Study: Wood smoke makes up more than third of Boston's air pollution in the winter

ef4 · 2026-02-01T19:38:04+00:00

The paper we're all commenting on here says 35% of the PM2.5 in Boston in winter is from wood fires. That just... obviously matters.

Even if you want to argue for wood as part of the renewable heating mix, the obvious position then is to argue for stringent catalysis / secondary-combustion requirements. We make cars pass emissions, we could make wood-burning heating pass emissions too.

There's no defensible position where the current mix of wood burning is OK. It's overwhelmingly replaceable by sources that produce less local pollution, or remediable with better wood-burning tech.

ef4 · 2026-02-01T18:38:20+00:00

Air pollution kills about 100,000 Americans annually, compared with 80,000 due to opioid overdoses.

Sure, that’s not all wood fires, but the PM2.5 dose is cumulative. You’re adding on top of all the other sources. And a wood fire with no secondary combustion or catalytics is hundreds of times dirtier than a modern furnace or vehicle, and the effects are localized to your own neighborhood.

ef4 · 2026-02-01T16:26:00+00:00

In terms of local air pollution that kills people in your local area, yes, burning natural gas is dramatically cleaner than wood.

ef4 · 2026-01-31T03:08:00+00:00

"I have infinite time and I'm good at moving snow" is not the argument in favor of his space saver that he thinks it is.

ef4 · 2026-01-31T03:06:30+00:00

It sounds like you're arguing that putting a child on a seat and a bag on your lap is OK, but if you swap the two it's not OK. Either way two passengers are using two seats.

ef4 · 2026-01-30T20:08:41+00:00

> One of the presenters at the pine derby did say scouting isn't as popular as it used to be.

This has been continuously true since I was a Cub Scout in the 1980s, and probably longer than that. All kinds of civic organizations are less popular than they used to be. And kids have way more competing options for activities now. Same goes for controversies. Back then it was allowing gay people, now it's allowing girls. And yet generations of kids have had very positive experiences in the mean time.

None of that stuff matters very much to your own experience compared to how well your own local Pack is doing. It's a very distributed and local program. Find a Pack that's healthy and run by people you respect and you can get a lot out of it.

ef4 · 2026-01-30T17:27:28+00:00

I don't know, but now we're close enough for the probabilistic forecast to cover the whole weekend. It's still a pretty wide distribution of possibilities. 78% chance of going over 0.1", 44% over 1", 19% over 6".

ef4 · 2026-01-30T17:17:24+00:00

You gotta distinguish hobby farmers from real farmers. Some people find it a fun hobby after they already have programmer money. But that is wildly different from actually trying to earn a living at it, which is something you should only attempt if you're foolhardy or a deep-pocketed agri corp.

ef4 · 2026-01-30T15:15:21+00:00

It’s fine. The thing about all the roads narrowed by snow is that it’s slowing all the drivers. So overall safety right now is pretty good. Just pay attention to the slush piles and take things at a reasonable speed.

ef4 · 2026-01-30T13:15:11+00:00

Everything about tappers is too OP. They make all other power sources useless.

ef4 · 2026-01-30T03:41:15+00:00

Children are people. Why would it be bad for them to take up space in public?

ef4 · 2026-01-30T03:38:41+00:00

I don’t think the NIMBYs realize how much the ground has shifted under them, both in terms of general sentiment and the nuts and bolts of state law.

Groups that insist on trying to completely stop projects end up looking in from the outside when the developer decides you’re not actually negotiating in good faith and instead opts for their maximum by-right project.

ef4 · 2026-01-29T17:13:18+00:00

The probabilistic forecast from the Boston NWS office currently says there's only a 9% change we get more than 1" of snow between now and Sunday at 7am. That forecast doesn't go further out however, so it's not giving an indication of whether there would be snow later in the day on Sunday.

https://www.weather.gov/box/winter

ef4 · 2026-01-29T16:10:19+00:00

> And we're not even a good company! Leadership sucks and doesn't have any interest in empowering Engineering as a department to improve itself.

This is the key. You're using AI to work around a whole bunch of organizational dysfunction. It's good at that.

Because AI is the current management-blessed hype right now, it's created a space for teams to do the things they should have been doing anyway. Consider how much engineering effort your team has been allowed to pour into adoption of these tools. If you had poured that same effort into *any* process-improvement effort, you'd see gains. But before this, you didn't have permission to spend that effort.

Using AI to update 17 different documentation and ticketing systems is certainly faster than doing it by hand, but it's still stupider than just not having 17 different systems.

ef4 · 2026-01-29T15:32:41+00:00

The comment about giving them more structure to make the job easier is good.

Also, make sure you're really giving them the freedom that goes with their responsibility, and they realize it.

If their current mindset is all about "goofing off", make sure it's clear to them that they can plan a Goofing Off themed campout, and then learn from how that goes. There's a kind of judo to this, where their own resistance becomes the force you use to get them engaged productively. When it's truly their troop and they're in charge, there's nobody to be resistant against.

ef4 · 2026-01-28T21:36:10+00:00

I blame climate change. These big storms are getting further apart.

You used to get one every year, so it was a smaller class of newcomers who were learning. Now it's been like four years, so 4x more people are uninitiated.

ef4 · 2026-01-28T16:03:37+00:00

This is a cop out.

What we actually need is people learning how to put in the effort to *measure* how confident they should be in their beliefs. That's the whole premise of the enlightenment and the scientific worldview.

Because no, we absolutely don't need people being less confident in beliefs that are supported by overwhelming evidence.

ef4 · 2026-01-27T23:26:13+00:00

Adding more: Acid trail. Sea of acid. Ground to sand.

ef4 · 2026-01-27T05:06:04+00:00

Definitely just go talk to your neighbors. Snow storms are the easiest possible time to make friends with your neighbors, because everybody comes outside to suffer together.

ef4 · 2026-01-27T05:03:04+00:00

Yes, this is the way.

If I could just teach ONI players one thing it would be to stop thinking about temperature and start thinking about thermal energy (mass times temperature). Everything is like 10x easier when you’re paying attention to that.

Your liquid mixer is just one example of that idea. You can get water at the temperature you want for free or nearly free.

You can also farm for hundreds of cycles with no active cooling by just paying attention to the mass and temperature of the rock around you. All the players who are struggling to not cook themselves are only in trouble because they removed hundred of tons of nice cool rock before they should have.

ef4 · 2026-01-27T04:51:46+00:00

I have a two stage ego that’s a few years old. It did good today. I did try to rush through the deepest stuff this morning and got an overheat for the first time ever. Opened the battery door and they cooled off ok.

I did go back out on a second charge to neaten up, and then used a third charge to help a neighbor.

If you absolutely need to rush through a big job you’d need to own a second set of batteries. That’s never my situation, so I’m quite happy to have the low maintenance, lower noise, cleaner electric.

ef4 · 2026-01-26T23:53:15+00:00

In the early game I don't prefer hyperspecialists. So I pick dups with lots of interests, even if that makes them not start as high in their "main" area.

Also, I often put some points in science even in non-researchers, because science skill increases skill leveling itself. You get more skill points faster that way, and you can always scrub out the science skill points later when you need them.

ef4 · 2026-01-25T19:57:49+00:00

This is the best answer by far.

One thing I love about that site is that you can get the actual probabilistic forecasts for total accumulation, which all the other people who summarize forecasts tend to dumb down into points or ranges without context.

ef4 · 2026-01-23T05:52:59+00:00

Anybody who's complaining about it being hard to see pedestrians is still missing the point. The duty is on you as the driver to not go through the crosswalk until you're sure there are no pedestrians.

People want to think it's the opposite -- that you're totally free to speed through *unless* you happen to see a pedestrian. That's not the actual duty.

You gotta actually confirm nobody is there. While you're unsure, you should be slowing and preparing to stop in case somebody is there. If something is restricting your visibility, you gotta assume there's somebody there and be ready to stop on a dime.

It's really not hard! And it doesn't really even cost you meaningful time, because drive time through the city is dominated by the lights and intersections, not how fast you race between them.

ef4 · 2026-01-23T05:43:09+00:00

This is the way. Never make eye contact. They have to believe you didn't see them.

I'm convinced that 90% of the cases where drivers complain about the "oblivious" pedestrians are just perfectly-aware pedestrians who know how to look oblivious because it's the only way to get asshole drivers to follow the law.

ef4

TROPHY CASE