How to walk upright and stop living in a cave | Hacker News Reader

How to walk upright and stop living in a cave

taylor.gl

17 pointstaylorlunt14 comments

Hmm, says to take vitamin D instead of going outside. But every time somebody tries to show some benefit to vitamin D supplementation, they utterly fail. (Covid resilience might be the only exception, if confirmed.) Something about being outside does whatever good correlates with high vitamin D, but we don't know what.

Similarly, every attempt to demonstrate any benefit of fish oil supplements fails miserably. There is something really good about eating oily fish, but it is evidently not the oil.

Those are some substantial assertions. Do you have references to back up those claims?

The Mayo Clinic page on vitamin D lists a number of positive effects, for example. https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-d/art-2...

Here's a massive meta-analysis of tens of thousands of participants finding a reduction in mortality associated with vitamin D supplementation:

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

Vitamin D + calcium supplementation for bone health in middle-aged or older people:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00198-015-3386-5

But you're right that some of the benefit of "vitamin D" will be associated with going outside. I outlined several reasons in my article: the outdoors has brighter lights, lower carbon dioxide, etc., which are good for our health.

> I have to contend with Canadian winters, which means opening the window is a valid strategy for a minority of the year unless I buy an expensive heat recovery ventilator. I don’t have a good solution for mitigating carbon dioxide buildup in the winter.

Why describe the solution to a problem, and then say there is no good solution? Do we need to make HRVs more popular, and hope that economies of scale can drive costs down, or are most of the costs already due to unavoidable labor?

> Noise issues are happily easy to control: earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones will generally do the trick. It would be utopic to eliminate bothersome noise from the environment altogether, but it’s not necessary.

Another option is to raise the noise floor of your environment. Copy some brown noise onto an MP3 player, run it through a decent set of speakers, and raise the volume until you can't hear the interfering source.

> Why describe the solution to a problem, and then say there is no good solution?

Because the solution I described is not good. Too expensive for me, anyway.

$1100 doesn't seem exorbitant on the scale of HVAC equipment:

https://foursevenfive.com/lunos-e/

It is, however, exorbitant on the scale of my wallet.

Airing out 2-3 times per day for 5-10 minutes is perfectly viable, even in the dead of winter. All windows and interior doors open, get a good flow through the entire house to replace the stale air. Airing out heavily for a relatively short duration keeps the walls and furniture from cooling off, so normal indoor temperature will be restablished in just a couple of minutes, and is vastly superior to leaving a window cracked for hours.

Unfortunately, from what I've heard at least, it takes less than an hour to again return to your carbon dioxide equilibrium.

Data > hearsay. Get a meter.

I've found that running my bathroom exhaust fan for ~30 minutes per day keeps CO₂ levels well under 1000, but you'll never know unless you measure it.

The title is misleading.

The 'advice' in the article is on how start living in a cave.

From the article:

> go to sleep at the same time every night.

I do not agree. From personal experience, I'll be wasting hours some days trying to fall asleep.

If anything, wake up at the same hour every day and go to bed when tired.

Is it possible that you have not yet formed the kind of temporal associations I mentioned in the article?

Theres something frustrating about having to retrofit my prewar 1 BR apartment with 2 ACs, 1 space heater, air cleaner, 3 humidifiers, co2, pm2.5, temp and humidity sensors just to get the same air a modern suburban house has with builtin central air and humidifier. I don’t think we can stand any more gadgets around.

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