TIL: Today I Learned

The NPR guy pointed out that no one has ever overdosed at Canadian and European safe-injection sites which regulate dosage and make sure people have clean needles. The drug war has been a miserable failure and we're long overdue for a rethink on how we deal with this issue.

 

There's lots of opposition to clean-injection sites, though. And a lot of the reasons are silly.

 

Hey at least you got them. Most of the US is still struggling with 'Hmm, should we keep locking up all the black guys? Will that fix it?'. It's funny in a morbid way that our society is reacting to the opioid epidemic with compassion and a yearning for alternatives to mass incarceration as it's mostly a white people problem.

 

And a rich-celebrity problem too.

 

TIL the Roman coliseum in Arles, France was fortified and turned into a mini-city of about 100 families during the middle ages. The people of Boston did this post-apocalypse with their baseball stadium in Fallout 4 but I thought it was an idea that would never work in reality.

 

As far as can be determined archaeologically, that was fairly common in the immediate post-Roman west, such as in pre-Saxon Britain. Michael Wood talks about it in his documentary on King Arthur.

 

The only way it'll ever succeed requires people to stop doing drugs and to stop doing drugs you have to stop the problems that lead them to do so. A lot of those who consume hard drugs, possibly most of them but I don't have number that can corroborate my personal experience, do drugs in order to cover holes, to fill vacuums, or to forget. If people's lives were less awful (unemployment, discrimination, lack of prospects, widespread sexual abuse, a sense of futility stemming from McJobs and the gig economy, etc. etc. etc.) then the need for escape and forgetfulness would drop. Ending the above would also solve other societal problems which result in an upwards transfer of wealth and rising inequality so there's a lot of people who benefit from the current situation (including the privatised incarceration industry) and who'll do their best to fight a progressive solution.
Of course, this is a progressive solution that requires long-term planning that goes beyond the next election, putting policy ahead of politics, and having a lot of heart and (corny as it may sound) love. And in the era of expendable products and Twitter-fast reactions this is nearly utopian.

And also, with decreased demand, you'd reduce the power of international organised crime which would also help with the economy, etc.
Of course, this is just the opinion (rather condensed version of a tiny part of a worldview, really) of a random Internet poster who's theorising about possible ways to make the world a better place without hitting people with a stick so take it with a pinch of salt.

 

TIL the 76-yr-old woman next door with one lung and one kidney was a silver-bird colonel. I think that means she was a full colonel, but I always forget which is the Lt Col and which is the Col, silver or gold.

 

A major is a gold oak leaf.

 

Today I learned that although Anticosti Island (that big island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence) is bigger than P.E.I., it has a really small population. I actually didn't know anyone lived there at all.

 

TIL that Denmark's foreign ministry has an ambassador to big tech companies, Casper Klynge.

 

TIL: Accurate economic data from China can be hard to get. Folks are getting creative to verify, or not, government data.

SpaceKnows uses satellites to track night light luminosity and infrared data from 6000 sites in China to detect electricity usage and output.
Boston based PanAgora uses Baidu (Chinese google) search tracking inquires into travel during China's Spring Festival (Lunar New Year) when city workers go home for the holidays. A drop in travel plans is a proxy for economic activity. 2019 showed a 12% drop in searches.

Repeated in East Asia Thread.

 

I think they do something similar also with monitoring industrial fuel tanks, but I'm not sure how the fuel storage is interpreted.

 

Some types of fuel storage tanks are open-air at the top so they can see shadows inside and estimate how much they contain. They also monitor deliveries to and from the storage facilities and other tell-tales (like human activity or flares given off, etc) to estimate storage capacity.

 

TIL that there are podcasts specifically spoken to help people fall asleep.

 

Today I learned of the 1979 Mississauga train derailment. A train full of chemicals and explosives went off the track and exploded. They evacuated the entire city, and it was the largest peacetime evacuation until Hurricane Katrina. There were no deaths.

I found out about it by hearing this song on the radio:

Spoiler :

 

TIL that Warby Parker glasses maker is named after Warby Pepper and Zagg Parker who were characters fabricated by Jack Kerouac in his fantasy baseball league stories.

 

TIL that Sam Esmail is married to Emmy Rossum and that Earl Grey tea is gross.

 

Your mistake was drinking it. You're just supposed to admire it, congratulating yourself on being the sort of person who makes a cup of Early Grey, then pour it out and make a cup of something which comes in a huge box with the name of an English county on the front.