Month: October 2013

Biggest polluter in history

This guy invented CFC which depleted the ozone layer, and added lead to gasoline, leading to widespread lead poisoning and crime (lead makes people into dumb criminals).
2022-02-23:

It has been suggested that the Roman period should be called the “Lead Age,” an archaeological successor to the Iron Age. Lead was used extensively in Roman construction, because it is malleable and resists corrosion when in contact with air and water. Molten lead was poured around iron clamps to join column drums together and to secure marble facades to blockwork. Lead sheets and solder were used to form and seal waterproof joints. Most famously, lead was used in Roman waterworks: to form pipes that transport water at pressure, to plumb fountains and baths, for rain gutters and roofs, and as tanks to store water, including potable water, for various purposes. It has been determined that the piped water of the city of Rome may have contained 40x the lead of natural spring water before 250, falling to 14x by the year 500, as pipes became choked with scale, cracked, and failed, and the broader water system fell into disrepair.
Contrary to a popular theory, it is unlikely that many Romans ingested toxic levels of lead from their water pipes. Although lead is soluble in water, calcium carbonate deposited by hard water provided a barrier between water and lead. Moreover, calcium prevents the gut from absorbing lead. Drinking hard water transported in lead pipes did not present a major health risk to Romans, although in soft-water areas the risks were higher, and lead carbonate might form a less protective scale inside pipes. If not from their water, however, Romans contrived many additional ways to ingest and absorb lead. It was used for medicinal purposes, in cooking and for mixing sauces, and for preserving and sweetening wine. Roman saucepans manufactured from a mixture of lead and tin were used to produce reductions of must (unfermented grape juice) called, according to its concentration, sapa, defrutum, or caroenum, all full of lead. Salt was produced in lead brine pans, heated to evaporate water, before the salt was chipped and scraped away.
At 3rd-5th-century cemeteries, lead concentrations were in a range from 100 to 250 mg/g, compared with c. 14 mg/g measured in the ribs of Neolithic farmers. Natives of Roman Britain were also far shorter than their Neolithic predecessors and, just as strikingly, shorter than the population that followed them. Women were on average only 152 centimeters tall and men 164 centimeters. The average length of a Roman’s thighbone was 3 centimeters shorter than that of an Anglo-Saxon. While changes in diet and disease burden after the Roman conquest were consequential, data suggest that Roman-age Britons were on average eating more proteins, including a range of seawater fish and mollusks, than their Iron Age ancestors, which should have led to an increase in stature.

One must wonder, therefore, at the impact of extremely elevated lead concentrations, since any level of lead contamination is known to stunt growth in children.

Existence

I hope someone optioned this. Brin is a very strong scifi author.

2015-05-15: I finally read this. I’d give it 3.5 stars. The story is compelling, the thing that grates (a lot) are the constant sermons from Brin. He’s not wrong, i just find the way he makes his arguments to be really tedious (you can get a sample from his website), it is full of “I told you so” and “I wrote about this x years ago”. The constant self-slapping on the back really detracts.

Government occasionally shuts down

I noticed a bug over the past week or so and it seems reproducible: Go to US Government. US Government is shut down. Hope you can resolve this soon. Love this project and would like to continue using it.

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Um, has anyone seen the crazy fragmentation in the congressional district db? That can’t be helping things.
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It seems that allocateFunds depends on the Congress class without any proper error handling, causing a complete shut-down of all non-essential system services. Perhaps a reserve allocation is required to ensure the system can use it when no resources are available.
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It’s a serious architectural issue. I think it’s time to go back to the drawing board and design something with scalability and modularity in mind, and have a talk with the client about the dangers of feature creep and monkeypatching every time some clueless executive wants something “right now” and can’t be bothered to pay to do it right. I wouldn’t even bother forking this; just redesign from the ground up. It’ll be cheaper in the long run.