teslabox

I don't post on reddit much, but I've gotten more off-channel messages asking for details about my quip in a post about how my friend realized her period was 2 weeks late, and how she got her period to come back. Then she went to Planned Parenthood for a free blood test. She was told she'd had a miscarriage, and don't do that again.

The essential oil of the plant that Nirvana sang about is highly toxic. The tea is relatively safe. My friend used a 3-prong approach to inducing her period, not just the tea.

This tweet makes the case that the leaker was probably Justice Bryer's clerk: https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/15216859689396305...

Looking at the present article, while these bio-lights are diffuse, they are probably the wrong spectrum. Due to the nature of the light-sensitive proteins in our eyes, humans do best with orange light at night. Our peripheral vision is most sensitive to blue light, and there's a reflex where we look at blue light in our periphery. Blue light is exhausting for us. Intense blue light is blinding.

Back when the lighting companies had all the money in the world to research their lights, scientists figured out how to use artificial light safely. Now that those scientists have mostly retired, and people alive today have no idea what it was like for artificial light to be precious, we're forgotten everything our predecessors figured out. Just last night I was at my current city's newest hotel, and while the lights are mostly pretty good, they also have a bunch of 5000K LED fixtures mounted at exactly eye level. Light is mostly useful to us humans when is bounces off of things.

In the 1970's the outdoor lighting industry standardized on High Pressure Sodium bulbs, because they're incredibly energy efficient AND because they're an almost blue-free light source. Low pressure sodium [LPS] bulbs are even more efficient and a perfect single-wavelength of orange (~590nm), but only a few cities (Flagstaff Arizona) really standardized on LPS.

I was whining to someone about how Phoenix, Arizona switched out its safe HPS streetlamps for 5000K LEDs in 2016 (I think they switched these to ~3000K after people complained about 5000K's effects on wildlife). The guy knew exactly what I was talking about, and said "I wrote the 1982 report that resulted in Phoenix's 1984 lighting ordinances." He'd recommended LPS, but the police didn't like how people have no color perception when things are lit with the single wavelength of LPS. HPS has a bit of a spread of spectrum from red -> yellow, with a peak at the pleasant orange color.

Arizona DOT is gradually switching out the safe HPS lights for defective LEDs. At first these were 5000K, but I watched them switch out one intersection's functional 5000K light for what I think is 3000K. LED streetlights' light is not nearly diffuse enough. I've come to referring to the bright spot under the lights as a 'cone of destruction', and have taken to lowering my car's street lamp visors to protect my eyes from the glare of passing under these streetlights.

Flagstaff Arizona uses pure-orange LED streetlamps, now that LPS bulbs are no longer being manufactured. These are wonderful... Not as nice as LPS, but 1000x better than "white" LED streetlamps.

If you're interested in the guy's 1982 report about street lights, give this comment an upvote, and I'll maybe work on that blog post.

When my dog’s time is up, I’ll either use CO2 or nitrogen on her. CO2 is sometimes used when cattle are slaughtered. Put the dog in a box, fill with CO2. Easy way to go.

There’s an 1940’s book/movie, Green for Danger, with a strategy for hiding your self-termination with industrial gasses.

While I think Bush's corn ethanol policy was stupid [2], I've come around to thinking there might be a silver lining. [South] Korea was supposed to be getting 300,000mt of corn from Ukraine. They went on the open market and couldn't find replacement corn for delivery in the April-May period: https://www.agricensus.com/Article/S-Korean-feed-makers-mull...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20061802

From my earlier comment [0]:

> Our modern Civilization is more vulnerable to an average once-a-millennium volcanic eruption than it's ever been, on account of our numbers and our dependency on supply chains for our sustenance.

> From the linked article: "In fact, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated the 2012 worldwide food storage to last for 74 days." (pg. 9)

> Grains are useful because they store well. Storage is not economical, but it is essential for reducing the suffering which would result from an 1816-like scenario in our modern world.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595353

/methinks it's much better to have a 7-year supply of grain than a 74-day supply.

Wars also cause tremendous disruption to supply chains. The conflict in Ukraine is going to cause massive problems for food distribution.

What do you do with your corn surplus, when it's just not needed? What do you do with stored grains after they're 7 years old, or if they become moldy? Ethanol seems logical.

If we hit an oh-shit moment (loss of growing seasons due to a volcanic winter/war/etc), we can turn off the ethanol plants and use the corn to supply calories for people.

tl/dr: essential to turn off the ethanol plants until we have 7 years of grains stored up.

Good point, thanks. The fried shrimp I had was soaked in oil. My understanding is that unsaturated oils are somewhat stabilized by saturated fats. Maybe I'll take some coconut oil chasers if I go to BWW again.

"Vegetable" oils weren't commonly used as food until it was figured out how to deodorize them. Mostly they were used to preserve wood (as paints and stains), then the paint industry figured out how to use petroleum distillates. The moniker 'vegetable oil' is a marketing term to trick people into thinking these products are edible.

McDonald's formerly used a blend of tallow, lard and coconut oil, iirc. The Tipping Point guy... .. . Malcolm Gladwell, had a podcast about this, McDonald's Broke My Heart: https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/mcdonalds-broke-my-heart/

Emotional stress increases the brain's demand for glucose and other nutrients. Orange juice is a great anti-stress food. B-vitamins are also required for the metabolism. Iodine is needed for thyroid hormone.

Supplemental carbon dioxide opens arteries to improve circulation in the brain. (Get a paper bag and stick your face in it.)

> If you eat out, all restaurants and fast food is either cooked in it or it's in the food they are serving.

Was recently searching for information about the restaurant industry’s switch from classic fryer oils to seed oils. I ran across something about Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) getting sued by a vegetarian because they’d assumed BWW used ‘vegetable’ oil in their fryers. BWW’s attorneys got the suit thrown out.

On learning this, I added BWW to my list of restaurants to patronize.

Had a friend buy me lunch last Thursday. She ordered fried shrimp from the appetizer menu. They were very greasy - I pulled off the breading to hopefully avoid the oil. The next day I cautioned her about eating foods fried in vegetable oil. We went to BWW that night. I ordered wings and French fries. Would order again.

[0] BWW lawsuit report: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-buffalo-wild-lawsuit-idUS...

It'd be nice if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would require automotive manufacturers to use safe LEDs. The regulations need to be updated to reflect the reality that people are blinded by too much blue light at night.

France used to require headlamps to have yellow tint [0], to knock out most of the blue. But nowhere else in Europe had this requirement, and the glass was tinted yellow with cadmium, a heavy metal.

[0] https://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/lights/light_color/...

"new vehicles in Europe are type-approved, unlike in the US, where OEMs self-certify that their new products meet the required regulations."

I think there must be no regulations about the color temperature of headlights, just how many watts the lights put out.

"to ensure that drivers on curved roads aren't subjected to glare."

Glare is the uncomfortable feeling we experience when our eyes are overpowered. The regulators don't actually care about glare anymore. We're all being blinded, only the ignorant like blue-white headlights.

These links are to two of my previous comments about how I protect my eyes from blue-white LEDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962021 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28332748

Some online shops make an effort to validate vision prescriptions, others do not. My most recent contact order was through Lens Direct, who did not validate. 12 years ago I gave an incorrect phone number for the optometrist. They tried to call but did not connect, and sent me an email: 'we're going to send your contacts anyways...'

The optometrist I went to recently put me in the strongest prescription I'd ever had. Instead of using that prescription, I ordered contacts using the prescription of the glasses that I thought were fine.

There's two numbers on the contacts... diameter of the pupil (doesn't matter for most people I think) and an angle (Edit: 'Base Curve'. The third number is the power of the contact, aka 'sphere'. Glasses prescriptions have power and astigmatism, but don't have diameter or base curve). I got these off my prescription. If you don't already know how to use contacts it's important to get instructions and a followup. I read of a guy who didn't know he had to take the contacts out at night - the contacts had started to grow into his eyes?

(Edit: you can get a set of "trial lenses" from Ebay if you want to try to come up with your own prescription, or to try out your prescription before buying glasses.)

My previous comments on ordering contacts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13691768 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366816

Edit: I live in the United States.

> But the MAJORITY of plants in the wild get the MAJORITY of their nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi. Something which is not present in sterilized soil.

Great comment, thanks. I think people forgot how to farm in 20th century. For example, my grandmother grew up on her parents’ farm, and managed it until the early 2000’s. She didn’t do the farming, she just told the guy who actually did the work what to plant. After grandma passed away my uncle took care of the leasing for a few years. Now Bill Gates probably owns what used to be Grandma’s farm.

At one point grandma started doing no-till to preserve the topsoil, but I think this might have been just spraying with roundup before planting corn and soybeans.

I have a National Geographic magazine, circa 1995, about the Frogs Leap winery [0]. This is an organic winery in California. The author talked about visiting a neighboring conventional vineyard, and how that soil was totally different than the soil at Frogs Leap.

[0] https://www.frogsleap.com/

> Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years?

In the pre-industrial era the oceans outgassed CO2 to the atmosphere to prevent land plants from suffocating themselves by sequestering all the carbon dioxide. In the post-industrial era the oceans capture a significant percentage of the CO2 that humans generate (because CO2 is heavier than air, and easily dissolves in water).

The most important considerations for the earth's atmospheric heat balance are the heat inputs from the sun (solar cycle) and underwater volcanoes, and the shielding provided by volcanic eruptions. The oceans store heat during the summer, and release heat during the winter.

My previous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20002823 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013166

There was a similar submission 16 days ago: Automatic Ripping Machine (2016) (b3n.org) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043497 ("Headless Blu-ray/DVD/CD Ripper")

There are options besides chemical fertilizers. The nodules on legume root are a symbiotic home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Farmers traditionally rotate corn and soybeans to reduce their nitrogen costs. Other plants have deeper roots, which pull up nutrients...

My comment about biological nitrogen fixation (15 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580

Saw this recently: Black eyed peas could help eliminate need for fertilizer: Popular legume attracts beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria - https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/20/black-eyed-peas-cou...

One of the problems with holistic agriculture is you have to understand more about what plants actually need to grow, and think more to figure out how to work with what you've got. I used to have a local farm that made a great mulch with wood chips and feathers from their turkey operation. Blood meal [1] (nitrogen) and bone meal [2] (calcium, phosphorous) are also good fertilizers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_meal

Most of the glasses sold for blue-light blocking don't block nearly enough of the blue light to make a meaningful difference. I think the main thing is to reduce the amount of blue light that you're exposed to at night.

My first purchase for night driving was some orange safety glasses, but these blocked out too much light to be safe. I now have yellow safety-style glasses that I use for driving. These knock out enough of the blue to turn the bad blue-white headlights green. They say overx.com on the side... Ahh: https://cocoonseyewear.com/shop/safety/lightguard-medium-fit...

My bulbs around the house are mostly low-blue. I have three light switches in my bedroom. I replaced the 1995-ish 5000k fluorescent tube hidden above the closet with a 6 or 8-bulb fixture from a thrift shop. I have a mix of red & orange single-color bulbs in this, which renders to a pleasant amber color. My bedside lamp has a Feit red bulb, which is a nice deep red. The fan has halogen bulbs on a dimmer switch, for the occasional time that I care about color rendition, or need a little extra light in the room. They're too blue full power, but I hardly ever use them.

My bathroom has halogens on a slider dimmer switch, which starts at the lowest light output. It's nice & yellowish at night.

The kitchen is lit with Citizen 2200K COB (Chip On Board) [0] LEDs on top of the cabinets. The terrible hangy-lights, that someone put in to replace the old canister lights over the kitchen stove, now have Philips Amber 2000K LED bulbs. There are some 2700K lights in the kitchen too, but I try not to use those.

I also use https://JustGetFlux.com to reduce the blue light from monitors...

tl/dr: I use yellow glasses for driving, day and night. Most of my lights around the house are red, orange, and amber bulbs, and all the important fixtures ahve dimmer switches. I hope to keep my vision for a while longer.

[0] https://led.cdiweb.com/products/detail/clu0481212c422al1k3-c...

> Farmers commonly switch between the two depending on market prices.

Legume roots have nodules that cultivate bacteria that fix nitrogen. Farmers rotate their fields between corn and soybeans/legumes because the bacteria on legume roots restores the nitrogen in the soil, thereby lessening their fertilizer costs.

Biological Nitrogen Fixation: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/biological...

This is an inoculant with bacteria for soybeans: https://www.groworganic.com/products/soybean-inoculant?_pos=...

Plants with deep roots pull up nutrients from deep soil. I think corn and soybeans generally don't help with restoring the soil like native plants.

A chart comparing root systems of North American prairie plants and bluegrass: https://www.reddit.com/r/ecology/comments/bxoh43/a_chart_com...

The little pocket on the right side of many pants is called the watch pocket. It was originally used to carry pocket watches. Because people don’t commonly carry pocket watches anymore it’s not as big as it used to be.

I got a new vision prescription a few months ago. Strongest lenses I’ve ever had. They were terrible… everything was crystal-clear, but I couldn’t read my phone. When I went back for the checkup, the practice’s other optometrist droppedblthe prescription by .5 diopter in each eye, and gave the term “intermediate range” for a prescription that’s good enough to read a computer and drive, but which does not correct your vision to 20/20 at 100 yards.

The second prescription was still too strong. I ended up mail ordering contacts with my old glasses’ prescription.

Read the link, came back to HN to find the discussion. The article’s title is a poor summary of the article’s focus. I went back to the article - the submission here indeed uses the article’s actual title.

It actually covers a lot of ground: How the US FUBAR’d Afghanistan, United States as the only country that can impose sanctions, China does its own thing, Australian nuclear submarine deal is saber rattling with China, climate change, Abraham Lincoln as a classical liberalist, (quote below).

I made a note of this quote:

> Now it’s supposed to be a wonderful thing if you can subordinate yourself to a master for most of your working life. It’s called “getting a job.” It was considered a horrible attack on human dignity for millennia. Millennia, literally, up through the nineteenth century. It’s taken a lot of work to impose on people the idea that it’s a wonderful thing to spend your waking hours following somebody else’s orders.

Climate discussion is the least important part of this article.

While ruminating on what to say about "OnlyFans Consulting" [0], I remembered this piece. Money is one way that we value other people's time. But we used to do things for barter, or just because they were the best use of our time.

> There is a much deeper crisis at work as well, a crisis in the creation of goods and services that underlies money to begin with, and it is this crisis that gave birth to the real estate bubble everyone blames for the current situation. To understand it, let’s get clear on what constitutes a “good” or a “service”. In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I babysit your children for free, economists don’t count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, “I watched my neighbors kids this morning, so please give me food.” But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a “service”. GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.

The crisis of civilization is that there's nothing left to monetize.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29190676

While the rise of OnlyFans is potentially more lucrative for the people who in years past might have gotten a one-time payment from Playboy/Playgirl, for society OnlyFans is a symptom of late-stage degenerate capitalism.

During the last financial crisis I ran across Money and the Crisis of Civilization [0], a piece about the monetization of services which have traditionally been performed for free: child care, meal preparation, etc.

While I'm not opposed to women making more than a one-time fee for showing their nipples to the world, I don't think it's sustainable. The vast majority of OnlyFans' payments go to a very small percentage of the "content creators". And how many of those who actually pull in 6 figures will be able to bank it for after they inevitably lose their looks?

Could meaningful work be subsidized so women who don't actually want to show their nipples to the world can get by without feeling pressured into trying to make a quick buck?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29190513 (just submitted pls upvote thx. :)

Some quotes:

> In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

> Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a “service”. And we are the richer for it. Right? > > Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.

I've been looking for something low-cost with ECC memory for a NAS, the Xeon-D would probably work. Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_D#Design_Goals

Title is not very clear. This is about google's bad summary of a webpage about what to do after someone has an epileptic seizure, not what to do after your computer gets seized.

TFA links to this tweet: https://twitter.com/soft/status/1449406390976409600

tl/dr: Google's summary of the University of Utah's page says to do what the University of Utah's page actually says to NOT do.

I think your link is interesting, in that the group without the copper enzyme also benefited from red light exposure. The copper enzyme explanation seemed reasonable to me, but perhaps there’s better explanation for why people seem to benefit from red light exposure. Maybe the benefit from red light it multifaceted.

The antidote for damage from UV light is the pro-metabolic effects of red light. Red light hits the red metal (copper) in the Cytochrome C Oxidase enzyme [0] in our mitochondria and refreshes this enzyme. When the cells have enough energy (ATP) they can repair the damage from UV light.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytochrome_c_oxidase (no mention of red light therapy in this article).

UV light from the sun comes with plenty of red light. UV light from the tanning bed does not have any red light. In the winter I used to go tanning, then would spend 12 minutes in the bright-light room [1].

[1] at Planet Fitness. The company website doesn't have any information, but I found this page: https://thelifevirtue.com/total-body-enhancement-pros-and-co...

> museums, including the J. Paul Getty, have instituted a very particular cleaning routine that relies more heavily on anoxic treatments than they do on harsh chemicals, which could potentially damage the art.

I assumed they'd use CO2, but it's apparently mostly nitrogen:

Nitrogen Anoxia Research (1987-1999) - https://www.getty.edu/conservation/our_projects/science/anox...

The Use of Oxygen Free Environments in the Control of Museum Insect Pests - https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pd...

Solar Minimum -> slightly less energy put out by the sun -> slightly less energy absorbed by the oceans -> slightly cooler oceans -> "most severe cold season on record"

Preparing for a solar minimum is easier than trying to get a volcano to not explode [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595353

The Duck Curve [0] is the enemy of grid reliability. Until the electric system figures out what to do with the useless energy generated in the middle of the day, we'll be chained to natural gas plants for surge generation.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...

Perhaps blowing bubbles in the ocean dead zones [1] would be a productive use of excess power? The bubblers would be turned on and off to bleed off extra electrons from the grid.

[1] How big is the Ocean Dead Zone off the Coast of California? - https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFMOS33D1492H/abstra...

From the cnbc submission:

> Finally, once the wheels are in motion to shut a nuclear plant down, it's expensive and complicated process to reverse. > > Diablo was set on the path to be decommissioned in 2016 and will operate until 2025. Then, the fuel has to be removed from the site.

If the next two winters are excessively cold [2], a real leader might arise to tell the anti-nuclear activists, 'you mean well, but we do actually need these thing for the next 20 years.' This leader would point out that the alternative is for all the Californians who are priced out of expensive electricity/natural gas to use coal from the Navajo Nation/etc to heat their homes [3].

[2] South Pole posts most severe cold season on record (seattletimes.com) (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28734308

[3] Coal Heating in the United States - https://forgreenheat.blogspot.com/2017/06/trends-in-heating-...

The year 1816 was known as "The Year Without A Summer" because it was 3°C cooler (in France) than normal. Crops failed, and there was much misery throughout the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Scientists later determined that the 1816 temperature anomaly was caused by volcanic eruptions in 1815 and 1814, which sprayed volcanic ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, thereby shading the oceans and preventing them from storing the usual amount of heat over those two years.

Our modern Civilization is more vulnerable to an average once-a-millenium volcanic eruption than it's ever been, on account of our numbers and our dependency on supply chains for our sustenance.

From the linked article: "In fact, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated the 2012 worldwide food storage to last for 74 days." (pg. 9)

Grains are useful because they store well. Storage is not economical, but it is essential for reducing the suffering which would result from an 1816-like scenario in our modern world.

Edit: the 1816 anomaly is classified as a volcanic winter [1]. Solar minimums have also resulted in years/decades with cooler summers than normal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter

Twitter kindly gave me a heads up on the UK CO2 shortage a few days ago, maybe on account of the algorithm being aware that CO2 is one of my interests.

This carbon dioxide shortage, experienced by a beverage company, is caused by fertilizer plants shutting down, on account of natural gas prices being too high, on account of the wind not blowing and the weather turning cooler.

The real CO2 storage problem will be with the lack of CO2 to slaughter chickens and pigs.

I speculate that food grade (clean) CO2 is easier to source from the fertilizer factory than by capturing it from the flue of a power plant.

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/20/co2-crisis-...