Please note that air quality in an area varies dramatically over time. You are looking at a current snapshot with maps like that. The map linked below has his more historical data and I can see several _weeks_ this past year in my area (which currently has very good air quality) where the PM 2.5 weekly average exceeded 25ug/m^3.
Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire, up to the activity of nearby factories and power plants, up to national and global phenomena like wildfires and weather patterns, all have dramatic effects. Looking at an air quality map once and determining that you don’t have to think about air quality because you’re in the US is a mistake.
Exercise outdoors is a wonderful thing, obviously, but there are some days, even in the US, where you might think twice or even consider shifting your exercise to a different (less-polluted) time of the day.
> Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire,
Summer evenings at home in my small Ohio village are often a health hazard, a polluted nightmare driven by the perverse compulsive ignition of so-called 'recreational' yard fires by pyromaniac neighbors.
If it is an Ozone Action day and/or a Heat Advisory day, it is near certain that one or more of the Don't Tread On Me jamokes who live nearby will come out of their houses at sunset, pile a bunch of garbage into a 55-gallon drum or a circle of rocks, sprinkle with accelerant, toss a match and back away. Eyes glazed, they'll watch for a minute, then go back inside, sometimes coming back out every ten minutes or so to refuel the fire, other times letting it blaze until the original pile is down to embers. In any case, there is a new plume of local smoke to add to the day's irritants.
It is a startling phenom to observe, let alone endure. The behavior is made all the more crazy, imho, by the presence of children. These are parents, asserting their rights to burn, and teaching their children to Live Free Or Die. It seems to me to be driven by a rebelliousness, part of the anti-woke wave, country-fried counter-culture, as in "I got your global warming right here, pard".
It's like, listening to country music stations and realizing how many (most!) contemporary and historical Country songs are themed around alcohol-worship.
But I digress.
I apologise. I was triggered by the mention of 'localized phenomena' and the horrified realization that so many of my fellow citizens are self-destructive cray-cray.
I’m not familiar with Ohio village, but I grew up in unincorporated county land in the Texas boonies. My dad had a burn barrel, and would dump oil into the ground “putting it back from where it came”. Even as a kid, nothing about it felt right. Just that experience alone gives no doubt to service members working the burn pits qualifying for disability
To be fair at one point in time people were actually told to dispose of used oil by dumping it into some stony ground. I live in a rural area in the north and most people have burn barrels but 99.9% of people exclusively burn cardboard and paper.
Same. I was very skeptical when Macrofactor introduced this feature, but have since been incredibly impressed. The ability to give it text alongside a photo and then adjust the results (broken out by ingredients) are critical. I’ve also been taking pictures of food sitting on scales and it will take the measurement into account.
Seems like the Macrofactor team took their time developing this feature, as it felt like they were one of the last to roll it out, but the extra polish definitely shows and was worth the wait.
I love this essay, and it very closely mirrors my own feelings about the topic. Thanks for writing/sharing it.
I’m perpetually bamboozled by my fellow software engineering colleagues who insist on proudly shouting from the rooftops “Look at me, ma! I’m vibe coding!” as if it’s some badge of honor to see who can churn out the greatest quantities of shitcode the fastest and completely surrender any last scraps of their cognitive abilities to the best LLM provider of the current moment.
Funny you mention that, I just wrote a bunch of arithmetic functions in js because floats cant be trusted. It was a tad more work than I expected but thats fine. Even I thought it was a tad silly but when I had to check if the results were correct and compared them in some big number calculators from the top of google it turned out not to match.
What do you think? 2/3 with 10 digits behind the dot in accuracy. Should that be 0.6666666666 or 0.6666666667 ? If I later add 1/3 to it my result is 1 which seems more correct?
Nice analysis! I still have an original Sega Saturn I’ve owned since 1996 that I fire up occasionally for a nostalgia bomb. The thing still runs perfectly, same as the day I unboxed it! They may have ended up with quite a complex hardware architecture, but you’ve gotta love the reliability of the older consoles. The same cannot be said of the more modern consoles I’ve had over the years - burning themselves up or failing in other ways.
It's not just old consoles that are reliable, it was SEGA (and Nintendo). When Sony and MS rolled in their consoles are ready cut corners in reliability, and here we are today. PSX and Playstation 2 disc-read errors are extremely common and crippling, even back then. But by the time people noticed they already owned a bunch of games and would just buy a new console lol.
So true. I bought a Saturn a month ago after hearing and reading much about it for years, and the thing still works perfectly. I even bought a stack of CD-R to burn some "backups", and not a single read error. I was expecting to have laser power issues, but nothing, it just works.
I’m also curious about the answer to this! I noticed similar behavior when opening a Typescript project. Enjoy the low latency, but I’d also appreciate accurate/helpful autocomplete suggestions.
https://map.purpleair.com/air-quality-raw-pm25
Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire, up to the activity of nearby factories and power plants, up to national and global phenomena like wildfires and weather patterns, all have dramatic effects. Looking at an air quality map once and determining that you don’t have to think about air quality because you’re in the US is a mistake.
Exercise outdoors is a wonderful thing, obviously, but there are some days, even in the US, where you might think twice or even consider shifting your exercise to a different (less-polluted) time of the day.