21–30 of 98 posts
>On the other hand, the pathologist assigned to work on the bodies I would prepare was a German, and she was named Fleishhacker, which sounded to Mr. Utton as though it should mean butcher, but actually didn't. It actually does though: http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=Fleischhacker
>"The black lungs of heavy smokers I would weigh once, then squeeze under cold running water for fifteen minutes until they became baby pink and tripelike, and then weigh again: the difference in the two figures, often a couple of pounds or more, was the weight of the tar and nicotine that quite possibly was the killer." A few pounds ? If you'd asked me, I would have guessed the weight of lung-accumulated smoking gun…
Modern LA is orders of magnitude safer than London in the '60s and earlier. Those conditions would have been comparable to some parts of China today.
>"The black lungs of heavy smokers I would weigh once, then squeeze under cold running water for fifteen minutes until they became baby pink and tripelike, and then weigh again: the difference in the two figures, often a couple of pounds or more, was the weight of the tar and nicotine that quite possibly was the killer." A few pounds ? If you'd asked me, I would have guessed the weight of lung-accumulated smoking gun…
Here's a video showing extraction of tar from 400 cigarettes.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_csz2dPjyAw
Not all of that tar stays in the lungs - some is breathed out; some is worked out by cillia (and sometimes swallowed, increasing the risk of cancer of the kidney, bladder, and penis).
Modern London pollution is bad and we need to work to reduce it - people still die from the pollution - but the London peasoupers were catastrophic. The US EPA has a great page about London smog, which has a long history: http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers
> Early on, no one had the scientific tools to correlate smog with adverse health effects, but complaints about the smoky air as an annoyance date back to at least 1272, when King Edward I, on the urging of important noblemen and clerics, banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern LA is orders of magnitude safer than London in the '60s and earlier. Those conditions would have been comparable to some parts of China today.
What exactly did they do to clean up the air in London? I mean, just pass regulations that factories have to be further from the city, or what?
http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers
http://www.air-quality.org.uk/03.php
There are still problems with NO2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32512152
Its stories like this why I come to HN. HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit, but you can't survive on a diet of just high risk investing weirdness.
You don't have to come to HN exclusively. I like the idea of HN or any other website being focused on single-theme. If I want to read about startups and tech I come to HN. If I want to read about something else, I go else where. I enjoyed this post very much but I would be very sad if posts like these became more frequent over here as I wouldn't have a good source of startups and tech anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern LA is orders of magnitude safer than London in the '60s and earlier. Those conditions would have been comparable to some parts of China today.
What exactly did they do to clean up the air in London? I mean, just pass regulations that factories have to be further from the city, or what?
Here's an interesting little writeup that has some really fascinating graphs on London pollution: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/urban.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to come to HN exclusively. I like the idea of HN or any other website being focused on single-theme. If I want to read about startups and tech I come to HN. If I want to read about something else, I go else where. I enjoyed this post very much but I would be very sad if posts like these became more frequent over here as I wouldn't have a good source of startups and tech anymore.
The thing is, aside from reddit (and perhaps Digg) what sites are "like" this, but not focused on tech?
Its stories like this why I come to HN. HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit, but you can't survive on a diet of just high risk investing weirdness.
You don't have to come to HN exclusively. I like the idea of HN or any other website being focused on single-theme. If I want to read about startups and tech I come to HN. If I want to read about something else, I go else where. I enjoyed this post very much but I would be very sad if posts like these became more frequent over here as I wouldn't have a good source of startups and tech anymore.
So your enjoyment of this delightfully written article (good taste, I must say!) can be apprehension-free.
Its stories like this why I come to HN. HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit, but you can't survive on a diet of just high risk investing weirdness.
Oh, no no no. It started as a way for pg to read more interesting things, literally about anything. Byzantine coins and cat prints in medieval manuscripts are two that I recall from years past. The site has always been for intellectual diversity above all else. Keeping that going is the thing we care about most.
In other words this article is 100% certified original Hacker News, and it warms my heart (freshly grateful to still be attached to the rest of my body) to see it at #1.