3 ms·

> A lot of assumptions about what was "safe" got upended with data when everything shut down. A lot of what we do is a lot more "unsafe" for us than we credit.

> A lot of assumptions about what was "safe" got upended with data when everything shut down. A lot of what we do is a lot more "unsafe" for us than we credit. Can you provide some context here? While I don't necessarily dispute what you are saying, it is a very broad and general statement. One should not spray plants or a lawn with soapy water (concentration being a factor, of course). For this approach to work without stripping off the wax coating most plants and grass have, you want to deliver the water to the roots rather than spray from the top. If you did that, the amount of soap in a typical shower, hand washing or dish washing cycle isn't going to be an issue. I can also imagine a simple filtration system that might treat the recycled water before irrigation. According to the EPA [0], in the US, about 9 billion gallons of water per day are used for landscape irrigation. That is an astounding amount of water. I found numbers in the range of 100 gallons per day for watering lawns during the summer. Even if we could replace half of that water with recycled water, the gains would be massive. Which brings me to the reality that one could filter soapy water and then, if necessary, dilute it with some clean water in order to maintain a plant-healthy soap concentration. The point is that this might be a worthy idea to consider. The details would have to be worked out. I don't think it is impossible. [0] https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/pubs/outdoor.html https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/pubs/o...

bsder 5y ago
> Can you provide some context here? While I don't necessarily dispute what you are saying, it is a very broad and general statement. You're allowed to dispute it. It's not an obvious thing. Let's take asthma as an example as it's the most recent thing I read. When you analyze the data about asthma, it turns out that asthma attacks decreased even more than expected during the lockdowns. If you compare people who were partially working from home versus the office against the results from the lockdowns, asthma decreased more than expected for the people suddenly thrown home. Since you have the people originally working partially from home, you get a read on the fact that general air pollution got better so you can tease the environmental effects out. What it looks like is that some significant chunk of asthma is due to general activity of the immune system due to swimming in a daily soup of pathogens. "Long COVID" is also a good example. "Long COVID" put a spotlight on lasting damage due to viral infections--of course, once we started looking we find that a lot of viruses leave lasting damage. So, general viral exposure isn't really as "safe" as we thought. How do you make sure that "grey water" doesn't have viral contamination?
- robomartin 5y ago
  While I understand your perspective one has to be extremely careful in deriving conclusions from such data or analysis. The only way to be able to approximate a supportable conclusion would be a double-blind study with randomly chosen and normally distributed individuals in both the control group and the group being studied for the effect in question. Isolating for the variable under study is one of the cardinal rules of this kind of statistical analysis. The simpler statement is the often-quoted, correlation is not causation. These things respond to dozens, hundred, thousands of variables and are difficult to analyze without adherence to strict statistical methods.

bsder 5y ago

> Can you provide some context here? While I don't necessarily dispute what you are saying, it is a very broad and general statement. You're allowed to dispute it. It's not an obvious thing. Let's take asthma as an example as it's the most recent thing I read. When you analyze the data about asthma, it turns out that asthma attacks decreased even more than expected during the lockdowns. If you compare people who were partially working from home versus the office against the results from the lockdowns, asthma decreased more than expected for the people suddenly thrown home. Since you have the people originally working partially from home, you get a read on the fact that general air pollution got better so you can tease the environmental effects out. What it looks like is that some significant chunk of asthma is due to general activity of the immune system due to swimming in a daily soup of pathogens. "Long COVID" is also a good example. "Long COVID" put a spotlight on lasting damage due to viral infections--of course, once we started looking we find that a lot of viruses leave lasting damage. So, general viral exposure isn't really as "safe" as we thought. How do you make sure that "grey water" doesn't have viral contamination?

robomartin 5y ago
While I understand your perspective one has to be extremely careful in deriving conclusions from such data or analysis. The only way to be able to approximate a supportable conclusion would be a double-blind study with randomly chosen and normally distributed individuals in both the control group and the group being studied for the effect in question. Isolating for the variable under study is one of the cardinal rules of this kind of statistical analysis. The simpler statement is the often-quoted, correlation is not causation. These things respond to dozens, hundred, thousands of variables and are difficult to analyze without adherence to strict statistical methods.