Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 3: Fire

It's a wet, miserable day, and I'm just getting the fire going.

Fire seems so intrinsic to human existence that we always feel more alive, somehow, when we are in the presence of fire. I've no idea how different this feels for people who have experienced the unpleasant side of fire, but for me the need to respect it, as well as to be enlivened by it, is all part of the magic.

An old house cannot really be true to itself without fire. The Victorian house, to my mind, is designed around a few fairly simple principles:

1. Shelter from the weather - in its original form the Victorian house is not especially good at this, prone as it is to draughty windows, leaky roof/wall connections and damp cellars, but nevertheless it fulfils the basic human need for shelter;

2. Front - generally the Victorians provided you with a grand front door and entrance way and a prestigious front reception room, even if the rest of the house was thrown together from bits of old rubble and driftwood held together with sand and horsehair - so it's relatively easy to show off;

3. Fresh air - the Victorians were obsessed with fresh air, despite the fact that outside air was usually anything but clean, and inside buildings this reflected itself in the high ceilings and sliding sash windows, which enabled fumes and soot from gas lighting and wheezing children to rise to the tops of rooms and be whisked out thanks to bracing draughts;

4. Fire - chimneys form the structural buttressing of the Victorian house, most rooms had open fires for warmth, and coal was delivered via a chute in the cellar, burned at will in vastly inefficient dog grates, and ornate chimney pots celebrated the affluent disposal of dirty exhaust gases into the city air;

5. Servants - if you could afford servants, they'd do your cooking and laundry in a miniscule corner of your house, and sleep in the draughty attic. If you couldn't afford servants, you'd soon learn to live like them, discovering how small a space it was possible to cook and clean your own stuff in.

Modern needs may have forced us to rebel against the tiny kitchens and sculleries, but the other principles seem to hold true to what we enjoy about living in old houses. However, the challenge of heating these big, tall rooms has taken us through the 20th century's era of big, clunky central heating systems, style-free gas fires, electric panel heaters, and "living flame effects" and has now rekindled our love of fire, but in the cleaner, more controlled guise of enclosed stoves with recirculating combustion chambers that minimise smoke emissions and create much more efficient heating than open fires.

In this, our first - and mercifully mild - winter in this house, we've survived almost exclusively on our Morso woodfuel stove. It has worked flat out while there is no other heating in the house, and because we're only living on one floor, it has coped OK. But the really interesting thing has been the way that lighting and feeding the stove has defined the rhythm of our day-to-day lives now for almost five months, in a way that we hadn't anticipated. It takes planning to make sure the wood supply is adequate, time to clean and prepare the stove, and practice and experience to work out how best to set the fire and work it up from cold into a proper inferno, and keep it going until bedtime. You learn to look at a scrap of wood, or a bit of log, and gauge how well and for how long it will burn. You look at junk mail in a new light - "Look darling, someone's sent us some more firelighters!" And often it is much more fun to sit and watch the fire than to see what's on TV.

The question of how "green" a woodstove is is a difficult one - really it must depend on the management of the source of the wood. Burning bits of old floorboarding and stud walling is kind of using up embodied energy in the building, and that can only go on for so long - but it has helped us through our first winter. However, it is hard to imagine a house like this without a real fire in it. One of the most intriguing things, though, is seeing how many bits of wood it takes to keep you warm for an evening, and completely re-evaluating the unthinking act of turning a thermostat up or down on a modern heating system, or putting the washing machine on. Suddenly each turn of that dial becomes directly related to the idea that somewhere, a few miles away, an extraordinarily big and fearfully hot fire is burning to supply domestic energy. Being closer to the fire brings you face to face with the basic issue of how to keep warm, and I don't want to forget that when the central heating is back.

Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 2

A bit like watching a TV series on the internet, I need to cram some of these blog posts to catch up.

Episode 2 is a technical one, all about energy efficiency. Just as I started writing this I learned that the Government has decided to scrap its proposals to tie in compulsory energy efficiency measures to home improvements through Green Deal finance. The plan had been that if you extend your house - increasing the space that needs heating and/or cooling, you would have to install measures so that your net energy consumption was at least no bigger.

The energy efficiency imperative in old housing stock is unbelievably enormous. It accounts for almost half of the UK's carbon emissions, and because so much existing stock will still be with us in 50 or more years' time, it puts the whole national carbon reduction strategy into the realms of farce, unless powerful measures for retrofitting are introduced. Sure, it's not fair to force people to stump up for this out of their own pockets, and the Green Deal is one way to spare their pain, by using their energy bills in effect as a loan scheme to cover upfront costs. But surely, compelling people to take action on their energy consumption when undertaking home improvements they'd decided to do - and pay for - anyway, need not be controversial. It just needs to be well-managed.

But no - the weedy Government has backed down again. However, one thing you can be sure of is that people with big, old, draughty, single-glazed houses with minimal insulation and ancient heating systems will be getting on the energy-saving case themselves and, I suspect, in their droves. The simple push for this is rising energy costs: big old houses are just getting too expensive to heat - and gradually it will make them unaffordable to live in. So people like me, whether or not they care about sustainability, really have little choice now but to start doing it for themselves.

A friend quoted to me a few months ago a mantra that there are 3 steps to doing this properly: insulate [the house]; a-rate [the appliances]; generate [your own energy]. In that order. That's why it's been a bit frustrating that there was a clamour last year for solar PV generation on roofs, whilst it's still weirdly possible to buy new appliances that aren't at least A-rated, and schemes to get serious about insulation are not getting much attention. There are some good insulation schemes, but these mainly apply to cavity walls - which pre 1930s houses don't have - and lofts - which you may also not have if you instead have an attic room or loft conversion. So older houses fall into the category of "hard-to-treat" and get left behind by the incentive schemes. My insulation needs to go inside my rooms, swallowing architectural features like lava pouring through quaint villages at the foot of a volcano.

But there is a big plus-side to this! I'm refurbishing anyway, and because I'm not eligible for an incentive scheme I can work out how to do it in a way that I think is architecturally appropriate, I can test out different methodologies and I don't have to let in a stampede of quick-fit installers who've just moved over from fitting hatchet-job replacement windows to cash in on the latest incentive scheme. I should also be able to measure the energy improvements in terms of their effectiveness and cost.

For my house, I have a kind of energy-saving shopping list, and it's really designed to make the house as liveable as possible. These are the main measures I want to install.

Insulate:

convert all windows from single-glazing to low-E double-glazing;

internally insulate all internal walls and roof;

insulate the ground floors (one suspended timber floor and three cellars);

thermally separate the cellar to give a cold room (to reduce refrigeration energy) and a hot room (to provide a drying room and reduce laundry energy);

provide some acoustic insulation against the party wall to improve privacy.

A-rate:

fit a new central heating system with condensing boiler feeding underfloor heating to all floors;

ensure all appliances are as energy-efficient as possible;

(hopefully) install a water meter and smart-metering of gas and electricity;

design room layouts, materials etc to optimise control and comfort at lower ambient temperatures;

use a high-efficiency woodfuel stove for supplementary heat on ground floor.

Generate:

install mechanical heat recovery ventilation from warm, wet rooms;

consider solar water heating.

I'll go into more detail on some or all of these measures as the project progresses. Tune in next time...

AW.

Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 1

Well, it has been several months already since my wife and I bought a very delapidated, neglected Victorian house and started to resuscitate it, and this is the first time I've blogged about it. This is partly because I've been too busy, but also because I wanted to get a sense of how I really felt about it before I started writing anything down.

As often happens, it was quite an unexpected trigger that inspired me to start writing about the house. I was listening to a back episode of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, and one guest was the poet Paul Farley, who has been illuminating the mundane, suburban life of Northern towns. In the programme the discussion touched on one of his poems in which the cellar of a particular house is a living character who listens in, observes and comments on the goings on in the rest of the house.

This idea crystallised for me the reason why "doing up" an old house is such a personal adventure and one that can so easily be messed up. When you first take on an old place, it is a husk of the life that, until moments before you collect the keys, was being lived in it. If, as was the case with our house, the previous occupant had long since lost heart in the place, rarely bothering even to clean it, let alone tend to its underlying needs, you open the door on your first day to a sad, yellowed hangover. And your first instinct is just to rip it all out and start again.

The trouble is, ripping it all out is actually something you have to do quite carefully. It's a bit like using leaches to eat the diseased flesh from wounds, and making sure they don't start on the healthy stuff. An old house has usually been badly abused as well as neglected - previous shoddy workmanship is often more damaging than simple neglect. On top of that, there is now an urgent need to make old buildings like this much more energy efficient. This puts a lot of the architectural charm of sliding sash windows, high ceilings, plaster mouldings and fireplaces under real pressure - often to the extent that you have to destroy or bury those features and then make decisions about whether, and how, to replicate them.

But I think the biggest responsibility is to create a home that is beautiful, relevant and fully-functioning in the modern age, without either clinging nostalgically to everything that charms us about the Victorians, or becoming all "boutique hotel" about the place and having over-priced, overblown and under-usable details straight out of a lifestyle magazine. This is where a bit of time to reflect, and a sense of what Paul Farley was getting at with his cellar imagery, comes in. Because what we really need to do is to listen to the stories our house is telling us, and then to develop the next chapter. We need a way to discern which architectural features are fundamental to the house's character, and which can be altered in a spirit of progress. We need to prove that a house needn't be cold and draughty just because that's how it's always been, but that walls and floors needn't be completely straight and true either. And we need helpers, engineers and tradespeople who are also willing to listen to the house, and treat is part of our family, rather than just taking the "this is how it is done, so this is how we'll do it" school.

People often comment on how new-build houses lack character, compared to old ones. There are some technical reasons for this, to do with street layouts and the regulation, automation and standardisation of constructional details. You could argue that character comes from the element of educated guesswork that went into earlier generations of building. However, in much larger part I'm coming to learn that houses acquire character by telling the story of how they have lived, and of the previous lives that have been lived in them. So it's actually the adaptability of an old house that enables it to acquire character.

The first thing we did when we bought this house was to rip out the worst of the havoc that the previous occupant had left behind. This was not as cathartic as I had hoped. But the second thing we did was to have a drinks party for friends and neighbours; and suddenly we began to sense that this place was going to become home, and that it would be good.

The following day, we started the demolition.....

AW.

What the Dickens is Sustainability?

It would be remiss of me to let the bicentennial of Charles Dickens pass without a mention as one of history's great progressive voices. When I say progressive, I mean one who sees the role of public policy as being to tackle the needs of the have-nots, rather than to protect the privileges of the haves. It's also significant, in our evidence-obsessed age, that he made his point through the medium of fiction, full of caricatures and dramatic licence, rather than through a dry, factual presentation of the dismal, unfair and unhealthy society he saw around him.

At the "How to Plan for Nature" workshop in Hamburg recently, I was describing the move from a "conservative" approach to a "restorative" approach in nature policy. The conservative approach involves preserving the best of our natural assets, which is fine insofar as it goes, but results in those best bits becoming isolated and fragmented, and eventually declining, and any less-valued assets are allowed to decline anyway. The restorative approach attempts to reverse decline by enabling valued assets to grow, and also tackling deficit in other areas so that, over time, the net worth of our natural environment increases and degraded environments are renewed and nurtured.

It seems both inevitable and desirable that this paradigm shift takes place: it has been a long time coming, but is now increasingly enshrined in international policy on nature. Perhaps the terms "nature conservation" and "conservationist" will gradually be replaced in the lexicon by "restoration" and "restorationist", clunky though they may sound at present. Or perhaps, to we should try out the word "progressive"? Should we push the language of "progressive" environmental policies, in the sense of promoting the needs of degraded environments as a higher priority than protecting what is already well-protected?

Against this backdrop I was intriged to hear several discussions in the media this week about "Conservatism" in the sense of the ideological context of Conservative politics. I admit to a patchy historical knowledge here, but the underlying principle is that "not all change is good, and so some things should be conserved". A particularly interesting take on this came in Start the Week, where the outspoken writer Peter Hitchens identified Margaret Thatcher as distinctly non-Conservative and more extreme-liberal, and took the view that the UK's Conservative Party is no longer anything of the sort. Deregulation of the market certain seems liberal, or even neo-liberal, in that it simply favours those who can make money and sell things, regardless of their social class, education or connections.

What really interests me here is not the machinations of the UK Conservative Party, but what "conservatism" means in a bigger sense. If Thatcherism was not Conservative, but liberal, then are Liberals liberal, or progressive? Someone said, "If you want to see who has the power in a society, look who has the tallest buildings". The truth in this is self-evident and pithy: before the 19th century it was invariably churches that dominated city skylines, then these were dwarfed by the tall chimneys of factories, and more recently by skyscrapers consecrated to the banking gods. As an aside, in many UK cities the tallest buildings of the moment are hotels and apartment blocks, suggesting that sleeping is about the most powerful thing we've done since 1990. But more to the point, if "Conservatism" means conserving power in society for those who currently have it (the breaking of which is the driving force behind the Labour movement), then Thatcherism was about moving power away from left-wing trade unions. In Sheffield the former (empty) headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers may not be especially tall but it is certainly domineering. Thatcherism didn't really have a view on whom power would move towards, and to give the Iron Lady some credit she may have intended to move it towards 'liberals' like herself - but that's not how it turned out, because the free market took over. One way of looking at it is that the market saw a power vacuum and jumped in, and then established a new status quo that "conservatism" was all too ready and willing to protect.

So here are some challenging questions:

If economic downturn results in no tall buildings being built, does this mean there is also a power vacuum inherent in downturn?

If so, why does downturn seem to be a catalyst for "radical overhauls" rather than "improving things, but not throwing out the baby with the bathwater"?

Is a period of economic gloom therefore actually the perfect time to be articulating and pursuing environmentally progressive policy and not, as many would have us believe, a time when environment takes a back seat?

AW.

A Christmas Message

Christmas Days always seem to start strangely, and today is no exception.

It's 5am in Crozon, Brittany, North-Western France. I've been at least half awake since 3, and have moved from a fairly uncomfortable bed to a luxurious sofa. I read the first few pages of “Ray Charles: Man and Music” by Michael Lydon, sleepily became stuck on an image of the flatlands of Northern Florida, and then decided to give up and just listen to the ticking of the grandfather clock. I decided to see where the ticking took me.

By daytime, the room I am in is dominated by its south-facing sea view, a captivating and ever-changing panorama of skies and cloud formations, rocks, sea and shorelines that are one minute bathed in sunshine and the next minute cast into gothic silhouette. Stand outside after dark, and your eye is drawn upwards to the stars, especially after about 10.30pm when the streetlights are switched off and the backcloth of millions upon millions of distant stars show up behind the few prominent ones that townies like me can usually see. The dominant sound is the sea, washing back and forth on a pebbly beach about half a mile away, plus the occasional calls of owls having a pow-wow across trees or chimneys above and behind.

But right now, all of that is barred by the window shutters, and if I opened them I'd wake the rest of this sleeping house. I'm acutely aware of the darkness outside, but I can't actually see it. It's like I'm inside an envelope. I know where the opening is and how to open it, and what's outside it, but it's the wrong moment to break out, so instead I have to to focus on what's inside.

Despite the comfort of the sofa and the large pile of Christmas presents in front of me, it's the ticking of this clock that now completely commands the room. It's an impressive old thing, made of probably oak or walnut, and it ticks once a second with a very even rhythm. You know how the sound of some ticking clocks are affected by the weight of the hands, so that as the second hand is dragged up from 7 to 11 it becomes a grudging shuffle, 11 to 1 is all quiet before it stumbles down to 5 like someone running down a hill and struggling to maintain their balance, and finally loitering around 6 and gasping for a rest before the next ascent? Well, there's none of that. This clock just ticks. A slight up note on one tick and a drop on the next, but that might even be a trick of my ears. There are subtler shifts in rhythm. Sometimes I can picture heavy feet pounding up stone steps to a citadel, and occasionally there's something more rounded, like a chain of railway navvies passing blocks or bolts from one person to the next and making neat piles at the end. Yet no matter how long I listen, and how much imagery I try to conjure, the overwhelming sense is that time is just carrying on, at its own pace, totally disinterested in me or anyone else, and I'm helpless to try and tame it.

I start to ask myself questions and to try and play with this inexorable rhythm. Can I synchronise my breathing to it? Not really, I end up breathing too slow or too fast, can't quite get a natural pace. If I could get my heartbeat to fall into line, would it take the 60bpm of a resting athlete or the 120bpm of an incessant pop song? 60 is divisible by three, so why can I only hear these ticks in twos or fours?

Finally, after two hours of listening closely, I've picked up a new sound. In the interval between each tick, as the pendulum turns for its next swing, there's a faint sort of tailing off, slightly lazy or apologetic, like some threads on frayed jeans dragging behind the shoes of someone meandering along a quiet road. Its at odds with the clipped, 'very British' rigour of the rest of the ticking, and in a way I feel like I've found a way in, a chink in its armour. Gradually I realise that I've already conjured several different scenes out of this clock, and with patience it could give me more. Maybe there's something colonial about it: the way that settlers and civil servants in far-flung places tried to assert the reassuring rhythms of their homeland, and usually ended up with something slightly out of kilter. As though, perhaps, the unerring tick of the trusty grandfather clock, uncrated after a month at sea and put up reverently in office or drawing room, just ends up exposing the fact that everything around it will ultimately refuse to conform to its imposed order.

I've time for a coffee and some more about Ray Charles, before the family wakes up and Christmas begins. And before the clock's purposeful walk is drowned out by the chaotic dance of voices, pots and pans, plates and glasses, ripping of giftwrap and post-prandial snoring.

Happy Christmas.

Moving Target: Proceed with Caution.

I'm currently bidding for two pieces of work that both involve facilitating aspects of strategic planning. This puts my brain into a very specific gear, where I contemplate what good strategic planning actually entails and, in particular, why strategies are so rarely implemented properly.

I suggest that a major reason for lack of implementation is not paying attention to moving targets.

I'm often fascinated by the way in which driving a car offers lots of analogies for thinking about how life works. This is particularly odd when you consider for how short a phase of civilisation people have been driving cars, and therefore how alien it ought to be to our psyche in evolutionary terms.

Today I was driving my car in the busy morning traffic. Some people of an environmentalist bent will immediately think me a fool for even contemplating such a time and energy-wasting endeavour but, like most other people, I have a complex and self-fulfilling justification for doing it. I should add that I don't do it very often.

Anyway, part of my journey was on a fairly busy stretch of motorway, and I entertained myself by observing patterns in the traffic around me. What I noticed was that when I concentrated on vehicles much further ahead - say 10 or so vehicles ahead, I actually drove a little more slowly. I think there may have been several reasons for this. Maybe I was responding more to the average speed of the traffic, rather than to the ebb and flow of roadspeed of the vehicles immediately around me. Maybe I was noticing when cars a long way in front began to slow down, and slowing down accordingly, rather than only reacting when the car directly in front slowed. Maybe I was setting my speed on the basis of seeing a couple of hundred metres in front, and then instinctively slowing if my view was impeded by nearer traffic.

You can see where I'm heading. It occurred to me that perhaps we instinctively anticipate hazards and adjust our behaviour accordingly, but if we shorten our time horizon we don't allow for hazards that are beyond it. In a car, if we are only staring at the back of the car in front, the only hazard we anticipate is that that particular car will do something we need to react to, whereas if we look in front of that car we can begin to assess what that driver is responding to.

When we do strategic planning, we tend to look to a point in the future and see it as a fixed point in time: we are trying to achieve a series of goals by the time we get there. But then we draw our timeline and identify obstacles and interim targets along the way, and tend - instinctively perhaps - to try and tackle each one in turn, as we get to it. While we concentrate on the nearest target, we're not watching what is happening to the subsequent ones.

Of course, what is happening is that those further away obstacles and targets are moving and morphing, being influenced by the decisions we're taking (or not taking) now, and the people who are monitoring what is happening further into the future are not the same people who are responding to immediate challenges.So by the time decision-makers have formulated what to do about the most immediate challenge, the nature of the subsequent challenges has altered, and the strategy is already on its way to redundancy.

Therefore, making sustainable strategies implementable means we need to bear three things in mind:

1) We are always working towards moving targets, not fixed ones, which means we need to be alert for movement;

2) Future targets move not only due to changes beyond our control, which we can't predict, but also because the decisions we're taking now are shaping the future all the time;

3) If we focus our gaze on the more distant, longer-term goals, the nearer ones are likely to be less challenging, whereas if we concentrate on the nearer, shorter-term goals, the distant ones may well be more challenging than they are now.

AW.

The Unlikelihood Principle

This week I have been helping some friends insulate their house. It is an old, solid-walled, terraced house, and we are aiming to achieve energy performance not too far from that of a modern house by fitting insulated panels to the inside of the outside walls. The construction is basically 50mm of rigid, foil-backed insulation board plus a layer of normal plasterboard, ready for redecorating.

Now, the standard size of an insulation board or plasterboard sheet is 2.4m by 1.2m, and up until today (when these materials arrive) my main concern had been getting these sheets up the narrow stairs. However, today is very, very windy, and now I'm much more worried about actually getting them into the house in the first place. This recalls Venturi's Law*, that windspeed is directly proportion to the surface area of the material you are attempting to carry. Practical applications include design of racing yachts, and not choosing to transport sheet building materials on windy days.

I have lived in traditionally windy cities - Sheffield and Newcastle - for most of the last 20 years, and I know that even in such cities there are probably only about 10 or 15 days per year when it is genuinely, seriously windy. That means on any given day there is about a 1 in 24 chance of high wind. I would guesstimate that I carry sheet materials outdoors only about 4 times a year, so on any day there is a 1 in 91.25 chance that I'll be carrying a sheet of plasterboard across the street. Therefore, if I stuck a pin in the calendar on, say, 4th February, the chances that I'd find myself carrying plasterboard in high winds on that day would be 1 in 2,190. That would mean only one day in every six years would I encounter this unfortunate coincidence. However, anecdotal evidence contradicts this, since I'm pretty sure it's windy almost every time I try to carry something.

I'm not paranoid and I don't believe I'm being singled out. I first noticed the phenomenon when carrying architectural models from home to university in Newcastle, where the flimsy polystyrene versions of my designs were always destined for some destructive weather-testing before a tutorial. Since moving to Sheffield I have often noticed other architecture students putting their models through the same testing processes.

This got me to thinking: supposing I'm not a victim of Venturi's Law, but of something altogether more insidious: unfortunate unlikelihood. That's to say, the less likely it is that I'm doing something, the more likely it is that something unlikely will happen at that moment. The evidence for the existence of this phenomenon is strong. If you use a train every day, it will occasionally be late; if you use it once a year, it is almost bound to be late that day. If you cycle every day, you will occasionally get wet; if you cycle once a month, you are certain to get caught in a monsoon. If you eat oysters every day, you may get a bad one and be sick once every couple of years; if you eat oysters only on Christmas Eve, you will inevitably spend Christmas Day feeling very poorly and vowing never to eat oysters again. If you drink alcohol every day you might have five nasty hangovers during the course of a year, and maybe one evening to be embarrassed about; if you only drink on bank holidays, you'll still have five nasty hangovers per year, and at least three causes to be ashamed of yourself.

The question is, is it possible to harness this force of nature, this convergence of statistical fragility with anecdotal certainty, and turn into something positive and useful? Does fortunate unlikelihood also work? For example, let's say I currently spend 1 day in every 10 days looking for new business, and actually win a commission once every 90 days. Now supposing I only spent 1 day in 90 looking for new business, is it more or less likely that my marketing efforts would pay off? Or, if my friend Filbert asked 10 women to marry him, would he be more or less likely to get a positive response than if he only asked one woman?

I suspect the only way to answer these questions is by empirical experimentation, but there is certainly a direct application to research methods. A good example is the kind of questionnaires used in transport or retail research, which begin, "How often do you use this service/shop, all the time, often, or rarely?" Conventionally, the subsequent answers of frequent customers will be considered more significant, because their repeated patronage makes them more valuable customers. However, the law of unlikelihood dictates that the customers who use the service/shop very rarely are much more likely to have 'outlier' experiences - good or bad - and therefore focusing the research on those occasion patrons will enable more detailed study of how, and why, things might go spectacularly right or wrong for any given patron on any given visit.

A closing conundrum: my grandmother always used to speed up the arrival of a bus by lighting a cigarette. She probably smoked about 10 cigarettes a day, and used the principle that a bus was more likely to arrive if it was interrupting a smoke by doing so. It often worked, but not always. Given that I've smoked fewer than 10 cigarettes in 37 years, it is almost infinitely unlikely that I would light up whilst waiting for a bus, so I couldn't actually use a cigarette to summon a bus without destroying the unlikelihood of my doing so. On the other hand, a chain smoker would always be smoking when the bus arrived, but his decision to smoke would have no effect on the bus's arrival. Therefore, does the greatest overall power lie in actions that are only moderately unlikely?

AW.

*Note: Venturi's Law is different from, though not wholly unrelated to, the Venturi Effect. The main difference is that the latter actually exists.