281–290 of 479 posts
So is IQ a "largely pseudoscientific swindle" to quote a popular article from a few years ago, or is it not? Because if the consensus is that it doesn't matter, then why bother using it as a metric here?
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If you ever find yourself cleaning the inside of a hot water heater some day, it will disabuse you of that habit. I'm sure it's mostly harmless, but they accumulate a truly horrific amount of mineral deposits and other weird gunk in there.
Looking inside a kettle in London provides the same experience (at least when I lived there). Now we live on rain water and the inside of the kettle is pristine, despite bird crap on our roof and flora in the guttering.
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Absolutely everything… that has a boiling point higher than water’s. It won’t do anything to remove alcohol, for instance. Or any other contamination that boils off before water does. Ofc you could discard the head and tail of your distillation operation…
Yes, you're right in a pedantic way =). I trust that my city's tap water doesn't have alcohol in it. After all, I previously and many people still drink it without extra filtering, and it's safe enough to do so. Relatedly, the standard technique in alcohol distillation is to discard the head because it contains toxic methanol. https://youtu.be/a1IruS1bKN8?t=672
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That's because it is primarily a historical artifact[0]. Most modern plumbing heats water on-demand, which pretty much entirely avoids the risk of storage tank contamination or Legionella. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfHgUu_8KgA
>Most modern plumbing heats water on-demand Where is this the case? These kind of things are extremely locational and here in the US it seems like 45 gallon hot water tanks are still the norm. We had a fad with "on demand" hot water heating but everyone gave up on it when the "it saves you money" part didn't work so well.
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Basically nothing you said here is true. People don't normally drink hot water People drink hot water all the time not to mention cooking, tea, instant coffee and more. legionnaires That's from water being stagnant for long periods of time. lead helps make metals and solders more resilient to high temperatures Not only is this not true, but water is never going to go above boiling. Propane torches (used for soldering…
> People drink hot water all the time not to mention cooking, tea, instant coffee and more. I always use cold water and then boil it in a kettle. Even in Europe with our copper pipes the heat will dissolve more crap apparently. It's always advised to do this. > That's from water being stagnant for long periods of time. Yeah stagnant under optimal bacterial growth temperatures like 30C. And it enters the body through…
That's great for you. This has nothing to do with how absurd the idea of using lead in 'hot pipes' would be.
Not drinking it doesn't prevent legionnaire disease.
I didn't say anything about drinking, I just said it comes from stagnant water.
I still use it for that reason because lead free is a bitch to work with. I only solder micro electronics though.
Lead free solder is very easy to work with when putting copper pipes together. The torch puts out a lot of heat and you don't have to worry about destroying anything near it (except for wood behind it). I can't imagine all the twisted logic it would take for someone to think using leaded solder in pipes is a good idea.
This feels like a good time to bring up the lead-crime hypothesis (flaws and all). For those who don't know, there's a strong (if faulty) correlation between lead levels in preschool children and crime rates: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/17991876/crime-drop-murder-lea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis Regardless of what you think about the hypothesis, the growth and crunch in lead levels…
[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
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Is this actually true? I think that’s changed. Also - how much of a problem is it? What kind of lead exposure do I receive from a small airplane flying over me one day? What does this risk compare to, say, smoking? Or not wearing my seat belt? Simply stating that a bad thing exists is not enough.
It's true, but that's because there was no legally approved alternative until about a year ago. Now that there's an approved unleaded replacement for 100 Octane avgas (G100UL), I expect leaded fuel will disappear quickly. Airports are currently in the process of installing the new tanks to dispense it. Many of the bay area airports already started offering unleaded 94 Octane (UL94) at the pump as of earlier this year…
Question for any IQ skeptics here (e.g. "it just measures your ability to take tests" or "it just tells you how rich your parents are"): what's your response to studies like this? Is there anything that can be said about the effect of lead on cognitive function? Why might IQ be a good measure of lead-induced stupidification, but unreliable for literally anything else?
You have to read the study to find out what it meant by IQ. People freely confuse IQ (a score on a test that's calling itself an IQ test) with IQ (a platonic ideal statistic people assume exists for the purpose of publishing research about it). This could be either.
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That's a terrible way to make tea, fwiw.
I want to stress that I actually don't give a shit (I am not that into tea, I just drink it sometimes, it's not a big deal to me), but I am curious as to why.