Viewing profile — meristohm

What are the environmental costs? Given that we exist in an ecosystem, and rely on myriad other life for our own healthy-enough existence, focusing on jerbs and the cost to build t…

I would be more inclined to give to people via Patreon if there was a way to set a desired income amount and a transparent "overflow pipeline" for what happens with any extra money…

No, but I don't use LLM stuff; I value effortful practice towards improving how I do things, without converting too much external energy in the process, and while I still use and b…

Do you understand the unbridled desire to consume a massive amount of resources to move a human body in a multi-ton knobby-tyred truck from home to school to work to grocery store …

...and it's fine to not use the loud, vibrating power saw and instead take some extra time to use a handsaw, and thus get more practiced at it. It's fine to hire movers, but someti…

I reckon a lot of people on this forum have poorer health thanks to man-made pollution. The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase envi…

Would there be so many billions if we didn't figure out how to convert petroleum into fertilizer and so many other useful things? My point is that, just because we now have billion…

Because all this fancy tech requires concrete and iron (smelted by burning fossil fuels), we're still in the Iron Age: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from.…

I learned about snail teeth in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey! It's a lovely, shortish nonfiction book about a woman with a rare infection that affects …

For an animated version of this story, see Cosmos, season 2 (I forget which episode, but it was helpful in teaching about this in high school)

Fair question (I'm neither the blog author or the person who linked it here). I read the short blog entry and the why is not answered. My own reasons for de-Googling is that I'm un…

Taxes support the infrastructure that those with Dragon's Sickness need to keep extracting gold from the uninfected and less symptomatic.

Years ago, when I was considering putting effort and time into learning more computer programming languages, I realized I cared far more about learning other human languages: I was…

What does "human flourishing" mean? And why do you want humans to have maximal access to energy? (what I'm getting at is, what story of humanity matters to you?)

I abhor exercise for the sake of it . Instead, I refuse to use a car to do anything but bring my family members to distant medical appointments, and the rare carpool'd vacation. An…

Somewhat related: in logging country, on several occasions I've seen logging trucks full of tree trunks pass each other in opposite directions.

One way to reduce the speed of such large vehicles in urban areas is cyclists to conspicuously use the wider lane. I do this regularly with my Class 1 ebike (assists to 20mph), in …

Long-time de-Googled Pixel user here: while it's not for most of the people I know, for whom the barrier to install LineageOS / GrapheneOS / etc on their Android pocket computer is…

...and a consequence of living in dense concrete "jungles" is increased energy consumption to cool ourselves, further increasing average global temperatures. What might the consequ…

Yep! Evaporation through leaf stomata creates the internal pressure drop that pulls water from the earth into the roots.

I like helping others learn and grow. Having a child helped focus my sense of purpose, but I already cared to help others, as a classroom teacher and private tutor. Parenting gave …

I prefer breathing like a resting dog: deep inhale, immediately relax and exhale (just let it out; it'll be forceful at first and taper off), and take the next inhale when the need…

Zero. Unless by "AI" you mean "software tool", in which case full-text search in Calibre ebook reader, language training with Clozemaster (I don't use the LLM-generated definitions…

Incredibly efficient, but if they're burning hydrocarbons to move, at scale they are incredibly damaging to earth's atmosphere, and to animals disrupted by engine and propeller noi…

Too many of us (here in the United States, anyway) rely on external energy conversion to do what we humans once did with our stored chemical energy. Using a drug to treat the sympt…