Coydon Wallham

When i was there for bootcamp we burned a lot of bark. I heard a later assessment that this was creating too much ash/not producing enough BTUs. Is bark part of the experiment/rethink here, or does it remain a separate category?

Is it possible that Li Ziqi mentioned Permies.com on some form of China's social media...?

Les Frijo wrote:I don't understand this.

Is my math right?

154 parts per million = 154000 parts per billion.

Where is the 600 servings number coming from?

I somehow missed this the first time. Yes, the comparison would actually dial up the number for concentrations, meaning each serving of rice would deliver 600 times the FDA recommended limit. I suspect Asian restaurants in the USA would have run out of customers by now if this were the case, hence my quick assessment that a disparity would be best explained in the other direction.

Looking at an FDA paper on the subject, arsenic in brown rice is actually listed as 154ppb, not ppm. I guess that would mean they recommend children get no more than a serving of brown rice every other day (or one serving max of white rice daily). This sounds in line with general social perceptions, although obviously this is just a crude guideline individuals should refine if they are concerned.

The FDA paper goes on to estimate observed chronic problems determined to result from real world arsenic exposure. They found lung or bladder cancer attributed to arsenic in rice in 39 people per million. The overall cancer risk was 90,000 per million, meaning rice was associated with ~0.04% of cancer cases, or four one hundreths of a percent of lung/bladder cancer cases attributed to arsenic in rice.

Going by the numbers in that paper, concerns over cancer prevention would be most productively focused in other areas. Apparently, arsenic is so omnipresent in our current environment, attempting to live 'gick-free' from it would not work.

Looking at the paper's introduction and conclusion, it seems likely to have been written to promote certain patterns or products for pediatric diets. I've seen ample evidence that the FDA readily departs from an objective assessment to pursue outside agendas, so I'd be interested to hear if other sources contradict what they say here. I have some confidence the numbers are roughly objective despite my concern with the conclusions stated.

Also, the paper mentions that washing/rinsing/soaking rice will reduce arsenic content somewhat, while also reducing some nutrients accompanying it. They refer to these minerals as "enriched", so I'm guessing that only applies to artificially "fortified" nutrients...?

John F Dean wrote:I suspected as much.  I referred earlier to the cranberries cause cancer scare on the late 1950s.   The news medias was all over it, cranberry farmers went bust … then someone actually read the research and crunched the numbers .   One would have to eat truck loads of cranberries ….

Similar story with rootbeer and sassafras, where rats force fed more than their body weight of the compound in the 60s were found to suffer liver problems. If you drink more than a 100+lbs of rootbeer a day, be sure it is safrole free, assuming you have a metabolism resembling that of a mouse/rat.

Nancy Reading wrote:I guess most recent first or chronologically earlier first, is like email inboxes - some people prefer one way and others another. Perhaps we could consider making it another pie feature? then people could select which they prefer and everyone (with pie) would be happy.
I find reading bottom to top to follow a thread more difficult than top to bottom. I guess if you've already seen it then having new posts at the top might be easier, but as said above 'the green line' and pie find my place so I forget that is one of the benefits of pie.

Email inboxes are like the thread summary pages. I use various email interfaces and the default is newest first on the summary page, with threads grouped and in chronological order- just like the default has been here.

Having a thread in reverse chronological order would be discombobulating to read updates on- with multiple new posts you'd have to jump down to the middle of the conversation and read up or read the responses before the preceding comments.

r ransom wrote:I look at my email every other day.  I look at permies hourly.  No need for extra emails clogging my bloated in box.

But what advantage does a thread 'subscription' give you if you are looking at forum summaries so often already?

J.P. Waters wrote:Suggestion:
1. To have a default view that shows last reply first and also shows (on summary) when the thread was created. As well as buttons/icons for first/last msg (see image 1)

After about 25 years of participating in dozens if not hundreds of similar BBS/forums/social media, I've concluded discussions where content within a topic is presented in a chronologically linear format like Permies is vastly superior to all others. What feels like a true public forum with individuals freely exchanging ideas around mutual aid here, becomes something more like the floor of a stock exchange with jackals fighting over slabs of meat in a cesspool environment like reddit with disjointed conversations of snarky comments competing for attention. Putting new comments first seems like it would be highly disruptive of the friendly, constructive conversational flow threads here currently exhibit.

Another rarer aspect of Permies I greatly appreciate is how topics are open ended and often span years, even decades, with gaps in between contributions. This highlights for me that people here are addressing relevant topics concisely, such that new information or viewpoints can gracefully be added to the flow of discussion. Appreciation depends on a reader being willing to dedicate enough time to read through the whole thread, somewhat filtering out those transient characters who commonly drop in disruptively and move on without contributing to the process of accumulating knowledge.

r ransom wrote:Pie feature allows a different colour icon if someone replies since you last read the thread.

You can also set a "watch" on a thread to get an email if someone replies, even if you haven't replied to the thread.  ( button is at Top of thread).  

There are also some email settings you can edit in your profile.

I believe I use default settings on all of my browsers.

In desktop versions, the "watch" button appears at the top and bottom of the page. It offers the option to receive email notifications or not when subscribing (not sure why you would subscribe without getting notifications).

In mobile mode, the button only appears at the bottom of the page and automatically subscribes with emails sent.

NM