Log in
Washington, District of Columbia
1 public comment
Ultimately, history would imperfectly record the story of the Foal of Troy.
Charlottesville safety campaigner used chalk to draw crossing near intersection where woman was fatally hit by car
After officials in Charlottesville, Virginia, reportedly ignored his pleas to implement a pedestrian crosswalk at a dangerous intersection, traffic safety activist Kevin Cox drew a crossing with chalk.
Authorities responded by covering Cox’s handiwork with black paint and charging him with vandalism in a case that evidently demonstrates how acrimonious relations can sometimes get between local government bureaucrats in the US and those who say they are trying to hold them to account.
Continue reading...
JFC people
Washington, DC
"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."
Excerpts from "Mortal Coils," in turn excerpted from Earthly Materials by Cutter Wood, via the April 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine. Posted for me for future reference re the meaning of life and humankind's role in the cosmos.
I find it amusing that an Imperial measurement snuck in there, especially because 3.5 million feet is more elegantly called 1 megameter.
(OK, also the energy section is also Imperial, but that's just explaining 500 MJ to us Americans.)
(OK, also the energy section is also Imperial, but that's just explaining 500 MJ to us Americans.)
Washington, District of Columbia
"I’m continually mystified that so many of YIMBYism’s critics identify with the anti-monopolist left—even though opposing YIMBY reforms means preserving the market power of incumbent landlords and developer cartels."
Washington, District of Columbia
Discussion about this post
Create your profile
Only paid subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.
Washington, District of Columbia
For all of the progress that humanity has made against water-borne, food-borne, and vector-borne disease, we remain devastatingly vulnerable to germs that spread through the air.
One of the best shots we have at turning the page on airborne disease is an emerging type of germicidal UV (GUV) light called far-UVC. Over the last decade, researchers have documented its ability to eliminate pathogens while being safe for humans. A landmark study from 2022 found that far-UVC reduced the concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4 percent in a room-sized chamber, all while operating within safe UV exposure limits. Compared to standard ventilation, this was the equivalent of changing the air completely over in the room 184 times every hour. To put that in perspective, the CDC recommends 5 or more air changes per hour in the workplace. Even hospital operating rooms in the US only require 20. Far-UVC is effective against viruses too; airborne coronaviruses are more susceptible to far-UVC than the same bacteria used in the other study.
Writing for Works in Progress two years ago, I called far-UVC ‘the most promising new candidate for building a pandemic firewall.’ Since then at the nonprofit where I work, Blueprint Biosecurity, we’ve spent thousands of hours poring over the academic literature. We’ve spoken to hundreds of experts in photobiology, atmospheric chemistry, indoor air quality, building science, environmental engineering, epidemiology, public health, and many other disciplines. With the benefit of all that further investigation, I still stand by that original claim today.
Considering the impressive findings quoted above, as well as society’s urgent need for better defenses against airborne pathogens, you might expect there to be a booming market for far-UVC devices. But most people have still never heard of it, let alone considered using it. What could explain this?
While we have promising lab studies, far-UVC researchers have not yet produced the kind of compelling real-world data that is needed to support safety and efficacy. If far-UVC were a drug, the situation would be straightforward: it would not yet be approved by the FDA, and would need to go through clinical trials before anyone could even buy a lamp.
But there is no FDA that needs to approve of installing a far-UVC lamp in an office, school, or nightclub. This is a double-edged sword. Lamps are freely available for purchase, but the flipside of there being no regulator is that there is also no entity to confer public trust in the safety and efficacy of the technology.
Nor is there a corporation willing to make an upfront investment in expensive clinical research when other far-UVC manufacturers will be able to free ride off a successful outcome. No for-profit entity can afford to obtain the standard of evidence expected by risk-averse institutions who are in a position to confer public trust.
The absence of a coordinator between research, industry, and these institutions is also a hindrance to progress. Instead of the select amount of ongoing far-UVC research being purposefully directed towards a common goal, it takes place in academic silos.
Herein lies the challenge and opportunity for catalyzing the development of far-UVC. There is no clear precedent for a technology like far-UVC gaining the trust of the public. This is the problem we set out to solve.
Over the past two years, Blueprint Biosecurity has been hard at work creating a plan. We’ve captured it in a report that we call our far-UVC Blueprint. Today, March 10th 2025, it’s being released to the public in preprint form.
In addition to detailing what we know about how, and how well, far-UVC works, the report identifies a handful of critical research questions that must be answered to enable trusted institutions to confidently endorse far-UVC. It starts with activities analogous to the goals of FDA Phase I and II trials: quantifying the doses of far-UVC needed in real applications and making sure our understanding of its biological and chemical effects is complete. After that comes Phase III: cluster-randomized controlled trials to obtain high quality evidence of far-UVC’s real world effectiveness.
As we publish the preprint, there are three things we’re launching today to move our work on this forward.
For the next month, we’re actively soliciting public feedback on our plan and looking to grow our pool of external reviewers we use to sharpen our work before public release. Find out more here.
We’re growing our far-UVC team. We’ve just posted a job listing for a central role in managing our forthcoming far-UVC field building work. Apply here.
Finally, we’ve launched a new Substack we’re calling Far-UVC Field Notes. Each issue will document the progress of far-UVC and our work on it. Read more about it and subscribe here.
Washington, District of Columbia
Next Page of Stories