Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

drive.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–149 of 149 posts

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#141

Post by Gibbon1 »

newsbinator wrote: post #19
zargon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO and CDC have had their head in the sand for 60 years when it comes to airborne pathogens. They have only acknowledged aerosol transmission of covid in the last couple weeks. It was physicists who had to figure out why they were domatically denying reality. https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

> 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.

This twitter thread from Jose-Luis Jimenez is far far better.

https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708

Credentials: https://www.colorado.edu/chemistry/jose-luis-jimenez

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#142

Post by goldenkey »

nradov wrote: post #131
goldenkey wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. The risk is nonzero. Turbid air takes a toll both physically and mentally, and can lead to inflammation and weakening of the body's defenses. Your definition of sick is quite narrow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_organic_compound

No you're just making things up. The link you posted doesn't support your statement.

> Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) encompass VOCs emitted by plants, animals, or microorganisms,

> VOCs are produced by animals and microbes

Try to have substantiative things to say instead of spouting off false declarations and inflammatory insults.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#143

Post by lhopki01 »

stkdump wrote: post #138
Robin_Message wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use heat exchangers between outlet and inlet air to mitigate a good portion of the energy cost I believe.

If the outflow is not compressed, you can transfer at most half of the heat and that is under perfect conditions.

That's not quite right. If the airflows are in opposite directions then you can transfer more heat. Since as the hot air cools it encounters progressively colder air ensuring there is always a temperature gradient to transfer heat. These systems are about 60%-90% efficient at transfering heat.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#144

Post by thatcat »

rcoveson wrote: post #99
TeMPOraL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism...

It is ordered most relevant to least.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#145

Post by TeMPOraL »

thatcat wrote: post #144
rcoveson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism... It is ordered most relevant to least.

Thank you. The other replies made me worried my memory is failing me.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#146

Post by staychilled »

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…

The problem is very seldom the house. The problem is shared spaces.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#147

Post by dredmorbius »

saurik wrote: post #102
TeMPOraL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wired is a magazine, not a newspaper: it doesn't exist to quickly present information every day, but to provide entertaining writing once a month; insisting it use an inverted pyramid is as strange as arguing that if only movies and books just led with the resolution, it would save you a lot of time.

Any publication still competes for attention.

Practices which show contempt for the reader's time and interest are ultimately counterproductive.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#148

Post by dredmorbius »

dorfsmay wrote: post #54
Reason077 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 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…

Excellent practice.

I'll also frequently apply this to HN comment streams.

1. Collapse the top comment. It's frequently good, but also frequently is an avalanche of compounded hot takes.

2. Scroll to the bottom of the discussion. Odds are that comments are lower-quality, but not always. I collapse these as I go up, upvoting the underrated ones. Occasionally comment.

3. If there's a long stream of lower-quality / redundant comments, I'll collapse those as well.

I really wish there were some way to surface more deeply-nested, high-quality comments. There isn't. (Though occasionally an email to mods will elevate one to a top-level comment.) There used to be a periodic HN curation. That no longer occurs AFAIU.

Re: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection

#149

Post by dredmorbius »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #91
hobs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is lollygagging in irrelevancies, and luxuriating in details.

The distinction can be quite arbitrary, but it usually does stand out.

Herman Melville and Neal Stephenson also come to mind. In nonfiction, John McFee.

Post reply on HN