Alon Elkin's Blog (6)

It's March 10th, 2020; more importantly, it's Tuesday.

Tuesday is shopping day, and like other residents of my neighbourhood I use my computer or mobile device to access the website of our neighbourhood's co-operative online grocery store. We usually wouldn't order anything through the internet - there's really no alternative to touching the vegetables to see if they're fresh and to checking the expiry dates on milk products to make sure that you don't get swindled. But this…

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Out planet is full to the brim with energy we can utilize. Life, sunshine, rainfall, geological forces and wind are but a few, and we're constantly learning cheaper and more efficient ways to harness these energies to fuel up our power grid. The most promising energy resource for my country is solar energy. Solar water boilers have been widely used here since the 1960s, and the rooftops of rural homes are slowly being covered with photoelectic panels.

Here's the problem, though: solar…

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Today is the last evening of Hanukkah. Christmas is less than a week away, and the Christian areas of Jerusalem are already decorated with shining Christmas lights. My family is out today, like many others, to see festive lights of a different kind. Religious Jews are obliged at the evenings of Hanukkah to light a Menorah - a vessel of 9 candles - at their windowsill. More observant Jews do not use wax candles for this purpose, but instead…

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Thanks to the Zionist ethos, which centred around building a Jewish economy based on farming, agricultural surplus in Israel is reasonably high, and according to the CIA factbook, except for grain, Israel is agriculturally self-reliant. White bread, milk and vegetables are subsidized by the government. Living in a rather poor city, I can testify that basic nutrition, comprised of white bread and fresh vegetables, is available to most if not all city dwellers, although being fed through… Continue

I wake up early in the morning when the first rays of sunshine touch my eyes. It's a typical Jerusalem morning - dusty, warm, and smells of dry earth and pine trees. I don't have to be early for work, but I prefer to cycle when it's nice and cool; the latest water bills are quite hefty, and with these new February heat-waves, being outside when the sun is high is a needless waste of sweat.



I drink a cup of coffee in the kitchen as I check my news feeds, and then quietly make sandwiches… Continue

My girlfriend and I live in a single room in a shared flat. The apartment design is somewhat strange, due to its chaning hands and purpose in the 50 years since its building. We have identified two problematic centres in our flat which seriously increase our power consumption. One is in our room.



Our room is L-shaped, and is roughly divided in two: the I and the _ (floorplan and photographs will be posted at a lated date. One of these parts is windowless, and the other has a… Continue