www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7mf... Orbital - The Girl With The Sun In Her Head. Long song too. A very solid spot on my "wistful" playlist.

A few recommendations in the electronic genre: Hybrid - Finished Symphony (really the whole "Wide Angle" album as a whole), and Orbital - Halcyon&on&on (you may recognize it as the outro music from Hackers). Comfort music for me, but you may not have heard them.

My initial response was mainly to defend Alec, in that saying "the refrigerant is slowed down by the capillary" is a perfectly reasonable way to convey to a non-engineer that the capillary is the part of the loop that limits the loop flow rate, while the rest of us know it's more complicated.

I'm familiar with conservation of mass in a system, and these posts are too short to get into a meaningful and nuanced engineering discussion. I've done choked steam flow calculations at work a few times - critical pressure ratio, solve for max entropy, etc. I get your point though. :)

I.e., I interpret this as "the capillary tube imposes a mass flow rate upper limit, that limit is lower than free flowing refrigerant without a capillary, therefore the mass flow rate in the system is decreased by the presence of the capillary."

But I looked at it from the perspective of "what happens with the capillary that wouldn't without it", and you may have been thinking about it differently (and correctly relative to your frame of reference). Compressible flow is weird, I have to look it up every time. (2/2)

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "[...] fluid flow velocity increase[s] due to the larger specific volume of the fluid until sonic velocity is reached and [it reaches Mach 1]. At this point the flow becomes choked where the mass flow rate reaches an upper limit [...]’. (1/2)

Not to "well ackshually", but it depends on which definition of "slows down" you're using. You're correct that the velocity increases (potentially up to the sonic velocity to fully choke the flow), but with the reduced diameter the mass flow rate decreases, hence its use for throttling.

In my house in the northeast US from the 1960s we have metal boxes in the walls. All the cables coming in have grounds that are bundled and bonded to the box, but often there's no dedicated ground wire from that bundle to the outlet (the screws do it). I've updated as I replace.