#i have a portable air conditioner but it’s pretty loud and the only room small enough for it is the bedroom

[aurischolar]

it’s supposed to go up to 35°C today…… agony

[quietlydiabolic]

“Attack of the Killer Robotos” - BassRock short oneshot fanfic

By: Jixie Fandom: Mega Man Classic @bassrockweek: May 15 - Zombie Rating: G Words: 1770

There was always a sort of order amidst the chaos. For all the trouble and destruction Dr. Wily caused, he also had some sort of compulsion to do things a certain way, using certain patterns. Set zones. Defined attacks. Eight Robot Masters. The winding path through Skull Fortress.

Order amid chaos.

Which is what made this so weird.

It was… unpredictable. Haphazard. Disorderly. Mega Man knew Wily's patterns and habits like the back of his hand, but he never truly appreciated just how predictable the mad scientist was until now, when everything was— well— the best way to describe it was 'on fire'. Mostly on account of all the fires.

They had been waiting to hear from Wily, either bragging about his latest plot, or begging and simpering about how he'd lost control over it, but so far it had been radio silence. Mega Man did his best to stop the robots running amok and rescue civilians and put out fires, both literally and figuratively.

The last thing he needed was Bass showing up to brawl. He never knew if Bass was going to be on their side or in Wily's corner— it was 50/50— and their relationship was pretty nebulous, so Mega Man wasn't sure where he stood with Bass at any given time.

Lucky for him, Bass wordlessly went after the berserker robots instead of hassling Mega Man.

They fought separately for a while, until Bass shot down a Potton delivery drone that was in Mega Man's blindspot. He used that as an opening. "Thanks! Let me guess… Dr. Wily's latest scheme got out of hand?"

"Yeah."

"Another virus?"

Roboenza had caused advanced robots to go wild, while less complex ones simply ceased functioning. This time, everything had come to life, from smart blenders to self-driving vehicles (traditional and flying) to robotic vacuum cleaners.

"Nah." Bass hesitated, because it would help if Mega Man actually knew what was going on. But at the same time, Wily was still convinced he could regain control of the situation, in which case it was better if he left his rival in the dark.

He was still on the fence when Mega Man's face scrunched up in amusement, clapping a hand over his mouth, trying not to laugh and failing miserably. "Oh my goodness, is that… is that a commode?"

Blinking in surprise, Bass glanced over his shoulder, then slowly turned around. Shambling down the road was, in fact, a computerized auto-toilet.

"Oh for cryin' out loud!" Built for consumer use, a single shot was all that was needed to dispatch it, but Bass unleashed a series of rapid fire shots until the hapless appliance was reduced to scrap. "Does EVERYTHING need to be a robot? Sheesh!"

***

Everything being a robot was the problem, really. They fought their way through hordes of air conditioners units, portable terminals, coffee makers, automated tellers, electric bikes, water efficient washing machines…

…and robo-pets, unfortunately. Bass was not-so-secretly enjoying the mayhem, but even he seemed ashamed of having to put down the robotic beasts.

He decided not to fill Mega Man in on the details. It wasn't a virus. It was a remote-control satellite, only somehow Wily had bungled the command codes. Instead of making the world's machinery his loyal subjects, it had turned them into mindless attacking zombies.

But hours dragged on and it was obvious Wily hadn't got a handle on the situation. Even more worryingly, he hadn't heard from him since leaving the fortress.

While they fought to restore order, Dr. Light scrambled to figure out what was going on and how to fix it, Roll and Auto offered support, and Proto Man…

Proto Man showed up, having been off doing his own secretive machinations, tossed energy tanks to the other two, and while they refueled, took a moment to appraise the situation. "Why don't you take this fight to Dr. Wily?"

"I don't think Dr. Wily's in control," Mega Man replied, glancing at Bass. "I'm not sure stopping him will stop this," he gestured at the scene of destruction that lay before them.

"Couldn't hurt to try." The tone in Proto Man's voice suggested he knew more than he was letting on.

Chewing at his lip, Mega Man shot Bass another look. "What do you think?"

If nothing else, they could probably force Wily to shut off the satellite signal. On the one hand: mayhem. Bass didn't exactly want to stop. On the other hand: the whole thing was pretty ridiculous, there was no end in sight, and it was weird that Wily hadn't been in touch.

"Fine."

With that Bass teleported, and Mega Man facepalmed. "Darn it, you know I can't just beam directly into Dr. Wily's fort!"

"Hey, listen." Proto Man threw an arm across his back. "I'm sure Bass never mentioned anything, but this whole disaster ruined our plans."

"What? What plans?" He didn't like the sound of this. Particularly the ‘our’ part of it.

"We were going to catch a movie—"

"A movie? ‘We’? As in… the two of you? A movie?" Mega Man made no attempt to hide his disappointment. "Like a— like a date?"

His brother laughed. "No. Like a ‘trying to teach that idiot normal life skills'. It was going to be a group outing."

"Wh— a group— what group?" He was both relieved and increasingly confused. He'd never met any of Blues' friends. Had Bass? Did they have mutual acquaintances?

"Rock," Proto Man said firmly, turning so that they were face-to-face, planting both hands on Mega Man's shoulders. "Rock." He sounded tired. "Invite. Him. To. The. Movies."

There was an unbelievably awkward pause, and Mega Man gulped loudly.

"O-oh. Right."

***

Mega Man was surprised to find Bass loitering outside the fort. Something was wrong— Bass couldn't teleport inside either.

So they fought their way in the old fashioned way. The badniks inside were just as erratic and violent as the household appliances had been. Not knowing the cause of all this, Mega Man started joking around, making wild, increasingly preposterous guesses for what hare-brained plot Wily had this time.

"Is he trying to scare the public by turning their dishwashers and street sweepers against them, terrorizing them into surrendering and begging for mercy?"

"No."

"Let's see… he wanted to ruin Dr. Light's day because he won the Aperture Scientific Achievement award last week, and because he's a super-villain Dr. Wily didn't even qualify."

"No."

"This is an elaborate cover while he builds a third King, even though the last time—"

"Don't mention that name around me."

"Ummm… he's trying to collapse the economy, to start up a corporate conglomerate monopoly for all consumer gadgets?"

Bass groaned. "Please stop talking."

"He just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning."

"No."

One of the weirdest things about all this was the complete and utter lack of Robot Masters. They got through the maze pretty quickly and found the massive arena where, under normal circumstances, Wily would attack with a massive war machine.

It was startlingly empty.

"Where is he?"

Mega Man did a double take. "You don't know?"

Gesturing for him to follow, Bass made his way deeper into the fortress. If Wily wasn't around, what was the point of trying to keep his plans secret? He guided Mega Man to one of the main control rooms, explaining the whole satellite hacking scheme along the way. Calling up Roll, Mega Man used the nearest terminal to create a network link that would allow Dr. Light to download everything he needed directly from Wily's computers.

They waited in silence, Mega Man not willing to leave until Dr. Light was good to go, and Bass unwilling to leave his rival unattended in the fortress.

"Sooooo," Mega Man said, trying to sound casual. "Did you catch the latest Revengers movie?"

"Nope." He then mumbled something about how he was supposed to, and scuffed his foot on the floor in frustration.

Weaving his fingers together, Mega Man offered a small, hopeful grin. "I haven't had a chance to see it yet, either. M-maybe after things are wrapped up here, we could go check it out…?"

It earned a derisive snort, but then Bass shrugged. "Sure, whatever. I don't care."

"Cool." Trying to hide the feeling of glee, he clapped his hands behind his head. "I wonder how they're going to resolve the whole Eternity Jewels story. It's been so hard avoiding spoilers!"

They were in the midst of debating if Atoman's screen adaption was better than the comic version when Roll called in with the all-clear.

"I'm going to go back and help Proto Man handle the zombie-bots until Dr. Light can shut off the satellite." Mega Man hesitated. "Did you want to…?"

"Nah, I gotta find out where Wily got to."

They went their separate ways, but in the middle of a surprisingly intense battle with a commercial impingement oven— able to launch projectiles from its conveyor belt with incredible speed— Mega Man received a text with a set of coordinates.

Catching his look, Proto Man nodded in understanding. "Go, I have this."

They led him to the grounds outside of Skull Fortress, where a desperate, shrieking Dr. Wily clung halfway up a tree, feet scrambling against the trunk, surrounded by three small robotic lawn mower units.

Bass stood in the distance, arms crossed, wicked grin on his face. "Hey," he said as Mega Man approached. "You don't think Dr. Light could shut down the signal to everyone except these guys, could he?"

"Maybe…"

Dr. Wily switched tactics from berating and cursing Bass to pleading with Mega Man.

"We really should help him."

Tilting his head, Bass tapped his chin and pretended to be lost in thought. "I dunno, I think he could use another half an hour up there."

Mega Man laughed. He should help Dr. Wily and take him to jail, he really should.

"…I think I'm going to let you two work this out," he said finally. "Uh, Leitersburg Cinema, 7:30?"

Glancing at him out of the corner of his eyes, Bass shrugged. "Assuming the projectors didn't go nuts, too."

"Oh, shoot!" Mega Man hid his face in his hands. "You're probably right."

But with all the attacks Wily had done over the years, most businesses had contingencies and bounced back pretty quickly. "Think they'll be up and running again by next Thursday?"

"I guess?"

"Fine. It's a date."

He knew that Bass didn't mean a date, rather that they had an agreed appointment…

…but he couldn't help wearing a stupid, goofy grin for the rest of the day.

-- -A/N: Special thanks to @s-uranet for suggestions and brainstorming.

[componentplanet]

DIY: Figuring Out How COVID-19 Might Travel In Your Home

By now we hopefully all know that it is better to be outside than inside when it comes not catching the COVID-19 from other people. You’ve probably also read stories like the famous (infamous) one about how certain patrons in the path of the air conditioner at a restaurant in China got sick, while ones at the other tables didn’t. Incidents like that one have resulted in pretty much shutting down entertaining non-family-members inside, at least in many places. But eventually, that is going to change. Which begs the question of how safe will it be, and how can we make it as safe as possible.

Many medical and commercial establishments are either designed with, or are now being remodeled with, sophisticated HVAC simulators to try and optimize the direction and speed of airflow to maximize safety. In particular, if air is either vented outside or recirculated through HEPA-grade filters, the faster you get it from people and out of the room the better. But that high-end design approach isn’t practical for a typical family and their apartment or home.

So, while it absolutely isn’t a medical-grade or even commercial-grade solution, we took the DIY approach to experiment with a combination of built-in HVAC and portable air filters to see if we could tell how (relatively) “safe” it might be to sit around our dining room table with friends someday, and how best we could prepare for that eventuality. We used an inexpensive fog machine (about $40 online) to create a simulated virus-carrying “cloud” for our tests. It’s not perfect; our setup certainly doesn’t model the extremes of sneezes at one end and potentially aerosol virus transmission at the other. Our approach isn’t really even commercial-grade, because cheap special effects “fog” doesn’t accurately mimic particular droplets or aerosols the way a high-end device costing thousands can. However, we figured that it was a lot better than simply guessing where the air we breathe goes after you exhale in your home or office.

Our Test Scenarios

We did most of our tests around the kitchen table, the most likely place in our home where we’ll be likely to eventually have non-family guests — once that makes sense. As a baseline, we tested with all the doors and windows closed, and no artificial air circulation. Then we turned on our whole-house fan (basically AC without the cooling), to get a sense of how much it would move the air around, and started experimenting with air filters.

Baseline: No Fans or Filters, Windows Closed

As a baseline we started with a closed room, with no AC, fan, or portable air filters:

You can see that the “fog” hangs in the air for several minutes. To reiterate the main caveat with our test methodology, actual droplets would have fallen to the ground much more quickly, even if they weren’t blown away. However, aerosols would have continued wafting around in fairly high concentrations.

Using What You Have: Whole-House Fan

Most homes in the US have some type of HVAC that in addition to heating and cooling can be used simply as a large fan. In many cases, like ours, the air returned to the system is passed through a HEPA filter and cleaned before being sent back into the room, making it a good candidate for an air-moving solution.

So we turned our whole-home AC system onto fan mode to see the effect:

Due to the design of the room, there aren’t any vents or returns in the immediate vicinity of the table. But there are vents in the ceiling a few feet away and a return about 12 feet away. However, the natural air path doesn’t flow across the table. The fan did cut the time the fog hung over the table roughly in half, so it definitely had an effect. Note that some HVAC units run their fans at a higher speed when you turn them to Cool or Heat mode instead of just fan mode, which means they would move the air slightly more quickly in those modes.

Home Air Filter, Placed on Floor

An obvious step for anyone wanting to improve airflow is to add a fan or portable air filter. The advantage of a HEPA-rated air filter is that the air passed through it will have been cleaned, so it doesn’t have to be vented to the outside. With a simple fan, you need to make sure it moves the air away and eventually outdoors. So we took a top-rated Coway 1512HH ($200 on Amazon) home air filter that we bought a few years ago thanks to the California wildfires, and placed in a typical location on the floor next to the table for our next experiment:

Home Air Filter On the Table in Auto Mode

Clearly the floor location doesn’t take full advantage of the air filter’s potential. So we moved it to the table, set to Auto mode. That might be an actual possibility for a home. For a restaurant, it might be similar to the effect of having a built-in air filter somewhere near or above the table:

As you can see this both increases its effectiveness in moving air, and means that much more of the air is actually filtered instead of simply being pushed around. In both cases, though, you can also see that a certain amount of the fog simply gets entrained in the fan exhaust and pushed up (the direction of the exhaust) even though it wasn’t directly affected by the fan.

Home Air Filter On the Table in Full-Power Mode

You can see in the last video that one issue with “Auto” mode is that the air filter doesn’t kick up to high power until it detects particles. Best case, that means a delay until enough particles reach it. Worst case, if everything is only aerosols, it might not trigger its High mode at all. So we did the same experiment again, but this time we set the air filter to full power from the start, to get it moving air more quickly:

Preset to High and set on the table, our room-sized air filter did a quick job of clearing and cleaning the air.

Upgrading to a Larger Air Filter: The Coway Airmega 400S

Next, we upgraded to a larger-capacity Coway Airmega 400S ($652.49 on Amazon), with a theoretical ability to filter the air in a 1,500-square-foot area. (Note: Filter ratings typically mean that the unit can move the volume of air in a room that size with an 8-foot ceiling a few times per hour — which of course isn’t directly useful as a measurement of how effectively it will move air from one particular location.) To start, we placed the Airmega on the floor next to the table:

The Airmega 400S definitely improves on having the smaller unit in the same location, although a lot of its effect is also simply by pushing air up from its exhaust port, rather than pulling it through its side intakes and cleaning it.

Going Whole Hog: Large Air Filter on the Table

For what we figured was the maximum intervention, we moved the Airmega 400S right onto the table, and set it to High. Coway has done a great job with the sound suppression on the unit, so it actually wasn’t that loud (the firm rates the unit at 66 dB, but doesn’t specify in which mode). I could imagine having dinner with it there (although perhaps on a small table next to the big table, instead of at the head of the dining table!) The results were impressive:

You can see that if you’re willing to get a little bit extreme, you can clear the air from a group of people around a table quite quickly. Of course, this arrangement isn’t incredibly practical. But I can imagine some clever designs of overhead lights or tables that incorporate some form of air moving and filtration.

Using Cross-Ventilation to Let Nature Help

Depending on your room layout and the weather outside, simple cross-ventilation can be a big help. In our case, we have sliding glass doors about 10 feet away from the table on either side. We opened those up while there was a decent breeze and re-ran our experiment:

Clearly just opening doors and windows isn’t enough to clear the air quickly unless you have a direct path for the air to travel and a breeze that will take advantage of it. It does clear the air over the course of a few minutes, though. So if you’re using a table or work area after someone else and are worried about what might be hanging around, having some cross-ventilation would be a great idea.

Here’s Why Being Outside Is So Great

Finally, to illustrate how powerful nature is we moved outside, into a breeze. Even aiming the fog generator directly across the table, with the breeze blowing the length of the table, the air clearly extremely quickly:

Note that if someone coughs across the table at you (or at the person next to you and you are downwind of them), there is still some noticeable, if brief, airflow to where you are before the breeze pushes it away. Heavier droplets might also get pushed away more slowly.

Lessons Learned

First, I’m happy we did these experiments. It gives me a better sense of airflow than I’d had from reading and watching videos — and of course, it is specific to our house. Second, I can easily imagine setting up an air filter near our kitchen table at whatever point we feel safe having people over for dinner inside. As to a choice of air filters, we continue to be impressed by both Conway units. The company also offers a 300 model that is sized between the two, and a non-S version of the 400 that skips the “Smart” bit. Short of adding a portable air filter, turning on our fans makes sense, and obviously keeping doors and windows open to the extent the weather allows.

We still know so little about how COVID-19 actually moves through the air, and how long it persists in a harmful form on surfaces, that there isn’t yet any way to tell how much safer each of these tactics makes us, unfortunately. The experiment has given us some ideas for future tests, where we use different types of “fog” and also some baffling or other controls on the speed, timing, and direction of the generated fog.

Now Read:

How Air Quality and the AQI Are Measured

Enormous air purifier creates bubbles of clean air in polluted cities

NASA JPL Engineers Design COVID-19 Ventilator in 37 Days

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/312678-diy-figuring-out-how-covid-19-might-travel-in-your-home from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/07/diy-figuring-out-how-covid-19-might.html