Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2086: Disbondment, my next road salt lesson.

 

The big boys — VDOT and its road-plowing bretheren — they salt the pavement when it snows.

So, why can’t I do the same, with my driveway?

Turns out, the reason VDOT salts the roadway is completely different from the reason I salted my driveway.

Huh.  Maybe you knew that, but I sure didn’t.

And as a corollary, recommended salt spreading rates for salting roadways have nothing to do with the amount of salt I needed melt the snow off my driveway.

Let’s not belabor this.

VDOT clears snow off the roads by plowing the snow off.  Their goal is to plow down to bare pavement when possible.  But they can’t do that if the snow and ice is stuck fast to the pavement.  VDOT uses salt to keep snow/slush/ice from adhering to the roadway.

Hence, disbondment.  The act of taking ice and snow that are frozen hard to the underlying pavement, and getting them loose.  Dis-bonding them from the underlying pavement.

Typically, VDOT’s goal is to use salt to melt just the very bottom layer of the snow/ice pack, where that touches the pavement.  They want to weaken that interface, so that the snow/ice can be scraped off with a normal snowplow.

I, by contrast, was using salt to clear the pavement.  That is, I wanted to melt the entire predicted thickness of the coming snowfall.  That, because I specifically didn’t want to scrape the snow and ice off the pavement.  I wanted them to run off, as salty water.  (I admit that I was right tired of shoveling, at this point in our most recent winter storms.)

Guess what?  If you’re only trying to melt that very thin interface between snowpack and pavement, a) you’re happy to use snow-melt pellets that just melt a little hole in the snow, until they get down to pavement, and b) overall, disbonding-then-plowing uses a lot less salt than melting the full thickness of the snow pack with salt.

A typical manufacturer recommendation for home use of de-icers (e.g., rock salt, calcium chloride pellets) works out to around one 50-pound bag of salt for every 1000 square feet.  Whereas the (reportedly) most common recommended rate for VDOT salting the road is about five pound per 1000 square feet.

 

Conclusion

There are a few fairly big conclusions, from the simple observation that VDOT’s use of salt and my use of salt are not at all the same.

First, just because VDOT salts the roads doesn’t mean I have an excuse to do it.  If for no other reason, what VDOT is trying to do with salt (disbondment of snow/pavement interface) has nothing what I’m trying to do (melt the entire thickness of the falling snow).

Second, you can’t take recommended salt spreading rates for road use, and apply those to melt the snow off your driveway.  It’s not nearly enough salt.  You will end up committing homeopathic ice melting, as described two posts back.

Third, using salt to melt snow in bulk — say, the full thickness of a light snowfall, off my driveway — that may be a remarkably stupid thing to do.  Again, per square foot, it takes vastly more salt to do that, than it does to treat the roadways.

While my road salt is but a minor contributor to the problems caused by society’s reliance on road salt, there’s no point in my adding fuel to the fire, needlessly.  Maybe in some climates, some locations, you absolutely have no choice but to use road salt on your driveway and walkways.  But Virginia, USDA Zone 7B, ain’t one of them.

I may take one more stab at this topic, trying to assess environmental safety of various road salts/ice melters.

And I may not.  Environmentally, the best choice is to use nothing.  So I’m not really feeling compelled to suss out various road salts’ claims of environmental friendliness or minimal impact on machinery and the built environment.

I may be done with salt.

Post #2085: The mess that is the ice-melt market, in one phrase: Pet-safer.

 

I am still trying to get up to speed on ice-melting compounds.  So far, two things appear crystal clear.

First, rock salt — sodium chloride, NaCl, halite — is the worst ice-melting compound, in terms of metal and concrete damage, environmental harm, and pet safety.

Second, most of the claims, made by most ice melters, are, at best, exaggerations.

Pet-safer:  Crossing the line on exaggerated product claims.

But some ice-melter claims — particularly regarding “pet-safe” and “eco-friendly” — are purposefully deceptive.

And, oddly enough, those purposefully-deceptive claims of “pet-safe” and “eco-friendly” ice melts work exactly the same way.  In order to be legal, they only claim to be pet-safer or eco-friendlier.  Than what, you might ask?  Than pure rock salt.  So the first takeaway is that anything that’s even trivially better than pure rock salt — such as rock salt with some tiny amount of additives — can advertise itself as both “pet-safer” and “eco-friendlier” (…. than rock salt).

Surely we agree that rock salt is not pet safe?

By way of making this as clear as possible, let me narrow it to dogs.  And focus on the bottom of the barrel — rock salt.

A dog will get sick if it ingests too much (table, NaCl) salt.  One reference listed a dog-lethal dose of sodium chloride (salt) as 4 grams per kilogram body weight (Source:  Veterinary Toxicology, 4th Edition.)  Thus a 30-pound dog that manages to eat two ounces of rock salt, and keep it down, might reasonably die from doing that.  (That’s about three level tablespoons of table salt.)

And a dog could pretty clearly get sick from a lower dose than that.  Salt poisoning leads to vomiting, diarrhea, and, if it proceeds far enough, to neurological symptoms (e.g., inability to walk).

Salt poisoning of dogs does not appear to be very common.  Another reference said that in 1998, there were just 50 such cases reported to ASPCA poison control hot line.  Currently, salt poisoning doesn’t make the top 10 list of common pet poisons.

And, from reading a few case reports, ice-melt poisoning can occur if a dog takes a big gulp of the stuff, straight out of the bag.  But, in general, that’s not the problem being addressed by use of “pet-safe” de-icers.  A mouthful of de-icer is going to be bad for your pet, no matter what.

Instead, people who buy pet-safe ice melt are worried about dogs walking on areas treated with (e.g.) rock salt as an ice-melter.  First, salt irritates dogs’ paws.  And second, dogs ingest salt from licking off salt crystals stuck on or in their paws,

The upshot of all that is that rock salt (NaCl) is something you don’t want to see in a “pet-safe” ice melt.

So what do I find, off the crack of the bat, on the Home Depot website?

And that’s not a one-off accident.  Here’s the same nonsense from Uline, a supplier of industrial products of all types:

So …

Once you move beyond colored rock salt — clearly not pet-safe — there’s some real ambiguity as to what’s safe or not.

Urea is typically considered fully safe for dogs and cats (but is not safe for ruminants).  But urea is basically high-potency nitrogen fertilizer.

I can’t see myself dumping a 50-pound bag of 43-0-0 fertilizer on the driveway in winter.  Or in any season, really.

Plus, it’s a poor ice melter, and you’d be hard-pressed to find it bagged in bulk for consumer ice-melt use.  Apparently, it is only commonly used in specialty situations such as elevated metal walkways, where lack of metal corrosion is the key concern for the ice-melt.

Acetate ice melters (calcium magnesium acetate (CMA) and potassium acetate (KAC)) are considered pet-safe by some.  But these, too, perform relatively poorly as ice-melters, and are expensive per effective melting dose, as well.  They have the additional advantage of not being chloride salts, and so being less toxic to the aquatic environment than (say) rock salt.

Beware “with CMA”, just as you should beware pet friendlier.  A lot of ice-melt blends want to bask in the glow of CMA without the bother and expense of actually including much of it in their blend.   (Plus, the ice melter probably works better as an ice melter if you go light on the CMA, because CMA apparently is not a very good ice melter.  It just has the big advantage of killing less stuff than chloride salts do.)

Magnesium chloride is considered safer for pets than other chloride salts.  It is sold, for example, by both PetSmart and PetCo as a pet-safer de-icer.  It also performs quite well as a de-icer.  From a pet-safety standpoint, the only drawback appears to be price.  In retail packaging, MgCl2 appears to cost anywhere from five to ten times as much as rock salt.  But, as a chloride salt, this is not materially better than rock salt, from the standpoint of toxicity to the aquatic environment.  And some references suggest that it causes more damage to concrete than rock salt does, particular to newer (under-one-year-old) concrete.

Conclusion

I have no dog in this fight, if you will excuse the phrase.  I don’t own a pet, so this isn’t my problem.  I only stumbled across it in looking for ice melts that aren’t chloride salts, hoping for lower environmental impact.  And was vaguely outraged once I figured the whole pet-friendlier thing as discussed above.

But I note that it is a common and accepted practice in the ice-melt market to take a bag of common rock salt, color it (green or blue, inevitably), sprinkle in some actually pet-safe materials, slap “pet-safer” on the bag, and then double the amount charged for it. 

Unlike pet food, nobody appears to regulate anything about “pet-safer” de-icers.  Even though the danger arises from pets eating the stuff.  Contrast that the the multi-agency Federal regulation of pet food.  (Not that the Feds need to regulate de-icers per se, but the use of “pet-safer” and similar legal-but-misleading claims.)

Unsurprisingly, then, a lot of stuff offered in the big-box hardware stores as “pet-safer” ice melt is just rock salt (plus a tiny amount of additives) sold at a steep markup.

Caveat emptor.

Post #2084: Homeopathic pavement treatment.

 

I’m no longer going to use pavement de-icer (rock salt, road salt, ice melt).

For now, at least.

That’s because, upon inspection, much about the modern road salt/pavement de-icer market confuses me.

But in my defense, I had a lot of help, getting confused.  The whole retail “de-icer” market pings my bullshit detector in some strong and unpleasant ways.  Not just the simple stuff (“melts as low as … ).  More importantly, “pet-safe” and “eco-friendly” have quietly morphed into their mealy-mouthed “safer” and “friendlier” versions.  And not in a good way.

Road salt is a deep topic, but I have to start somewhere.

As described in Section 1 below, I did not intend to fuse the principles of homeopathy with those of winter pavement maintenance.  That happened entirely as a result of my own stupidity.

But, per Section 2 (next post), I had a lot of help being stupid about it.  Pavement de-icers are arguably the worst consumer product I’ve ever seen, in terms of manufacturers’ claims and deliberately misleading marketing.

Plus, Section 3, the practical use of chemical pavement de-icer is complicated. Even absent all the baloney presented by sellers of de-icers, there’s a lot to unpack.  I’m not sure I understand the chemistry part of it, yet, let alone the weather’s contribution.

And, Section 4, most (perhaps all) commonly-used de-icers are crap for the environment, especially the aquatic environment.  I can’t complain about the taste of road salt in the drinking water if I’m spreading this stuff on my own driveway.

This is just the first of several posts on pavement de-icer.

Part 1:  Driveway homeopathy

1A:  The hasty but satisfying post-hoc conclusion

Source:  Good ol’ clipart-library.com, which has upped its game with an on-the-fly AI picture generator.

A few days ago, I salted my driveway, using calcium chloride pellets.  The idea was that the (calcium chloride) salt would melt a coming light snow, causing it to run off my driveway as (slightly salty) water, and, ideally, leaving me with bare pavement. Instead of a driveway with an inch of snow on it.  This, as being preferable to re-shoveling my driveway to remove a light coating of snow.  And this to be achieved despite temperatures consistently (but not hugely) below 32F.

By the end of the next day, my driveway was dry and snow/ice free.

So the salt obviously worked, right?  End-of-story.

Part 2:  But … science

As I was patting myself on the back, I could not help but notice that all my neighbors’ driveways were also dry and snow-free.

Which, after a moment’s solemn reflection, pretty strongly suggested that my salting my driveway was a complete waste of time.

I’m pretty sure none of my neighbors salted theirs.

Part 3:  thus was born the short-lived science of driveway homeopathy.

First, I found a pretty chart.  (This is, in fact, an excellent chart from an excellent practical reference.)

Source:  National Tank Outlet.  These folks sell the tanks you need to store this stuff at industrial scale.

Those substances are all salts, chemically speaking:

  • CaCl2 — calcium chloride
  • NaCl — salt– rock salt — halite — sodium chloride
  • MgCL2 — magnesium chloride
  • CMA — calcium magnesium acetate ( calcium acetate and magnesium acetate).
  • KAC — potassium acetate.

Then doing this crude calculation:

And then, only as a last resort, actually reading the directions on the bag.  Which, they just flat out say, per for 1000 square feet, for some “typical” conditions (I guess), I should use just touch more than what I calculated above.

The upshot is that I should use at least an entire 50-pound bag of calcium chloride.  On a 1000-square-foot section of driveway.  That, to get rid of an (one) inch of typical snowfall.  That should make a brine strong enough to have all that snow turn to water and run off, even though the weather is (maybe) 10 degrees below freezing.  This, instead of shoveling the driveway, again, for the new inch of snow that fell.

I’ve never used it at anything close to that rate.  I use it a few pounds at a time.  (And, correspondingly, my first (and current) bag of calcium chloride is at least a decade old.)  Nor will I ever.

Ergo, I have been engaging in homeopathic ice melting.  Sure, I start off with strong brine, when those first few snowflakes hit those salt (calcium chloride) crystals (pellets).  Implicitly, I must have believed that after adding a whole lot more water (in the form of an inch of snow), the resulting very dilute brine would somehow recall the strength it once had, and so continue to melt the snow.

Contrary to the laws of physics and chemistry.  Or common sense.

Or the directions on the bag.

Or all of the above.

Conclusion

For now, the simple message is that homeopathic pavement de-icer helps no-one.  Avoid it.

It achieves nothing while causing slight environmental harm. It’s a net negative, except perhaps in (easily deceived) the mind of the user.

So, with regard to salting the pavement:  Do.  Or do not.

Crazily enough, I have a lot more to say about ice melters.  That’ll come out in the next posts.

Post #2083: Cold wave, heat pump, wood stove secondary heating.

 

Sometimes, all you need is a warm place.

Cold wave:  It’s going to get cold next week.

How cold?

In Vienna, VA, the National Weather Service is predicting a nighttime low of 4F, a week from now.

That’s rare but not totally unexpected.   

As of 1990, Vienna was at the edge of USDA plant hardiness Zone 6B, and could expected to see (and did see) occasional wintertime lows down to minus 5F

Three decades later, and we’re ten degrees warmer.  (In terms of our expected extreme low winter temperature).  As of the most recent USDA Hardiness Zone map, Vienna has moved into Zone 7B, with an expected extreme low of 5F.

That trend came through clearly in my analysis of annual low temperatures at nearby Dulles Airport.

So, it’s going to be cold, but it’s in line with expectations.

Heat Pump:  Cold weather remains the soft underbelly of air source heat pumps.

 

I fully grasp the irony of heating my house with an electrical appliance that, by design, quits working when it gets really cold outside.

Near as I can tell, all air source heat pumps all do this.  It’s just a question of how low can they go.  What I think of a “standard” home unit, as I recall, shuts down around freezing (32F).  Conversely, the “high heat” versions of the heat pump I got will go down to -17F or some such.   Mine — the regular versions — stop working at 5F.  This — super cold weather — is where ground-source heat pumps shine, as the ground loop temperature may be quite cold by that time, but nowhere near as cold as it is outside in a cold snap.   So the ground source is starting from much “warmer” material to extract its heat from.  Which, as you might well imagine, is an enviable position for a heat pump to be in.

But.

But 1, I didn’t think I’d hit that lower temperature limit the first winter I owned the thing.  The lower limit for mine is, in fact, 5F.  So, I will be looking at some (brief?) period when this new air-source mini-split may not run.  Not because it’s broken.  Just because it’s cold outside.

But 2, now I have to suss out the secondary heat.  Every heat pump system has secondary heat, I think.  (Or maybe it’s “should have”).  That’s what you use when the heat pump isn’t enough.  (Or to speed up the heating of rooms, when the heat pump alone would raise temperatures too slowly.)

Secondary heat for this mini-split is strictly DIY.  That’s by design.  It doesn’t come with — nor is is capable of activating — secondary heat of any sort, as far as I can tell.

So, just burn some natural gas …

White Clouds in Blue Sky ca. 1996

Secondary heat isn’t really a problem, because I can burn natural gas for heat.

But.

But 1, I can only do that — use the baseboard heating in that part of my house — by jury-rigging what’s left of my (still kind-of functioning) baseboard hot water heating.

But 2:  My fancy gas water-heater/furnace objects to serving as mere house heater.  (Another long story.)  It’ll work, but it’s bad for the device (as in, this is what burnt out the internal pump motor the first time.)

So I’m going with something simpler.

Buying a small quantify of firewood in the dead of winter.

 

I am now that guy.  That guy who is … per the title.

I wanted more than a shrink-wrapped bundle. But far less than a cord.  Where can I buy that, around here?  Preferably to pick up.

The right place for that turned out to be the Reston Farm Garden Market.  Where I paid $85 for an eight-of-a-cord, kiln-dried, stacked (by them) into the back of my hatchback Bolt.

So, $680 a cord, for kiln-dried hardwood, bought in small (one-eighth-cord) quantity.  I thought that was OK, in an area where a cord of kiln-dried hardwood, delivered, from my nearest source, would run $550 plus delivery fee.

Kiln dried or merely seasoned?  We go for kiln-dried now. It guarantees that it’s good firewood, but it’s a little too good. For sure, it burns more readily.  There are no bad logs.  But it burn faster and hotter than it ought, which means messing with the draft and relying on the air-tightness of the stove door gasket.  (FWIW, I’m convinced that the hotter burn nearly makes up for the fossil fuels used to dry the wood.  So the kiln drying step is not quite as much of an energy loser as it might seem at first.  And with all the pests harbored by firewood, it has to be kiln-dried to be moved more than a county or two away, anyway.)

FYI, the various shrink-wrapped or netted bundles of firewood for sale at local retail stores seem to work out to around $1600 a cord.

Apparently, this little out-of-the-way farm store moves tractor-trailer-loads of firewood, per year, through their yard.

That said, local air pollution aside, firewood is an expensive way to heat my house, given prices in my area.

As I recall, this is about what I found the last time I figured it.  Recognizing that for me, electricity is cheaper than natural gas, this means that firewood is my most expensive fuel option.

Short of this:

With the understanding that I’ve already shown that electricity remains my least expensive fuel, almost regardless of the outside temperature.*

* As long as the heat pumps will run.

Conclusion

My wife and I agree that there is just something comforting about having a full rack of dry firewood.

It’s not rational, practical, economical, or conducive to the public health.

But it is comforting.

And firewood is going to provide our secondary heat through this cold snap.  For the occasional night or two when we hit the extreme winter lows for this climate zone, it seems like the easiest solution.

Post #2082: One-in-1000 Californians just lost a home?

 

I started off trying to get the LA fires into perspective.

I just want a back-of-the-envelope number

 

I hate to sound blase, but, OK, parts of LA have burnt.

Not wholly unexpected.  Surely more likely to happen as climate change progresses.

But, it’s, you know, California.  Stuff happens in California.  Earthquakes.  Mudslides.  Wildfires.  Excess rain and snow events.  Droughts.

I’m from the Mid-Atlantic region, where the worst we typically face is 17-year locusts and the occasional dry spell.

And this is in no sense a slam on California.  California is about as good at dealing with stuff like that as can be.

I just want to know something along the lines of “how does the value of the damage from the current LA fires compare to other disasters?”

I’ll settle for a count of homes lost to fire

Source:  fire.ca.gov.  Cal Fire?

As of 1/16/2025, the overwhelmingly quoted number in news coverage is 12,000.  That appears to be from 12,300+ “structures destroyed”, from Cal Fire.  As I understand it, that’s a number from the government of the State of California.

At the same time, a couple of big local banks (Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, cited by ABC News) have already projected $30B in insured losses.

If that projected $30B cost is close, these LA fires will be by far the most expensive fire event in California history, more than twice as expensive as the (now) second-most-costly fire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire.

Source:  Cal Fire statistics page, this is their top 20 list.

By the numbers, it’s clear that a high cost per structure contributes to the overall higher cost of the LA fires, compared to the Camp fire.  To know that the loss estimate for the 2018 Camp Fire was $12B (reference).  That the works out to a $600K cost per structure for the 2018 Camp Fire — the costliest California fire until now — versus about $2.4M per destroyed structure for the LA fires.   I’m not sure I fully understand why the difference would be that large, but that’s what the simple arithmetic says.  Bear in mind that the $30B estimate is just a preliminary estimate by a couple of big banks.

 

13.4 million households in California

So says the U.S. Bureau of the Census (reference).

If the Los Angeles area just lost 12,300 plus structures, and if all of that was housing, and assuming (the equivalent of) predominantly single-family homes, then, roughly speaking, (12,300/13,400,000 =~) 0.1% of California households just lost their place to live.

If I had to take it further, it looks like Californians on average pay about 0.4% of the value of housing as insurance premiums each year.  Inverting that, this one event — a total loss of 0.1% of California housing — would seem to amount to about a quarter-of-a-year’s property insurance premiums for the entire state of California.  But because those LA properties appear to be so expensive per dwelling, it’s entire possible that this one even could cost … about a year’s worth of property insurance premiums for all of California.

Conclusion

A plausible scale of insured costs of U.S. natural disasters puts 2005 Hurricane Katrina at #1 with more than $100B (reference).  That’s in current (2025) dollars, roughly speaking.

The $30B projected insured losses for the LA fires would put them 10th on that list, just past the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the one that shook down a section of freeway.

It’s California.  I’m sure they’ll deal with it about as well as it can be dealt with.

Post #2081: Eighty pounds and still a loser.

 

This morning I reached 205 pounds.  In my underwear, admittedly.  But it still counts.  So I’m calling it 80 pounds lost, since September 2023.  BMI is now just under 28.  If I can lose another 20 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.  Something that I honestly never thought I would ever see.

This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.

And, while I’m at it, how helpful or not Google’s AI would have been, in dealing with these changes.

They are, in order:

  • My mattress is too hard.
  • My sneakers are too stiff.
  • My balance is much better.
  • My weight loss remains on trend.

My mattress is too hard

Google AI score, 50%.  Good solution, totally wrong reasoning.

I never considered body fat to be part of the overall mattress-comfort equation.  But apparently, this is well-known, at least in the sense that Google’s AI knew about it.

After a couple of months of waking up with numb patches of skin on my hips and thighs, it finally dawned on me that, together, my mattress and I have lost a lot of padding.  And, as if the AI read my mind, the addition of a 2″ memory-foam mattress topper has solved the problem of a too-hard mattress.

That said, the rest of the AI’s “reasoning” was wrong.  The problem has nothing to do with firmness — the tendency of the mattress surface to sink downwards with weight.  The firmness of the mattress is just fine.  And putting a mattress topper on doesn’t affect the firmness, and can’t fix a mattress with the wrong level of firmness for the sleeper.

It’s the level of padding on top of that structure that’s the problem.

I give the AI partial credit on this one.

My sneakers are too stiff

Google AI score, 0%.  (I’d give it a negative if I could).  On this question, Google’s AI hallucinated the reasoning and offered really bad advice.

You expect to buy new clothes when you lose a lot of weight.  And I have, right on down to my underwear.  But I didn’t expect to have to buy new shoes.

For the past couple of decades I’ve worn Nike Air Monarch shoes.  These are plain-Jane sneakers with lots of padding, heavy construction, and very thick soles with the Nike Air technology.

These were, effectively, the perfect shoe for an obese-but-active person.  The thick air-cushioned heel was more-or-less exactly what a fat person needs.

As a bonus, buying new sneakers was a no-brainer, because Nike kept these in production for decades.  I think that’s because Nike has a steady market of devoted wearers consisting of a) heavy people, and b) people who spend a lot of time on their feet, like nurses.

The thick soles were comfortably flexible for my old, 285-pound self.  But at 205, they’re like walking on padded boards.  To the point where it became almost comically difficult to, say, run on a treadmill while wearing them.

Though, to be fair, I don’t think the average purchaser of Nike Air Monarchs does a lot of running.

So, for the first time in two decades, I bought an actual running shoe.  One with lightweight construction and flexible soles.  I’ll never be a graceful runner, but running feels a lot better with a more flexible shoe.  At least I no longer have to hear “slap-slap-slap” as I plod along on a treadmill.

My balance is much better.

Google AI score:  33%.  From what I can tell, the only point it got right is that it’s easier to maintain control when you have less mass.  The rest of it appears to be imaginary.

My balance is vastly better than it was.

To test your static ability to balance, just stand on one foot.  In medical parlance, this is the “single leg stance” test.  Health care providers assume that this measures something about your neurological health.  Eyes open, hands on hips, standing on one foot, if you can’t count to five before you fall over, you’re at enhanced risk of falls.  But if you get past ten seconds, apparently, you’re good to go (reference).

Near as I can tell, at 205 pounds, I can stand on one foot until I get bored.  That was not true of my 285-pound self, to the point where Wii Fit always told me that, physically, I was ancient, because it could sense how much I wobbled around when standing on the Wii Fit scale.  At any rate, I just now stood a minute, on one foot, and while it requires concentration, it seemed like muscle fatigue would set the limit there, not balance per se.

But I think this is entirely explained by physics, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of my nervous system or musculature.

First, fat people — or at least those with a lot of belly fat — have a higher center of gravity.  Most of the weight I lost was from the waist up.  That, for the simple reason that I never had much fat on my legs (or arms), typical for “central obesity” in fat males.  And I had a big gut.  This means that my center of gravity is now lower.  That by itself, makes me more stable.  (Apparently, the whole story is more complex, and involves both lowering the center of gravity, and moving it closer to the spine.)

Second, I now have a better power-to-weight ratio.  By reducing my fat, the ratio of muscle mass to total weight has risen.  This means that for any given off-balance situation, I’m more likely to be able to bring myself back to an upright position.  (Crudely, 40% more power, reckoned as 285/205=~1.4.  That assumes neither loss nor gain of strength, for the muscles used for balance.)

In any case, it’s not rocket science.  Consider loading a backpack with 80 pounds of bacon, putting that on, and trying to keep your balance.  That was more-or-less the situation when I started on this course back in September 2023, compared to where I am now.

Improved balance is no surprise.  And it required no improvement in nervous system or musculature to achieve it.  It just required taking off the backpack.

My weight loss is on trend.

Google AI score:  100%.  Google simply repeats the conventional wisdom, which is that long term weight loss inevitably proceeds by fits and starts, not smoothy.

If you read about people who’ve lost a lot of weight, all you seem to hear about is how hard it eventually gets, how they plateau, how tough it is to keep the weight off.

For some reason, none of that seems to apply to me.  I have lost weight at a weirdly steady rate of 5 pounds per month.

I can only guess why I’ve had this unusual experience.

  • As I’ve lost weight, I’ve lowered my daily calorie target.
  • I monitor my diet, separately from counting calories.  Simply put, if I don’t wake up hungry, I know I ate too much the day before.
  • I eat a very simplified diet, so “cheating” isn’t really possible.

But at this point, I think that’s mostly due to having an incredibly simplified diet.  This makes it easy to keep track of how much I’ve eaten each day.  And, more importantly, it keeps me away from food that gets me off track or amps up my sense of hunger.

Breakfast is a cup of coffee with a serving of protein powder in it.

After that, I eat five (or so) 300-calorie (or so) meals a day. Typical meals include:

  • A garden salad with a nice high-fat salad dressing.  (Without the salad dressing, my body does not seem to register salad greens as any type of food, hunger-wise).
  • A bowl of frozen berries, topped with “protein pudding” (Jello no-sugar chocolate pudding mix made up using whey protein powder).  Tastes like ice cream, gives you as much protein as a quarter-pound hamburger.
  • A bowl of home-made soup of some sort.
  • Peanut butter sandwich on a “slider roll”.
  • A breaded fish filet on a slider roll.
  • A 300-calorie piece of cheese.

All of that is fine, tasty food.  None of it is stuff that leaves me begging for more.  Some of it is from-scratch cooking, some of it is disgusting mixes of chemicals (no-sugar Jello).  None of it includes a large amount of carbs at one time.

Anyway, after a lifetime of obesity, this is what works for me.  I eat a very limited diet, the upside of which is that I never have to think much about what I eat.  And, after a year-plus of this, it doesn’t even occur to me to eat something outside of that narrow range.

Nor do I crave the foods I used to eat.

Weirdly, it now feels wrong to eat a full meal, as one might at a restaurant, or over the holidays.  And from the standpoint of weight loss, that’s a really good thing.

Interestingly, when I deviate from this — over the holidays, say — it takes me the better part of a week to get back on track.  I think it’s the combination of readily-available calorie-dense foods (e.g., stuffing from the turkey), and a lot of foods rich in simple carbs (e.g., desserts) that disturb blood sugar and insulin levels and set off a fresh bout of hunger a few hours later.

Conclusion:  My diet and my new tastes evolved together.

Here I am, where I thought I’d never be:  Within striking distance of having a “normal” weight.

If I can achieve that, it’ll be for the first time since I went off to college.

I cannot say, exactly, why I’ve finally been able to lose weight.

But in the end, now that I know what it takes, I think that in the past I just under-estimated what it took to undergo sustained weight loss. It more-or-less required a complete revision of lifestyle.  Giving up alcohol was a big part of it.  Giving up refined-carb meals (e.g. spaghetti and meatballs) was part of it.  Finding a convenient fat-free protein source (whey powder) helped.  Giving up all pretense of “normal” eating patterns helped.

But the bottom line is that what and how I eat now bears almost no relation to how I lived in the past.  And, apparently, for me, that’s what it took, to get significant, sustained weight loss.

Let me emphasize how this is not like I’m a different person.  I still find all that stuff appealing.  (“That stuff” being “all those yummy foods I used to eat”.)

Hand me a Dorito right now and I’d snarf that down.  No questions asked (other than those directly related to hygiene.)

But it’s as if I no longer find that stuff compelling.  Or something.

In any case, I never even consider buying a bag of Doritos.

But that’s been gradual.  A few months into this weight loss, I might stroll the chips aisle at the Safeway occasionally, to pick up something.  But to dole it out. By the countable-small-hundreds of calories.

Later in the process, I’d stroll the aisle and buy nothing.

Now? I never go down that aisle.  Never think to do so.

Never’s a strong word.  Maybe one of those single-serving size bags at the 7-11?  There’s another habit that I’m out of.  Gotta be a couple of years since I visited a 7-11.

My change in diet and … tastes? occurred gradually.  And to some large degree, mutually.

If I’d gone from my previous diet, to how I eat now, in one step, I don’t think I could have stuck with it.

It’s very much that when I gave up my excesses with drink, I gave them up for food as well.

Either that, or I felt so crappy being sober all the time that I didn’t eat as much.

Take your pick.

The only real point here is that I didn’t clean up my act all at once.  I never “went on a diet”.  It’s just that the longer I was on this track, and the more weight I lost, the narrower and more simplified my diet got.

The bottom line is that I didn’t intend to get to this point. Things just kind of evolved.  And what you see above is (so far) the final product of that evolution.

The nice thing is that it’s not my tastes, by my cravings, that have evolved over this diet.  I progressed more-or-less by tossing the worst offenders out of my current eating habits, metabolically speaking.  And then, just vowing to drop the weight and clean my diet up further as I went a long.

I still like all that stuff I used to like.  I just don’t eat it.  And I’m fine with that.

How screwed-up is that?

If all goes well, based on the graph, I’ll achieve “normal” weight sometime late this spring.   We’ll see how it plays out.

Post #2080: Vienna, VA sidewalks in the snow.

 

In Vienna, VA, we are religious about shoveling the snow off our sidewalks.

God put the snow there.

God will remove it when he’s good and ready.

I tried to take a walk yesterday morning …

… without walking on snow and ice.

But, because I live in the Town of Vienna, that meant spending a lot of time walking in the road.

There’s no requirement to shovel your sidewalk in the Town of Vienna.  Unsurprisingly, some sidewalks are shoveled, some aren’t.  Which means that you typically can’t walk the length of a block without either walking on an un-shoveled sidewalk, or walking in the road.

This got me to thinking about what the snow-clearance laws are in Northern Virginia.  I know there’s no ordinance requiring it in Vienna.  But what about the rest of Northern Virginia?

Turns out, Vienna is in the minority.  Most of the jurisdictions around here require residents and business owners to shovel their sidewalks promptly after a snowfall.

I find that to be an oddly mixed bag.  Loudoun County is in general far more rural than Fairfax County, yet they require snow shoveling while Fairfax does not.

In all cases, the penalties for failure to clear a sidewalk are nugatory, so it’s not clear whether any of the laws are or are not effective.  I considered taking a field trip to the People’s Republic of Falls Church to see if their sidewalks really do get cleared or not.  But it hardly seems worth it.  Give it another few days, and the snow will be gone.

In the end, it’s just another oddity of living in No. Va.  These jurisdictions all have the same weather and have pretty much the same population demographics.  I’m guessing that the presence or absence of a shoveling ordinance is mostly a matter of historical accident.

In any case, in Vienna, we clear our sidewalks the old fashioned way, via religious observance.

Addendum:  Businesses in Vienna VA?

I know there’s no ordinance requiring homeowners to shovel their sidewalks in Vienna, but I was immediately questioned about businesses.  You can, and many places do, have different shoveling laws apply for business versus residential.

Old news reporting says that Vienna Town Council turned down any sort of shoveling ordinance in 2011 (Reference The Patch).

And that’s the last Google seems to have heard of it.

A search of MuniCode for Vienna VA for snow yields 13 mentions, none of which have to do with requiring businesses to shovel snow.

A search of the Town Website yields nothing useful, but that’s never definitive.

For sure, the Maple Avenue sidewalks were cleared around here.  Here’s Pleasant and Maple, looking west and east.

So, I don’t know.  There doesn’t seem to be an ordinance requiring it, but something resulted in the clearance of the Maple Avenue sidewalks in my area.  This is distinctly different from (say) Nutley, also a multi-lane road, but with large sections of un-shoveled sidewalk.

If it’s due to an ordinance, that ordinance appears well-hidden.

Post #2079: So, when will Greenland be ready?

 

To use, I mean.  For us to use.

Now that it’s on order.  Once we buy it, or take it, or whatever.

How long before we get to use it?

I appreciate the sentiment.

Republican policy, if I can infer such, is not merely to ignore global warming, but to encourage the consumption of fossil fuels.

And yet, even as they deny it, they seem to realize they’ve got to have a place to put people.  You know, once Florida is under water, the Great Plains have reverted to sagebrush desert, and so on.

But, we’ve got this big empty island, just offshore.  Kinda.

Buy the big empty island, set up resort destination with a few casinos, and problem solved.

It’s a no-brainer.

Plus, if we’re tired of NATO, there’s no better way to do away with it than to attack a NATO country.

It’s a no-brainer and a two-fer.

But I digress.

How long for the ice to melt?

At present, Greenland is 80% covered by a remnant of the North American ice sheet.  It’s a relic from the most recent ice age.  I vaguely recollect that the ice is two miles thick in places.

But on average, it’s under a mile-and-a-half thick.

 

Based on all sources available to it, Google’s AI thinks it’ll take at least 1000 years for the ice to melt.

If I specifically narrow it to the IPCC, Google tells me “a few thousand years”.

Admittedly, some real estate will open up before the ice melts fully.

But given the overall time line for global warming, and certainly the likely remaining lifespan of the USA, I don’t think the ice up there is going to melt in time to do us much good.

 

Post #2077: I opened the hood of my car.

 

Finally.  I finally opened the hood of my 2020 Chevy Bolt, a year after I bought it (Post #1924).

I never saw a reason to look under the hood, figuring I’d have no idea what I was looking at.  It being an EV, and all.

Now that I’ve opened the hood, I was not disappointed.

Not ringing a lot of bells with me.  I think I recognize a brake master cylinder and tan plastic reservoir mounted to the firewall, driver’s side.  But all those big metal thingies?  No clue.

Luckily, one can be ignorant and still drive a car.  That, proven daily, I’d say.

Even now, I wouldn’t have bothered to open the hood, ever, except that with the recent winter storm, and the resulting sloppy roads, I figured I should top off windshield wiper fluid.  Seeing as how that hadn’t been done in a year.

I was able to do that without reading the manual.  The hood release was in an obvious place, the hood emergency latch was easy to find, and (shown below) the right place for windshield wiper fluid is pretty clearly marked.  Even had a hood prop where I expected to find it.

So thumbs up to Chevy for making that much obvious.

Weirdly, I swear there’s a fan and radiator in there somewhere.  For sure, there are several little reservoirs that look like they hold coolant.  Plausibly that’s all part of whatever manages the temperature of the battery and the electronics.

It’s magic, as far as I’m concerned.

Plus it runs at a lethal 350V DC.  As long is to works, leave it be.

And pour carefully.