If you’ve been paying attention at all, you’ve seen articles with increasingly horrifying information about how much our world is swimming in pollution, PFAS, chemicals of all kinds, and in particular, microplastics (and nanoplastics). We now have a plastic spoon’s worth in our brains and that’s up 50% in the last eight years, rising with increasing plastic in the environment:… Read More
Backup Power for Air Filters + Water
Learning From Climate Disasters I try to learn something out of every climate disaster (sadly, there’s no end of supply of those), but this fire in LA is particularly rough because my kid is like 1/2 mile from the evacuation zone (they’re safe and now that the fire’s maybe being contained, I’m less freaked out). I grew up in CA… Read More
Friends, Backup Your Backups
Friends, back up your stuff! This is my semi-regular PSA to make sure you’re backing up all that data you would be miserable if you lost. After several hard drive failures in succession in the early 2010s, I put together a triple redundant backup system that I use to this day to make sure I don’t lose irreplaceable things —… Read More
Backup Power/Battery Options for the Climate Crisis
I’m a huge advocate for solar and will make a separate post for that (SOLAR: How to Get Started and Why You Should), but whether you have solar or not, having backup power is going to be more important going forward (especially with a climate denier in the White House not only eager to make the climate crisis worse, he’s… Read More
A Note on Wildfire Smoke From an Aerosol Scientist
Pittsburgh, Summer 2023 These are the worst fires in Canadian history… and the smoke will be here (in the US, intermittently, depending on which way the wind blows) all summer. I didn’t expect the PhD in aerosol science to come in quite so handy for everyday life, but knowing a lot about tiny particles (aerosols) has been pretty useful the… Read More