gaiabaracetti, Jan 14, 2024
A compost toilet is one of my life goals (funny given that many billions of people’s life goals probably include a flush toilet).
I agree about the pets, but I don’t think it’s about manliness. I think it’s an extension of the selfishness we see in every realm of life. Pets are whatever you want them to be, especially if you ignore their actual needs, and they love you “unconditionally” (because, unlike the wildlife which is free, they have to). Dealing with humans, who can tell you off when you’re being obnoxious, is a lot harder.
You can't put people in a cage to cheer you up or keep you company. Well, not anymore and not legally, at least.
Even as someone who is very glad people are having less children, when I see them substituting children with pets I think we live in a very sick society. There’s lots of other things you can do if you’re not having kids. The whole “kids or dogs?” debate is so weird. Given that many dogs end up in shelters or are abused, it’s actually tragic.

gaiabaracetti, Jan 14, 2024
“If US pets were a country, they would rank fifth globally in terms of meat consumption – greater than Germany.”

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An Epidemic of Pet Obesity
Jan. 16, 2024, US Dept. of Agriculture
If you are still trying to keep your New Year's resolutions to lose weight, one expert says maybe you should include your pets in those resolutions. On this edition of "Agriculture USA" Gary Crawford reports on what some say is an epidemic of pet obesity and what we pet owners can do about it.

https://www.usda.gov/media/radio/weekly-features/2024-01-16/epidemic-pet-obesity

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Otto Robert Frisch (1904–1979) was an Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Otto Stern and Immanuel Estermann he first measured the magnetic moment of the proton. With Lise Meitner he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission (coining the term) and first experimentally detected the fission by-products. Later, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls he designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940.

In 1944 at Los Alamos, one of Frisch's tasks as the leader of the Critical Assemblies group was to accurately determine the exact amount of enriched uranium which would be required to create the critical mass, the mass of uranium which would sustain a nuclear chain reaction. He did this by stacking several dozen 3 cm bars of enriched uranium hydride at a time and measuring rising neutron activity as the critical mass was approached. The hydrogen in the metal bars increased the time that the reaction required to accelerate. One day Frisch almost caused a runaway reaction by leaning over the stack, which he termed the "Lady Godiva assembly". His body reflected neutrons back into the stack. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the red lamps that flickered intermittently when neutrons were being emitted, were 'glowing continuously'. Realizing what was happening, Frisch quickly scattered the bars with his hand. Later he calculated that the radiation dose was "quite harmless" but that if he "had hesitated for another two seconds before removing the material ... the dose would have been fatal". "In two seconds he received, by the generous standards of the time, a full day's permissible dose of neutron radiation." In this way his experiments determined the exact masses of uranium required to fire the Little Boy bomb over Hiroshima.

He also designed the "dragon's tail" or "guillotine" experiment in which a uranium slug was dropped through a hole in larger fixed mass of uranium, reaching just above critical mass (0.1%) for a fraction of a second. At the meeting to approve the experiment, Richard Feynman, commenting on the transient danger involved, said it was "just like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon." In the period of about 3 milliseconds, the temperature rose at a rate of 2000 °C per sec and over 10 to the 15th power excess neutrons were emitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Robert_Frisch

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The Monumental Task of Clearing Debris From the Lahaina Fire
By Jim Carlton, Jan. 14, 2024, Wall St. Journal
The debris removal will mark an important milestone in Maui’s recovery from the Aug. 8 wildfire which destroyed the town of 13,000 and killed at least 100. With most residents displaced pending a rebuilding that will take years, charred remnants including still-standing concrete walls and crumpled cars remain along the lone highway that runs past Lahaina to the world-famous tourist resorts of West Maui.

Clearing out debris from fire-ravaged communities is often long and difficult. After the Camp Fire destroyed the city of Paradise, Calif., in 2018 and killed 85 people, it took a year for crews to remove more than 3.6 million tons of ash, metal, concrete and other debris—or the equivalent of 10 Empire State Buildings.

Rebuilding in Paradise is still under way, with just 3,000 of the over 11,000 lost homes replaced so far.

Meanwhile, some of the over 6,000 displaced Lahaina residents have moved off the island, while most of the others remain in hotel rooms and other temporary housing pending more permanent arrangements by state and local officials.

One of the first jobs immediately after the fire was to remove hazardous materials such as paints, solvents and batteries—a process completed in November by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agency shipped 13 containers of toxins to safe disposal sites off the island.

To make room for the nontoxic debris, the county led efforts to create a temporary landfill outside Lahaina so trucks wouldn’t have to travel far, Delatorre said. Lahaina sits on the opposite side of the island from Maui’s biggest population center.

County officials said they are determining a permanent site for the debris—but agreed not to make it at the temporary location, which Native Hawaiian activists say is too close to the ocean and on sacred ground.

“If a tsunami comes in, all of that could just go into the sea,” said Tiare Lawrence, a Native Hawaiian organizer on Maui. “It needs to be further inland and contained in a better way.”

County officials said that protective features have been put in, including a high-density plastic liner, and that state and federal assessments have determined there wouldn’t be any harm to the environment or important sites.

At a public meeting on Dec. 18, officials in charge of the cleanup warned residents in attendance that the process would be disruptive. “There will be a lot of trucks,” said Col. Jess Curry, recovery field office commander for the Army Corps of Engineers. “I will not pretend there will not be an impact. But we will work to minimize that.”

Not much remains of the old town, with many homes and businesses reduced to little more than ash and rubble in the heart of Lahaina. Some buildings farther out are damaged but still standing, and a few neighborhoods on the outskirts survived intact.

Erika Pless and Dylan Medina live in one of those homes, but worry the cleanup will be hard to endure in terms of the noise, the smell and general disruption. “When it rains, it smells like an ashtray,” said Medina, 34, an artist. Pless, a lei maker, worries about the drinking-water quality, and said the couple tried to find other housing but had to return to the rental because of scarce supply.

“I feel stuck here in a sense,” Pless, also 34, said one day last month as crews were working to remove toxic materials in the wreckage below their home.

As the final cleanup begins, Delatorre said a team of 25 cultural monitors would accompany cleanup crews, affixing color-coded tags to denote known graves and other sites of concern. “We’ve heard from some individuals that they know their grandfather or great grandmother, around this big tree on the property, that’s where they’ve been buried,” she said.

Col. Curry said there would be “a tremendous amount” of removing debris by hand in those sensitive areas, followed by excavators that would remove everything including the foundation—as well as at least 6 inches of soil.

Once everything is clear, the island will face rebuilding, a task community leaders say could take five years. Among the issues to be resolved: whether the Front Street main drag should be rebuilt as it was, catering to tourists, or with stores and businesses more focused on the local community, as Lawrence would prefer. “Lahaina wasn’t our town anymore,” she said.

Front Street might even have to be moved inland from its oceanfront location, which predated state laws that prohibit development so close to the water, local officials say. The county said it would be hosting public workshops to plan Lahaina’s future.

The new Lahaina can be rebuilt to help fix some of the problems of the old one, such as overreliance on tourism, said Kainoa Horcajo, director of community development for the nonprofit Global Empowerment Mission Hawaii. “My hope,” he said, “is that people will be able to come together and compromise what they want.”

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-monumental-task-of-clearing-debris-from-the-lahaina-fire-98f3a063