Sapere Aude
Tag: environment
The different shapes or letters were thus chosen for research purposes, the goal being to learn which ones produced the best “edge effects” for plants and wildlife on the ground. If the S shape allowed more efficient access to sunlight, in other words, well, then S shapes would be used in the future to help stimulate forest recovery due to their particular pattern of sunlight.
capacity utilization rate is 30% higher for UberX drivers than taxi drivers when measured by time, and 50% higher when measured by km
uber isn’t just much much nicer for consumers, it’s also superior for congestion / the environment. no wonder they’re being fought so hard.
very mad max
An estimated 3000 fish, brought to the roofless, flooded building 10 years ago by nearby vendors in hopes of controlling a burgeoning mosquito population, are being removed by Bangkok Metropolitan Administration staff. Once the fish are captured, they’ll be brought to Thailand’s Department of Fisheries research and development labs before being released into various water bodies across Thailand.
At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since.
Eustace travels through life with perfect equanimity. He has never experienced an awkward moment. During his visit to New York City, I lost him 1 day in Tompkins Square Park. When I found him again, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you’d ever want to meet. They’d offered Eustace crack, which he’d politely declined, but he was chatting with them about other issues.
“Yo, man,” the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, “where’d you buy that dope shirt?”
Eustace was explaining to the drug dealers that he did not, in fact, buy the shirt at all but had made it out of a deer. He described exactly how he had skinned the deer and softened the hide with the deer’s own brains and then sewed the shirt together using strands of sinew taken from alongside the deer’s spine. He told the drug dealers that it’s not a difficult process and that they could do it, too, and that—if they came to visit him in the mountains—he would show them all sorts of wonderful ways to live off nature. “Eustace, we gotta go.”
The drug dealers shook his hand: “Damn, Eustace. You something else.”
The Next National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day is scheduled for October 26, 2013. One or more of your local pharmacies will likely accept your old pharmaceuticals free, no questions. It disposes of them safely and keeps them out of landfills or sewers where they apparently are having ever-worsening effects on water supplies — for example putting female hormones from birth control pills into what you drink from the tap. Go through your cabinet!
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.
Britain’s biggest ever ‘fatberg’ has been removed from a London sewer. The bus-sized lump of wrongly-flushed festering food fat mixed with wet wipes formed in drains under London Road in Kingston, Surrey.
that soap scene from fight club? plausible.
whatever happened to acid rain, the ozone hole, forest dieback, and the many other environmental dangers of the 80s? apathy seems likely or perhaps some things have actually improved? you never hear about these anymore.
By many measures, the Clean Water Act has fulfilled the ambition of its drafters. The sewage discharges that were commonplace in the 1960s are rare. The number of waters meeting quality goals has doubled. Given the successes described above, how has the Clean Water Act done so poorly despite doing so well? Much of the answer lies in the law’s narrow focus. We have made great progress in controlling industrial pipes that discharge waste, but other major sources remain largely unregulated. To gain sufficient congressional support from farm states in 1972, the Clean Water Act largely exempted runoff from agricultural fields and irrigation ditches.
while there is still a long way to go for many rivers, it is encouraging to know that some environmental trends are going in the right direction. as far as i can tell, this success was mostly passive, stopping new pollution and letting sedimentation take care of it. an active approach would have much more impressive results.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 