days). It is amazing, if you do it on a regular basis, the people you meet. I now know an electrician, a retired book shop owner, a dog trainer (security not pets), a recent graduate mechanical engineer, a highly intelligent young mother, and a couple that look after their grand children. We are all in the cafe for the same reasons, it gives us a space that has noting to do with our everyday work. There are twats there as well, but we all just tut tut about them. So in conclusion, make things simpler, ask for help, occasionally accept you have to stop for a while and accept that you need a bit of clear space (physical or emotional). Oh, and drink tea.

Not quite. You have to take the thermal conductivity into account as well. And the thermally exposed areas where potential differences are. A tonne of concrete will store the same amount of energy as an identical tonne of concrete, but if one is a sphere and another spread over 50m2, they perform very differently.

@Omnibuswoman Anytime.

Yes, and it is why there are, sometimes, no solutions. Though you can put a time element into the mix, which you, in effect, be enthalpy. But as you are working within limits, and tight limits as well, it is probably close enough.