teslabox

People in cities can’t see stars anymore, so this complaint about the new satellite constellation is almost academic.

In decades past, people began to be concerned about light pollution. The city of Phoenix, Arizona passed its first lighting ordinances around 1983. One of the goals was to reduce sky glow.

After all those politicians retired LED lighting came out. Because the politicians who worked on the sky glow problem were two generations back, the current politicians didn’t realize there are very good reasons for using amber low pressure sodium bulbs for the street lights, and replaced those lights with white LEDs. The quality of light from the LEDs is terrible, but the city saves a few pennies a year (electricity, maintenance), so they probably won’t be fixing the problem.

My friend told me of how she takes her grandkids out to look at the phases of the moon, and how sometimes they find a single star in the sky.

Interesting... tl/dr: In January the planet is closer to the sun, but the earth doesn't heat up as much because there's more ocean on the southern half of the planet, and water pipes heat into the depths of the ocean. In June the northern part of the planet heats up quicker, even though the planet is slightly farther away from the sun, because rocks transmit heat much slower than water.

I think climate scientists need to be careful about doing conclusion-oriented research, and climate crusaders should be more careful with their marketing efforts.

CO2 is heavier than air. Most of the human-generated CO2 ends up in the ocean [0]. This changes the pH of the ocean water, making it slightly more acidic. pH changes and nutrient changes (CO2 + agriculture runoff) probably explain the observations of changes in the types of plankton better than temperature changes.

The climate is a complex system with lots of inputs. It is fundamentally dishonest for the climate crusaders to whip up a frenzy (hockey-stick doom prophecies) on incomplete models and data.

Changes is solar activity (sun spot cycles) and underwater volcanic activity aren't really incorporated into the climate scientists' models, because they don't have much/any data. Temperature sensors have only recently been placed on the Juan de Fuca Ridge [1] (just off the coast of Oregon/Washington/British Columbia). The volcanic trenches in the deep ocean have no network of temperature sensors, or long-term activity data.

The Wall Street-owned utility model for the provision of electricity is technically and ideologically bankrupt, but the "green energy" replacements aren't much better. Solar panels wear out after a few decades, and are not easily recycled with current technology. Most people can't put a wind farm on top of their house, so wind-derived electricity is still purchased from a utility company.

I wrote a piece titled use as much energy as possible: "Under our current system of money and finance, Wall Street is trusted to plan for the economy's future energy needs. Wall Street invests where it sees the most potential for payoff, and THEY make more money when the economy uses as much energy as possible.

"Like a rigged carnival game, the energy economy is specifically distorted so that we have little choice but to send lots of money to our financiers' energy companies. [...]" [2]

[0] "The constant atmospheric CO 2 concentrations in the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution suggest that the oceans released a small amount of CO 2 to the atmosphere to balance the carbon input from rivers. Today, this trend is reversed and the oceans must remove CO 2 added to the atmosphere from human activities, known as anthropogenic (humanderived) CO 2. In the 1980s, the oceans removed an estimated 2.0±0.6 Pg of anthropogenic CO 2 each year. Because humans are producing CO 2 at an everincreasing rate, the average ocean removal rate increased to 2.4±0.5 Pg of carbon each year in the 1990s." - http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Bi-Ca/Carbon-Dioxide-in-the...

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

[2] https://teslabox.com/use-as-much-energy-as-possible/ [I wrote this in 2011 - all my picture links are broken, hmm...]

> Do the police and politicians not see the danger themselves in the rear view mirror when they drive on the road?

They don't realize there's a problem, or they've just spent a lot of money "upgrading" their vehicle fleets and don't want to consider that they've been ripped off.

The vehicles of my local police departments and state highway patrol have had all their safe incandescents replaced with blinding LEDs. Flashing blue LEDs on the roof of the cars, flashing blue-white LEDs mixed in with the flashing red and blue LEDs, and blinding amber LEDs to warn of road hazards. The vehicles have blue-white spot lights, and sometimes they have blue-white light bars on to blind everyone within a quarter mile of the scene.

I think the police officers think their new lights are cool.

OSHA [0] should intervene, but I don't know that I can make a complaint on the police officers' behalf...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_Safety_and_Health...

I didn't appreciate the medicinal nature of Rhubarb until a few years ago. If I'd known how helpful it is, I would've started growing it a long time ago.

> This is a whole article about how it's useful for a lot of things.

I just re-skimmed the article. I didn't notice much/any discussion the medicinal properties of rhubarb, just how 'forcing' rhubarb makes it extra-sweet, and that rhubarb is used to flavor gin and cheese too.

Rhubarb is actually a very useful food. It is a good source of Emodin, which has gentle laxative properties. IMHO, it's better to eat foods that gently facilitate bowel movements than than to rely on laxatives.

I've been growing rhubarb for several years now. It comes back by itself every spring, and can be frozen for off-season use. The rabbits and gophers won't eat it, because the leaves are rather toxic to us animals (the stalks are perfectly edible, either cooked or raw). All I have to do is make sure my plants get adequate water.

This spring I bought three more bare rhubarb roots when they first appeared at the garden store. Last spring I bought bare root rhubarb late in the spring, when they were half-off, but they never grew.

The instructions say to not harvest any stalks the first year, so the plant can put energy into its root. When I bought my first plant it was already a year or two old. The garden center guy said to cut the bottom out of the pot it came in and put that over the plant, so the stalks would have to 'stretch' to reach sunlight.

Here's a random page about forcing, as this bbc article mentions: http://rhubarbinfo.com/forcing

My blog post about Rhubarb as a 'functional food': https://radialappliance.teslabox.com/2017/06/pie-plant-rhuba...

I think Rhubarb roots can be split when they get big enough, sort of like bulbs, but I haven't gotten to that point yet.

> I take my dog on a walk every night. Suddenly, on one of these trips, I walked out my front door and into a horrible blue-white neighborhood

That reminds me... Almost 2 years ago I responded to HN user jacobolus' comment on bad LED lights, which also included his strategy for dealing with LED streetlights while walking his dog:

"[...] After San Francisco installed some awful LED lamps on my street, I’ve taken to wearing orange safety glasses when I walk my dog, and if I had to drive with any regularity I would consider wearing orange glasses to drive at night. [...]" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170344

I got some orange safety glasses, but they cut out too much light to be safe while driving (easy to miss pedestrians). I eventually found some yellow glasses that cut out enough blue to eliminate the shock of sudden exposure.

I was not previously aware of the origin of the ubiquitous frosted light bulb. Thanks.

> The public felt that the glare from clear transparent incandescent lamps gave off a harshness that was unwanted by most people. Another side effect was that they made it hard to see objects in immediate vicinity of the lamp. They desired a lamp that had a softer light with no glare.

The first half of the 20th century was spent figuring out how to use artificial lights safely and effectively. In the last decade we've forgotten almost everything our predecessors figured out.

For example, my father had some great hanging lights over his kitchen stove. These provided just enough light to get around the kitchen - if you wanted more light, you could turn on the other lights.

His wife redecorated and replaced the red-colored globes with clear globes. Now there is no diffusion effect, and visitors without baseball hats get the 'ice picks to the eyes' ("glare") effect from direct exposure to the filaments.

They also installed terrible 3000K LED bulbs in their new fixtures. I switched them out for proper incandescents, so I don't get headaches when I visit. The only LED bulbs I find to be acceptable are some of the 2700K bulbs. If the 3000k bulbs are shielded by a lamp shade they're tolerable, but still slightly too blue.

Old street lights were fine. LED streetlights put out more more lumens per watt, but the quality is terrible. My brother's neighborhood has been LED-ified, and now has a terrible night experience. My city has mostly orange low pressure sodium [LPS] [0] lights still, but the state highway department is gradually switching out their LPS lights for "fake white" LEDs.

Flagstaff has Lowell Observatory (astronomers). They have wonderful night lighting. A few business flaunt Flagstaff's dark sky ordinances with non-shielded floodlights, but most of the city lights and businesses' lights are a pleasant orange (or yellow), and only over-stimulate my eyes when I look directly at them.

The "lighting resource center" has information about good lighting practices: https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp#Low-pressure...

Modern chicken is terrible -- too much meat, too little cartilage. Slashdot had a post titled "Fast-Growth Chickens Produce New Industry Woe: 'Spaghetti Meat'" - https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13563208&cid=58...

Before the 1950's chicken was mostly bones and cartilage. Hens were used for eggs; when they stopped laying eggs they were used for soup.

In rural Arizona we deal with pack rats [0]. These are sometimes-destructive nuisances. For example, my father replaced his car's spark plug wires. The new wires rapidly disappeared - apparently rodents need to chew hard things to keep their teeth from getting too long. Father bought a second set of wires from the same company, which again rapidly disappeared. Apparently some kinds of spark plug wires are coated with rodent bait (peanut oil?). The third set of wires was from a different company. These did not have rat bait like the other company's wires.

My neighbor leaves their vehicle hoods open while on their rafting trips... he also uses live traps to catch and relocate the rats around his house. Otherwise pack rats will set up a nest in vehicles' engine area, destroying the wires and filling it with twigs and food.

An Arizona company [1] came up with a sort of poison that only targets rodents' reproductive organs: "ContraPest contains the ovotoxic chemical 4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide (VCD), which is a known killer of oocytes in immature ovarian follicles. The rat version of ContraPest also contains triptolide, which the company reports has adverse reproductive effects on both males and females. The product has been successfully used to sterilize both male and female mice, rats, and dogs." [2]

As "Mr. Pack Rat" explains, it's better to understand the pack rat than to indiscriminately poison them, as rodent predators fall victim to secondary poisoning with standard city-rat poisons, which makes pack rat problem worse [3].

[0] https://www.mrpackrat.net/packrats.html#six

[1] https://senestech.com

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ContraPest

[3] https://www.mrpackrat.net/poison.html#fou

> I think hospitals/police should really start texting a phone number first, before calling to contact a family member.

Two years ago I got a txt message, "congratulations you won, we'll be calling you shortly." I thought, "NO WAY" (I remembered doing the 'text [band name] to #####' a few weeks before), then a short time later the phone rang. I picked up the tickets and went to the concert [0].

Might not have answered if not for the text.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/53wch8/17_years_ago_...

Some way to screen the submissions that have been seen already might be helpful too.

Maybe a client-side javascript button, 'update now', or 'latest'?

I compulsively look at ingredients in packaged food, including pet food. Two of the most common ingredients in cheap pet foods are soybeans and corn. Neither of these are evolutionarily-appropriate for our pets.

Corn is mostly starch, with little in the way of nutrients. Humans traditionally made corn more digestible with a little lime [1] -- modern corn tortillas are all made this way, but corn chips are not. I don't think pet food manufacturers properly treat their corn (I'm speculating here, and would be happy to be incorrect).

Soybeans have some nutrients, but they also contain mega-doses of the inflammatory Omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Soy is also a potent source of phytoestrogens. These plant chemicals cause an estrogen-like reaction in tissues. In healthy people estrogen is tightly regulated. In unhealthy people, adipose tissue creates aromatase [2] to turn testosterone into estrogen, creating a self-destructive feedback loop that is hard to escape. Estrogen is removed from the body by the liver [3]. When the liver is overwhelmed it can't keep up with excessive amounts of estrogen.

Pets, people, and food animals need evolutionarily-appropriate foods, fewer soybeans, less corn.

One of my family would like to lose weight (more than one, but I'm thinking of one in particular). He commonly has a "healthy" salad, but smothers it in inflammatory soybean/canola oil (sold as "salad dressing"). Even expensive pet foods are typically contaminated with canola oil (ostensibly for the "omega-3's", but really because they're cheap calories that look good on the label).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominy#Production / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipose_tissue#Physiology - "Adipose tissue is the greatest peripheral source of aromatase in both males and females,[citation needed] contributing to the production of estradiol."

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrogen#Metabolism

I just recently learned about ESOPs: a few weeks ago I visited Graybar's [0] website, and learned that this large electric/etc distributor has been employee-owned since the 1920's.

Louis Kelso was "the inventor and pioneer of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP)" [1]. Kelso wrote *The Capitalist Manifesto" [2] about employee-ownership in 1958.

I think most businesses would run better if their employees were more invested in their success.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graybar

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitalist_Manifesto

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Employee-owned_compan...

(now I can close those tabs: HN comments are much better for me to keep track of things I've read than bookmarks.)

I'm thinking of compiling a list of conditions that modern medicine treats well, and conditions where doctors try real hard to help their patients.

For example, my neighbor wrecked his bicycle a few months ago. His doctors decided he needed a couple implants to help his leg bones grow back together optimally. I went over to look for my supposedly-delivered package this evening. He's recovering, slowly. Today he was hobbling around with a cane, and told of going to all the rehabilitation he can get (physical therapy, etc). I don't have formal medical training, but I think the rod in his leg was a reasonable intervention.

Trauma surgeons do amazing work in keeping people alive who in prior centuries rapidly expired from similar injuries.

I don't think modern medicine does well with multi-factorial conditions that develop over long periods of time.

Cancer will be a much smaller business when someone figures out how to put it in a more appropriate context, rather than treat it with the tired old war metaphor.

Heat lamps provide a full spectrum of artificial light, including near infrared. The clear bulbs would probably be more appropriate than the red-tinted ones. I have mine on a dimmer.

If young people learned useful skills in their elementary and primary school years, college wouldn’t be such a rat race. The only reform that can make college more affordable is to make it unnecessary for the vast majority of occupations.

College programs are what you make of them. Some people make good use of their college programs. I learned a few useful things, but mostly felt trapped.

If you're on a tight budget, your best bet is to look for a OpenWRT- or DD-WRT-capable router at your local thrift stores. I'm using a linksys/cisco consumer router as a wireless bridge. DD-WRT apparently supports more of the closed-source chipsets.

I have an EdgeRouter POE and a UAP-lite - might've gotten the cheaper edgerouter if I'd realized the UAP single-pack comes with a power injector. I wouldn't buy the edgerouter POE again, as it uses non-standard passive POE. If I want to be "safe" about the cables I'm running, I'm going to have to buy this device: http://tycononline.com/TP-POE-2456D-24VDC-Passive-POE-IN-to-...

EdgeRouter X + UAP-lite would be around $130.

A friend of mine pointed out that all the original sodas were herbal beverages. Coca-Kola was made to deliver the beneficial properties of two tropical plants (coca leaf and kola nut [2]), root beers were flavored with various plant root extracts, Dr. Pepper has 21 natural flavors, etc. The plant extracts provided anti-oxidants, caffeine, and other medicinal substances.

"Adaptogens or adaptogenic substances are used in herbal medicine for the claimed stabilization of physiological processes and promotion of homeostasis." [1] - wikipedia goes on to discuss how the term is not considered valid today, where something is only a "medicine" if it's highly purified, entirely isolated from its natural context, and has specific physiological effects that are understood and described.

I think it important to point out that before the modern era, foods and plant-derived substances were humanity's best option for improving our body's function. I've read how civil war soldiers greatly appreciated coffee (entirely imported from tropical countries).

The Coca-Cola company has a monopoly on coca-leaf flavoring [3]. This substance is a good source of anti-oxidants. Coca-Kola allegedly has been found to have more flower extracts than Pepsi-Kola...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptogen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_nut [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca#United_States

Sodas were originally consumed in small quantities - 8 to 12 ounces was typical. Now we're getting plant-free "sodas" (sugar water with artificial colors and flavors, and without plant ingredients) in 64+ ounce servings.

My poor father buys Coke-zero, not realizing that research has found that people who consume artificially sweetened beverages actually consume more calories in total. I think he's desperate for the caffeine (exhaustion), and doesn't realize the metabolism boost of caffeine is best balanced with a small amount of sugar (caffeine without sugar -> low blood sugar -> cortisol release).

I disagree that "soda pop" was originally toxic. I keep a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Kola around for a small serving (8-ounces) of coca leaf and kola nut in the mid-afternoon period, after lunch & before dinner.

Dr. Matt Might is one of the few people that I remember from high school [0]. He's the only one from that school whom I've communicated with post-graduation. [edit: one other, actually...]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11366288

I think it important to put medicine's lack of progress in adequately treating many conditions in context, and only consider genetic factors as one consideration in the web of causality. Too often doctors make a diagnosis and treat the diagnosis. Much more work needs to be made in respecting the complexity of even the simplest of diagnoses.

Consider the simple ear infection. Sometimes children have regular ear infections, but these usually go away as the person grows up. I started having chronic ear infections in college, well after the usual age that one experiences chronic ear infections. The prescribed antibiotics took care of the problem for a few weeks before the infection returned. After a year of this I figured out how to take care of my ears myself with non-prescription interventions, and after maybe 6 years I figured out how to treat the causes behind my ears' poor drainage.

The GQ story "Sperm Count Zero" was recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942744

GQ didn't really drill down into the causes behind the male population's shrinking sperm counts, because the experts themselves aren't at all sure about the causes behind the symptom. While the causes of an individual man's low sperm count are unique in every case, it is a combination of factors that causes our society's shrinking sperm counts. The causes that I suspect include evolutionary-inappropriate modifications to our diet, mass exposure to endocrine disruptors (xeno-estrogens), etc. The Mayo Clinic's page about this condition [1] shows there's a few known simple causes for a man's low sperm count, but there is no effort to put society's condition in context.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/low-sperm-cou...

Women are having similar responses to the causes behind men's shrinking sperm counts. Because women are supposed to release one egg a month rather than millions, their condition gets a label (PCOS/Endometriosis/anovulation/etc) and standardized treatments. Women are often subjected to palliative treatments for their diagnosis -- frequently this is some form of birth control. While some women find their condition to be helped with these prescriptions, medicine has failed to 'cure' their problem. They've just shut down the symptoms enough to make the patient's life a little more tolerable.

Sometimes women think they have "polycystic ovaries" [PCOS] because their mother had symptoms of polycystic ovaries, and think their own condition "must" be genetic. But habits get passed down too, and "stress" is a major factor in many women's conditions. Poverty is not genetic, but it usually gets passed down with all the other habits we learn from our parents.

Treating a woman's diagnosis of PCOS with birth control is using hormone analogues to suppress the normal functioning of the reproductive system. The use of these drugs for PCOS is a 'palliative' rather than 'curative' treatment.

There are certainly 'rare diseases' with genetic causes, but an effort also needs to be made to clear obsolete and harmful treatments from medicine's tool chest. Sometimes "war" is appropriate, but war can also be prevented with good diplomacy.

Metformin is just a drug that impairs the liver’s ability to put sugar into the blood stream. While there are certainly drugs to treat the conditions associated with aging, this is probably not one of them.

... strictly speaking you’re certainly correct that there is still a significant non-food use for linseed and the other vegetable oils. But there were only limited food uses for polyunsaturated oils before deodorization and hydrogenation techniques were figured out in the early-mid 20th century. People might [have] measured out a tablespoon for their cooking pan, whereas today people use these oils prolifically.

> Refined oils have nothing to do with being rancid it’s an extraction technique that uses heat instead of pressing.

The petroleum distillate hexane is used to extract the oil from seed meal, then is boiled off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil#Solvent_extracti...

The specific step I'm referring to is "steam deodorization": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil#Deodorization

Most so-called "vegetable oils" were traditionally used as drying oils. This was before the paint industry figured out how to use petroleum distillates in their products in the mid-20th century.

Linseed oil was renamed "flaxseed oil" when the market for stain made with linseed oil dried up.

Containers of vegetable oils typically develop a sticky film on them, due to the drying oil effect.

IMHO, the contamination of the food supply with rancid vegetable oil is a more important factor in the diabetes epidemic. Almost all of the vegetable oils at grocery stores are refined so customers don't realize they're using rancid oils. Vegetable oil is useful as biodiesel, and for making paints and stains.

  A drying oil is an oil that hardens to a tough, solid film 
  after a period of exposure to air. The oil hardens through 
  a chemical reaction in which the components crosslink (and 
  hence, polymerize) by the action of oxygen (not through 
  the evaporation of water or other solvents). Drying oils 
  are a key component of oil paint and some varnishes. Some 
  commonly used drying oils include linseed oil, tung oil, 
  poppy seed oil, perilla oil, and walnut oil. Their use has 
  declined over the past several decades, as they have been 
  replaced by alkyd resins and other binders. 

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil

With regard to salt, I like the advice “salt to taste”: add salt to your food until it taste good. Salt has many roles in the body; it was simplistic and wrong to blame a oerson’s high blood pressure on salt consumption.

> I always thought that historically, the elite schools were for the children of the elite;

Parents of means sent their children to College so they'd have a leg up on the under-class. The Screwing Of The Average Man [0] pointed this out to me. It additionally pointed out that college was subsidized for returning WWII soldiers so they'd have something to do that didn't involve fighting, via the GI Bill [1]. This had the effect of causing college costs to spiral out of control.

My dad's parents both went to college before WWII. My grandfather's mother had played Prohibition well (legally), and sent all four of her children to college. My grandmother was an only child, and her parents had the means to pay for college for her.

My mom's father was relatively old by the time he was released from the army, and didn't take advantage of the GI bill. My grandmother said he really should have - that they probably would have greatly benefited financially from it.

Education is an industry whose purpose is mostly to keep people out of the workforce for as long as possible. Some people get a lot out of their degree programs, but mostly school is just a distraction.

I wonder if there's a way to gracefully reform K-12 & post-secondary education so that it better serves the needs of the students.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=-PJ0DLVOIXcC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill

Thanks for your comments here. Re: Brown vs Board of Education: Malcolm Gladwell's podcast has an interesting take about how the schools could have been much more effectively integrated:

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-per...

Thanks for the references. I have looked at some of them on google books.

The problem is not with the teachers, but with the system itself, which seems to resist change because of inertia. I read Gatto's and Holt's books maybe 15 years ago. They were a refreshing explanation for why I had found "school" to be such a miserable experience: no freedom, teach to the test, bullying (students pick on each other when they're miserable), the training to 'not care' about anything (ringing of the bells), etc.

I frequently meet people that were traumatized by their age-segregated school experiences. Gatto and Holt both advocated that children be 'educated' with experiences in the real world.

Nails that stick out get hammered down. What do you have to say about Gatto's criticisms in this 27-year old essay?

> [...] but I wonder what has kept it all so fringe?

A lot of people are employed by the school system. Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse.

> Does anyone have insights into Gatto's credibility?

John Gatto was most active in the 90's and 2000's (Wikipedia says Gatto had two strokes in 2011). He seemed to start his protest against school in the latter years of John Holt's rebellion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator)

https://web.archive.org/web/20050206095110/http://www.holtgw...