I don't understand why gas stations don't have them, if they have a little parking.

What better use of your time while you wait 20 minutes to charge, than wander in, get a bottle of something, maybe a snack, keep warm in winter, etc.

IIRC most gas stations make their profit from the convenience store, not from selling gas.

High blood pressure leads your heart to work hard constantly, with two long-term effects:

• you get an enlarged heart, which can actually lead to less efficient beating - there's only so much room in there, so a larger heart has less room in which to beat;
• your blood vessels never get a chance to relax, so they tend to harden, meaning that the higher pressures are progressively experienced further away from your heart.

Harder, stiffer blood vessels are more prone to breaking and tearing. They're also more prone to damage that leads to clotting, but the clots don't stick as well. Your risk of strokes rises.

As time passes and your heart spends years working much harder than it was designed for, the muscle starts to degrade, so eventually you have this rather large yet, paradoxically, very weak heart that beats ineffectively. Your blood vessels are trashed all the way out to the capillaries, and between that and the ineffective beating you're not getting adequate oxygen to your extremities. the only fix we have, and it's not a good one, is total heart replacement - organ transplant.

You only have a few options for heat, and only one that can exceed 100% efficiency - a heat pump.

A typical heat pump exceeds 2.5, a good heat pump exceeds 3.0, and a fantastic heat pump approaches 4.0.

The latter generally show up in highly specialized applications like geothermal, where you can tailor your working fluid to a narrow, predictable temperature range.

> in other words, how much of a waste is it to heat my place via use of stove/oven rather than the central electrical heating?

Since the rest of the conversation is about heat pumps, do you mean a central heat pump when you say "central electrical heating"?

Resistive electrical heating, as others have stated, is 100% efficient: every joule of electricity is used to produce heat.

A heat pump, however, can move a lot more joules of energy than it consumes. The term is "coefficient of performance" rather than efficiency, but you can think of it the same way. Most heat pumps have a CoP of 3 (or more), which means they're effectively 300% efficient - they move three times more heat than the electricity they consume, or three times more efficient than resistive heating.

OP was wrong, btw. Heat pumps are available with CoPs of 4.0.

Not to be too much of a downer, because what you say is possible, but odds are overwhelming that extraterrestrial life will be carbon based. Carbon is just so flexible, there's a good reason why organic (carbon-based) chemistry, as a discipline, is larger than inorganic chemistry (everything not involving carbon).

It's also very likely that it will exist along with liquid water. At lower temperatures there just isn't enough energy to lead to complex life in reasonable time frames; at significantly higher temperatures you start bumping into other issues even before you reach plasma (which will probably make life development impossible to bootstrap).

> People must understand that we don't know how old the Pyramids are, we are only doing calculated guesses.

We have actual, written history of Egypt going back for thousands of years. They recorded who was buried in each pyramid, both on the pyramids themselves and in their records. The Greeks and Romans themselves have written histories that talk about their interactions with Egypt and corroborate much of what they wrote.

Egypt wasn't some kind of insular backwater, the Egyptians interacted with other states. Sometimes they were a regional superpower, sometimes they were closer to a vassal state, sometimes they were broken up into multiple states. There's over six thousand years of continuous history there, a lot can happen.

I've been inside the pyramids of Giza. They were very much a personalized tomb for a single, highly revered, person.

The outer shells of the sarcophagi are still present inside. You can't remove them without breaking them apart or disassembling the rest of the structure.

Just a tip: should you find yourself in Giza you too may visit a pyramid and go inside. It's hot and damp in the burial chamber, and you'll certainly be in a long line of people. Glad I did it, wouldn't do it again though.

It doesn't seem to be helping much, there are hardly any.

News on scene

https://twitter.com/EliNBCBoston/status/1585337647027093504

Edit: plus an article now: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/report-of-person-with-a-gun-near-wentworth-university-in-boston/2874318/?r

I have a son who is a student at MassArt and is currently stuck outside due to the lockdown. His report is:

> The police don't know anything but guys with guns went in

Which is both accurate to the situation and a commentary on policing in general.