Liquid capsaicin treatments for bird seed are an effective squirrel repellent.
They also illustrate the evolution of this protein: birds have no receptors for capsaicin, while mammals do. Birds eat seeds mostly intactly. Their digestive systems are capable of breaking them down - but it's stochastic and some seeds make it through the bird undigested, being redistributed elsewhere. Obviously, having an agent sow your seeds widely is a fitness advantage, and so seedy plants are ultimately served well even if 90+% of their caloric investment into seeds goes into the birds.
Mammals, on the other hand, have teeth - particularly molars. Mammals that eat seeds grind them apart orally before even swallowing. As a result, any seeds ingested by mammals are very likely to be completely destroyed. Plants - peppers, anyway - found a chemical irritant that repels the mammals without even being sensed by birds.
I've used one such treatment (with an amusing logo illustrataion - https://i.imgur.com/JAl8vyW.png) to good effect to discourage squirrels at my feeder, so that they stick to my dedicated squirrel bungee with a log of compressed corn instead.
Oh? Which pepper species and carrier mammal are involved here?
Edit: DERP duh you mean humans. :D Literally made the comparison without recognizing it, too. /Edit
Not challenging you, just curious and not immediately finding the answer myself with a quick search.
The capsaicin receptor is TRPV1, which is a critical protein for thermoregulation and detection of being burned. In other words, it's not just a quick and easy evolutionary path to have a mutation break the receptor for capsaicin and now be immune to the taste. Obviously the animals could evolve behavior or even simply learn as juveniles to tolerate or even enjoy the taste (as many humans do).
I do declare I thought it was a cheeky reference to those tomato plants that grown down by old railroad tracks.
You see a long time ago, someone at a tomato. Could've been a slice in a cold sandwich. Could've been a fresh one, maybe with A little cheese and pepper. But chili just won't do. Neither would spaghetti.
Then, before we had such regulations as we do today, they deposited that tomato seed, post digestion, in the train lavatory toilet. Being back then as it was, the tomato seed and associated fertilizer was dropped from the train car to the track ballast below where it germinated.
It's the same process where researchers deposit tomatoes on new volcanic islands.
You know what they say: when you gotta go, you gotta go.
I mentioned in another comment about growing a Carolina Reaper last summer and trying it with my dad and 13 year old son. My dad and I instantly knew how bad the next half hour or so of our life was about to be. My son also found it hot but no more then 5 minutes later comes out of his room (after we all chewed a pepper and spat it out he went to his room with a slurpee) he casually walks out and says dad is it okay for me to have a shower. He didn't have his slurpee and really did not seemed bothered by the experience at all. Me on the other hand was in insanity pain. Could not stop running water over my tongue or suck on ice and suffered for at least a half hour. I just couldn't believe he took it so well. My only thought was he must not be so sensitive or lacks something like the receptors that detect it.
After writing all that I did a search about people with low TRPV1 receptors and found an interesting study done on a couple people lacking functional TRPV1 channels. They were insensitive to the application of capsaicin to the mouth and skin. Furthermore they had an elevated heat pain threshold as well as an elevated cold pain threshold. Why I found this interesting is because my same son who barely reacted to this insanely hot pepper I can never get to wear a jacket to school. He does not mind the cold at all. He will if we were up a mountain or something but he always complains the car is too hot when I am cold. Anyways not sure he lacks function TRPV1 receptors but still interesting to think about. Article linked below.
> Could not stop running water over my tongue or suck on ice and suffered for at least a half hour.
Capsaicin is a nonpolar molecule that is fat soluble and hydrophobic, so running water over your tongue either has no impact on the problem or makes it worse.
You want to consume anything with fat like milk or sour cream or even pure olive oil which will dissolve the capsaicin and carry it down your digestive tract. For something as strong as a reaper challenge, you’ll want to gargle olive oil because the mechanical action of the bubbles helps break up anything coated on your tongue like soap does when washing your hands. Alcohol based mouth wash also works as does ethanol (Everclear) in general. Edible surfactants and emulsifiers work best but unless you like drinking blended raw eggs or mustard, that might not work for you.
To help when it comes out the other end: drink lots of dairy because the casein helps and eat a bunch of starch (rice, potatoes, bread, etc) and bananas, and stay well hydrated.
Definitely. And I did do thinks like swish milk and wiped my tongue with a paper towel and a cracker and a couple other things. But ultimately the running water and ice was a huge relief but only while I was actively doing it. It didn't lessen the pain if I stopped. Where I am the water is very cold this time of year so it helped.
As for the other end I really didn't want the pain in my throat or other end so I chose to only chew a big chunk briefly and spit it out.
At the end of the day I had to know what it felt like. It is pure pain lol. Will not be doing it again.
If he consistently avoids dressing warm the human body is pretty adaptable to cold conditions so I wouldn't look to deep at that. Both a persons circulatory pattern and metabolism change when exposed to the cold, and people who expose themselves to cold consistently enough respond in far better ways. Their metabolism will shoot up near immediately when someone not adapted will only gain that after they are already cold and shivering. And blood flow is maintained to the extremities but just avoiding more of the skin's surface, where as the unadapted will have just a general decrease in bloodflow to that entire extremity.
If you go extreme enough humans can even walk barefoot through the snow without a problem all day without a real problem, where as someone who wears socks and shoes when it is freezing cold will get serious frostbite on their feet in like 30 minutes or less if they tried it without adapting themselves over time.
For a direct application of this, ice climbers will soak their hands in ice water for 45 minutes every day in the weeks leading up to a climb so that their hands don't freeze and maintain blood flow when on an ice climb, because obviously you can't just stop and warm up your hands by a fire when you are halfway up a frozen waterfall and having stiff or frostbitten fingers makes climbing more difficult/dangerous.
driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field: tasted a lot like flour. what is that "thing"? an attractive tasty flour nodule? the energy yolk to the seed's egg?
I picture your ancestors impulsively tasting mushrooms, and figuring out which ones were not poisonous enough to kill them. Thank you for your lineage!
In Mexico, our ancestors cultivated corn despite not knowing fungicides to prevent mycotoxin contamination. Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value. Guess they really loved corn.
If you have a few 100 people in an area literally spending their waking hours worrying about having enough food. Areas without enough of the right nutrients are pretty common. People are pretty good at figuring out what makes them feel better/healthier.
Some places are iron poor, some even resort to eating dirt, especially when pregnant when you need more iron. Some areas are salt poor and animals will go to extreme measures to get to salt. Some areas have poor bioavailability and require crushing, special cooking, soaking, or a narrow range of acidity to be available, which of course becomes the norm for cooking in those areas. Some even become religious standards, things like fish on fridays or avoiding pork (before trichinosis was controlled).
>Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value.
that one always amazes me. How did they figure it out? it's not exactly intuitive, especially when they wouldn't have known about the chemistry underneath.
It would probably take weeks or months to notice if doing A instead of B was making people sick or not
It might not be that the process was discovered so much as the method of cooking pot production happened to suit the food being cooked.
In particular, lots of civilizations learned to strengthen the basic clay pot by the addition of lime-y things, eg burnt mussel shells. If all your pots are made in this manner then you dont so much discover nixtamalization as experience it only by its absence when you meet settlers that have pellagra and dont use your style of pot.
See [0] for a technical write up on this and many other pot themes.
Maybe some people with sensitive stomachs are able to detect things like this quicker than others. Further, maybe the gene for a sensitive stomach confers a survival advantage not just to the individual, but to relatives of the individual (who can ‘free ride’ on their relative’s discerning stomach).
Sure, there _are_, but also don't underestimate humans...
> Nine young backpackers were rushed to hospital in the west Australian city of Perth after snorting a drug they mistook for cocaine. Three remain in critical condition after *ingesting the mystery white powder which arrived in the post addressed to someone else*
> The bystander states that the older man is a “death with dignity” patient who invited loved ones to be present while he consumed the [Medical Aid in Dying] medication. After his first swallow, he remarked, “Man that burns!” The younger man said, “Let me see,” and then also took a swallow.
It's been nine days, and I've been thinking sporadically about your comment. The two links you provided are great to make your point. Specially the second.
> She remarks that the older man “should be dead” and the younger one “should be alive.”
I was in Cape Cod for a wedding late last year with some friends, and came across what we later learned was a Yew. Some of us had popped into an ice cream shop, and one of the members of my party apparently decided to eat a sweet berry while they waited.
When we came out, we were initially incredulous but they clarified that the flesh of the berry was sweet, but the seed was disgustingly bitter. Which prompted the rest of us to quickly do some research on what this plant was. The mood was initially somewhat light-hearted, however articles with titles like “Why is the Yew Berry sometimes called the Death Berry?” had us on the phone with poison control pretty quickly.
Poison control was very professional, and once they confirmed that it was indeed a Yew Berry that had been ingested, things got pretty serious. Apparently even small doses can quickly cause irreversible heart failure, with death the earliest “symptom” in some cases.
My friend didn’t die— just experienced some terror and gastric distress— the latter likely exacerbated by the terror). No drugs or alcohol or involved, just an impulsive decision, and a sobering reminder about the fragility of life.
One of the other replies in this thread mentions mushrooms. Which reminds of the aphorism: _There are old mushroom foragers, and bold mushroom foragers, but there are no old AND bold mushroom foragers._
Oh wow that was a journey. As soon as I saw "yew" I started internally screaming.
The route that my kids walk to school took us underneath a large yew tree, and the road underneath is often covered in hundreds of delicious-looking pink berries. Since they were tiny they have had to know all about how yew berries look lovely but even one can kill you. What I didn't ever tell them is how apparently the flesh is actually not toxic and is tasty, and it's the seed that will kill you.
The aril (the red flesh of the “berry” surrounding the seed) is tasty, and not toxic. But the leaves, stems, roots, and seeds are poisonous. Our elementary school has evergreen yew bushes growing around it and I taught my children not to eat the seeds. A fellow parent advised use not to eat them because other children might not be so careful.
Are yew rare where you are? Here in Ireland (and also in Britain), they're traditionally found in churchyards (where grazing livestock cannot get at them) and are well known to be poisonous. (Agatha Christie used yew as a poison in one of her novels.)
I read this and thought; I sure hope so if I’ve made it this far in life not knowing. I believe someone’s rectangle plant-identified this particular one as European Yew (Taxus baccata). None of us had encountered it before and this particular plants arils (thanks drjason) were quite strikingly pink.
Apparently, there are others in North America, but mostly not in the Southwest. I lived in the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago which also has a yew (Taxus brevifolia) but I don’t recall if I ever saw the berries.
That said, most folks I know were raised with a baseline of “don’t eat random berries you don’t recognize.”
They're common in landscaping throughout the US. We had some in our front yard, but us kids knew better than to eat random berries. It's painful for me to think that there are people out there without the common sense not to eat random plants they don't recognize.
Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.
Except for grass and most trees, suburban foliage is often quite toxic. A lot of your ornamental plants are poisonous. Think lilies, foxglove, Solomon's seal, and all the excitement of morning glories. The basic understanding that you don't eat anything you can't identify as edible is important in the suburbs too.
I don't disagree, but I'd say there's not really a big problem with people or kids trying to eat flowers. Foxglove and solomon's seal are dangerous but they also don't grow where I'm at. Lilies and morning glory do grow here, and they are also not terribly dangerous to humans (without eating a lot of them.)
Where I'm at, particularly in the suburbs, there's a distinct lack of things that are tempting to eat (like a berry) and also poisonous.
The berries (but not the seeds!) are apparently edible, and I have myself eaten one without noticing any ill effect. IIRC it was indeed the berries that were used in the Agatha Christie novel, so apparently a mistake.
This is an example that mushrooms unfairly get a bad rap - there are much nastier things in the plant kingdom. Some of them you don't even have to eat to get seriously hurt by, and they're not even that rare (e.g. giant hogweed)
I'd add hemlock in there in too. Both are plants you'll see in parks in town. A toddler died here a few years ago because his parent allowed him to play in the big plants with the pretty white flowers. They don't look dangerous and don't have to be eaten to be deadly. Breathing too much pollen is enough, especially for a child.
I'm pretty confident with berries as I've got plenty of experience, but I don't mess with wild carrot or even elderberry as I don't feel I have the knowledge at this point to make it worth the risk. There are just too many lookalikes.
> driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field
Fun fact: The danger in eating raw cookie-dough isn't primarily from fresh eggs (though they can have problems too) but rather from the raw flour, which before cooking may have a bunch of bacterial nastiness in it.
I feel like dividing the outcomes into just two buckets of "direct cause of permanent death" versus "everything else" isn't the ideal way to approach routine decisions about what to eat. :p
("This cardboard is unlikely to kill me, sooooo...")
microwaves cook eggs, throw some scrambled eggs in a glass and into the microwave you get a very smooth scrambled egg. Unpleasant generally but a lot of coffeeshops do this for breakfast sandwiches.
You can pasteurise eggs with a basic sous vide setup. Take any of those home sous vide circulators, set it to 140 F, and once it's up to temperature put the eggs in for 4 minutes...
At least where I live, only a minority are advertised as "ready to eat". It's more common to see the opposite, an explicit warning that it must be cooked.
Wild potatoes look pretty close to some domesticated potatoes I had.
Also I had lots of wild berries (of various species) in forests, and they look pretty much like the berries you can find in a garden. (Though probably not like the berries you can get in a supermarket?)
Wild grass also looks pretty much like some of the domesticated variety. (Well, some varieties do.)
My understanding is that most berries weren’t farmed until recently because they couldn’t be domesticated like other plants, rather they were typically foraged. I remember reading that initially wild blueberry bushes were simply dug up and replanted. Not certain of the veracity of this, however.
Wheat still generally looks like wild grasses, but like maize its seeds are much larger than you’ll find on wild grasses.
THC from the cannabis plant. It is a very long list though, plants go to a great deal of effort to deter pests so the list would be more limited by the subset of plants that humans find useful to cultivate.
side note: It kills you by making all your muscles tense so strongly that you can't breath any more. The muscles in your face tense in a way that it gives you whats called a "Strychnine Smile".
Being delicious to humans is a pretty good evolutionary advantage. Although, not necessarily good for the longevity of individuals of that species, see, for example, cattle.
Though you're right, in kimchi the primary preservative is initially the saltiness and then later the low pH caused by lactobacilli producing lactic acids.
I don't dispute that. My understanding is that the introduction of chili allowed a reduction in salt content, which was important in an era where salt was expensive to produce.
Whatever it is, I'm absolutely certain that it can be launched in a few seconds on archive.org, with no special software requirements besides the JavaScript interpreter that a web browser already has, and that all of this can happen even on your standard-issue pocket supercomputer.
(Every couple of years I fire up an Apple ][ version of Oregon Trail on archive.org because even though we had a PC at home way back when, that's the version I remember playing in school. That game is still hard and I'm not sure exactly what it is that it is supposed to teach except that dysentery is evil.)
Chilli was introduced to Kimchi during the Imjin War. The Portuguese had brought them to Japan perviously, as far as I've seen all kimchi recipe prior to that is only garlic heavy, I like that style of kimchi better personally.
Your squirrels are wimps. I use WBU's no-mess spicy version ... Squirrels have little problem with it. Every now and then one will bounce around a bit after eating it but they still come every day.
I find that it is an effective rat repellent - a neighbor has a rat colony they will not address - but while it was effective for squirrels at first, they seem to have gotten over it, and we now see them eating dropped seeds without any pause at all. I think the first generation never overcame it but now they do eat whatever the birds spill.
A mouse died in my plow truck this summer and the smell was unreal. Like, thank god I got the power windows working bad.
I was told that Irish Spring soap is minty enough to repel mice. Based on the scratch/tooth marks in the bar I left in the glovebox, it apparently isn't.
Next summer, I'll try something with peppermint oil. Assuming I can get the transmission fixed for a reasonable price. Not having reverse is proving to be a hassle.
Pure essential peppermint oil definitely works as a rodent repellent, even in very small quantities, although the effect wears off pretty quickly (that's the thing about essential oils, the essence is volatile). Plan to reapply every 3-7 days. Btw. the reason it works that that for rodents the sense of smell is primary, and mint smell overpowers everything else, so in its presence they are effectively blind.
Drinking them is usually how fatal doses are reached, yes. There isn't much risk topically, as you say, or by inhalation. I have read in the literature of one fatality from topical oil of wintergreen, I believe a teenaged marathon runner who was treating her muscle pain. I don't know if her preparation (an FDA-approved over-the-counter patch from a mainstream pharmaceutical company, if I recall) used DMSO or similar excipients. But such topical fatalities are very unusual.
But we are specifically discussing ingestion of non-recommended substances here.
To correct a minor misconception that could arise from your comment: essential oils do not contain active ingredients. They are, generally speaking, the active ingredient. Some, like oil of wintergreen, are an almost pure compound, while others, like oil of peppermint, are mixtures, but generally they do not contain inert or nontoxic components.
One specific way that a fatal dose could be ingested is if the person ingesting it had previously obtained adulterated essential oils from an irresponsible drug dealer, containing an active ingredient but consisting mostly of something like canola oil, and then switched to a pure essential oil without realizing it.
I don’t think people are ingesting peppermint oil to ward off rats in a plow truck.
It really doesn’t matter how you classify the active ingredient (and there is absolutely an active ingredient). It’s not getting absorbed in five gram quantities unless you snort it, drink it, or apply a stupid homeopathic topical with DMSO that penetrates the skin.
Edit: you’ve edited your post several times since I’ve made mine and I’m just not going to bother. There a dozen everpresent household chemicals that are deadlier than essential oils by a long shot. Nobody seems to have a problem except the kids who eat Tide pods, and they solved that with a zipper.
People who are handling chemicals whose lethal dose is less than a teaspoon need to understand the hazards involved. That is as true of common household chemicals like lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid as it is for essential oils (though I would not describe any of those three as "everpresent").
However, it is worth noting that most household chemicals have a much larger lethal dose (are much less toxic) than commonplace essential oils! Such less-toxic chemicals include not only Tide Pods, but also everything else commonly used for laundry (even liquid bleach), window-cleaning ammonia, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, hair-bleaching-concentration hydrogen peroxide, most paint thinners, and even industrial degreasers like trisodium phosphate. I thought bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) was an exception, but I just looked up its LD50, and it's 850mg/kg orl-rat. So the lethal dose for an adult human is probably about 50 grams, which is an order of magnitude less toxic than oil of peppermint.
(Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough. But in reasonably concentrated forms they're corrosive enough to cause fatal injuries if ingested, even, potentially, at the teaspoon quantities we're talking about. Your mileage may vary, though, and you may just end up permanently maimed.)
It is possible that you don't appreciate just how small a quantity five grams is, or you have a vastly exaggerated idea of how dangerous commonplace household chemicals are. I have no idea how you could get to a dozen. Are you poisoning your rats with strychnine and sodium cyanide? There are much safer options now, you know. Most people stopped keeping those in their houses decades ago, even in poor countries.
(Yes, I edited my comment, just as you did, because I think it's important to make it a high-quality comment so that people who read it are not misinformed.)
For the record, 5 grams is a teaspoon worth, and it’s pretty easy to accidentally splash that around if you’re pouring something.
Essential oils aren’t obviously caustic like bleach and since it’s food product someone might think that getting a little in their mouth or food they’ll eat is no big deal.
Usually people don't transfer oils like oil of peppermint by pouring, but rather drop by drop, a drop typically being around 20mg. That is a fine quantity to put in your mouth or your food. Turpentine (essential oil of pine resin) is the main exception. If you have enough essential oils in one place that splashing teaspoonfuls is common, you need to take additional precautions, probably at least a suitable respirator or active ventilation.
"Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough."
Right. Decades ago when I was in highschool and learning chemistry the chem teacher brought out reagent bottles of HCl, HNO3, H2SO4 and NaOH (in soln.) which he intended us students to smell and taste. He also had boxes of brand new test tubes and he issued everyone with four thereof for the demonstration/experiment which he insisted that we wash thoroughly under running water despite them being brand new.
His stated reasons were that as chemists that (a) we needed to become familiar with these common reagents as they were ubiquitous in chemistry labs and industry, and (b) we needed to know and experience the acidity of acids and to clearly distinguish them from the soapy character of the alkali. He also had a more important motive that I'll come to in a moment.
He then diluted the reagents to a safe level (I think it was about 1/40 Normal but I can't remember for sure). Then we students all lined up and he poured a few ml of each of the reagents into our test tubes for us to first smell then taste, which we all did.
Afterwards when we were all back in the tiered seats of the demonstration lab he made a statement in the sternest tone that shocked the wits out of lot of us:
"You're all dead!"
—long silent pause—
"Don't you ever do that again. You don't know whether the reagents are true to label, for all you know I could have given you poison and you'd be none the wiser until it was too late. And even if the bottles are true to label then you've still no idea how pure they are—they may contain impurities that are highly toxic."
He then went on to point out that these bottles of reagents were new and that he'd unsealed them in front of us and asked if anyone of us had noticed that.
He then pointed to print on the label that said BP—British Pharmacopeia grade and then to the assay list of impurities which were many decimal places below one percent (the minutest of a trace).
This chemistry lesson was by far the most important one we ever learned—nothing at university was ever the equal of it.
It's a great tragedy that these days health and safety rules preclude students from ever participating in such a demonstration. Students must be taught not to fear chemicals but nevertheless to treat them with care and great respect lest they bite.
These days much of society has an almost irrational fear of chemicals despite the widespread teaching of chemistry. That tells me there's something terribly wrong with the way we teach the subject—a matter that I've covered on HN previously.
I agree. (Nitric acid is somewhat toxic as well aside from its corrosivity; accidental fatal poisonings with neutralized nitrates are well known in the literature.)
Essential oils are generally not at high risk of deadly impurities, for three reasons. First, they are mostly intended for human consumption (whether BP grade or not), except for turpentine; second, their production process is just steam distillation and so doesn't normally involve any highly-toxic impurities; third, because the essential oils themselves are sufficiently deadly that most potential impurities would have to be present at very high levels before they were a concern.
Agreed. Whilst the lesson played out almost to the letter as I described it (I well remember the experience) some of the fine minutiae/details may be a bit unclear (after all, that lesson was in the 1960s). Thus, it's possible the 'odd-man-out' in the lineup wasn't HNO3 but rather H3PO4, but don't think so.
Remember, the amount the teacher put in the test tubes was at most only a couple of ml and most just barely tasted the samples (you can imagine, there was much ooing and arring at the bitter taste) so the amount tasted was actually minuscule). Incidentally, there was general agreement that the most objectionable reagent to the taste was NaOH, 'yucky' was the most common description.
Whilst I said the dilutions were about 1/40 N. that was almost certainly so for HCl but not necessarily so for the others which may have been more highly diluted (HCl's dilution specifically comes to mind because the teacher mentioned it in connection with stomach acid).
The reason I don't think it was H3PO4 is that we didn't do much chemistry with it although I do remember it being discussed in connection with Coca-Cola in that we shined up pennies with it.
I'd also point out there were other 'safety' lessons of a similar nature. Ones that come to mind Immediately include the need to take great care when handling aqua regia and H2SO4, especially so if heated in a retort, another was the preparation of H2S in a Kipp's generator/apparatus—the mandatory use of the ventiated fume cupboard and that H2S is particularly dangerous as it desensitizes one's sense of smell in even quite small concentrations. Then there were the strict rules surrounding the use of Hg (of which the lab had many litres thereof).
It's interesting you mention turpentine as an exception. I occasionally do a bit of woodworking and I know others who are more avid woodworkers than I am. One thing that characterizes a small subset of them is that they insist on using real oil/spirit of turpentine rather than the mineral (white spirit) variety for no other reason than it's 'natural' whereas the mineral stuff is 'unnatural' as it comes from the petroleum industry.
Frankly this horrifies me. As you'd know oil of turpentine is a catch-all name for any number of terpenes—of which there are hundreds if not thousands—all mixed in ill-defined ratios, what you get depends on where it's sourced.
There's no telling these guys that many terpenes are both irritating to the skin and quite toxic—and that some are known carcinogens. What surprises me is that woodworking suppliers are actually allowed to stock and sell the stuff.
If I had my way I'd ban it for that purpose (there might be some excuse for its availability if mineral turpentine was actually inferior in this application but that's not the case).
Yeah, phosphoric would be another great example of "corrosive but not toxic per se." But even nitrate is something you could ingest a reasonable amount of, and is commonly used in food. Too much and you turn blue and die.
As for turpentine, it depends on the person and the particular turpentine, but generally turpentine on your skin isn't particularly irritating and may even be therapeutically beneficial. Like many other essential oils, it's a broad-spectrum fungicide, bactericide, and antiviral, but isn't absorbed particularly well through the stratum corneum, and it's a pretty decent solvent for removing other chemicals that may be more toxic and are commonly used in woodworking.
I think there are two good reasons for preferring natural turpentine, despite its variability, to mineral spirits:
- as with cyanide, the humans evolved with frequent exposure to small amounts of plant terpenes, from chewing pine needles and other leaves and from dermal exposure to broken and crushed plant matter and to pine resin. So you'd expect them to have reasonable ways of clearing out the terpenes that occur naturally, and in fact they do. Mineral spirits might just contain the same compounds (and other well-tolerated ones like octane and xylene) but they also might have novel compounds humans don't tolerate as well. And you can't usually tell from the label; just as with turpentine, what you get depends on where it comes from. Typically the MSDS will tell you the major components, but not the impurities thought to be harmless.
- culturally, there are millennia of traditions about how to use turpentine safely, due to its extensive use in shipbuilding, painting, and woodworking, so we can be reasonably sure that the health risks are small when handled in traditional ways. Mineral spirits are only 200 years old or less, and the processes for producing them today aren't the same as the processes used 50 years ago. So it's much more plausible for them to contain impurities that turn out to be dangerous. Indeed, many such novel nonpolar solvents widely used in the past turned out to be unexpectedly dangerous, such as benzene, carbon disulfide, polychlorinated biphenyls (used as solvents for woodworking in old Fabulon; see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2267460/), and "cleaning fluid" (carbon tetrachloride). It would be much less surprising to find some novel hazard in mineral spirits than in turpentine.
I used mineral spirits last month to clean oil off my immersion blender. They're probably pretty harmless. But we can have a lot more confidence in the exact degree of harmlessness of turpentine.
"Mineral spirits might just contain the same compounds (and other well-tolerated ones like octane and xylene) but they also might have novel compounds humans don't tolerate as well. And you can't usually tell from the label; just as with turpentine, what you get depends on where it comes from. Typically the MSDS will tell you the major components, but not the impurities thought to be harmless."
Right, I agree. It's necessary to say where I am and that's Australia. It's important because I've lived and worked in both the US and in Europe and from experience nomenclatures and formulations of these substances vary substantially from country to country.
The term 'mineral spirit' for mineral turpentine (aka mineral turps) is rarely used here. If one went to any hardware store and asked for mineral spirit the person serving would likely be quite confused and ask for clarification 'do you mean Shellite?', or whatever.
BTW, Shellite† is our version (concoction) of naphtha, it's much more flammable ('explosively' so) than turps.
Here, labels on containers of mineral turps are always titled with the name 'Mineral Turpentine' followed by its UN number and description, ie: UN-1300, Turpentine substitute. The UN-1300 MSDS is: https://advancechemicals.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/0....
As with all SDSs, almost every warning possible is described but for mineral turps two particularly relevant points stand out which are 'Mutagenicity: Not mutagenic' and 'Carcinogenicity: Limited evidence…'.
Despite the usual danger warnings to not inhale it, to avoid skin contact and avoid long exposure to it etc., the facts are that in practice there's little evidence of any serious harm coming to those who are exposed to it on a regular basis—so long as they take reasonable safety precautions. Here, painters use it as their primary most-used solvent for linseed oil-based paints. Go to any hardware shop and you'll see 1, 4 and 20-litre containers of it everywhere. Paint shops stock mineral turps along with acetone and DCM. At a guess, for every litre of DCM there'd be 5 litres of acetone and 20-50 litres of mineral turpentine.
I'd always have several litres of mineral turps at home. Today, I used about 300ml to wash out dirt from an old clock, here it's a household solvent with a multitude of uses. I've a range of pre-mixed solutions—mixed with Shellite, with ~5℅ EtOH and trace H2O, etc; they're used for degreasing, stain removal, etc.
EtOH is the safest chemical I use on a day-to-day basis (I've always about 10 litres of 95% available—unlike the US, denatured EtOH is readily available here). The next safest solvent I use is mineral turps, yes I avoid deliberately sniffing it or getting it on my skin but I take no other special precautions (that's the procedure most here would adopt).
It's worth noting that mineral turpentine that's available here is very consistent in its formulation, benzene and other toxic impurities never exceed 0.1%, and I'm reliably informed levels are usually much lower. I cannot speak for stuff that's called mineral spirits that I've seen in the US and in Europe. I've not done an assay but I know they differ significantly to our local product, for starters they have quite dissimilar odors (here, all brands have an identical odor).
I'm in no way trying to whitewash the dangers of mineral turps but in this highly regulated country it comes in as one of the solvents of least concern. On past evidence it draws pretty much the least attention.
I say that as someone who considers ALL aromatic hydrocarbons as potentially dangerous, especially so if they've benzene rings. DCM is considered significantly more toxic than mineral turps, trichloromethane is now unavailable to the GP, and CCl4 was banned years ago, and righty so (but when I was a kid evey dry-cleaning shop used it, walk nearby a store and one would always smell it).
Turning now to gum/wood turps, from your description it seems the stuff to which you are referring is very different to the type that's available over here. Reckon they're different substances, the only similarity seems to be in name only.
Over here, gum turps is at least four to five times more expensive than mineral turps, at minimum it costs around $28/litre versus $5-6/litre for the mineral stuff. Some art supplies even sell it for upwards of $11/100ml that's around 20 times as much! At that exorbitant price no normal person is going to use it as a general purpose solvent.
Comparing their harmful effects they're as different as chalk and cheese with gum turps being substantially more toxic. Obviously, I'm unfamiliar with chemical regulations in your jurisdiction but you'll note from the MSDSs that here there's much greater concern over gum turps than there is for the mineral stuff, in fact the gum turps MSDS is a frightening read. Gum's MSDS sums it up as 'Hazardous', it goes on to say that one must wear gloves, protective clothing, eye protection with side shields and a respirator. It also makes the point I remarked upon in my earlier post, that is:
"…essential oils can consist of up to several hundred constituents, which can vary considerably depending on many factors (e.g. genus, species, growing conditions, harvest period, processes used). Therefore, a description of the main constituents is often not sufficient to describe these substances. …"
As someone who does some carpentry, I've often heard stories from fellow woodworkers never to use the stuff. Some have told me from experience that its effects on the skin are as bad as urushiol if not worse and it produces rashes and blistering that can take weeks to heal; and that's just the effects on one's skin, breathing or ingesting it are much, much worse.
All up, it's little wonder the stuff has a nasty reputation in this part of the world.
Again, it seems to me the only explanation for our differing accounts is that we're discussing two different substances. Perhaps where you are regulations are much more stringent for the product. Perhaps also it's distilled from a genus that has compounds that are low in toxicity and or that post-distillation purification further reduces the amount of its toxic compounds to safe levels.
"as with cyanide, the humans evolved with frequent exposure to small amounts of plant terpenes, …"
I'm not a toxicologist but I know that a main function of the liver is to metabolize various toxins including those produced by one's body; eg, alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes mop up the small amounts of EtOH produced during digestion, same goes for numerous other 'nasties' including various terpenes. As chemistry teaches, concentration matters. Similarly, as we evolved to eat fruit, so we've adapted to the small quantity of toxic amygdalin glycoside that's in some fruit kernels one metabolite of which is HCN and our bodies have learned to mop it up quickly..
Incidentally, as a young teenager who was keen on processing my own films, I recall a darkroom experience when reducing the amount of Ag in negatives with HCN. To be dark the room had to be almost airtight and the HCN got to me. Fortunately, I was aware of its effects and staggered from the room. A short time later I was quite OK.
I'd like to discuss the impurities 'triangle' with you as it's a fascinating subject but this comment is already too long.
Here's an anecdote that's somewhat off topic but given it's about Shellite and that it's so memorable I couldn't help but to recall it here. Quite some years ago during a prolonged strike of some weeks by petroleum workers I kept my car running on Shellite—at least so for most of the strike's duration. At the time I had access to a number of 20-litre drums of it, and it was marvelous to drive around without almost any other traffic on the roads except for emergency vehicles (they had special reserves of fuel available). Having the normally bottlenecked roads in a large busy city with a population of millions almost all to myself for several weeks was a strange and unforgettable experience—and a very pleasant one.
That said, unfortunately about two-thirds way through the strike I ran out of Shellite. Well, not to be deterred I resorted to using any flammable liquid that I could lay my hands on including EtOH, kerosene and mineral turpentine mixed in various ratios depending on what 'fuels' were available on the day. Initially, the car ran quite well on the combo mixture—albeit a little rough—that is, so long as I had enough EtOH in the mixture. Trouble was, soon I also began to run short of EtOH and each day I had to reduce its percentage which made the vehicle very difficult to start. Eventually, the ratio of EtOH to the 'oils' was so out of wack that the vehicle wouldn't start, there just wasn't enough of it in the mix to get ignition.
What to do next? Fortunately, the uni's physics school had lots of sealed tins of Et2O, so I resorted to pouring a small amount directly into the carburetor and that solved the issue of the engine not starting, but then (as I expected) another problem arose. Unfortunately, kero/turps mixtures are not that dissimilar to diesel fuel and engine run-on became a problem, to stop the engine I'd turn off the ignition and then put my hand over the carburetor's air intake to choke it. :-)
I promise it's not as exciting as you're imagining. Getting the truck back out of the snow bank, on the other hand, would probably be amusing in a schadenfreude sort of way. Lacking traction (because winter), we used a lot of momentum. It was pretty undignified.
In my previous house, I had mice get into a bag of gochugaru, so I guess some mice can tolerate it. For squirrels, I've only sprinkled it on the ground to keep them from digging up my garlic cloves.
I have a deal with all of the animals. They stay out of our houses, we leave them alone. We can't coexist in a home with wild rodents for sanitary reasons. Thankfully, at my home only ants don't get the memo and must be poisoned at scale outside their favorite point of access.
(Spiders have a special deal: Just stay out of sight while inside and we're gucci. But I'll just move them outside because I see them as allies against the insects.)
I tried to make a similar deal with an ant colony. I was even more lenient than you. Told them they can stay if we split the rent on a per-capita basis. They failed to caugh up the money though so had to poison them.
If you poison them then they die in the walls or somewhere you can't get to them and stink. Shooting is the sporting method (a very low powered .177 air pistol works well indoors if you take careful shots), but trapping also works. You can make a trap guaranteed to kill a rodent with a sheetrock bucket, a butter knife, and a delicious morsel. Walking the plank is a much more effective method of execution than the spring loaded guillotine, no partial results.
Mice are cute as hell, but we have traps on the kitchen counters (they come in in the fall) because they shit everywhere they walk. It's not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
Not a good deer repellant, though—at least for the mule deer around here. My mom once sprayed some plants she had to prevent the local pests from eating them, but instead, they just ate the plants anyway, and then proceeded to shit all over the yard everywhere.
It's wild to think that plants are engaged in this constant struggle to produce seeds that have an outer shell that is just strong enough not to be consistently dissolved in a bird's stomach but not so strong that they won't ever dissolve.
One one hand, some seeds must survive passing through the bird's digestive system intact to later grow into a plant, on the other hand, some seeds must be digested in order to keep the birds interested in consuming that seed... Alternatively, a bird species interested in eating indigestible seeds may become extinct due to malnutrition.
I can not remember the tree or plant and the following is only my best recollection and may be slightly incorrect, couldn't reach my dad to ask, he told me about a plant and I forget if it had basically been eradicated possibly to human harvesting and was unique to a region if I remember correctly and it was believed to be gone. But then some seeds were found and they tried to germinate them but continually failed. As I remember what he told me was that someone going through some ancient writings or paintings and it showed the tree and birds eating from it. He then said the person had the idea to feed the seed to a bird and see if it did anything. Apparently it was successful and he was able to grow this lost plant/tree what ever it was. The whole story sounds far fetched but my dad is not a bullshitter he would have seen it on some history channel or similar. Looking up birds eating seeds and germination explains that the digestive enzymes in a birds stomach can help break down the hard outer coating on some seeds helping germination. I will ask him when I can and report back if I can verify anything he said.
As for spicy peppers funny to me story. I grew a Carolina Reaper plant last summer and the plant did well and I got something like 200 peppers from it. Of course I had to know what it felt like so me my dad and my 13 year old son tried them. We all threw a big chunk in our mouths chewed for about 5 seconds and spat it out.
The pain was basically instant. It was at about 2 seconds I knew this was not going to be good. It was insanely hot which lasted about half an hour, the entire time me running my mouth under the tap or putting ice on it, trying crackers and milk, even tried to wash my tongue. Some how my son after about 5 minutes very calmly says can I go have a shower. He was hardly bothered by the pepper.
Funny thing happened couple weeks later. I was telling my friend how insane these peppers were. He then asks if he can have some as he has a bear knocking over his garbage every night and wants to leave some for the bear to eat and hopefully encourage it to stop. So he makes a burrito and fills it with 5 or 6 nice sized reapers and leaves it out before bed. Well middle of the night his phone dings and his outside camera detected motion. Fires up the video and what does he see, not the bear but some stray dog walking the neighborhood run up and down the thing in a couple bites. Oh man I hope that dog didn't suffer too bad when it came out the other end.
Of that list, we have a Metasequoia / Dawn Redwood tree in our yard, it's great fast-growing shade tree with deciduous leaves that are so small you don't need to rake them. Thought to be extinct, re-discovered in China in 1944, availability in nurseries is pretty good.
If the above comment was interesting to you... you might really like the YouTube video "The truth about Hot Ones sauces"! It goes into this theory, along with how spice levels are measured.
>birds have no receptors for capsaicin, while mammals do.
True. I suspect it is only placental mammals. Brush-tailed possums (a marsupial mammal) do not seem repelled by it at all. I've had my birds eyes and Carolina Reaper chilly plants and fruit eaten by them.
I'm seeing quite a few websites suggesting cayenne pepper to keep Virginia Opossums out of your plants. I've never tried it myself, but that's a marsupial that appears to not like spicy food. The only species coming up in these increasingly useless search engine results as liking spicy food is Chinese tree shrews.
I'm getting so frustrated anymore trying to use google, bing, brave search, startpage, etc for finding anything except reddit or quora answers and business pages. If you find any more info on marsupials and peppers, I'd love to see it. It's a super interesting question.
I friend of mine got that and spilled it in their house and I had me coughing the whole time I was over there till they were able to air it out so be careful if you're handling it indoors some people get got by it worse than others.
The fox population has grown a lot near me. I often have a couple foxes sleeping in my back yard at night. I used to have a major squirrel problem, but The foxes ate them all.
We have coyotes around in DFW. Not too many in the urban core areas (mid-century suburbs), so the squirrel are rampant. Out in the exurbs (more recent suburbs), the coyote population is high enough I practically never see a squirrel.
Granted - the older areas have more mature oak, pecan, and other nut producing trees too. But there should be some squirrels out in the exurbs and I never see any. I've spent some significant time out there too. They have more rabbits than I see intown, which I imagine is the coyotes main food source.
At my house, they crash into the windows because they are so damn aggressive. They see themselves in the reflection and attack the other bird. They shat all over my cars this year because they kept seeing themselves in the side view mirrors. Then shat all over the back of my car because it has a chrome bumper. I have watched robins sit on the side of my car for an hour just attacking the sideview mirror over and over. They regularly crash into the one window in my house that has a tree next to it, because they land in the branches, then decide to attack the other bird in the reflection. They will sit there for hours doing this until they finally hit the window hard enough to scare themselves off.
I've used the UV reflective "anti-collision" stickers with reasonable success. You can get discrete (to humans) ones that look like etched bird silhouettes.
Just make sure to put them on the outside.
Capsaicin binds to TRPV1 receptors, which are mammal-specific. Other animals have different proteins in this role and birds in particular are not sensitive to it. Also TVRP1 is only triggered by temperatures over 43°C, lower temperatures are sensed by other proteins.
Capsaicin isn’t just effective on mammals, it also has an effect on some fungi and insects, though mostly through metabolic disruption.
Evolution doesn't plan ahead. Various plants got various random mutations that produce various random chemicals. The ones that were tasty to birds but disgusting to mammals for their seeds spread all over and ended up pretty widespread, so they survived and became common.
The ones that were repulsive to birds but tasty to mammals got eaten by something that grinds up their seed, and so they are extinct. Or, (after humans invented agriculture), possibly got domesticated and became extremely numerous since we'd intentionally save some seeds to plant despite eating the rest.
But there was no awareness and no plan, just chance and history and whatever happened to work.
There's some products that you spray and it's supposed to give them a nasty headache and then they learn and stop coming. It gave me headaches as well though.
Contrary to what the internets want you to believe, there are bird murder machines called "cats", which seems to skip most of the "learning" and the "headache" part.
One of my pet-peeves: Certain science fiction writers (often amateur) posit that humans will greatly impress aliens with our willingness--no, zeal--to consume capsaicin, a terrible death substance all sentient races flee from etc.
This is nonsense since it's basically an narrowly targeted false-alarm trick between relatively closely related creatures. It's not acidic, caustic, corrosive, etc.
> this protein
Just to head off the ambiguous phrasing here: Capsaicin itself is not a protein, but a much simpler kind of chemical.
Mammals that eat seeds grind them apart orally before even swallowing. As a result, any seeds ingested by mammals are very likely to be completely destroyed.
not really true, mastication isn't practiced to perfection in the wild, which is why you might often see seeds right on the poop. a portion of them get distributed intact.
Squirrels kept trying to get my squirrel proof bird feeder and then they’d get mad and chew on the furniture when they couldn’t get the seed. And they’d poop in the rails because they’re squirrels.
I smeared some Last Dab on the bird feeder support and cayenne on the furniture and railings and haven’t seen a squirrel since.
That's one of the best blog posts I've read in a while. It nails the idea of "write one line that makes the reader want to read the next". It's humorous but also serious. There's no fluff. Instant subscribe.
It's like the opposite of clickbait. The author did, upon information and belief, taste Honda's spicy rodent-repelling tape, and made a strong case that she will in fact do it again unless someone stops her. Truly giving the people what they want.
If yiu have any real examples of llm written text that's as fun to read as that, I'd be curious to see them. Most llm text I see is vapid and uninspired. Kinda exactly the mediocre writing you'd expect from a machine designed to create statistically average sentences based on all the writing its creators could steal.
LLMs write bland LinkedIn "thinkpieces", not Douglas Adams style creative wordplay.
I don't believe anybody should care. If AI made it better, why should I care that they used AI? Either way, I doubt this was AI-assisted - I absolutely love this style.
Damn I could have gotten the "no fluff" version by looking at wikipedia or just googling.
Why do people expect their non-fiction reading to be entertaining? That's not the point and I inherently don't trust your judgement if that's what you're looking for. At some point you've got to provide insight.
Wikipedia won't inform me about the social media and email dynamics at a car manufacturer. Just the email response alone was entertaining and informative: self-aware humor-encrusted legalese that is very human. I can appreciate it for what it is: great PR work from a professional. Wikipedia is pretty humorless, it probably wouldn't even acknowledge the subtext.
"Informative" and "entertaining" are both valid goals for non-fiction writing (and, indeed, fiction writing, if you squint enough to recognize that it can convey "information about how people think/feel/act"). Arguably, the ideal would be to achieve both; but, achieving either is perfectly fine.
Most non-fiction aims to inform, and most fiction aims to entertain, but either can do either.
There isn't that much to know about this tape. It's just a spicy tape, and it's probably not very toxic. "The point" here is the story - the tweets and emails, the thought process.
I really liked it, and clearly a lot of people here liked it too! You're free to dislike it, but that doesn't make it pointless. There's more to humanity than pure, unadulterated facts (however important and interesting they really are!)
It's entertaining when reading is entertaining. This was a great "read while eating lunch at work" read because it was entertaining.
I didn't really care too much about rodent-repelling tape before reading and don't care much now. It was the entertaining writing that brought value for me.
But would you have thought to research how a specific car manufacturer's spicy anti-rodent tape tasted in the first place?
There's an element of discovery in this article, as well as being entertaining and informative. Her writing is—subjectively and objectively—uncommonly good.
This is one of those times where "I bet you're fun at parties" is a perfectly justified response to the (G?)GP [1]. This story is funny, well-written, succinct. Liz would be a hit at parties. GP would not be invited again.
[1] do we prepend great- when referring to parent comments more than two levels (GP) up? Or do we just say GP and rely on context?
The most hilarious thing to me in this story is the PR guy who replied "most of the things sold in the US these days require warnings about causing cancer". And everybody seems fine with that. LOL
It's ridiculous, but maybe not the way you think; Prop 65 in California classified a lot of things as requiring notification, including things like "Wood Dust." so now every apartment building has a sign in the hallway that says "this building may contain chemicals" and everyone ignores it. The law has lead to people being less informed rather than more informed.
I despise Prop 65 warnings in principle, but the damnable thing about them is they may actually have some effectiveness, if this study is to be believed ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11651356/ ): "Levels of certain chemicals listed under California’s law have declined in biosamples from people across the nation. ... Although the law did not require changes to product formulations or processes, interviews with representatives of affected companies have indicated that many businesses did alter formulations to avoid having to post warnings or manufacture special products just for California."
The study has a lot of limitations, and NHANES is not really designed for this kind of analysis, but it sounds like the warnings do well as a cudgel to beat manufacturers with even if regular individuals ignore them. Even more interesting is the knock-on effects Prop 65 has on people outside of California. Overall it seems like an argument to keep them around, sort of.
I remember when I first bought a knife either made in USA or just targeted at that market (not sure: I mean, I don't think it was the first thing I bought made by an USA company, but I've never seen that warning before), and found that warning inside the package I was quite puzzled, like WTF, I though I was buying a good knife, not some recycled hazardous waste-material or whatever this is. Then, of course, I googled and found out that they stick it on pretty much anything, so that plastic handle is probably just like any plastic handle of any knife I held before. But still it was very weird.
They're as silly as they sound. Growing up, there was a sign when you enter the school's bus storage and maintenance area. More recently, I've seen them at Starbucks (for coffee), in the vinegar section of the grocery store, and on untreated lumber.
This isn't California being California, but it is well-meaning legislation getting out-of-hand because of enforcement mechanisms. It's like website cookie warnings. It was a nice idea, but it lead to a silly place.
Replying because I remembered coffee too, and had to look it up. ‘Good’(?) news is that it was decided in 2019(!) that coffee does not require a Prop 65 warning.
Whenever I see these warnings in the wild, I (jokingly... mostly) think to myself: "well I don't have to worry about getting cancer from this because I live in Texas now, not California"
Prop 65 is frequently joked about but at the time it was a resounding success. The drawback is that any item being sold in California that doesn't pay for the extensive testing (to confirm it doesn't contain any of the thousand chemicals on the list from 1985), ends up carrying the label that the item might cause cancer. If Wikipedia is too dry for you, there's a podcast that explains the history and facts well https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/warning-this-podcast-...
I caught that too, though I believe the California warnings are generally of the form "if you can't prove nothing in there causes cancer, then it might cause cancer."
Back in the day when I worked desktop support, we would use a lot of canned air. And when they added bitterant to that stuff in order to keep kids from huffing it, it became almost unusable for its intended purpose because it turns out that nobody wants to have to breathe the bitter air after they clean out a PC. So, I went to the office supply store and sampled some different brands to see which ones didn't add a bitterant. The irony that their anti-huffing measure led to me (essentially) huffing canned air at the store was not lost on me.
And if you don't want to buy an air compressor, an electric computer duster saves you money in the medium and long term. I haven't bought a can of compressed air in years.
I found this out accidentally. I have a habit of holding the cartridge between my lips when I switch cartridges (my hands are occupied with the case). Then minutes later I'd notice a bitter taste when drinking water or licking my lips, and have no idea why!
Case in point: in Germany, there are occasionally "Durchgang verboten" ("passage forbidden") signs next to driveways leading to e.g. an inner courtyard. These are most of the time a sure sign that it's possible to take a shortcut through the courtyard to the other side of the block. Of course, this is a country where you can be reasonably sure of not getting shot for trespassing...
Even in cattle country, if you make no attempt to hide your presence, I would expect no trouble. I have pulled a gun on someone and had one pulled on me. It was fine both times. Just needed to be explained.
... if you got to the point where gun was pulled on you, that was already a situation where it's so fine? I'll be honest, I don't understand how can you be so calm.
I live in a mostly rural state. Guns are common. Dealing with some person who doesn’t know you, doesn’t know what you want, and is an hour away from law enforcement support has to have some self-reliance. Hands up, explain why you are there, and you can be friends. High-visibility vests help, but you might ditch them.
Various legal systems have varying definitions of what is and is not a legal infringement on property rights.
For instance, in (some parts of?) the UK there's the Right to Roam, I believe, which grants the public limited rights to pass through certain private property (such as an open field). Obviously this doesn't extend to harming anything. The point is, passing through someone's private property without causing any damage or inconveniencing them is not automatically considered unethical.
For the record, freedom to roam in England and Wales is rather limited in scope; the quintessential right-to-roam countries are the Nordics (and to an extent Scotland, but it’s an honorary Nordic country anyway). For example, in Finland the customary rights extend beyond just hiking to activities like gathering wild berries and mushrooms.
I couldn't find anything to support the idea that Hawaii’s protection of beach access allows anyone to traverse private property except where a specific rights-of-way easement exists on that property. I don't think the gp would consider use of land via an easement to be disrespectful as the easement holder has rights to the land that must be respected as well.
The courtyards of apartment complexes/condos are usually considered either semi-public or semi-private spaces, and their status with regard to passing through is not clear-cut either legally or morally.
I thought it tasted like quinine/tonic water or maybe grapefruit rind (the ingredient in the Beverly soda from Italy). Coin batteries sometimes have a bitter taste coating which is similar to the Switch cart.
I stuck just the tip of my tongue on there, and it was so bitter that it was more of a sensation than just a taste. Enough that I reflexively pulled away.
I was disappointed that it was a bit bitter, yes, but not in the category of “won’t do it twice”. Such that I even tried multiple cartridges. I’m retirement age, though, so maybe my taste buds are shot.
When I lived in Chicago with a car, and parked it in the small lot behind a condo building, I had to battle with the rats chewing through my car's wires. Twice they chewed through the MAP sensor wires which caused all kinds of misfires. Had to rewire that whole section of the harness. Then wrapped every wire I could see with this rat tape, and it worked for a while, until maybe the hot/cold cycle of the engine bay degraded the tape enough to not be effective.
They loved the warmth of the engine in winter. They'd climb up into the engine bay and hang out throughout it, bringing along nesting material, aka trash.
To try get rid of them, I tried the typical bait boxes, specialized rat traps, regular rat traps, peppermint, moth balls, a motion sensor light underneath the car, and more. The only thing that really worked was sending so many rat reports to the city that they had to keep coming out to bait the burrows in the neighbors small yard, until they likely talked to the owner directly to do something about it. I had talked with the guy briefly once and asked him about the rats (that were obviously only coming from his small backyard), and his response was pretty much "well it's the city so yeah they're around." Pretty sure one of his tenants also abruptly moved out because the rats chewed through their car too.
The lack of awareness from the guy contributed to me moving out of the city for good. Couldn't stand playing the lottery of good neighbors when most were either renters or inept owners, or a combination of both.
> The only thing that really worked was sending so many rat reports to the city that they had to keep coming out to bait the burrows in the neighbors small yard, until they likely talked to the owner directly to do something about it.
I was recently deputized into the "Rat Pack" of New York City[1].
The main thing I learned is that exactly what you said is true. When there are rat problems, you have to go to the source. Traps/poison in a localized area is not going to work, as the brown rat is easily able to reproduce faster than we can kill them with those methods.
In fact, certain methods have ended up helping the rats. At one point the city put out thousands of boxes with poison in them. The problem is the boxes were designed to be nice and cozy for the rats, so they'd be tempted to go in and eat the poison. Instead, they go in there and mate. (They also use the boxes to evade predators).
NYC's current strategy is to improve data collection on rats, and then use that data to better enforce standards (like garbage disposal), eradicate burrows, and plant different shrubs that aren't as friendly to rats. You have to fully eliminate the environments that sustain them, you can't exterminate your way out.
This. This is what I come to Hacker News for. Absurdly well-documented writeups of things about which I am intellectually curious but that no normal person in their right mind would experiment with.
Rodents love chewing on the electrical harnesses in these vehicles.
When I ran an import repair shop, my clients owned over 100 Jaguar sedans, and every single one of them was towed in at some point due to rodent-damaged wiring. While the problem wasn’t as severe with Land Rovers, we still had more than 40 of them towed in each year for the same issue.
In one of my previous flats we had rats and mice which we ignored - my flatmate was jain so very live and let live - until one day I turned the cooker on and there was a huge bang - they'd gnawed off the insulation on the power cables.
I didn't know about chillies but it might have helped.
It's a big problem in old airplanes too. I've known a few pilots who found out their nav lights (on the wingtips) weren't working anymore because a mouse got inside the wing.
I had a Subaru that required over $1000 in labor replace a $13 master wiring harness that was chewed by a rodent.
Of course, nothing will beat having a rodent die somewhere in the engine, and not noticing it until exiting the car after a 45 minute highway ride and making my in-laws neighborhood smell like someone barbecued rotten meat.
I found this spray at the feed store that looked to be a sort of small outfit based on the label. It was hot pepper extract, diesel, glycerin, a few other ingredients. Worked really well. But then it disappeared so I made my own.
I bought a few bags of dried cayenne peppers, crushed them and soaked them in acetone (no I didn't care if the mice got cancer at that point). Then filtered and discarded the remaining pepper chunks and let the acetone evaporate in a pan outside. I then got a few glycerin suppositories from the pharmacy and mixed with kerosene, the pepper extract and a little peppermint oil and had my own spray. A few times a year I spray down the engine blocks and wiring harnesses and we haven't had an issue since.
Unfun pet rat fact: if their teeth start growing at weird angles for whatever reason, this mechanism stops working and you have to get the teeth trimmed every couple weeks.
> If they don't wear down their teeth, they'll grow out of control and kill them.
cf the Babirusa - "If a male babirusa does not grind his tusks (achievable through regular activity), they can eventually keep growing and, rarely, penetrate the individual's skull."[0]
I remember reading that rodents chewed car cables since the insulation was made using the same compound as soy and that attracted them, but in reality it was just they liked chewing on stuff.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a21933466/does-your-car-ha...
I just read that article and it doesn't appear to agree with your conclusion. That was just a single quote from a a pest control guy who works for Orkin.
The article does say that car owners and mechanics have noted a large increase in rodent damage to car wiring with the new soy-based insulation while manufacturers have denied any connection. Likely because they are fighting several class-action lawsuits over it.
I used to work in a rather well-known building running the electronics operation and we had long PVC conduits that contained communication cables that ran large distances throughout the building and both the conduits and cables were attacked by rats.
The main conduits were about 15cm (~6") in diameter and the total CSA of the comms cables therein occupied about 40% of the total diameter.
40% of the total CSA was the nominal/regulated maximum cable-carrying capacity for the conduits as (a) drawing cables through long conduits in excess of this limit could damage them, and (b) there was still some small margin/extra capacity should there be need to add a few extra circuits.
Now rats quickly discovered that the remaining 60% of space in these conduits provided them with excellent 'highways' from one end of the building to another.
As one would expect, cables would also enter and exit these conduits at various points throughout the building at 'T' junctions. The adjoing conduits at the 'T' junctions were often of much smaller diameter than the main trunk ones and rats had difficulty getting though their small orifices so they simply enlarged them by gnawing through both the conduit walls and the comms cables.
Many of the cables were PVC covered and EMR shielded such as RG-59 coaxial cable and Belden Beldfoil-type balanced comms cables and there were many cases where both the copper braiding/outer shielding and inner conductor of the coaxes and the aluminum shielding of the Belden cables were completely chewed through. It seems that PVC, mylar, copper and aluminum are not objects that act as impediments to determined rats—anything in their way they'll chew right through.
Trouble was these points of ingress and egress were in very awkward places and repairing the cables was a tedious and difficult job.
Somewhere in my archives I've photos of the havoc and destruction they caused, if HN would also post images then I'd dig them out.
Incidentally, I've seen photos of lead-sheathed (completely covered and shielded) telephone cables consisting of hundreds of phone circuits where rats have gnawed right through the lead to get at the paper insulation on the cables. Some of these photos are quite amazing, it's hard to believe how destructive these rodents can be until one actually sees the evidence.
Chewing through lead! How do they know something is worth it on the other side? Or do they like sweet metal?
For the unaware, lead tastes sweet. Kids used to eat lead paint chips. And there have been sweet springs of great tasting lead water. Hmmmm forbidden springs
"Chewing through lead! How do they know something is worth it on the other side?"
I wish I knew, it's something I've been curious about since I first saw the photos. Perhaps it's because lead can taste sweet, or there's residual smell on the outside of the cables, or maybe they've learned from elsewhere where the telephone pairs exit the main cables.
Incidentally, it's a long time since I've seen those photos but I vividly remember them as it seemed so strange. I'm almost certain the photos were in the Electrical Engineering Supplemently Volumes of the Newnes Encyclopedia. (The exact name(s) of the supplemently volumes could be slightly different, memory's short given the length of time since I've last seen them. BTW, I think there were four supplemently volumes.)
I wouldn't have expected tape infused with capsaicin to have any deterrent effect on mice given Mousetrap Monday's video evidence to the contrary [1]. Is it possible that the high price of the tape mentioned in the article isn't entirely justified?
> DEHP is a compound added to plastics (like vinyl tape) to make them more flexible. It’s used in hundreds of household products, which means lots of people who bathe in Dr. Bronner’s Useless Fluid think it will kill them.
I get the joke (that people who use Dr. Bronner's soap are probably uninformed hippies) but am confused by the "Useless" part. I've used that soap and thought it seemed fine. Is it a known fact, or factoid, or meme, among smart people that Dr. Bronner's is ineffective?
I love humans. You all are so weird, wild, and wonderful.
I'm also inspired to use capsaicin to fight my personal fight with some squirrels that feel the _need_ to live in my garage. They ignore all my humane traps and are chill with all the light and sound disruptions I put in there.
I wonder if it could prevent mice from chewing into food bags in the backcountry. Not sure what it would incur in terms of weight but could be another type of product instead of the alternatives (odor proof sack, Ursack and hanging).
Bear spray is supposed to attract bears, and the story is they even like the taste - except when it's blasted into their eyes/nose/mouth/lungs. It is a food product. So I would be a little concerned about that.
"Still, I fired off a couple emails to Honda’s PR team just in case. To my great surprise, Chris got back to me the next business day"
Why do people think that Twitter is the support page for companies? Honest question.
Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.
I had an issue for 2 months with Verizon where they messed up my new phone deliveries by sending me the wrong ones and they didn't ship other merchandise I purchased at the same time. Their customer support was terribly unhelpful, even after repeated escalations. It was enough I nearly went to AT&T[0].
They first wanted to charge me re-stocking fees on an order they very clearly messed up (for the wrong phones delivered). Then they wanted me to pay for shipping on the correct devices, and they incorrectly billed me as well, and it took several escalations to get them to understand I didn't receive my other merchandise either, which they then told me I had to make another support request for. It was a whole mess.
I sent a tweet (and mind you, I'm a nobody) and within 24 hours it was resolved correctly, and they even next day shipped everything to me, which I did not expect.
It will be the last time I ever buy from Verizon instead of Apple directly, but at least it got resolved in the end.
[0]: Still might. I need the coverage of the big 2, unfortunately I can't jump to say, T-Mobile, as a result.
I had to go out of the country, so I overpaid my AT&T internet bill so it would cover 2 months and rounded up by ~10 cents to the nearest dollar amount.
First month bill, no problem. Second month bill, no problem.
Third month bill should be $amount -credit, nope. They took my credit, listed it as an underpayment and applied a fee.
So I go to the store; they can't help with account issues, you have to call.
I call, sit through the waiting music, get a rep who get a rep is quite obviously doesn't care. No "Sorry for our obvious billing mistake" or anything. They correct the account and ask if I will pay right now, I decide that I will since I don't trust their system to update in a timely manner.
The rep then has the audacity to talk about how AT&T charges a convenience fee to pay via phone but they are going to waive it this time.
AT&T fiber and Xfinity cable are the only options in my area....
I still can not understand how they made that error in the first place. It's not like accounting, credits and balances are a new thing. The bill even showed the credit transaction correctly, showing it coming out of the bill balance owed.
I do set up auto payment when I am sure the bill will be stable, this was while I was still in the introduction rate and I wanted to be aware of when the price change hit.
Now the question is, since they messed up what should be a simple accounting transaction, do I trust their billing system to have unfettered access to take funds from my bank :)
I'll let that marinate for a few years first before I decide to trust it entirely.
Though its not rural areas that are the only issue. There's saturation issues with other carriers in some of my travels. Only Verizon and AT&T doesn't fall apart comparatively.
It's still the fastest/only way to receive customer support for a lot of place. It's very sad but it's the truth.
The last time an airline screwed up and refused to fix their mistake the employee at the booth lowered her voice and said "Do you have twitter? You might try complaining there, they don't like it when people complain on twitter" which was just the most depressing thing to hear.
I can much quicker get an answer from Bank Of America--and get a Tier 3 Customer Service person to call me--on X than I can by calling their main number.
The old piece of advice if you were getting stonewalled was to write a personal letter to "$CEO_NAME, $HQ_ADDRESS". I wonder whether that still works today.
It often does. The other thing that has worked for me is contacting the legal department. Probably the same address, c/o legal.
Just don’t say something stupid like, “I’m going to sue you”. If you escalate too far they’ll wait for the summons.
—-
I worked in a department called “hot site support” back in the 90’s for Iomega (maker of the Zip drive). That meant I delt with two things, customers who spent over $100k on hardware, and customers that wiggled their way up to the CEO’s admin. I had carte blanche to resolve the issues and I was just 20 years old and early into my career.
Only if their software thinks you have enough followers, and the software thinks they aren't fake followers.
If you don't have enough potential impact, the humans may never even see your post.
If anyone thinks that insert company here cares about your tweet about your issue because they replies to insert even slightly famous person here, you're deluding yourself.
I once had an insurance problem that was resolved only after I posted about it .. on Livejournal. They'd namesearched themselves and assigned a special team of super-customer service "fixers" (maybe just one person!) to look at complaints on social media.
We all understand that the only customer support channel for Google for things like unjust account cancellations is to post and hope a Google employee reads it, yes?
I myself have always had luck with contacting customer service via Twitter. It's the only reason I have ever used Twitter.
I recently had a problem with FedEx that wasn't resolved with multiple phone calls and emails.
I messaged them on Twitter and had the problem resolved in minutes.
I've had the same luck when I had a problem with a collections department calling my phone daily for 2+ years. They were looking for an individual that must have owned my phone number prior to me.
I told the caller to remove my number from their list every time they called. I sent multiple emails.
I finally had luck by reaching out to their Twitter account and politely threatening to alert my attorney general. The issue was resolved that same day.
I stumbled upon a new way to get out of this same situation - they’d been looking for Joshua for five years by calling my phone, and I am very much not him. All kinds of tactics.
Mid last year, I just offered to pay the debt. Conversation looked like this:
Them: “Can I speak to Joshua?”
Me: “No, he’s not here, and I think he’s dead. But I’ll write you a check right now for the debt amount to stop you calling me. How much is it?”
Them: “So you are Joshua?”
Me: “No, I’m just irritated and you’ve won, I’ll solve this by paying you”
Them: “What is your social security number?”
Me: “Doesn’t matter. How much do I write this check for?”
Them: “We can’t tell you the debt amount without verifying you are Joshua”
Me: “Well, I guess we’re at an impasse then.”
And they haven’t called me again for nine glorious months.
It can depend on the company, but some companies literally don't have a public facing email anymore. I was trying to get in contact with Bank of America of whom I am not a customer because they were (and still are) spamming my inbox and the only human contact I managed at all was via their support Twitter page.
Back when Twitter was the most useful and popular (roughly 2018-2022), it was common for some companies to do support over tweets. Delta Air Lines (@delta) comes to mind.
> Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.
German here. Raising a stink on social media is the only thing that helps even for large national companies (cough telco providers cough).
The reason is simple, the callcenters are either absolute doofuses barely capable of following a script or they're artificially restricted by the script. People with access to the corp social media account are more carefully vetted to have brains (because you don't want them to like some pr0n on the official account by accident) and social media criticism always has the potential to go viral, so the agents have a lot of leeway to deal with enraged customers.
I actually think it is just the public nature of it all. If there's a bunch of twitter posts on your page complaining about the product being crap that you're ignoring that already says something. Whereas if you resolve them in public you've turned bad PR into good PR. But bad customer service when they call in is just a rumor.
You mean the cartel ruining (running) the telecommunication services? And then running ads on the radio gaslighting potential customers about how "cheap" they are? Yeah..
Fun fact, it's often cheaper to use a foreign European data plan in Germany than to get a local contract. (Of course your mileage my vary. Some providers forbid it.)
If only it fading away didn't mean instead of being able to treat Twitter as support there's no place to get actual support from a lot of companies. E.g. Google sent me a promotion for a Nest camera if I bought their subscription, and instead of a camera I've had their "support" read the same script about how they'll fix it within a few days since November. At least if I used Twitter as support, other people would see the issue that didn't get resolved.
I would dearly love to return to even the 2021 era of the internet in general. 1999 would be ideal, actually. But I'd settle for most anything up to 2012 or so.
I've been trying to work out what the end date of the good internet was, and if there was a trigger event, and I'm starting to think it was somewhere between Tahrir Square (2011) and Euromaidan (2014); once the political internet became really effective, it had to be countered by those in power.
The selling point software that monitors social media to do support is about brand reputation. If people are saying bad things about your company on social media, then that is hurting your public image, so you should respond to those issues and make sure they get resolved. In practice, this means that the people responding are less likely to be outsourced because the the funding is more than just a support cost. In practice, this means you can often get better support through Twitter than email.
A couple of years back I had a problem with a package that didn't reach me, and it was marked as delivered. The only point of contact that responded in any way was Twitter, the shipping company did not have other functioning way to connect to them.
This was in Spain, so no, not only USA. I have not deleted my X user, even though I never use it, just in case I need to ever go in and contact some company that I can't contact otherwise.
I had to have my password reset a several years ago for some service, and the only mechanism they had to do this was to reach out to the company on Twitter. This would have been around 2018 and I remember thinking it was bizarre at the time.
I think there was a _time_ when this worked; companies were very anxious about their Social Media Presence (TM) so would treat public social media messages, particularly complaints, as priority support cases. You can imagine all sorts of factors which would have decreased its effectiveness in recent years though; overuse, companies becoming more used to social media, the death of a usable Twitter API, making tracking this stuff difficult, the general decline of Twitter (if it's likely to be presented beside Elon Musk retweeting a white supremacist or something, are twitter complaints about your dishwasher being too noisy really all that consequential?)...
It's definitely a thing some people still _believe_ in, though, and some people have twitter accounts which they use _solely_ for moaning about brands (there used to be a fun Twitter account which replied to them, as if from the brand they were moaning about; not sure if it's still a thing).
In India, there are dozens of imposter accounts on twitter that pose as a bank's or telco's official handle.
They are very often the more responsive, and very caring and polite, quick to admit they are at fault ... and lure complainers into sharing personal info on DM on promises of speedy resolution.
This was a problem before Twitter became X. The blue tick mark was the only indicator of genuine accounts. Then X started selling tick marks to whoever pasy 8 dollars.
Facebook has a similar issue (although in this case the accounts may be from India but they go after everyone). People commenting on a company's page will get replies from accounts that set their name to "CUSTOMER SERVICE" or "TECH SUPPORT" (Mr. and Mrs. Support must have really had a specific career path in mind for their child) saying they're here to help and to kindly message them for a solution.
I've tried reporting these and Meta really does not care. Report as scam, nope looks fine to us. Report as fake name, nope looks fine to us. I don't think I've ever seen their report system work.
Some still are anxious about it, but others have seemingly stopped caring, as I think they believe their near monopoly positions means bad PR no longer matters. Looking at Comcast in particular.
I had a car once that a chipmunk or mouse decided to give birth in. The car wasn’t used often but as fate would have it the litter was born somewhere in the engine and when we went for a short trip they were all killed. This was not noticed until the stench of their decomposition wafted into the vehicle a week or so after the fact. Again, the car wasn’t used often.
The shop removed the mangled bodies, replaced all the air filter components, etc. It took a few months for traces of the scent to finally dissipate. Or maybe we got used to it?
Regardless, the car sold a couple years later. My next car was new.
Funny read. There could be a huge difference between licking the tape and chewing the tape. Which I guess is why they found it to be mildly spicy and not hellishly spicy.
Also effective: petroleum-based plastics for the wiring insulation.
Some squirrels chewed on my add-on wiring harness in my pickup back when it was parked outside (this the thanks I get for hard braking when they run across the road in my neighborhood) but never touched the vehicle's wiring harness. Why? Because the vehicle was built in 2009 and used old formulations instead of the new plastics with tasty bits in their formulas.
You are repeating FUD. There is no soy in the final plastic.
The plastic is derived from soy that serves as a cheap source of organic molecules, but it's converted into polymers no different from petroleum based plastics.
Did you know that most wall paint is made from corn? It's hyper processed into latex.
>This soy-based insulated wiring was touted as being more "environmentally friendly" due to, inter alia, the biodegradable nature of the soy-based insulation as compared to traditional plastic insulation.
While it is no doubt possible to process biochemicals into petrochemical-equivalent synthetic polymers, it appears that at least one law firm doesn't believe that happened here. And they go on to claim that Honda had claimed they were using biodegradable insulation, which a traditional wire generally is not.
There's something. Little guys could have more easily chewed on the harness for my trailer hitch, for example, or the main harness - thankfully they didn't, it might have totaled the vehicle - but went for the new stuff.
There's enough anecdotal evidence to warrant a real experiment on whether rodentia prefer new plastics over old.
My dad lost two sets of sparkplug wires to pack rats [0], circa 2016-2017. I recall him sharing that the auto store staff told him the bioplastics used to insulate the wires tastes like peanuts. He switched to a different brand, and didn't lose another set.
Then why do the rodents only eat wires on new vehicles? This is a recent phenomenon, like within the last ~15yr of vehicle manufacturing. Cars and equipment older than that don't get their wires chewed up.
Source: talking to auto mechanics and people who operate fleets of construction equipment.
Rodents have been eating the wires of cars forever. This is not a recent phenomenon. All of my 6 cars range from 1980-2000 and most of them have had an infestation at one point or another and I have repaired chewed wires in a couple of them. I've heard soooooo many stories from old people of mice getting into cars and eating wiring, it's been a problem since we've had cars.
Maybe it is mostly FUD, but it does not mean it is impossible. Yes, soy-based plastics are very processed, but it does not mean that the end product has no impurities that "smell" like soy. Rodents have very sensitive smell and some can even detect landmines. Also, plastics made solely from biomaterial or with bio-based components (e.g. plasticizers) are not (always) chemically exactly similar to petroleum-based plastics.
I found one research article from 2020 titled "Assessing Rodent Gnawing of Elastomers Containing Soybean Oil Derivatives". It did not find statistically significant difference in rodents gnawing when soy oil derivates were added to plastics. Maybe they have found a way to remove the tasty components.
Personally, for stuff not intended for food or food prep, what I would worry about (even if the MSDS didn't have anything concerning) is an unlisted/unknown contaminant.
I'm sure the reasoning behind this is that it just has to discourage, and therefore the capsaicin amount is low enough to do that, but also cheap enough to manufacture in tape format and sell at a markup.
What I'm more interested in is...does this actually work? Could you put this tape on things in your house that could actually be targets for rats? On random pantry items? On your siding?
I once trapped a mouse using a cheese under a glass bowl, where the glass bowl was propped up by a matchstick with a thread attached to the cheese. Proper Tom and Jerry style. It worked, after several attempts, but did amputate the end of the mouse's tail. Oops. But at least the mouse survived (and was released a safe distance away).
We had a rat in our engine. I cleared it's nest out 3 times and tried putting peppermint oil everywhere. Nothing worked it kept coming back. Then one day it snowed and we saw blood everywhere. It appears the crows killed our rat. Problem solved!
Would this be a good deterrent for cats? One of my cats has gnawed through several USB cables too in range to its mouth, destroying keyboards, webcams, ...
Would be wonderful if so!
You can often cut off the frayed ends and splice the wires back together. There's usually only 4-5 wires in there and they're color coded so they're simple to match back up.
On a similar note one of my childrens friends absolutely loves the taste of Nintendo Switch cartridges and licks them untill the bitter coating wears off.
- 6 of the tokens were within the top 10 predictions
- 8 of the tokens were in the #10-100 range
- 3 of the tokens were in the #100-1000 range
- 3 of the tokens weren't in any of the top 1000 predictions
So we can conclude that the LLM doesn’t think much of “tasted Honda” or “repelling tape”, and was very surprised by “Honda’s spicy rodent”, but it knows enough about human nature that “and I will do it again” came as almost no surprise whatsoever.
Yes? And while they're there, you don't want them to chew on the wires.
You can't prevent your engine from being warm (assuming you need to use your vehicles), but you can make it less appealing to gnaw on the nice chewy parts of it.
Rodents chewing through cables is a problem even in latitudes closer to the equator, where it can get hot enough that they don't (need to) seek an engine for its warmth.
> It smelled like a Band-Aid-flavored Rockstar Energy drink. It tasted like…heat. The capsaicin was subtler than I expected: nothing abrasive or punishing, just a blushing, ambient warmth like a string of white Christmas lights. There was almost a numbing, mala element, in the vein of a Sichuan peppercorn.
The people who produce envelopes know that envelopes are likely to be licked, and that they would likely be in big trouble if they or a supplier substitutes in a material that sends someone to the hospital.
My guess is that this is a funny column about whimsical things (often food related, the author seems to have worked as a restaurant critic) and it's full of "don't do this at home" disclaimers.
So I'd say:
- Your children shouldn't be reading her blog.
- Adults reading her blog shouldn't imitate her behavior, and instead, take it as a bit of humor.
I bet in reality she did a little bit more fact-checking than she shows on her blog post.
Sometimes I think to myself 'I should ignore HackerNews and do all my posting on lobste.rs' and then I come across a post like this and I remember why I love this site.
Brilliant idea. Now we need to spray capsaicin all over the inside of our vehicles. I had mice chew up the firewall for nesting material. Pain. In. The. Ass.
My neighbor keeps an old tuna can filled with gopher poison (strychnine laced grains) strapped to the inside of his car. Mice are destructive little bastards.
Yet another reason to buy old cars. When I went for my annual inspection this year my mechanic was telling me about a 2021 pickup truck he had to do like $10k worth of rewiring on because of rodent damage. Apparently newer cars have delicious and nutritious soy based wire insulation.
This whole article seems to be revolving around getting engagement and being verbose, they could have just said "rodent repelling tape exists and they put spice in it" and I would have received the same message.
It's not supposed to be informative, it's supposed to be funny.
And while I'll readily accept that funniness is in the eye of the beholder, in my case it achieved its intended effect. I also read some other blog posts of the same author, and she seems consistently funny!
