Our heat pump didn’t really kick in the resistive auxiliary heat until temps were well below 0°F, but humidity also plays into that. It wasn’t ever running the resistive heat exclusively.

If sized correctly, heat pumps also don’t really like setbacks in the winter. Just set the thermostat to whatever and leave it – don’t have it cool down at night and warm back up in the morning.

*since 2020.

If my cowboy math is correct (assuming two parents and two children), that comes out to about 292 people per year or 876 since 2020.

With a population the size of the United States (330 million), that means that, for a given year, 0.00009% (rounded up) of that population dies as a result of a family annihilation. For comparison, around 40,000 people (including around 1,000 children) die in vehicle accidents annually in the US.

Not that family annihilations aren’t horrible. They are. But, from a purely statistical perspective, there are much more frequent horrible things that we don’t talk about as much, for a variety of reasons.

[gestures vaguely]

Speak for yourself.

I mean, we’ve already surpassed The Expanse in some ways (at least the first couple books).

Something that struck me was in Caliban’s War they were relying heavily on mirrors to focus sunlight for growing crops out at Jupiter. I guess the authors just didn’t foresee LED technology advancing as rapidly as it did.

Leviathan Wakes was published in June 2011. Caliban’s War was published in June 2012.

The L-prize “60W” category winner was announced in August 2011 (it was Philips). It didn’t become commercially-available until April 2012, but even then, it was like $50 – far from affordable for most people. Now you can get equivalent or better bulbs for less than 1/10th of that.

Yes.

Talks about Perseverance.

Image is of Spirit or Opportunity.