• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.

    Pretty sure this is only true for some microorganisms. Well, I’m not sure about length of survival time, but I’ve definitely see studies that have shown that lower humidity causes respiratory droplet evaporation, resulting in more airborne virus particles and increasing spread. There is some evidence that this increases infection rates





  • The current tunnel is a relic from a long time ago when trains were slower, and there were competing train lines that had to try and fit through baltimore where they could. If you look at a map of the train line, it actually sharply curves out of the way of that currently Black neighborhood to go under the currently white neighborhood. This means the top speed is 30 mph. Under the new plan, they could hit 100 mph.

    There are other problems with the current tunnel, mainly just down to being old, and those you could fix by redoing it in the same spot, but that wouldn’t fix the speed issue, because the speed is governed by the curvature (and grade).





  • That doesn’t appear to be good journalism. The article does not mention that the reason they want to move the location of the tunnel is to remove the biggest bottleneck on the northeast corridor, and redoing the current tunnel location keeps that bottleneck. Removing that bottleneck would have huge benefits to public transit on the eastern seaboard.

    Additionally, they mention “train emissions”, but don’t mention that the trains that would use the tunnel are all electric. The only time there would be any emissions would be in the case of a fire, which is very uncommon in passenger trains. The highway and other busy streets in the area are a far bigger problem.

    Overall, it seems like standard nimby-ism.




  • They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.

    Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.


  • Yeah, I definitely agree we’d be better off cutting land used for livestock. I guess it’s a slightly different story in Germany because any land you’re using for livestock (or livestock feed) is presumably land that could be used for human food. In America, much of the land used for cattle is ranch land not suitable for agriculture. We do still have massive amounts of land cultivating crops like corn and hay for cattle that is suitable for agriculture, though.

    Just going down that pro and con list, though, it really does seem unclear to me. OA releases less CO2, but it also stores less CO2 in the soil. Lower energy use/higher efficiency per land area is great, but what we really want is lowest energy use per X amount of food. The “enhanced soil and water quality” part is also debatable. this study shows a higher eutrophication potential from OA, so worse for water. It does seem to be dependent on the crop, and the impacts of beef are so insanely higher than plants, that it almost seems irrelevant how you farm crops.

    It’s somewhat like saying that a suburban block is better for the environment than a city block. It’s true, but only if you consider just that plot of land. A city block is way more efficient in terms of per person effect on the environment.

    I think the crux of the problem is that the original tenets of organic agriculture were set by some scientists a hundred years ago, but also people like Rudolph steiner who was an occultist. There’s still a mix of actual science and hippy pseudoscience mixed in to this day. For example, the focus on only “natural” pesticides means using compounds that have higher runoff, persistence in the soil, and broader impacts to insect life. I wish that there was more flexibility for OA standards to change to the best evidence that we have.