Degree days work better in regression as, assuming the correct base temperature is chosen/calculated, heating degree days are directly proportional to heating energy consumption (including being zero when it is warm enough that no heating is needed) and cooling degree days are directly proportional to cooling energy consumption.

More info and data here: https://www.degreedays.net

including an article explaining the process typically used for before/after calculations:

https://www.degreedays.net/calculate-energy-savings

Disclaimer: I work for the company behind that site, and yeah I know it looks a bit dated :D

So buildings have what is known as a heating base temperature, which is the outside temperature above which heating is not needed inside the building. This is not the thermostat temperature inside the building (say 20 C), it is actually lower because of various factors like people and electrical equipment generating "free heat" inside the building, and how well the building is insulated to retain that free heat.

The base temperature varies from building to building, but let's say, for example, a fairly-well-insulated home might have a heating base temperature of 14 C. If the temperature outside is 14 C or above, that building will stay perfectly warm inside on its own, without the heating system needing to come on.

But, if the outside temperature drops below 14 C the building will need some heating to keep it comfortable inside. How much heating it needs will depend on how much the temperature drops below 14 C, and for how long.

And this is what heating degree days quantify. Here is an example diagram that demonstrates quite nicely how they are calculated (using a base temperature of 14 C):

https://www.degreedays.net/images/heating-degree-days-calcul...

The neat thing is that the heating degree days for any period of time represent all the relevant temperature variations across that period of time, and assuming you used an appropriate base temperature, are proportional to the heating energy consumption over that period of time. So for example you can have just one figure that represents the heating degree days across an entire week/month/year, and that will encapsulate all the relevant temperature variations across that week/month/year.

If January had 200 heating degree days, and February had 300, you can expect the heating energy consumption of the building to be 50% greater in February than in January. (Assuming you have chosen the right base temperature for your building that is!)

Compare this with knowing that the average temperature across a week/month/year was 12 C. What does that tell you about how much heating was needed in that week/month/year? Not a lot, cos you have no idea how much it varied within that time. This is the case even within a single day, since the temperature can vary a lot within a day.

Hence why people in the energy-saving business would typically use degree days rather than temperature data :)

(That said, hourly temperature data or similar is good for more sophisticated building simulations. But those are a lot more involved. On the simpler end of the spectrum degree days are a much better choice.)

In my experience people tend to become vegan:

1. for the animals; and/or 2. for the planet; and/or 3. for health.

I have never heard another vegan say they became vegan because they didn't like the taste of cheese.

Not me, but the gal I am dating is allergic to dairy, and so we had some fun finding vegan cheeses that did not have casein. It was nice to make a dish that typically has cheese, that we both could enjoy.

Honestly if it weren't for all the amazing fake meats, milks, and cheeses, I would find it a lot harder to be a vegan. As it is though, it's a piece of (vegan) cake :)

And my interpretation of the original question wasn't why someone wants to be vegan, it was why someone would want to eat vegan imitations of non-vegan food.

Piano keys were traditionally made of ivory, now, fortunately, they are made of plastic. Does the elephant butchery of the past mean I should not play the piano today? I don't think so.

Times change. When kinder and more sustainable alternatives exist, it makes sense for us to favour them.

But of course what I said had nothing to do with being vegan because you don't like the taste of cheese. What I said was, if you like the taste of meat and cheese so much so that you can't do without a substitute of it, then why are you vegan? If you are vegan, for good ethical or environmental reasons, then why do you need to eat pretend-meat and pretend-dairy? Either you are vegan and you don't want to eat meat or dairy, or you want to eat meat or dairy and you're not vegan.

"I eat it because I like the taste of it" is exactly the moralising accusation levelled at non-vegans. If I have to go without meat and dairy to satisfy your morals then you have to go without pretend-meat and dairy to satisfy mine. You can't have it both ways. You can't preach to me that eating meat is murder and then turn your back and scoff down a pretend-sausage because you like meat. That's hypocritical.

And it only encourages people to eat more meat anyway.

I used to love steak, and fish, and various other non-vegan things. But I became increasingly uncomfortable with the thought of where those things came from, and eventually I had to give them up. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. Having vegan substitutes just made it easier. I don't see the harm in that, neither do I see the hypocracy. I want the taste, but I don't want the suffering.

Your assessment is exactly right and most people go vegan for the animals and the planet. You're also exactly right in the mental gymnastics most of us have partaken in before making the switch. It's a meme, but bacon is fucking delicious. I would love to continue eating bacon, but I couldn't keep blocking out the thought that this shouldn't go on like this. And if there is ever vegan bacon that comes close to the real thing, you can bet I'll be on that shit in no time, while simultaneously hoping I won't hurt any meat eaters feelings in the process.

I'm not sure where you live but in the UK we have something called This Isn't Bacon that I find rather delicious :)

In the UK recently we just keep getting more and more new vegan substitutes, and vegan options in restaurants. It's an exciting time!

You can't. You have no idea where I come from. I never had to perform any mental gymnastics because I don't believe I contribute to any suffering by eating meat.

For example, maybe you "come from" (to be literal) such a place as North America, Argentina, or Western Europe, where people eat way too much meat and have no idea how to eat without meat? If so, then I grew up eating half or less the amount of meat you eat, and still do as an adult, I don't eat beef, most of the dairy I eat is not from cows bred in industrial farms, like yours, and I do not have to worry that I'm eating too much meat, or contributing to the destruction of the environment, as you would.

The bottom line is that you have some moral ideology that is yours and matches your life experience, but it doesn't match mine and I don't need to share it. And I don't need to make mental gymnastics to avoid sharing it, I just have no raeson to share it in the first place.

But I do have rasons to wonder why vegans, who don't eat meat and cheese, eat meat and cheese. Unless what they eat is not meat and cheese, in which case why call it meat and cheese?

I doubt it.

Curious to find out more about where you might be coming from, I took a look through some of your past comments. One in particular caught my eye:

> "I don't know how people can do that, slaughter an animal they've raised themselves."

To me this suggests that do have compassion for animals. This doesn't surprise me, because virtually everyone does. However, having compassion for animals just doesn't sit nicely with eating them, so we come up with reasons to justify that illogical behaviour of ours. Otherwise we would not be able to live with ourselves.

I am sure you do eat less meat than many people. But I bet that you would eat a lot less again if you had to personally slaughter all the animals you eat. Especially given how easy it is to not eat animals at all.

And in response to your last question, I think it's mainly just because it tastes good. Vegan meats and cheeses could quite reasonably be called something else, and I would still happily eat them. Though having them named as they are does make them more discoverable. I can see why that might make you annoyed if you are in the business of making and selling dairy cheese, and you see the rise of vegan alternatives as a threat to your business.

With all the anger you seem to have towards veganism I sense you may be closer to an awakening that most. Perhaps soon you will be making delicious vegan cheeses yourself :)

I personally welcome the recent increase in vegan products and I hope it continues that way. You're still free to skip the vegan isle in the supermarket, fortunately.

I mean, you disagree with me so I must be worked up about what you say? What can I reply to that? There's only one way discussion quality can go after that, and that is down the drain.

Not to mention the casual sexism inherent in that kind of comment to users with clearly feminine identified usernames. "Calm down dear" and all that.

In any case, I didn't even state that you were worked up, I honestly wanted to know if the semantics was your only beef (lol). However, I can see how that may have come across as provocative and for that I apologize.

Nonetheless, I stand by what I said and I think you are indeed worked up. Hell, I'm worked up after this nonsensical back and forth. That's my assumption based on the amount of various emotions you put into your comments.

> Either you are vegan and you don't want to eat meat or dairy, or you want to eat meat or dairy and you're not vegan.

This is some strange version of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Why can you not want to eat meat and dairy and yet be vegan anyway? Why can someone not be vegan for ethical reasons, and yet still miss the taste of cheese? That makes them not a "true" vegan, in some weird definition, but who on earth cares? The person is still not eating cheese. The end result is the same, whether you gatekeep the name "vegan" or not.

> You can't have it both ways. You can't preach to me that eating meat is murder and then turn your back and scoff down a pretend-sausage because you like meat. That's hypocritical.

This is where you've gone off the deep-end. Eating a pretending sausage is not "murder," and whether you like meat or not doesn't suddenly make eating the pretend-sausage "murder." No one's ethics are being violated because someone eats a soy product, unless it's ethics against the eating of soy, which is irrelevant to this discussion.

> And it only encourages people to eat more meat anyway.

[Citation needed]

> Precisely how much energy can be saved by lowering the thermostat depends on the outdoor temperature. In temperate climates, lowering the thermostat just 1° C (or about 2°F) yields an energy savings of about 9 to 10 percent

It does depend on the local climate. For anyone interested in calculating the savings you have made if you have already done something to reduce your heating/cooling energy usage, like turning down the thermostat or installing new windows or insulation, a little while ago I wrote an explanation of the process that is usually used in the industry:

https://www.degreedays.net/calculate-energy-savings

And for anyone just thinking about stocking up on high-clo clothing rather than having actually done it, you could estimate how much you could save as follows:

a) get say 12, 24, or 36 months of energy-usage data from your smart meter or utility bills (making sure not to include any figures that were estimates made by the utility).

b) get a baseline regression formula as described in the link above, which will give you an estimate of your current heating base temperature (which should be lower than your thermostat temperature).

c) work out your hypothetical new heating base temperature, by reducing the current heating base temperature by the number of degrees that you intend to lower the thermostat by.

d) get, say, 5-year average heating degree days in both the current base temperature and your hypothetical-lower base temperature.

e) plug them both into your baseline regression formula (separately) to get i) your average annual energy consumption now and ii) your predicted average annual energy consumption if you lowered the temperature.

f) compare those two figures to get an estimate of how much energy you'd save in a typical year.

I will admit that estimating 9-10% savings per Celsius is a lot more straightforward :D

However, for me what made piano a whole lot more fun was ditching the sheet music and opting to learn about chords, all the different ways to voice them, and the various scales that fit well on top of them. I started taking lessons with a pro jazz pianist (instead of a more typical classically-focused piano teacher), I gave up on sheet music altogether and started working off lead sheets instead (just chord symbols and a melody line). I am so pleased I made that decision, it's so much more satisfying playing a tune in your own way rather than just aiming for a note-for-note reproduction of what is written on a sheet.

I still have loads more to learn, but I'm fairly pleased with where I've got to so far. I've got a few videos on youtube so you can judge for yourself if interested: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_NWuVoCn-Oc1KIiHEhe7Eg

However, although I think I can play reasonably well now, my sight-reading is awful, and it does hold me back because it makes it a lot harder for me to learn new techniques from sheet music (which I am actually interested in doing, as opposed to simply learning the sheet music note for note). I can do it just about, but it's painfully slow, so I am usually too lazy to bother.

Given the choice of either playing with full sheet-music or learning chords/voicings/scales and how to put them together, I'd pick the latter no question, and that is what I recommend to other adults who are learning piano, but I do think it's best to have both. So I can definitely see the value in this, even if it doesn't currently seem to teach the theory and improvisation that, in my opinion, is what really brings the joy into piano playing. I might give it a proper go myself some time soon, to see if it can help me improve my rubbish sight reading.

I can also imagine this being very useful for a beginner... Although I'm singing the praises of chord theory and improvisation I'm guessing most beginners might realistically do better starting with sheet music, for a while at least.

In summary: it might not teach everything, but it looks really useful nonetheless :)

One thing I did find was the very helpful, was putting those stickers with note names on each note on the keyboard. They help me keep track of what I'm playing, and when I compose something I rely on the stickers to help me transcribe.

I find complex rhythms particularly hard to read. Figuring out timing from a sheet without hearing it is like pulling teeth :D That said, listening to a recording of a great pianist and trying to work out exactly what they are doing can also be very difficult and frustrating when there are chords and complex patterns in two hands, so a good transcription can help a lot. I have a book of Bill Evans transcriptions that I would definitely do more with if I were better at reading music, or had software assistance!

I've not taken the plunge yet, but I was convinced this was the way to learn by Scott the Piano guy infomercial on TV. https://youtu.be/k50uk8elR0M

Some day...

The conventional way of learning piano has a student learning sheet-music pieces that get increasingly difficult as the student improves. It's a fairly linear path, and the vast majority of students will never be able to play a difficult piece like, say, Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu, as well as a top performer.

Similarly the vast majority of students going the chords/voicings/improvisation route will never be able to play Over The Rainbow as well as Keith Jarrett, but they can at least have the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it in their own unique way.

Composing your own music takes it a step further again.

Obviously there are going to be incredible performers at the high end but there is plenty of fun to be had in the middle and even on the low end.

I have a few pieces that are so beautiful compared to evertyhing else out there that if that were the norm those pieces might as well never be performed again, but then again, it's all subjective and what I like you might not.

> Similarly the vast majority of students going the chords/voicings/improvisation route will never be able to play Over The Rainbow as well as Keith Jarrett, but they can at least have the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it in their own unique way.

Yes, true. And that too is a lot of fun. I did some jam sessions with the sax (and I wasn't all that good), most fun I had making music to date.

> Composing your own music takes it a step further again.

That might actually at some level be more essential than just reproduction. The cave men had it easy: everything they did was original.

The beauty of a piece doesn't depend on its technical difficulty. Back when I used to play classical music more I loved playing a few of Chopin's Nocturnes repeatedly - they were about the right level for me so it was fun, and I could play them pretty well, I think. But I also spent a lot of time learning a few harder pieces (like Fantaisie Impromptu), and I remember getting frustrated that it took me ages to learn them and, although in the end I could play them sortof OKish, my efforts just weren't a patch on what a better pianist could do.

Looking back I can see that I shouldn't have picked such hard pieces until I was really ready for them. It was probably a big part of why I ended up quitting for quite a few years before taking it up again more recently with an entirely different approach.

Give it a try if you have an opportunity, I'm curious what you make of it given that you are roughly on the same path but clearly very much ahead of me.

And I might as well put in a feature idea (which I suspect would be rather tricky to implement but here goes anyway!): it would be awesome if it could take input from a mic and figure out the notes from that, so it could work with acoustic instruments too :)

https://twitter.com/happyanimalnews

I am, of course, a big fan :)

This one (Ergotron LX Desk Mount LCD Monitor Arm, Tall Pole) has been working well for me for the last couple of years, in conjunction with a Conset sit/stand desk (also great). I got the Tall Pole version just to be on the safe side, and it gives a lot of flexibility on where you want to position and angle the monitor.

I struggle with that feeling. I've been bootstrapping my own business for years, and I have a strong inclination to feel guilty if I'm not "at work" while other people with more conventional jobs are at work. It can result in me spending a lot of unproductive time at my desk.

I recently took a year pretty much away from work, to do my house up (mostly building a home cinema, woo!). The business kept ticking over just fine with me doing 20 minutes of emails a day on average, and a bit more here and there to fix the odd pressing issue.

The time off reshaped my attitude to work-life balance quite considerably. After a year of not doing much work on my business, I no longer felt so guilty for not being at my desk. Now I go through phases of doing lots of work (I reckon that when the motivation is there, one should run with it), but I also try to do other things: meet friends for lunch, play tennis, learn Spanish, go on the odd little holiday. My instincts still tell me that I should be at my desk, working (or at least at my desk), but I've got better at seeing them as illogical and fighting them.

A huge perk of having your own small business is having the freedom to organize your time the way you want to. If you can have a successful business without having to put in lots of hours, that's great. But you have to give yourself permission to do this.

Sitting at a desk wasting time is pointless, but I can associate and I think it's a natural inclination. But it's a very unhealthy inclination, in my opinion much more so than the inclination to go and do something completely different, something fun.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't be able to find productive business-related things to do. Without knowing a lot more about what you do and what you're looking to do with your business I can't really comment on that. But with almost 15 hours a day at your computer, and "no life" (your words!) I do think you might do well to try and address your work/life balance, which may involve tackling the deep-seated feelings or instincts that have you sitting at your desk so long when you're not being productive.

What I learned as a writer is, focus on output, not time-spent or schedules met.

Set yourself a daily goal, but from there, be flexible in how you achieve it. When I was still writing, I'd try and aim for about 2k words a day, usually done off and on, but if I had an off day I just let it happen and took whatever break I needed to let the creativity come back in its time.

The thing is, the traditional work day is lousy for creative professions (and I count programming among these). It is a construct born of factory work, and you can't produce a quality creative process under factory conditions.

Give yourself a break, and let the mind take the respite it needs to get spinning again. I recommend taking a look out for John Cleese's insights on creativity and the creative process, he has done some lectures and videos on the subject that should be findable on Youtube, and they're very valuable insight into the different pressures of a creative field versus a 'production' one.

I would love to see HN editors update the URL in cases like this.