I think that's an interesting double standard. Partly it's because there was a strong Western European tradition of female nudity in art during the Middle Ages, so people are just coasting, and I think partly it's because both men and women are somewhat more innately comfortable with female nudity than male nudity, as being less threatening. But I may be entirely wrong with that. Doesn't the Venus have her hand covering her not-dangly-bits, by the way? Not that that changes the overall idea, and there are plenty of other examples in art, but I suspect it might get a pass because it's only breasts and breasts in public have been marginally acceptable for centuries, although it's varied a lot. In some periods, women had breast-displaying fancy outfits in the French and German royal courts, whereas in the 1920's my grandfather was arrested and ticketed for appearing shirtless on a beach in Georgia.
I had a friend who, for his senior design project in physics, made a sound-seeking torpedo. It was great fun against ducks. (it didn't blow up.) It also worked well against powered RC boats, but wasn't sensitive enough to hear a sailboat. But it sure was fun watching that thing home in on something and watching the something desperately try to evade it. Easier for the ducks, since they can fly.
tell ya from personal experience: bad idea with R/C's that use highly flammable covering material.
By the way, should you want to make a rocket engine fly more or less straight sans fins (like, say, it's in a barrel as a launcher) you can carefully, carefully drill a tangential hole through the casing about 1/3 of the way up from the nozzle, to make it spin. If it launches straight it'll stay straight once that begins venting.
War becomes cheaper, but the law of unintended consequences suggests that if group A has no chance of fighting group B in a formal war (because they don't have killer death robots) group A will instead use non-formal war, aka terrorism.
So, yeah, I entirely agree with you. It's a really bad idea, but I don't think it's avoidable.
Well, to be honest, I tried to build an R/C with a full-auto bb gun in it. It did not work at all. So my friends and I went to doing ship-to-ship battles. Too bad: it would've been great to do real dogfighting. (Or, as I dreamed in my nefarious moments, be a sky pirate and fly the plane into an R/C park, shooting down other planes, and then make my escape.)
Duh! And the strippers will think they're $20's if they don't look carefully, and will be VERY nice to you.
(I learned this from my girlfriend. Yes, I'm serious. Well, at least about the who-I-learned-it-from part. And the weird thing is that it wasn't even the ex-stripper girlfriend who told me this.)
A *long* time ago, in about 1971, LEGO opened the first LEGO manufacturing plant outside Denmark -- or to be more specific, they licensed a Sampsonite company to produce LEGO bricks. It was in my hometown of Loveland, Colorado, and I can't find any good web links except for a passing reference in this pdf which is a shame because the original plant is still standing and its exterior design is clearly LEGO-influenced. The windows are enormous 1:2 rectangles with eight huge circular extrusions on them, just like a 2x4 cube. As kids, we all envied the children whose parents worked there because they'd come home with garbage bags of floor sweepings and those kids could build houses we could actually get inside. The local library had several models of famous houses/buildings that, again, were large enough to crawl into.
I've often joked about people who make huge radio-control aircraft just getting in and flying them, but somehow I didn't expect they'd put guns on them. Silly me.
Solderjoints do break, but it's been my experience that it's because of bad design: you don't just stick a stock power connector onto the unsupported corner of a PC board and expect the solderjoints to be the only things taking the strain without breaking. If you use a powerconn that screws to the PC board, you add twenty cents to the manufacturing cost and triple the longevity of the board. Apply that philosophy throughout, and you come up with why industrial-rated equipment costs twice what consumer-rated equipment costs -- and why consumer-rated equipment sells at 20x the rate of industrial-rated equipment. People don't understand what makes quality (and without taking the equipment apart, they cannot judge it even if they know enough), so they buy based on the only metric they do have access to: the price. That's why Consumer Reports and the like have a market niche: they can do (some, inelegant, inexpert) analysis of the quality.
And as for capacitors, old Tektronix scopes from the '60's are notorious for leaky/failed capacitors because they were early adopters of new cap technology and the caps weren't as good as they were represented to Tektronix. Replacing all the old caps on an amp often results in clearly audible improvement to the sound quality, and I've fixed a lot of old test&measurement equipment by replacing caps.
You say that as a joke. A friend of mine is taking a community-college-level intro to becoming a teacher course, and one of the things they did was went to the local art exhibit. Some of his classmates -- these are people who are planning on becoming high-school teachers, remember -- were saying "I think it's awful that they'd show that in public" (a copy of Michelangelo's "David") and "why is he standing so faggy?" (Donatello's "David".) For that matter, do you remember when John Ashcroft insisted on putting clothes on the statue of Justice in the White House? (I think that was primarily because he was tired of seeing his sweaty red face as he started yet another rant, with Justice's huge bronze boobs behind him, framing his head.)
If you want them to spark, mostly bisect them -- like butterflying a chicken breast. Cut nearly in half so only a little bit of skin is still connecting the two halves, open them up and lay them on their backs (so the cut face is pointing upwards) and zap. You've just made a dipole antenna roughly tuned for microwave radiation. Every time I've tried this the small uncut section has vaporized with sparks and flames. You could get the same result by putting two grapes just barely touching, I think, but I haven't actually tried that.
Instrumentation amplifiers. They're cheap and astounding. CMRR's of 80 or 100. Take a look at the Analog Designs AD620, for instance. It's superb (even if they are our competitors.) I've used it for making an EKG based on an old Scientific American Amateur Scientist article, and here's a slashdot thread about another AD620-based EKG.
I want to see some good data on the bandwidth and frequency selectivity of this antenna of theirs before I'm going to be wearing one next to any body part I care about, let me put it that way. Water, or more particularly they hydroxyl molecule, has an enormously wide absorption peak in the IR. Anything transmitting anywhere in that range will transfer thermal energy to the hydroxyls. It's possible that they've found a frequency range where nothing biological has any coupling whatsoever, but I want to see some more data. (And yes, I'm looking.) There are, generally speaking, some physical constraints on how narrow an EM peak you can produce.
Piffle. I've said this before and I'll say it again: dustbeams.
Socrates lived about 1500 years before Michelangelo. Neither had any form of copyright, patent, or trademark protection whatsoever, nor did any of the people who lived in the intervening years. It's not clear to me that anyone has ever created anything with patent/copyright/trademark protection that's anywhere nearly as worthwhile as what these two artists created in their respective fields.
Freaking cave people drew pictures on the walls of their caverns. People make stuff. It's what they do. They always have, they always will, whether or not they make money from it.
It's even possible that if we removed all barriers to copying, that would remove the get-rich incentive and its follow-up high-price-of-marketing-and-advertising barriers, and more people would make more beautiful stuff because they wouldn't be comparing their works to the people whose commercially viable products get well-funded.
I can't claim I'm posting this from my 1000 or 2000 since I'm at work, but they both still run. In 1987 I was, to my knowledge, the only person on campus with a full-color, stereo, multithreading PC, at a fraction of the cost of the monochrome Macs and the VAX mainframe. When someone else got one, we cabled them together and played full-color, networked jet fighter games and people's heads exploded watching them.
You probably can't. It's likely that the amount of heating is a fraction of a degree, and is completely overwhelmed by, say, standing in the hot sun.
But, notice the 'probably' and 'likely'. I don't think there's a correlation between cell phone use and cancer, based on what I've read, but if you'd asked me, 5 years ago, if I thought Vioxx was a great idea, I would've said yes. (I still would, in fact: just not for everyone.) We consistently make decisions based on the best science of the time, and consistently find out that we were wrong. That's science evolving, and I always get wary when people make definitive-sounding statements based on our current understanding.
With all that said, I seem to remember there were cases of cancer caused by people (stewardesses) working with early microwaves, which is why they put interlocks on them to keep them from being used while the door is open, but a quick search on Google finds nothing to support this memory.
The body's pretty good at thermoregulating, although there is evidence that chemically induced reduced body temperature increases lifespan. (note actually being cold doesn't do a bit of good: this requires making the hypothalamus mistakenly believe the body is cold.)
I'm guessing that reducing the body's rest metabolism reduces free radical damage (because free radicals are formed during metabolism.) People have observed that most animals die after about a billion heartbeats, give or take a few (except for humans, presumably as the result of better medical care.) It's likely that oxidative damage over time is responsible for much of aging, and oxidative damage is linear with metabolism (as is heart rate.)
So it's not as simple as just moving to Sweden, although living somewhere full of Swedish women is not too bad a way to spend the rest of your life.
Ummm... I don't know if you're really unaware of physics here, but if you stick a mouse in a microwave and turn the power to 11, the mouse sort of dies.
The absorption frequencies of DNA might not specifically match cellphone radiative frequencies, but high-power microwave radiation absolutely is dangerous to living tissue. Water absorbs very nicely at most microwave frequencies, and thermally-induced damage to water-containing tissues means the cell has to repair the damage. The thermal damage may be to the DNA, and it may be just to random proteins in the cell, but either way the cell has to start translating/transcribing, and when DNA is unravelled and depaired for transcription, there's a much greater chance of damage to the DNA happening from random processes, free radicals, stuff like that.
The question is: does sufficient damage happen to living tissue from radiation at the frequency and power density seen in cellphones, and I don't think anyone has positively answered that question yet.
Other people have already made some relevant points but I figured I'd add mine. Licking wounds is better than no treatment whatsoever, which is what dogs got prior to the invention of medicine. Medicine can be better than either no treatment *or* licking wounds. Evolution has given the dogs a set of responses; human ingenuity has come up with better ones, but the dogs still have their responses wired-in. Hence the satellite-dish-head. Conventional wisdom says that open wounds should be covered and slathered in antibiotics. I've found that my injuries recover more quickly and with less scarring if carefully cleaned and then left open to the air, which might be because I live in a very dry, very high-altitude, very clean environment. But those are a special set of circumstances and I wouldn't advise other people to try this blindly, without experimenting. Ditto dogs licking wounds: it could help, it could hurt, but it's known to be counterproductive to healing up stitched wounds. Don't assume that your results are universally true.
My dog would give her left ovary for cooked carrots.
By the way, about the water: amimal metabolism is the process of converting hydrocarbons and carbohydrates to water and carbon dioxide. When you eat, you need water to provide some of the initial hydrogens that serve as electron donors in the mitochondria, but as soon as you've digested some of the food you start producing water as a waste by-product and that serves to fill your future needs. So, if you eat small amounts, slowly, you don't need to drink as much water, but if you eat a bunch in a rush you'll be thirsty. Same goes with dogs.
Or how my friend intended to potty-train his (obviously first) child: give the kid some M&M's every time the kid used the toilet. He said he wasn't sure which went up faster, his grocery bill or the water bill.
As someone who works at one of the chip makers, I can answer part of that. You ask your customer "Do you want chip A, that pumps out 1 watt of heat and costs $0.50, or chip B, that pumps out 2 watts and costs $0.47?" They'll choose B every time. Chip A is 4mm x 3mm and dumps 1 watt, chip B is 3mm x 3mm and dumps 2 watts: they'll take chip B. It's an externality thing: the end-users have to pay for air conditioning, but they're buying stuff that's already designed around hot chips. The people turning chips into systems don't pay for the air conditioning, and their profit margin depends on purchase price and die surface area, not heat.
At some point, the end users start buying based on heat, as well as price, and at that point the system manufacturers start choosing chip B, but given the lag time in chip design (we design small quick-to-market power supply chips and it takes about a year from design proposal to silicon in the marketplace) and the lag in marketing's perception of new needs, it takes at least two years for a change in demand to start showing up in supply.
And, of course, that doesn't begin to address the speed/heat relationship, which (as an analog company) we don't have to deal with, but I'm sure that a 10% increase in speed, with a doubling of heat, would outsell the original-speed chip as well.
A setback thermometer that automatically turns the heat down during the day (and even somewhat at night when you're asleep) is also a help. I feel I should mention that closing the bathroom door during showering isn't a great idea. It retains heat but it also retains moisture and over the long-term that *will* degrade the physical structure of your bathroom: mold grows on the wall studs and under the flooring, condensation on the cold toilet tank runs down and makes the wood subfloor around the base of the toilet rot, and so forth. Moisture is by far the leading cause of structural degradation in houses. If you like your bathroom warm, put a switch-controlled IR heater in the ceiling, so that you (and anything else within line-of-sight of the bulb) are warmed, and leave the exhaust fan on when you're showering. I live in one of the drier parts of the country, with humidity between 10-25%, and when I refurbished the bathroom in my 40 year old house, I had to remove a lot of rotted wood from the walls and replace the flooring. In a more humid environment that damage will happen much more quickly.
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I think that's an interesting double standard. Partly it's because there was a strong Western European tradition of female nudity in art during the Middle Ages, so people are just coasting, and I think partly it's because both men and women are somewhat more innately comfortable with female nudity than male nudity, as being less threatening. But I may be entirely wrong with that.
Doesn't the Venus have her hand covering her not-dangly-bits, by the way? Not that that changes the overall idea, and there are plenty of other examples in art, but I suspect it might get a pass because it's only breasts and breasts in public have been marginally acceptable for centuries, although it's varied a lot. In some periods, women had breast-displaying fancy outfits in the French and German royal courts, whereas in the 1920's my grandfather was arrested and ticketed for appearing shirtless on a beach in Georgia.
I had a friend who, for his senior design project in physics, made a sound-seeking torpedo. It was great fun against ducks. (it didn't blow up.) It also worked well against powered RC boats, but wasn't sensitive enough to hear a sailboat. But it sure was fun watching that thing home in on something and watching the something desperately try to evade it. Easier for the ducks, since they can fly.
That's awesome. That's the coolest thing I've read in a while. Next time I fly gliders with someone else...
tell ya from personal experience: bad idea with R/C's that use highly flammable covering material.
By the way, should you want to make a rocket engine fly more or less straight sans fins (like, say, it's in a barrel as a launcher) you can carefully, carefully drill a tangential hole through the casing about 1/3 of the way up from the nozzle, to make it spin. If it launches straight it'll stay straight once that begins venting.
War becomes cheaper, but the law of unintended consequences suggests that if group A has no chance of fighting group B in a formal war (because they don't have killer death robots) group A will instead use non-formal war, aka terrorism.
So, yeah, I entirely agree with you. It's a really bad idea, but I don't think it's avoidable.
Well, to be honest, I tried to build an R/C with a full-auto bb gun in it. It did not work at all. So my friends and I went to doing ship-to-ship battles. Too bad: it would've been great to do real dogfighting. (Or, as I dreamed in my nefarious moments, be a sky pirate and fly the plane into an R/C park, shooting down other planes, and then make my escape.)
Duh!
And the strippers will think they're $20's if they don't look carefully, and will be VERY nice to you.
(I learned this from my girlfriend. Yes, I'm serious. Well, at least about the who-I-learned-it-from part. And the weird thing is that it wasn't even the ex-stripper girlfriend who told me this.)
A *long* time ago, in about 1971, LEGO opened the first LEGO manufacturing plant outside Denmark -- or to be more specific, they licensed a Sampsonite company to produce LEGO bricks. It was in my hometown of Loveland, Colorado, and I can't find any good web links except for a passing reference in this pdf which is a shame because the original plant is still standing and its exterior design is clearly LEGO-influenced. The windows are enormous 1:2 rectangles with eight huge circular extrusions on them, just like a 2x4 cube.
As kids, we all envied the children whose parents worked there because they'd come home with garbage bags of floor sweepings and those kids could build houses we could actually get inside. The local library had several models of famous houses/buildings that, again, were large enough to crawl into.
I've often joked about people who make huge radio-control aircraft just getting in and flying them, but somehow I didn't expect they'd put guns on them. Silly me.
Solderjoints do break, but it's been my experience that it's because of bad design: you don't just stick a stock power connector onto the unsupported corner of a PC board and expect the solderjoints to be the only things taking the strain without breaking. If you use a powerconn that screws to the PC board, you add twenty cents to the manufacturing cost and triple the longevity of the board. Apply that philosophy throughout, and you come up with why industrial-rated equipment costs twice what consumer-rated equipment costs -- and why consumer-rated equipment sells at 20x the rate of industrial-rated equipment. People don't understand what makes quality (and without taking the equipment apart, they cannot judge it even if they know enough), so they buy based on the only metric they do have access to: the price. That's why Consumer Reports and the like have a market niche: they can do (some, inelegant, inexpert) analysis of the quality.
And as for capacitors, old Tektronix scopes from the '60's are notorious for leaky/failed capacitors because they were early adopters of new cap technology and the caps weren't as good as they were represented to Tektronix. Replacing all the old caps on an amp often results in clearly audible improvement to the sound quality, and I've fixed a lot of old test&measurement equipment by replacing caps.
You say that as a joke. A friend of mine is taking a community-college-level intro to becoming a teacher course, and one of the things they did was went to the local art exhibit. Some of his classmates -- these are people who are planning on becoming high-school teachers, remember -- were saying "I think it's awful that they'd show that in public" (a copy of Michelangelo's "David") and "why is he standing so faggy?" (Donatello's "David".)
For that matter, do you remember when John Ashcroft insisted on putting clothes on the statue of Justice in the White House? (I think that was primarily because he was tired of seeing his sweaty red face as he started yet another rant, with Justice's huge bronze boobs behind him, framing his head.)
Plus, if we elected him in 2016, he wouldn't actually take office until Q4, 2018.
If you want them to spark, mostly bisect them -- like butterflying a chicken breast. Cut nearly in half so only a little bit of skin is still connecting the two halves, open them up and lay them on their backs (so the cut face is pointing upwards) and zap. You've just made a dipole antenna roughly tuned for microwave radiation. Every time I've tried this the small uncut section has vaporized with sparks and flames. You could get the same result by putting two grapes just barely touching, I think, but I haven't actually tried that.
And all over the world, parents, pedophiles, and policemen are cackling and rubbing their hands with glee.
Instrumentation amplifiers. They're cheap and astounding. CMRR's of 80 or 100. Take a look at the Analog Designs AD620, for instance. It's superb (even if they are our competitors.) I've used it for making an EKG based on an old Scientific American Amateur Scientist article, and here's a slashdot thread about another AD620-based EKG.
I want to see some good data on the bandwidth and frequency selectivity of this antenna of theirs before I'm going to be wearing one next to any body part I care about, let me put it that way. Water, or more particularly they hydroxyl molecule, has an enormously wide absorption peak in the IR. Anything transmitting anywhere in that range will transfer thermal energy to the hydroxyls. It's possible that they've found a frequency range where nothing biological has any coupling whatsoever, but I want to see some more data. (And yes, I'm looking.) There are, generally speaking, some physical constraints on how narrow an EM peak you can produce.
Piffle. I've said this before and I'll say it again: dustbeams.
Socrates lived about 1500 years before Michelangelo. Neither had any form of copyright, patent, or trademark protection whatsoever, nor did any of the people who lived in the intervening years. It's not clear to me that anyone has ever created anything with patent/copyright/trademark protection that's anywhere nearly as worthwhile as what these two artists created in their respective fields.
Freaking cave people drew pictures on the walls of their caverns. People make stuff. It's what they do. They always have, they always will, whether or not they make money from it.
It's even possible that if we removed all barriers to copying, that would remove the get-rich incentive and its follow-up high-price-of-marketing-and-advertising barriers, and more people would make more beautiful stuff because they wouldn't be comparing their works to the people whose commercially viable products get well-funded.
To chime in with everyone else: AMIGA FOREVER.
I can't claim I'm posting this from my 1000 or 2000 since I'm at work, but they both still run. In 1987 I was, to my knowledge, the only person on campus with a full-color, stereo, multithreading PC, at a fraction of the cost of the monochrome Macs and the VAX mainframe. When someone else got one, we cabled them together and played full-color, networked jet fighter games and people's heads exploded watching them.
You probably can't. It's likely that the amount of heating is a fraction of a degree, and is completely overwhelmed by, say, standing in the hot sun.
But, notice the 'probably' and 'likely'. I don't think there's a correlation between cell phone use and cancer, based on what I've read, but if you'd asked me, 5 years ago, if I thought Vioxx was a great idea, I would've said yes. (I still would, in fact: just not for everyone.) We consistently make decisions based on the best science of the time, and consistently find out that we were wrong. That's science evolving, and I always get wary when people make definitive-sounding statements based on our current understanding.
With all that said, I seem to remember there were cases of cancer caused by people (stewardesses) working with early microwaves, which is why they put interlocks on them to keep them from being used while the door is open, but a quick search on Google finds nothing to support this memory.
The body's pretty good at thermoregulating, although there is evidence that chemically induced reduced body temperature increases lifespan. (note actually being cold doesn't do a bit of good: this requires making the hypothalamus mistakenly believe the body is cold.)
I'm guessing that reducing the body's rest metabolism reduces free radical damage (because free radicals are formed during metabolism.) People have observed that most animals die after about a billion heartbeats, give or take a few (except for humans, presumably as the result of better medical care.) It's likely that oxidative damage over time is responsible for much of aging, and oxidative damage is linear with metabolism (as is heart rate.)
So it's not as simple as just moving to Sweden, although living somewhere full of Swedish women is not too bad a way to spend the rest of your life.
Ummm ... I don't know if you're really unaware of physics here, but if you stick a mouse in a microwave and turn the power to 11, the mouse sort of dies.
The absorption frequencies of DNA might not specifically match cellphone radiative frequencies, but high-power microwave radiation absolutely is dangerous to living tissue. Water absorbs very nicely at most microwave frequencies, and thermally-induced damage to water-containing tissues means the cell has to repair the damage. The thermal damage may be to the DNA, and it may be just to random proteins in the cell, but either way the cell has to start translating/transcribing, and when DNA is unravelled and depaired for transcription, there's a much greater chance of damage to the DNA happening from random processes, free radicals, stuff like that.
The question is: does sufficient damage happen to living tissue from radiation at the frequency and power density seen in cellphones, and I don't think anyone has positively answered that question yet.
Other people have already made some relevant points but I figured I'd add mine.
Licking wounds is better than no treatment whatsoever, which is what dogs got prior to the invention of medicine.
Medicine can be better than either no treatment *or* licking wounds.
Evolution has given the dogs a set of responses; human ingenuity has come up with better ones, but the dogs still have their responses wired-in. Hence the satellite-dish-head.
Conventional wisdom says that open wounds should be covered and slathered in antibiotics. I've found that my injuries recover more quickly and with less scarring if carefully cleaned and then left open to the air, which might be because I live in a very dry, very high-altitude, very clean environment. But those are a special set of circumstances and I wouldn't advise other people to try this blindly, without experimenting. Ditto dogs licking wounds: it could help, it could hurt, but it's known to be counterproductive to healing up stitched wounds. Don't assume that your results are universally true.
My dog would give her left ovary for cooked carrots.
By the way, about the water: amimal metabolism is the process of converting hydrocarbons and carbohydrates to water and carbon dioxide. When you eat, you need water to provide some of the initial hydrogens that serve as electron donors in the mitochondria, but as soon as you've digested some of the food you start producing water as a waste by-product and that serves to fill your future needs. So, if you eat small amounts, slowly, you don't need to drink as much water, but if you eat a bunch in a rush you'll be thirsty. Same goes with dogs.
Or how my friend intended to potty-train his (obviously first) child: give the kid some M&M's every time the kid used the toilet. He said he wasn't sure which went up faster, his grocery bill or the water bill.
>So where were the chip makers?
As someone who works at one of the chip makers, I can answer part of that. You ask your customer "Do you want chip A, that pumps out 1 watt of heat and costs $0.50, or chip B, that pumps out 2 watts and costs $0.47?" They'll choose B every time. Chip A is 4mm x 3mm and dumps 1 watt, chip B is 3mm x 3mm and dumps 2 watts: they'll take chip B. It's an externality thing: the end-users have to pay for air conditioning, but they're buying stuff that's already designed around hot chips. The people turning chips into systems don't pay for the air conditioning, and their profit margin depends on purchase price and die surface area, not heat.
At some point, the end users start buying based on heat, as well as price, and at that point the system manufacturers start choosing chip B, but given the lag time in chip design (we design small quick-to-market power supply chips and it takes about a year from design proposal to silicon in the marketplace) and the lag in marketing's perception of new needs, it takes at least two years for a change in demand to start showing up in supply.
And, of course, that doesn't begin to address the speed/heat relationship, which (as an analog company) we don't have to deal with, but I'm sure that a 10% increase in speed, with a doubling of heat, would outsell the original-speed chip as well.
A setback thermometer that automatically turns the heat down during the day (and even somewhat at night when you're asleep) is also a help.
I feel I should mention that closing the bathroom door during showering isn't a great idea. It retains heat but it also retains moisture and over the long-term that *will* degrade the physical structure of your bathroom: mold grows on the wall studs and under the flooring, condensation on the cold toilet tank runs down and makes the wood subfloor around the base of the toilet rot, and so forth. Moisture is by far the leading cause of structural degradation in houses. If you like your bathroom warm, put a switch-controlled IR heater in the ceiling, so that you (and anything else within line-of-sight of the bulb) are warmed, and leave the exhaust fan on when you're showering. I live in one of the drier parts of the country, with humidity between 10-25%, and when I refurbished the bathroom in my 40 year old house, I had to remove a lot of rotted wood from the walls and replace the flooring. In a more humid environment that damage will happen much more quickly.