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A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

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Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#91

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

hobs wrote: post #83
jerf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written." I'm not accusing you of doing this on purpose, but there's a certain amount of equivocation in the phrase "news article" there. Yes, that's a style that is recommended for factual news articles in a newspaper context, but that's not the only form of "news article". Call this a "news essay" instead and give it its own style and it might ma…

Sure, but most of the content they are writing is neither entertaining or engaging, its long and wandering and I couldn't care less. No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time. It's like someone misunderstood that the act of moving your eyes along the page is not interesting in and of itself.

>No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time.

With barely less than a second's though: Watership Down, a hugely popular novel in the 1970s, spends untold amounts of text/paper immersed in detailed descriptions of the flora that the characters are moving through or eating.

Why not just say "I don't enjoy this style of writing", rather than trying to come up with some supposedly objective metrics for how other people should write?

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#92

Post by yboris »

pbronez wrote: post #68
dorfsmay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is going to sound crazy, but give it a try sometime. When I lose track while reading an article, or find difficult to understand it, I stop and reading it bottom up, one paragraph at a time. First the last paragraph, then the one before that, etc... This cuts through directly to the conclusion, then the detailed explanations form particular to general (which works better for me) and I can skip the "excite…

man... this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written. Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell you everything again in the first body sentence. Then tell you everything again in the first paragraph. and the first page. And so on. It's supposed to be a fractal that unfolds additional detail as you press forward, while ensuring that even a casual reader com…

I suspect that doing the opposite helps trap people on the page, resulting in more money going to advertisers. If all the info is at the top, who will scroll lower (and see more ads)?

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#93

Post by [deleted] »

inanutshellus wrote: post #66
newsbinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know It’s really hard for me to read a WIRED article for information. I mean I realize that’s not what it’s there for but it takes forever to get into the content of the article.

Wait, is this a Wired link? The URL seems to go to drive.google.com and... that weirded me out so I didn't click on it but figured I'd check out the comments to see what folk had learnt.

[deleted]

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#94

Post by SamBam »

Reason077 wrote: post #31
newsbinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know It’s really hard for me to read a WIRED article for information. I mean I realize that’s not what it’s there for but it takes forever to get into the content of the article.

> "it takes forever to get into the content of the article." I've found this is the style of American long-format journalism in general. Just look at something like The New Yorker: not to dispute the quality of their writing, but the word counts certainly skew high. Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct.

I love The New Yorker. I actually read several pages of it every night to my wife to help her fall asleep. And that's not actually a joke about it being boring. (Currently reading about the evidence for UFOs, it's highly interesting.)

However, almost every article follows such a predictable format: Introductory section, full of all the interesting and tantalizing details, and stuff you actually want to find out about. Then section two: we jump back to the main subject's childhood, what clothes they were wearing when the journalist met up with them, how softly they speak. About two pages of biographical content. Section 3: we jump to the background of the story we're actually going to tell. Explain how it fits into the history of some movement or scientific question or whatever. The "point" of the article gets buried somewhere in sections 4 or 5, in between riffing on other people's dead ends and more biographical content.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#95

Post by graeme »

londons_explore wrote: post #58
ddxxdd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course, that flies in the face of all efforts to make things green…which involve better insulation, sealing windows against leaks, more air filtration systems and etc. If anyone has a half-hour of time to waste, you can look into the science of "countercurrent heat exchangers". It's fascinating to see how 2 pipes of air current switch temperatures when they're in contact and moving in opposite directions. So if y…

Wikipedia claims "Heat recovery systems typically recover about 60–95% of the heat in exhaust air". But even recovering 95% of heat isn't exactly great. If you live in Canada and have a 2600 sq ft house with 8 ft ceilings and 10 changes of air per hour, and the indoors is 70F and outdoors is 0F, thats 2600 8 10 cubic feet of air/ per hour, or 12000 BTU/hr. That means you are more than doubling your heating costs comp…

Something must be off with your math. I’ve tested opening a window a crack in my building in montreal. The co2 gets low even with two people present. Heating costs did not double.

Or maybe I had less than ten air changes?

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#96

Post by Scoundreller »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #75
richardw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can’t be that hard to focus on the rooms with people in them, reduce the other rooms to eg one change an hour.

This is already done when calculating ventilation rates. It won't matter much because the majority of space in an occupied building is going to be classified as, well, occupied.

I always wonder how much I save by blocking off the vents in under-occupied rooms. They end up sitting a few degrees cooler in winter.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#97

Post by Joker_vD »

goldenkey wrote: post #86
Joker_vD wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miasma theory rears its ugly head once again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory#Contagionism_ver... The night air is dangerous, close those windows before you go to sleep!

Miasma was a perfectly good theory and if anything, is obviously true innately. Bad smelling air from urine, shit, festering corpses and the like, was often laden with viruses, bacteria, and noxious chemical fumes. Sure, plenty of diseases are not airborne but air that smells like shit isn't exactly a boon to be inhaling. There is a non zero chance of getting sick from noxious air.

Yes, it's "obviously true" because of the confounding factors: bad air tends to go hand in hand with dirty water, contaminated food, and infection-carrying insects.

Neither cholera, malaria, typhoid nor plague are airborne, and yet their causes were ascribed to miasmata.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#98

Post by nradov »

goldenkey wrote: post #86
Joker_vD wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miasma theory rears its ugly head once again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory#Contagionism_ver... The night air is dangerous, close those windows before you go to sleep!

Miasma was a perfectly good theory and if anything, is obviously true innately. Bad smelling air from urine, shit, festering corpses and the like, was often laden with viruses, bacteria, and noxious chemical fumes. Sure, plenty of diseases are not airborne but air that smells like shit isn't exactly a boon to be inhaling. There is a non zero chance of getting sick from noxious air.

Nonsense. The pathogens in urine, shit, and corpses are almost never airborne. And the fumes are only toxic in extremely high concentrations. The chance of getting sick is effectively zero.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#99

Post by rcoveson »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #78
pbronez wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

man... this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written. Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell you everything again in the first body sentence. Then tell you everything again in the first paragraph. and the first page. And so on. It's supposed to be a fractal that unfolds additional detail as you press forward, while ensuring that even a casual reader com…

Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid", and it's supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic writing. IIRC it's being taught as part of vocational education. And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise. (It's as if they were making a lot of…

> Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid"...

Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me.

An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing.

I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#100

Post by nradov »

disabled wrote: post #16
colechristensen wrote: post #8

It seems overly complicated. Just raise the air exchange per person and or per volume by a significant factor and mandate a very fine particulate filter. You could do many measurements and lots of theory but nobody is going to engineer their buildings like cleanrooms anyway so the results of a lot of science wouldn’t be so good regardless.

> Just raise the air exchange per person and or per volume by a significant factor and mandate a very fine particulate filter. An alternative in the meantime is to use a PAPR (powered air purifying respirator), which are more efficient, last much longer (device and filter), and are much more comfortable than N95 masks. I use an Optrel Swiss Air and cover the valves of the mask with a hoodie style balaclava. It would…

It's sad to see people fall victim to mysophobia (germaphobia) and related obsessive mental disorders. They can be more harmful to overall health than actual viruses.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/cleanliness-rul...

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