Greetings from the last day of the first long weekend we've had in these parts for a while. It hasn't been all that relaxing, but the things the need to get done are getting done.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Not Cool — A lengthy look at the need for us to relearn how to passively cool our spaces and how that's a part of how we manage and use energy and how that can help mitigate the effects of climate change.

From the article:

With no source of cooling other than the night air, holding onto cool morning temperatures indoors is crucial. To prevent thermal gain, two complementary approaches are necessary. Most advice coming from low-tech and passive-energy experts encourages the first: minimize the heat filtering in from outside.

How the Railways Killed a Medieval Law — Amelia Soth dives into a legal concept called the deodand, which covered compensation due to death cause by someone's property, and how the rise of rail (and the greed of rail barons) helped write deodands off the books.

From the article:

[D]uring the Industrial Revolution, juries began to assess deodands at much higher costs. Perhaps they felt that the industrialists were particularly negligent, or wealthy enough not to mind the cost. In some cases, the jurors even explicitly suggested they would let the whole deodand issue go if the industrialist made some kind of provision for the family of the departed person.

Venus Has Been Waiting 40 Years. One Scientist Is Done Waiting With It — Once upon a time, humans believed that we'd learned everything that we'll learn about the second planet in our solar system. It turns out that conceit was wrong and we're about to learn a lot more about that world.

From the article:

Every world in our solar system represents a different outcome of the same starting conditions. Mars shows what happens when a planet loses its magnetic field and its atmosphere bleeds into space over billions of years. Titan shows what organic chemistry looks like when liquid water is replaced by liquid methane. Venus shows what happens when you are almost Earth, same size, same mass, formed from similar material at a similar distance from the same kind of star, and then diverge.

Your Perception Of Time Is, In Fact, Warped — A musing on how we (internally) perceive and mark the passage of time, and why that perception and marking is actually not quite the same as we believe it to be.

From the article:

As we grow older, however, we become more immersed in patterns and routines, without the same opportunities to process new information, foster fresh skills or feel our way through unfamiliar circumstances that galvanize our intellects. We’re living by rote, so to speak, and our consciousness slides into a more dulled, dampened state.