Readit News logoReadit News
jws commented on Air-dried vs. Kiln-dried Wood   christopherschwarz.substa... · Posted by u/crescit_eundo
cmrdporcupine · 3 months ago
Had some poplar milled from some large trees we had to take down here. Air dried in my shop for 4 years before having it made into a table. All it took was 1 winter and it split and bent severely inside the house. I will only kiln dry from now on.
jws · 3 months ago
I dried three red oak trees using a dehumidifier kiln. ( 4'x4'x16' 1" pink insulation foam box assembled with packing tape with a household dehumidifier and fan inside. Very low tech. Knock it down when not using it.)

The process is mostly: measure moisture content of wood, pick a humidity to maintain, check wood periodically to see if it is drying too fast or too slow. Weigh water coming out to monitor process.

Very low effort if you have space to allocate while in use. The wood came out well, no complaints.

One downside is you won't kill insects with heat, so you could have trouble if it is buggy wood.

jws commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen   theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla
taylodl · 4 months ago
I LOVE it! THIS is the kind of truck I'd be looking at to replace my 1998 Ford Ranger.

Here is what could be potential deal-breakers:

- Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

- Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!

- Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).

- Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

If anyone from Slate is reading this, this is how I'm looking at this truck. FYI, I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.

jws · 4 months ago
Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog.

Ah, there's the problem. You have violated Pauli's "spouse/dog size exclusion principle". You need to either have a dog that can sleep curled up on the spouse's lap during the trip, or a dog big enough that the spouse can sleep curled up on the dog.

Bench seats also aren't a panacea, I still feel the burn of my dog's stink eye when then girlfriend was prompted to center of bench seat and dog on the side.

jws commented on Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?   saytheprime.com/... · Posted by u/robinhouston
jws · 10 months ago
Don't be boring. A quick triage with an AI and a spot check suggest that the guitar solo at the end of Hotel California has just about the right number of notes (depending on how many '7' you get).

Sweet Child of Mine probably works.

Comfortably Numb(ber) allegedly works, but I doubt any of the singers I have access to can enunciate fast enough. For the most relaxed of the options, it has amazing little clouds of fast notes.

MUST RESIST: this is worse than waking up to a Saturday morning "Nerd Sniping", I could lose the whole weekend to this… I'll bet Nate isn't busy… With him and the girls from (redacted) Bohemian Rhapsody could work…

UPDATE: There goes the weekend. So far I've been in a fight with ChatGPT about counting syllables in copyrighted lyrics where I ended up suggesting it get help for its obvious emotional trauma at the hands of an IP lawyer and lined up 5 singers. "enjoy the ride" has beaten "they are just intrusive thoughts".

jws commented on EPA cancels pesticide shown to be harmful to unborn babies   thenewlede.org/2024/10/ep... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
TeaBrain · 10 months ago
Why bring this IARC list up out of the blue? The parent comment mentioned an EPA classification and you brought up a list of IARC classifications. The EPA and IARC frequently disagree on their classifications.
jws · 10 months ago
Probably because you don't find a list from the EPA.

The two categories are very similar, they are sort of aimed at the same result but have slightly different criteria. e.g. the EPA considers exposure levels, IARC requires at least some human evidence. So you wouldn't say one is stricter than the other, just different ways of skinning a cat.

jws commented on EPA cancels pesticide shown to be harmful to unborn babies   thenewlede.org/2024/10/ep... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Jimmc414 · 10 months ago
Great! But the EPA classified DCPA as a "likely carcinogen" 29 years ago. Why does it take 30 years to stop spraying the stuff?
jws · 10 months ago
For the EPA, "likely carcinogen" means:

• There is evidence of carcinogenicity in animals. (Multiple, consistent studies)

• The substance is shown to directly or indirectly cause chromosomal damage or mutations in a way that is relevant to humans.

• There are no or limited human studies, they are inconclusive, or otherwise inadequate. ((Note: This is sort of a "Why isn't this classified higher?" factor.)). ((If a substance isn't in widespread use, it is kind of hard to design an ethical human study. I mean, you aren't going to have some of your test subjects drink a bunch of likely carcinogen each morning.))

So this is a a classification for "Let's maybe not go nuts with this stuff, and someone really ought to check this out. And if you plan to ship tons of this stuff you might want to talk to your lawyers and lawsuit judgement mitigation team."

I didn't manage to find an exhaustive list of things the EPA has listed with this, but I found one that included higher risks as well, and in my little warehouse/workshop I identified 8 things at a casual glance that I have in inventory or generate. Proper use of these have minimal exposure to my squishy bits for most of them, and the others a well informed user should know to take adequate precautions. (e.g. "wood dust": wear a respirator)

The US does not currently fund the EPA to commission studies to further investigate likely carcinogens, so they stay on the list for ages.

jws commented on Study shows most doctors endorsing drugs on X are paid to do so   medicalxpress.com/news/20... · Posted by u/peutetre
davidgay · a year ago
This is the bad kind of statistic, because it doesn't actually tell us anything interesting about the impact on individual doctors (but does sound scary / impressive!).

A Google search says the US has 1 million doctors, so $12B over 10 years is $12k/doctor/year on average - nice, but not wow...

The linked article did actually have something useful to say on a per-doctor basis:"The analysis showed that more than half of physicians received at least one payment, and roughly 94% of payments were associated with one or more marketed medical products. A small percentage of physicians received the largest amounts, often exceeding $1 million".

So: nice but small for most doctors, rather (too?) large for a small percentage.

jws · a year ago
Does one not suppose that a fair bit of this is the trial and starter doses that they give to doctors? Surely the drug company values them at list price for purposes of a business expense.
jws commented on Don't be terrified of Pale Fire   unherd.com/2024/05/dont-b... · Posted by u/lermontov
Tycho · a year ago
The 'hook' of Pale Fire is this: ostensibly you're reading a long-form poem with a foreword and footnotes and editing by a friend of the poet (a poet of some eminence), but it soon becomes apparent that the editor is trying to jam his own life story into those footnotes.

If you like that idea, I think you'd like the book.

jws · a year ago
Another interesting variant of "annotations are the star" is "But What of Earth?" by Piers Anthony. It's an old school sort of sci fi story, but the publisher rewrote it in the publishing process. Eventually Anthony got the rights back and published the first draft with the editor's changes and his commentary on it. I think it was intended to be commentary on the publishing business, but as a way of knowing an author, you come away feeling like you know the guy in a way you don't get from carefully crafted stories.

It's one of those old paperbacks I know I wouldn't have tossed, but darned if I can find my copy to reread. Maybe I loaned it and it found a new home. Maybe you have it.

(Do remember, he is a 55 year old man writing this in the '80s. Some of his world view is… archaic?… in the greater society today.)

You want the Tor version from 1989, not the Laser version from 1976.

jws commented on Man who shoveled new channel into Lake Michigan convicted   msn.com/en-us/news/us/man... · Posted by u/ww520
ungreased0675 · 2 years ago
After reading the article it’s still unclear why what he did was bad? I presume some kind of negative ecological effect?
jws · 2 years ago
I'm not sure "bad" is required.

As a person responsible for maintaining a harbor in Lake Michigan, I am allowed to move 1 cubic yard of material a year, by hand, with a shovel (last time I checked, the rules change). Anything else requires a detailed permitting process with lots of limitations on what is even possible.

You are looking at a body of rules built up to prevent draining large wetlands without permission, destroying your neighbors waterfront, dredging huge plumes of PCB contaminated sediment into the active water zones, wiping out a regional spawning bed, or casting an intermittent shadow on a patch of lake bed of the great state of redacted. This is administered by a staff who will be held accountable for unforeseen damage and has limited resources.

So you do the paperwork, wait for your permits, only work during the weeks of the year when work is allowed, and try to generally make do with less than you wanted.

jws commented on Ex-Hertz Tesla Model 3s Cost as Little as $14,000. Would You Buy One?   thedrive.com/news/ex-hert... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
jws · 2 years ago
I went to the Hertz used car site and couldn't find anything close to the $17k in the screenshots used for all those news articles. They are mostly around $30k.
jws commented on Ask HN: Should I try to manufacture toasters?    · Posted by u/Dig1t
jws · 2 years ago
I married into toaster moguls. When they sold out in '97, domestic toasters had been infeasible for years already. And this was for a company where all the knowledge, equipment, and facilities had beed paid for many decades before. (They invented the electric pop-up toaster for certain definitions of electric pop-up toaster.)

Toasters are refined brilliance, if done right. The concept of "done" is computed using an analog computer programmed by human experts. (Ok, its usually a bimetal strip but it is placed so that the cooling of the moist bread keeps it from going off and your lighter-darker input is biasing when it considers the toast done.)

Tear apart some toasters. There won't be anything in a modern cheap toaster that isn't absolutely required. Ask yourself why everything is the way it is.

Research the UL requirements. I have the corporate 2 pound copper ball that had to be dropped on things from prescribed heights and not cause malfunction. Make sure you can hit this targets with what you think you can build. Also check the CE, they might have more modern rules.

Be ready for litigation. Toasters catch fire. The toaster moguls were horrified whenever they saw someone's toaster under a cabinet. Decades after selling the business they were still being sued by mesothelioma suits for things like a repairman that got lung cancer and repaired home appliances, so he probably might have worked on one of their 1920's models with asbestos insulation. Don't let it stop you, but put the backup insurance into the expenses.

u/jws

KarmaCake day12694January 18, 2008View Original